114 chapter four
obstinately refuse, we pray you then to certify their names unto us, to
the end Her Majesty may take such further course therein as it shall
seem best in her princely wisdom.^62Where before Elizabeth pretends that she “doubts not” that the English mas-
ters possessing “blackamoors” will follow Van Senden’s lead and deliver those
subjects up, now she admits directly that some of her subjects might “willfully
and obstinately refuse.” She therefore prescribes more aggressive action
against any noncompliant citizens. She directs her public officials, if they
know of anyone “possessed of ” “Negars and Blackamoors,” to “advise and
persuade” that citizen “to satisfy Her Majesty’s pleasure.” If that pressure fails,
the officers are to “certify their names unto” the Crown “to the end Her
Majesty may take such further course therein.”
In trying to counter willful domestic resistance, the queen couples these
practical measures to a developing ideological argument—enforcing a more
limited conception of nationalism and a more absolute conception of race
than had appeared in the earlier letter and strategically widening the divide
between the national and the racial, the English and the blacks. Now, instead
of scripting the English into a wider Protestant community, with a Dutch-
man at its helm, Elizabeth closes England’s borders and stresses the primacy
and priority of her “own natural subjects.” The need for action comes this
time from her, from “the Queen’s Majesty,” whose main worry is the situa-
tion of the English who suffer—and suffer more extensively, as this version
tells it—from “hard times of dearth.” While she again praises Van Senden as
“a man that hath very well deserved of this realm,” he appears as her ap-
pointee rather than, as before, the one dictating the conditions of the ex-
change. The queen herself gives the “especial commandment” that blacks be
deported because they take jobs from England’s poor. In the background are
“the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain,” which demand
attention to nation, an assertion of “Her Majesty’s dominions,” and the pro-
tection of her “own liege people.” But notably here, it is the unemployed un-
derclass, and not English masters, who become the citizens whose problems
define her moves and her state, they who “want the relief which those [black]
people consume,” they who (like herself ) are “greatly annoyed” that blacks
are “fostered and relieved” by English masters, whom she implicates through
the passive voice. If those masters are to be, like the poor, loyal representa-
tives of the realm, troubled as it is by Spain, they must hand over the blacks