Jacques Francis was a salvage diver from Guinea working on the wreck of the Mary Rose. In 1548, he became the first known Black person to give evidence in an English court — and the court accepted his testimony.
On 19 July 1545, in the Solent off the coast of Portsmouth, Henry VIII watched from the shore as his flagship the *Mary Rose* heeled over and sank during a battle with a French fleet. Several hundred men went down with the ship. It was a catastrophe — the loss of one of the finest warships in the English navy, along with her crew, her cannon, and the material of a decade of naval investment.
In the years that followed, a Venetian entrepreneur named Piero Paolo Corsi secured a contract to salvage what he could from the wreck: cannon, anchors, rigging, whatever could be recovered from the sea floor. Among the specialists he recruited for this dangerous and technically demanding work was a man described in the subsequent court documents as a “blacke Moore” from Guinea, a professional diver named **Jacques Francis**.
We do not know when Jacques Francis was born, how he came to be in England, or how Corsi found him. What we know is that he was a skilled deep-sea diver at a time when diving meant holding one’s breath, and that he was good enough at his work to be hired for one of the most technically demanding salvage operations in English waters.
The Mary Rose Salvage
The salvage of the *Mary Rose* in the 1540s was not the famous project of the 1980s, when the ship’s preserved hull was raised to the surface and is now displayed in a specially built museum in Portsmouth. Corsi’s sixteenth-century operation was more limited: he was trying to recover the bronze cannon and iron guns from the wreck, working in the tidal, cold, murky waters of the Solent with the technology of the 1540s.
The technology was, by modern standards, almost impossibly primitive. There were no diving suits, no breathing apparatus, no underwater lighting. A Tudor diver worked entirely on held breath, descending to the sea floor and working by touch in limited visibility, carrying whatever tools his buoyancy allowed, and returning to the surface before his air gave out. Depths that modern divers consider routine were genuinely dangerous — and the *Mary Rose* lay in water deep enough to make the work extremely hazardous.
Jacques Francis was evidently skilled at this work. He dived on the *Mary Rose* wreck as part of Corsi’s team and, according to the later court testimony, recovered items of value. He also, apparently, gave evidence about what he had seen and found on the wreck bed.
The Court Case
In 1548, the salvage operation became the subject of a dispute that ended up before the Admiralty Court in London. The details of the dispute are somewhat obscure, but it seems to have involved Corsi being accused of misappropriating or illegally retaining goods belonging to others. Jacques Francis was called as a witness on Corsi’s behalf.
The opposing counsel attempted to have Francis’s evidence excluded. The argument they made, preserved in the court record, was that Francis was not a credible witness — that, as an African, he should be considered to lack the legal standing necessary to give evidence in an English court. The implication was that he might be a slave, and that enslaved people could not give testimony.
The court rejected this argument. The record shows that the Admiralty Court accepted Francis’s evidence and proceeded to hear it. In practice, this meant the court was treating him as a free person with legal standing — an implicit but significant ruling. He was not a slave in English law. He was a witness.
His actual testimony, delivered in 1548, related to the salvage operations and what had been recovered from the wreck. The specifics are not fully preserved. But the fact of his testimony is: Jacques Francis, a Black African man from Guinea, stood before an English court in 1548 and gave sworn evidence, and the court heard him.
The First Black Witness in English Legal History
This makes Jacques Francis the first named Black person known to have given evidence in an English court of law. The distinction matters not as a legal technicality but as evidence of something about his status and about the world he inhabited.
Tudor England did not have a coherent legal doctrine about slavery. The famous Somerset case — in which a judge ruled that English common law could not be used to return an enslaved man to the colonies — would not be decided until 1772. In the 1540s, the question of whether Africans in England could be enslaved under English law was genuinely unresolved. The Admiralty Court’s implicit decision that Jacques Francis was a free person with legal standing was a small but real contribution to that unresolved debate, decided in favour of Francis.
Miranda Kaufman, who writes about Francis at length in *Black Tudors* (2017), notes the significance of the opposing counsel’s attempt to exclude his evidence. The argument that he lacked credibility because of his African identity is one of the earliest documented uses of racial argument in English legal proceedings — and the court’s rejection of it is correspondingly important.
What Happened to Him?
After the Admiralty Court case, Jacques Francis disappears from the English documentary record. We do not know whether he remained in England, returned to Guinea, or went elsewhere. We do not know whether he continued his career as a diver, whether he married or had children, or when and where he died.
The *Mary Rose* herself remained on the sea floor. Her preserved hull was eventually raised in 1982, in one of the great achievements of maritime archaeology, and she is now displayed in the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. The museum’s exhibitions tell the story of the ship and her crew — but the story of Jacques Francis, the African diver who worked on her first attempted salvage, is only beginning to be incorporated into the histories that surround her.
His Place in British History
Jacques Francis is not a famous figure. He does not appear in school textbooks. Most people who know the story of the *Mary Rose* — a reasonably well-known piece of Tudor naval history — have never heard his name.
But he is part of the story. He worked on the wreck. His voice, transmitted through the Admiralty Court record, has survived for nearly five hundred years. He spoke in an English court, in English, in 1548, and the court wrote down what he said.
He is evidence — specific, documented, human evidence — that Tudor England was not racially homogenous, that African men of professional skill and legal standing were present in England, and that their presence was recorded even when it was not celebrated.
Sources
- National Archives, HCA 13/93 — Admiralty Court records containing Jacques Francis’s testimony (1548)
- Kaufman, M. (2017): *Black Tudors: The Untold Story*, Oneworld Publications, Chapter 2 (“Jacques Francis, the Diver”)
- Rule, M. (1982): *The Mary Rose: The Excavation and Raising of Henry VIII’s Flagship*, Conway Maritime Press
- Rodger, N. A. M. (1997): *The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain*, HarperCollins
- Fryer, P. (1984): *Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain*, Pluto Press
- Onyeka (2013): *Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England*, Narrative Eye
- Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth: maryrose.org
