26 May 2020
In present-day use, a blackguard is a scoundrel or villain (when it’s used at all that is; it’s a rather old-fashioned term). The term dates to the early sixteenth century as a two-word, noun phrase, and it was compounded, with attendant loss of the / k / in the pronunciation, by the late seventeenth century. The word’s history, while on its face rather straightforward, tells us of class distinctions, religious bigotry, the world of seventeenth-century whores and pimps, and eighteenth-century, Oxbridge students.
From our position today in the twenty-first century, we can’t tell exactly what the two elements meant in the early uses. The black refers either to black livery of servants or clergy, dirt and soot covering menial servants, a connotation of evil and bad reputation, or a combination of some or all of these depending on the specific context. The guard, in the early uses, is not a reference to a literal body of soldiers, but rather a metaphorical use to refer to a body of people gathered for some purpose.
The oldest extant use of the term appears in financial records of the Church of St. Margaret in Westminster in a receipt for torches costing six pence:
Item Receyvid for the lycens of iiij. torchis of the blake garde vjd.
We can’t be sure exactly what the blake garde here refers to, but it’s probably to black-liveried, professional mourners that accompany a burial.
In other early citations the term is applied facetiously to soot-covered servants of the kitchen and scullery. William Fitzwilliam, the first earl of Southampton, writes in a 17 August 1535 letter:
Of the blak garde of the kings ketsyn bee two of the principalls.
And there is this by William Fulke in his 1579 sermon “A Refutation of Maister Rastels Confutation,” in which he advocates for the defrocking of Catholic clergy, some of whom he claims were kitchen servants raised to the priesthood:
That bagpipers, horscoursers, gailers, alebasters, were not admitted into the Cleargie without sufficient triall. We affirme they ought not, nor yet any of the scullerie or blacke garde, as some yet liuing were made Priestes in Queene Maries time.
And John Webster’s 1612 play The White Divel has this exchange between where the character Flamineo attempts convince Vittoria that she is better off with her husband Camillo than the man she really loves:
VITTORIA: I did nothing to displease him, I carued to him at supper-time
FLAMINEO: You need not haue carued him infaith, they say he is a capon already, I must now seemingly fall out with you. Shall a gentleman so well descended as Camillo.—a lousy slaue that within this twenty yeares rode with the blacke guard in the Dukes cariage mongst spits and dripping-pannes.
But at around the same period when blackguard was being used to refer to scullery servants, it was also in use to describe attendants liveried in black. For instance, there is this description of black-uniformed sailors at the 1513 Battle of Flodden written sometime before 1550:
This yer þe Skottyshe Kyng cam in to Ynglond with a gret power, whan þe Kyng was in France; & with hym mett þe Erle of Surrey with a gret power; & þer þe Skottyshe Kyng was slayn in þe fild & his ded body was browght to Rychemont. & at þat fild was my Lord Amerall, with his maryners, callyd “the black gard.”
And John Foxe’s 1570 edition of Actes and Monumentes, an anti-Catholic polemic, uses blackguard to describe black-cloaked Dominican friars in contrast to the gray-cloaked Franciscans:
With these and such other like reasons, the Gray Fra[n]ciscans voyded their aduersaries, defendyng the Conception of the Virgine Mary to bee vnblemyshed & pure from all contagion of Original sinne. Contrariwise the Blacke gard of the Dominike Friers, for their partes were not all mute, but layd lustely from them agayn, hauyng great authorities and also the Scripture on theyr side.
With some of these literal descriptions, though, we can start to see connotations of disrepute creeping in, as with Foxe’s description of the Dominicans.
And about a century after Foxe, blackguard was being used to denote criminals, as in this 1674 citation from News from Whetstones Parke, or, a Relation of the Late Bloody Battle There, Between the Bawds and Whores:
The first onset was given by Gammar Jilt, that flung a Bottle of Steppony, and beat out one of Doll Tiremons Eys, who in revenge pluckt off the old womans Nose, and flung it just in another Bawds Chops, who Spitt it out again in the Face of a young Whore that she was Engaged with, Hoods, Scarfs, Pinners, Laces went miserably to Racke, Biteing, Kicking, Scratching, and Confusion fill'd the place, never was there a Sadder Sight, here lay a Nose, there an Eye, a little further a Sett of Teeth, here a peice of a Necklace, there a parcel of Black Patches, and by and by the Ruines of a glorious Tower trod under Foot; The Bawds were never so Bang'd, nor the Morts so Mortified, but who had the better of it is hard to say, For Fortune had not yet declared in favour of either party, when the Pimpes, Hectors, Bullies, Bully-Rocks, Bully-Ruffians, Bully-Sandies, and the rest of the Black-Guard, taking the Alarm, came in Multitudes to part the Fray.
And roughly some seventy-five years after the description of this “battle,” the word is in use to mean someone who is dishonorable or scurrilous in general. From a complaint about the word humbug that appears in the January 1751 issue of The Student:
Upon the presumption therefore of having a little smattering of English, from the advantage of a liberal education, I will venture to affirm that this HUMBUG is neither an English word, nor a derivative from any other language.———It is indeed a black-guard sound, made use of by most people of distinction.———It is a fine make-weight in conversation, and some great men deceive themselves so egregiously as to think they mean something by it.
Unlike this student’s opinion of humbug, the word blackguard does mean something, although rarely something pleasant.
Sources:
Dyboski, Roman, ed. Songs, Carols and Other Miscellaneous Poems. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1907. Early English Text Society.
Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1570 edition). The Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield, 2011.
Fulke, William. “A Refutation of Maister Rastels Confutation.” In D. Heskins, D. Sanders, And M. Rastel, [...] Ouerthrowne. London: Henrie Middleton, 1579, 779. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, 2011.
News from Whetstones Parke. London: D.M., 1674. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. blackguard, n. and adj.
The Student, or the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, vol. 2 of 2. London: J. Newbery, 1751, 42. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Webster, John. The White Divel. London: Nicholas Okes, 1612. Early English Books Online (EEBO).