relieve the English suffering at home; and just as he did so “at his own cost
and charges,” so implicitly should they. The queen underscores the “reason-
ableness” of this request by insisting that she asks no more from her people
than Van Senden has already given voluntarily. He is to “have lycense to take
up so much blackamoores”—and onlyso many “blackamoores”—as he needs
to be repaid via a one-for-one exchange. That exchange, Elizabeth assures her
subjects, will prove “very good.” In stressing that “those kinde of people may
well be spared in this realme” because they are “so populous,” she may as well
be hinting that there will still be plenty of “blackamoores” to go around after
the deportation. Indeed, her first pronouncement (in 1596 ) that “there are all-
ready here to manie” may itself imply that there will always be enough.
Despite itself, Elizabeth’s second letter makes clear that while unem-
ployed English citizens stand to gain from the deportation, then, English
“masters” stand to lose. In the face of this economic double edge, what begins
to emerge in the second letter, and what will get an even bolder iteration in
the third, is an important shift from a practical argument based on economic
expediency to an ideological argument grounded on innate difference. Eliza-
beth draws here a unifying boundary around England, one that can at once
accommodate the service of the Dutch mediator and at the same time ration-
alize the expulsion of the serving blacks. In promoting the Protestant Van
Senden as a model for English Christians, the queen defines her people as part
of a Protestant community that selectively exceeds the bounds of nation. That
community is unified and identified by its charity to “insiders,” and it in-
cludes the Dutch Protestant, Van Senden, whose status as “stranger” she high-
lights. And it excludes, of course, “blackamoores,” some who have served the
Spanish/Catholic foe. Within this Protestant framework, their deportation
comes to answer an indisputable moral imperative, trumping the economic
losses of English masters. Insisting that “God hath blessed” the increase of the
English people, she implicates the burdensome increase of “blackamoores” as
a recent development that works against this providential design. Notably, al-
though this letter is more explicit than the first about where those “black-
amoores” are being sent (Iberia) and why, it is less explicit about their identity.
Elizabeth notes that they have been brought “of late” into the country, but she
gives no indication of when or by whom, as she did before. Rather, she dis-
tinguishes the group mainly by their increased numbers, which make them
expendably unlike the English, whose increase “God hath blessed.” In con-
trast with Christians, they begin to emerge as a problem and a race in their
own right, a “kinde” of people without a country, homeland, or history, and
112 chapter four