Yes, There Were Black People in Britain in the Nineteenth Century

It seems that, with my characteristically late timing, I have only just gotten around to watching the show that everyone was talking about six months ago. On 25 December 2020, Netflix released the period drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813 during the Regency Era. The show has triggered enormous controversy over the fact that it portrays a large number of British aristocrats who are not white, including one of the main characters, Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, portrayed by the Black British actor Regé-Jean Page. Many people on the internet are predictably outraged over this, insisting that the show is not historically accurate and that it is “blackwashing” history.

The show, however, for its own part, makes very little pretense at historical accuracy in the first place. After all, most of the music is modern pop music played in a “traditional,” orchestral style. Furthermore, the show is not quite as historically inaccurate as some people might think. It is true that there were no Black people who held titles of nobility in Britain during the period when Bridgerton is set, but there were certainly free Black people living in Britain at the time who were both prominent and prosperous.

Was Queen Charlotte Black?

Chris Van Dusen, the creator of Bridgerton, states in an interview with The Wrap that the show’s casting is not meant to be historically accurate, but the casting was not “colorblind” either, saying:

“I don’t call the casting ‘colorblind,’ because I feel like the word ‘colorblind’ implies that color and race was never considered — and I don’t think that’s true for Bridgerton. I think color and race is very much a part of the show and very much a part of the conversation, just like things like class and gender and sexuality are.”

He goes to explain that the casting of Bridgerton is based on a historical hypothetical: What if Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III, was really Black and she was actively using her position to promote other Black people to noble status?

Let’s address the first part of this scenario first: Was Queen Charlotte Black? The answer is, in a word, “no.” It is true that Queen Charlotte was a very, very remote descendant of King Alfonso III of Portugal (lived 1210 – 1279 CE) and his much younger mistress Madragana. It is also true that the Portuguese chronicler Duarte Nunes de Leão (lived c. 1530 – 1608) described Madragana as a “Moor.”

This description, however, is highly questionable, since Duarte Nunes de Leão was writing around three hundred years after Madragana’s lifetime and it is much more likely that Madragana was a Mozarab (i.e., a Christian who lived in territory in the Iberian Peninsula that had been under Islamic rule), since she had a Christian name and she had an affair with a Christian monarch. This does not necessarily mean that Madragana couldn’t have been of African ancestry, since some Mozarabs were Christians of Arab, Amazigh, and/or Black African ancestry. There is, however, no clear evidence that she was.

Furthermore, Queen Charlotte herself was born over four hundred years after Madragana’s death, she was removed from Madragana by no less than fifteen generations, and all Charlotte’s other known ancestors were white Europeans. Even if Madragana was fully what most people in English-speaking countries today would consider Black, it is extremely unlikely that Queen Charlotte’s very remote descent from her would have much noticeable influence on her appearance. Indeed, all surviving portraits of Charlotte depict her as pale-skinned.

In order to possibly consider Queen Charlotte Black, you would have to apply the most extreme possible version of the “one-drop rule,” so that anyone with even a single ancestor fifteen generations back who might have possibly had some African ancestry is Black. Under that definition, however, nearly all white people would be considered Black.

ABOVE: Portrait of Charlotte as a young princess with a Black footman, painted c. 1761 by Johann Georg Ziesenis

Black people in Britain before the nineteenth century

Even though Queen Charlotte was not really Black, however, Bridgerton is at least correct that there were a lot more Black people living in Britain in the early nineteenth century than most people might expect. We’ve all been conditioned by period dramas to expect that everyone in Britain prior to the twentieth century was lily white and that Black people were nowhere to be seen. The reality, however, is that there have been dark-skinned people of recent African descent living in Britain continuously ever since at least the time when southern Britain was ruled by the Roman Empire.

As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020, during the second, third, and fourth centuries CE, there were people living in Roman-occupied Britain from all over the Mediterranean world. This certainly included many people from North Africa and the Middle East and almost certainly included at least some people whom most people in the English-speaking world today would consider Black.

One such example is the Ivory Bangle Lady, a wealthy young woman of high status who lived in the fourth century CE in the Roman-Celtic city of Eboricum (which is now the city of York). Archaeologists have identified her, based on craniometric measurements of her skull, as having most likely been of African ancestry.

ABOVE: Forensic facial reconstruction of what the so-called “Ivory Bangle Lady,” a wealthy woman of probable African ancestry who lived in the Roman city of Eboricum (modern York) in the fourth century CE, might have looked like

The Roman Empire lost control of Britain in the early fifth century CE. Germanic peoples from what is now Denmark migrated to Britain and started to take over. As I discuss in this article I wrote in April 2021, however, even during the period of the Early Middle Ages, a period of British history that people generally think of as being very white, there were still people of recent African ancestry living in Britain.

Notably, in the late seventh century CE, an Amazigh man named Hadrian, who had originally been born in North Africa, served as the abbot of Saint Peter’s Church in Canterbury, while a Syrian man named Theodoros of Tarsos served as the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. We don’t know what Hadrian looked like, so we can’t say if he was what most people in the English-speaking world would consider Black, but, in all likelihood, at the very least, he probably wasn’t lily white.

Black people had a continued presence in Britain throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. By the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (ruled 1558 – 1603), there were at least several hundred Black people living in Britain. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the involvement of British merchants in the Transatlantic slave trade exponentially increased the number of Black people living in Britain.

This was especially the case in the major English port cities of Liverpool and Bristol, which were hubs of slave trade activity and consequently developed large Black populations relatively early. London also developed a significant Black population. By the late eighteenth century, there were most likely around 10,000 Black people living in London. Street scenes of London from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regularly feature Black people. This strongly indicates that they were not an uncommon sight.

ABOVE: Engraving “Noon” by William Hogarth from 1738 from his series The Four Times of Day showing a street scene in London with a Black man fondling a white woman’s breasts on the far left

Ignatius Sancho: a wealthy and prominent free Black British man

In general, white British people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were extremely racist toward Black people. Britain was undoubtedly an extremely hostile, unpleasant, and even dangerous place for Black people to live. Nonetheless, despite the animosity towards them, some free Black people managed to attain success and, in some cases, they even worked their way into the upper classes. One famous and successful free Black British person during this era was Ignatius Sancho.

Most of what is known about Sancho’s early life comes from a biography of him written by a man named Joseph Jekyll that was published in 1782, two years after Sancho’s death, along with a collection of 160 of his personal letters. According to Jekyll’s biography of Sancho, he was born sometime around 1729 on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Both his parents died shortly after their ship arrived in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, a Spanish colony in South America.

In 1731, when Sancho was around two years old, his owner took him to Britain and gave him as a gift to three unmarried sisters living in Greenwich, who forced him to work as their slave. The sisters did not give Sancho an education, but John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, who frequently visited the sisters’ home, saw Sancho’s intelligence. He taught him how to read and write and gave him books to read from his personal library.

Sancho ran away from his mistresses in 1749 and fled to the Montagu House. He worked there as a butler for two years for Mary Montagu, Duchess of Montagu. While he was working for them, the Montagu family allowed him to study literature, poetry, and music. Lady Montagu died in 1751 and left Sancho with a pension of £30 a year. In 1758, he married a West Indian woman named Anne Osborne. They eventually had seven children together. By the 1760s, Sancho had established a reputation for himself as a learned gentleman.

ABOVE: Portrait painted by the Scottish portrait artist Allan Ramsay sometime between c. 1757 and c. 1760, now believed to depict Ignatius Sancho

In 1774, Sancho opened his own grocery shop. While owning the grocery shop, Sancho composed and published his own works of music and drama, along with a number of books and essays. Sancho’s intense hatred of slavery led him to actively campaign for its abolition. He soon became recognized as one of the most prominent abolitionist activists in Britain.

As a free, independent, male landowner, Sancho became eligible to vote in British Parliamentary elections at a time when it is estimated that less than 3% of people living in Britain were eligible. He voted in the Parliamentary elections of 1774 and 1780, making him the first Black person who is definitively recorded to have voted in a British Parliamentary election. When Sancho died of gout on 14 December 1780, he became the first Black person to receive an obituary published in a British newspaper.

ABOVE: Portrait of Ignatius Sancho painted in 1768 by the English portrait artist Thomas Gainsborough

Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano was a younger contemporary of Ignatius Sancho. Most of what is known about him comes from his own autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, which was originally published in London in the year 1789.

According to Equiano’s own account, he was born sometime around 1745 into a wealthy Igbo family in the Kingdom of Benin in what is now southern Nigeria. He and his sister, however, were abducted sometime around 1756 when he was around eleven years old and sold into slavery. He was soon separated from his sister. He never saw her again and never found out what happened to her. He laments in his account:

“Though you were early forced from my arms, your image has been always rivetted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it; so that, while the thoughts of your sufferings have damped my prosperity, they have mingled with adversity and increased its bitterness. To that Heaven which protects the weak from the strong, I commit the care of your innocence and virtues, if they have not already received their full reward, and if your youth and delicacy have not long since fallen victims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer.”

Equiano was eventually forced onto a European slave ship. He describes the horrors of the Middle Passage and enslavement in great detail. He was brought to the island of Barbados and then sold as a slave in Virginia, where worked on a plantation for some time before being sold to Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, who forcibly renamed him “Gustavus Vassa.”

Pascal enslaved Equiano until he sold him in December 1762 to a British sea captain named James Doran. Doran, in turn, sold Equiano to Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia. King forced Equiano to work on his ships and in his stores, but he also taught him to better read and write and allowed him to trade goods for his own profit until he had finally made enough money to buy his own freedom for £40 in 1766.

Equiano continued to work at sea and abroad until he finally settled in London in 1777. He became an active leader in the abolitionist movement. In 1789, he published his autobiography, which became an immediate bestseller. It went through nine editions during Equiano’s lifetime without ever going out of print and was sold not only in Britain and the United States, but also in the Netherlands, Germany, and even Russia. It is generally credited as the foundational work for the genre of the “slave narrative.”

In 1792, Equiano married a white English woman named Susannah Cullen and, together, the couple had two children, both of whom were daughters. (There were no laws banning miscegenation in England at the time.)

ABOVE: Portrait of Olaudah Equiano from the frontispiece of his own autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, published in 1789 in London

Dido Elizabeth Belle: a Black British aristocrat?

Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano were prominent and successful free Black people in Britain in the late eighteenth century, but neither of them was an aristocrat in any sense. There was, however, at least one Black person in Britain during this era whom some might arguably describe as an aristocrat.

Sir John Lindsay, the son of Sir Alexander Lindsay, 3rd Baronet of the Lindsay of Evelick family, was serving as the captain of the British warship HMS Trent in the British West Indies when he had sex with an enslaved Black woman named Maria Belle. In 1761, Belle gave birth to a daughter. Sir Lindsay acknowledged the girl as his illegitimate offspring and named her Dido Elizabeth Belle.

In 1765, Sir Lindsay brought his young mixed-race daughter back to Britain and entrusted her to his uncle William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield—an anti-slavery aristocratic politician who is famous today for his ruling in the landmark 1772 case Somerset v Stewart that an enslaved person living in England could not be seized and taken to the colonies against their will—and his wife Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Mansfield.

Lord and Lady Mansfield raised Belle as a free woman and a member of their own family at Kenwood House, their mansion in Hampstead Heath. They raised her alongside their other grandniece, Lady Elizabeth Murray, who had recently been orphaned. In private, they raised the two girls as equals, giving Belle the same quality of luxurious bedroom furnishings and the same quality of education that they also gave to her cousin.

The Scottish moral philosopher and abolitionist James Beattie met Dido Elizabeth Belle at Kenwood House in around 1771. He cites her intelligence as evidence that Black people are not innately intellectually inferior to white people in his Elements of Moral Science, Part II. He writes (on page 59 of this edition):

“But I happened, a few days after, to see his theory overturned, and my conjecture established by a negro girl about ten years old, who had been six years in England, and not only spoke with the articulation and accent of a native, but repeated some pieces of poetry, with a degree of elegance, which would have been admired in any English child of her years.”

In around 1778, the painter David Martin painted a famous portrait depicting Belle standing close beside her cousin Lady Murray on the grounds of Kenwood House, showing them both dressed in the finest clothing, reflecting their shared status as members of the Mansfield family. The portrait is almost unique among British paintings of the period because it portrays a Black woman and a white woman as equals.

When Lord Mansfield died in 1793, his will confirmed Belle’s status as a free woman and granted her an inheritance of £500 as an outright sum in addition to an annual payment of £100 every year for the rest of her life. Shortly thereafter, on 5 December 1793, Belle married a French man named John Davinier. She gave birth to at least three sons before her death in July 1804 at the age of forty-two.

Dido Elizabeth Belle was not technically a member of the nobility, since she was illegitimate and she never held noble titles, but she had a noble father, she was raised in a mansion as an acknowledged member of a noble family, and she had a substantial inheritance.

Given the unusual nature of Belle’s upbringing and status for the period, it is no surprise that her life has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Notably, the 2013 period drama film Belle is loosely based on what is known of her life. The film is directed by Amma Asante. It stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Belle herself, Tom Wilkinson as Lord Mansfield, and Sarah Gaden as Lady Elizabeth Murray.

ABOVE: Portrait painted by David Martin sometime around the year 1778, depicting the cousins Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray

Conclusion

As I said in the beginning, Bridgerton is a fictional television show. It makes no claims to historical accuracy. It is about fictional characters living in a fictional, heavily romanticized alternate version of the nineteenth century. If you’re watching the show to learn about history, you’re watching it for the wrong reason.

Leaving aside matters of race, there are many aspects of the world in which the show is set that are wildly historically implausible. For instance, as I will probably discuss in another article in a few days, the show’s portrayal of all the young women as having absolutely no idea what sex is or how a woman becomes pregnant is not only historically inaccurate for the time period, but also highly implausible for any time period.

Despite all this, however, there were Black people in Britain during the period when the show takes place and, despite the very real racism that was deeply entrenched in British society at the time, some of them were able to become both prominent and prosperous.