indication that they were enslaved, since medieval forms of slavery had been
abolished from England and most of Europe by the sixteenth century.^59 As far
as we can tell, imported Negroes occupied positions of service—positions
that, the queen insists, the English themselves could fill.^60 According to her
argument, the problem with so many “blackamoores” is, then, that they dis-
place “nombers of hable person[s]” from jobs. To deport “those kinde of peo-
ple” was to open up the labor market. It was also to encourage English
“masters” to give preference to their own countrymen, who are “the subjectes
of the land and Christian people” and who might otherwise (as the first letter
asserts) “fall to idlenesse and to great extremytie,” and even “perishe,” “for
want of service and meanes to sett them on worck.”
Yet the internal, nationalist focus of this proposition is compounded by
external, practical pressures that appear more urgent and compelling. In both
sets of orders, the number of “blackamoors” to be expelled is obviously in-
commensurate with the magnitude of the articulated problem. The creation
of ten, or even of eighty-nine, new jobs would do little to ease the situation
Queen Elizabeth represents as resulting from a “great increase of people of our
owne nation” and affecting “manie” in “want of service.” In fact, in the sec-
ond letter, the size of the population to be deported is determined notby the
needs of the unemployed and idle English but by the needs of a “stranger,”
the “merchant of Lubeck,” Casper van Senden. Van Senden, “at his owne cost
and charges,” brought eighty-nine “of her Majesty’s subjectes” “home to their
native contry”—something, Elizabeth stresses, that “could not be don with-
out great expense.” His “requestes to transport so many blackamoores from
hence” in recompense comes first. The desire to repay him determines and
trumps the justification that follows: that “those kinde of people may well be
spared,” “being so populous,” and that the English need their jobs. In justify-
ing her schemes, the queen puts Van Senden’s “labor and travell” tellingly be-
fore the lack of “labor” faced by England’s idle poor, the “great misery and
thraldom” of the English he saves tellingly before the “perishing” of the un-
employed English at home, and even his nationalism, his respect for their
“native contry,” tellingly before theirs. Represented thus, remunerating the
merchant seems more urgent than relieving the poor or, indeed, ostracizing
unwanted blacks, and it takes precedence as the central problem for which the
deportation is the “reasonable” solution. It is because—and within the docu-
ment,after—the “blackamoores” figure as a “very good exchange” for Van
Senden (and indirectly for the men he rescued) that they become a people
who “may well be spared in this realme.”
110 chapter four