Last year I had the pleasure of acting as editor for Nadia T. van Pelt's ground-breaking article on ‘John Blanke's Wages’. This acquainted me with the website of the Project devoted to John Blanke, one of the trumpeters to Henry VII and Henry VIII, and the claims being made on his behalf as ‘the first person of African descent in British history for whom we have both an image and a record’. The existence of visual as well as documentary evidence for John Blanke has proved irresistible; it gives him a face, however fictitious, and one apparently sufficiently characterised for a modern viewer to relate to. A name and a handful of appearances in administrative accounts are not nearly so evocative – though his surname and the tag, ‘the blacke Trumpet’, that often accompanies it are intriguing.

To summarise what we know of him: he first appears in November 1507 in Henry VII's Chamber Books as ‘John Blanke the blacke Trumpet’. He is paid 20s a month, half the wages of the elite King's trumpeters, until January 1508/1509, when he appears to have been added to the strength on full wages of 40s a month. On 21 April that year, Henry VII dies, and John Blanke, with the other King's trumpets, is granted mourning livery for the funeral on 9 May 1509; then on 24 June 1509 comes the coronation of Henry VIII, for which nine named ‘Kyngs Trompyttes’, including John Blanke, are given scarlet livery. Some time around December 1509 he asks, apparently satisfactorily, for his salary arrangements to be regularised: he seems to have dropped back to 20s, possibly in the administrative confusion that always followed the death of one monarch and the accession of the next. On 12–13 February 1510/1511 he appears at the Great Tournament in Westminster, not by name, but as a presumably identifiable image in a commemorative heraldic painting. On 14 January 1511/1512, not quite a year later, he is given a suit of clothes of violet cloth for his wedding – and that is the last we hear of him. The next time the king's trumpeters are listed by name, in February 1513/1514, his is not among them. His time in the limelight of the English court could have lasted as little as four years, or as long as six.

So far, no one has found out what happened to him.