![]() It was the first time the document was shown outside London. In May 2022 an exhibition The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics at the Walker Art Gallery displayed Blanke's two portraits on the Westminster Tournament Roll in public for the first time in 20 years. In January 2022 a Nubian Jak blue plaque was installed in John Blanke's honour at King Charles Court, home to Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance's Faculty of Music at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London. He appears a second time in the roll, wearing a green and gold head covering.īlack trumpeters and drummers were documented in other Renaissance cities, including a trumpeter for the royal ship Barcha in Naples in 1470, a trumpeter recorded as galley slave of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1555, and black drummers in the court of King James IV in Edinburgh.īritish rapper and novelist Akala, based a character in his book "The Dark Lady" on John Blanke, released in 2021. All six of the trumpeters wear yellow and grey livery and bear a trumpet decorated with the royal arms Blanke alone wears a brown and yellow turban, while the others are bare-headed with longish hair. ![]() John Blanke is depicted twice, as one of the six trumpeters on horseback in the royal retinue. The Westminster Tournament Roll is an illuminated, 60-foot manuscript now held by the College of Arms it recorded the royal procession to the lavish tournament held on 12 and 13 February 1511 to celebrate the birth of a son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall (died 23 February 1511), to Catherine and Henry VIII on New Year's Day 1511. ![]() ĭr Sydney Anglo was the first historian to propose that the "Blanke Trumpet" in the 1507 court accounts was the same as the black man depicted twice in the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll, in a footnote to an article about the Court Festivals of Henry VII. He successfully petitioned Henry VIII for a wage increase from 8d to 16d. A surviving document from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber records a payment of 20 shillings to "John Blanke the Blacke Trumpet" as wages for the month of November 1507, with payments of the same amount continuing monthly through the next year. Little is known of Blanke's life, but he was paid 8 pence per day by King Henry VII. Black People in 16th Century England" for the BBC History Magazine, published in July 2012. One is "Tudor Africans: What's in a Name?" in October 2012 for History Today magazine and the other is "The Missing Tudors. ![]() Historian Onyeka Nubia has written about John Blanke's possible origins in his 2013 book Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, their Presence, Status and Origins. His name may refer to his skin colour, derived either from the word "black" or possibly from the French word "blanc", meaning white. He is one of the earliest recorded black people in United Kingdom after the Roman period. 1501–1511) was a musician of African descent in London from the early Tudor period, who probably came to England as one of the African attendants of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. John Blanke (also rendered Blancke or Blak) ( fl. Extract from the Westminster Tournament Roll almost certainly showing John Blanke, the only figure wearing a green turban latticed with yellow.
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