Blog

By Michael I. Ohajuru

The Gallery’s Tudor portraits are currently on tour to the Holburne Museum in Bath as part of The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics exhibition. Next month, the exhibition will be heading to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and, joining our portraits, will be the Westminster Tournament Roll (College of Arms, London), which features two images of John Blanke - a royal trumpeter in the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. John Blanke remains the only Black Tudor for whom there is an identifiable image. In this blog, Michael Ohajuru, founder of the John Blanke project, examines the significance of this image.

The Westminster Tournament Roll (Membrane 28), Unidentified artists, 1511, Painted vellum, 60 feet long and 143/4 inches wide (whole roll), College of Arms

Blanke has become the poster boy for the Black presence in Tudor England. He alone is seen on the covers of books and magazines, his visual presence helping us rewrite and reimagine British history. Today, to the vocal frustration of some, historians are rewriting parts of that history, embracing less well-known figures such as John Blanke. They are shedding light on ordinary men and women, the poor, those with disabilities, Black folk – those seen as marginal in the conventional view of a history presented around the exploits of the great white men of the day such as Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell and others. The John Blanke Project is a part of that rewriting, an art and archive project that celebrates the Black trumpeter to the Tudor court reimagined by artists and historians from those two distinctive images in the Westminster Tournament Roll and his brief presence in the written Tudor court accounts found in The National Archives.

The Project has offered new insight into John Blanke’s image, what it meant when first produced and what that image means today. Some were mundane yet thought-provoking, such as when a primary school student told me that they “imagined John Blanke as a strong man because he could ride a horse and play the trumpet at the same time”. The skill and strength required to do both while keeping time and pace with the other trumpeters and the procession were new considerations. Other perspectives gained from the project were not so prosaic, but were equally intriguing: how special it was to have a recognisable image of a non-noble Tudor sitter, the significance of depicting his difference both in skin colour and dress, the meaning behind his name, and the implications of our desire to treat him as exceptional.

A Remarkable Portrait

Portraits of recognisable, named non-noble sitters such as John Blanke were very rare in the early Tudor period. His double representation on the Westminster Tournament Roll is extraordinary, as portraiture was a new form of visual representation at the time reserved for those of high status and powerful elites such as Henry VIII and close members of his court. The image is a thumbnail sketch, a caricature, yet with sufficient detail to give John Blanke a strong visual presence, his dark brown skin tone and distinctive headgear setting him apart from the white, bare-headed trumpeters in the troop. Certainly, the scribe did not produce lifelike portrait sketches as Holbein was to do a few years later of Henry and his court. Nevertheless, he created an image with sufficient detail for us to put a name to the figure from court records, making it a truly remarkable portrait for the time.

Tribute to John Blanke by Artist: Stephen B. Whatley, 2015

Accepting Difference

It is not just John Blanke’s dark brown skin tone that makes him different from his fellow white trumpeters. They are all bare-headed while he alone wears headwear. The multicoloured patterned cloth of his headdress is religious and cultural, rather than a convention or fashion statement, perhaps indicating he had once been Muslim, or at least had been raised in a Muslim cultural context. It contrasts sharply with the headwear of processing Gentlemen of the Court and Henry VIII, for they all wear flat caps of different colours and materials festooned with feathers and, in Henry’s case, jewels. The Roll allows us to glimpse an occasion when the Tudor court permitted a member of the royal households to wear a marker of Islamic religious faith and cultural difference that contravened the normal insistence on the homogeneity of livery in quite an extraordinary fashion, making John Blanke even more distinctive.

John Blanke’s Namesakes

His name is not as special as his image. It is perhaps an attempt to highlight the difference in John Blanke’s skin colour when compared to others, at a time before race was used to create that difference. John Blanke is a nickname, punning on the colour of his skin, as ‘blanc’ is the French for ‘white’. There were other Black Africans in Europe with very similar names: in fourteenth-century Spain an enslaved ‘Johan Blanc’ was given as a gift by the king of Aragon to King John the Good of France; in fifteenth-century Venice one ‘Zuan Bianco’ was a courageous commander of infantry in the Venetian army (Shakespeare may have drawn on him indirectly in conceiving his own Black Venetian commander, Othello), and in seventeenth-century Spain ‘Juan Alba’ (in Latin, ‘alba’ means ‘white’) was a courageous African soldier in the play The Valiant Black in Flanders.

Black British History and John Blanke

The most profound insight of the project has been that, by making John Blanke an exception, he is marginalised and his existence made strange. This exceptionalism can help maintain prejudices and, in doing so, marginalise him as an anomaly. The research and writings of historians have shown there are many more Black Africans in Tudor society, some of whom we know far more about – it is only John Blanke’s image which makes him exceptional when compared to other Black Tudors. John Blanke is important and he is rightly highlighted here. But only when he becomes less important and not seen as an exception will we actually begin to understand him, Britain’s history, and the Black African role in that history more clearly.

This article features in our The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics publication, which accompanies the exhibition. You can purchase a copy of the book from our Online Shop. To discover more about the John Blanke project, including the artists and historians involved, head to the project’s website.