How did an African trumpeter end up in Tudor England?
That’s exactly what happened to John Blanke, a favorite musician in the court of King Henry VIII. We even have pictures to prove it.
The 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll
Blanke shows up twice on a 60-foot-long illustration of a joust held in 1511 to celebrate the birth of the King’s son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall. The child died a few days after the joust, leaving the monarch without an heir. But the two-day celebration, known as the Westminster Tournament, drew so many famous guests that the King demanded a visual record.
The appearance of an African musician wearing a green turban is conspicuous.
Blanke is mentioned in surviving royal accounts—suggesting that he was highly valued by the King. He earned three times the wages of a servant, and worked full time for the monarchy. Blanke also received a pay increase under the King—likely an indicator of his superior musicianship.
How did an African musician get hired by King Henry VIII at the dawn of the English Renaissance?
Blanke almost certainly came from Spain, along with the future queen, Catherine of Aragon, in 1501. This unfortunate princess arrived in England to marry Prince Arthur—she had been betrothed, more than a decade earlier, at the age of three!—bringing with her a dowry of 200,000 ducats. Musical influences often crossed borders in those days via wedding parties and dowry packages. John Blanke would have made a striking member of the entourage.
His name inspires speculation. Blanke may derive from blanco, the Spanish word for white. Maybe there’s a joke here, like those goofy gangster nicknames that represent the opposite of somebody’s physical appearance—Slim is fat and Fat is slim, etc.
But the musician is described in surviving records as “John Blanke the blacke trumpet”—and this raises the possibility of a misspelling. Or maybe John arrived without a last name, which was thus a blank—like my father whose middle name became NMN after he joined the Navy, because that’s what he wrote on the induction form to indicate he had “No Middle Name.” (From that point on, like Odysseus in the Cyclop’s cave, Dad was officially called Nmn.)
There's much more at the link.
