The British monarchy needs to address more than just Prince Harry’s claims. Amid all the brouhaha surrounding the release of Spare, it’s important not to overlook a crucial piece of monarchy-adjacent news. The Church of England, following publication of a report detailing the historic links between the Church Commissioners’ endowment and the slave trade, has pledged £100m in an attempt “to address some of the past wrongs by investing in a better future”.
Both the Church of England and the Royal Family purchased shares in the South Sea Company, which not only held the right to sell slaves to Spanish America but was also obligated by the terms of the asiento contract to deliver 4,800 enslaved Africans to the Spanish plantations annually for a period of 30 years.
Between 1713 and 1739, the company delivered approximately 34,000 enslaved Africans to Jamaica and Spanish American ports, including Veracruz, Havana, Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Portobello, Panama, and Santiago de Cuba.
In response to this “shameful” revelation that the Church’s investment portfolio benefited from these atrocities, they have committed to spending £100m over the next nine years on a programme of investment, research, and engagement. It intends to fund additional research to support dioceses, cathedrals and parishes investigate their historic links with slavery and to offer grants to assist descendant communities adversely impacted by slavery and its devastating legacies.
By openly acknowledging and apologising for this history and seeking to make financial amends, the Church is engaging in a process of restorative justice. “We wanted it to become public, to acknowledge the sins perpetrated through our predecessor fund and to respond to the findings,” the report says.
“It is now time to take action to address our shameful past,” concluded Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
But the Church of England was far from the only institution to invest in and profit from slave trading. Britain’s single most important institution, one tightly interwoven with national identity, has kept quiet about its involvement in the expansive and violent system of human bondage that arose in the Americas: The British monarchy.
This silence is purposeful and effective. By avoiding discussion of its own past entanglements with slavery, the Crown has distanced itself from the current discussion surrounding legacies of slavery and reparations for historical crimes.
Long before the abolition of the British slave trade, the Crown and prominent members of the Royal Family invested in, expanded, and defended the transatlantic slave trade and African bondage. The formation of the Royal African Company during the reign of Charles II enabled the Stuarts to control and profit directly from a state-sponsored monopoly of the transatlantic slave trade, to develop flourishing, deeply exploitative colonial plantation economies, and to expand England’s imperial footprint in the Americas.
The Stuarts and their successors did not simply invest in slave trading to make money, though they certainly profited; they embraced slavery as a means of expanding England’s overseas empire. By wresting control of the slave trade away from international rivals, the Stuarts aimed to provide English planters with a captive labour force deemed necessary to build and sustain profitable plantation colonies – to the benefit of the mother country and the Crown.
Far from passive investors, British monarchs – specifically George I and George II (when Prince of Wales and as King) – held personal shares in the slave-trading South Sea Company and protected the Company’s interests as governor.
But the cost of the wealth and everyday luxuries flowing from the plantation colonies into Britain and the Crown’s coffers was unimaginably high: the abuse and death of millions of enslaved individuals of African origin and descent.
Their participation in Britain’s imperial project was not optional. “Nothing we do, hundreds of years later, will give the enslaved people back their lives,” Church leaders have conceded. “But we can and will recognise and acknowledge the horror and shame of the Church’s role in historic transatlantic chattel slavery and, through our response, seek to begin to address the injustices caused as a result.”
It is now the British monarchy’s turn. The Crown has nothing to gain by remaining silent and turning a blind eye to the past, except the preservation of its inherited wealth and the exacerbation of racial inequality and injustice. As Prince Harry recently told Anderson Cooper: “There becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”
Brooke Newman is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of the forthcoming book, The Queen’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery (Mariner/Mudlark)
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