SLAVERY
SLAVERY
So the British monarchy is to be investigated for possible links to slavery, all because William III was given shares in a company that transported slaves from Africa to the Americas. King Charles III’s relationship to William III is remote in the extreme, but worth examining. It is often said that England hated Catholics – not true, England hated foreigners, which is not the same thing. King James II, who succeeded his brother Charles II in 1685 was Catholic. That did not matter, his only children and therefore his presumed successors were two daughters, Mary a Protestant married to William, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland (later William III), and Anne, also a Protestant married to George of Denmark, both out of James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, who died in 1671.
Then, in 1673, James married Mary, a princess of the Duchy of Modena, a French client state. She was Catholic, and the king of France paid her dowry. So far, no great problem, for although Mary was twenty-five years younger than James he was aged fifty-five and thought by most to be past siring children. Mary had at least ten pregnancies, but all resulted in miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death. Then, in 1688, Mary gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who lived and appeared to be a healthy child. Now everything changed. As a male James Edward would supersede his sisters in line to the throne. The prospect of a French dominated succession was unacceptable, and in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 James was deposed and after military defeats in Ireland in 1689 and 1690 he and his son (later to be known as ‘the Old Pretender’) lived in France as pensioners of the French king. The crown was now offered to Mary, James II’s eldest daughter who would only accept it if her husband William ruled jointly with her as king of England. It was the only joint monarchy in English history[*]. William was James II’s nephew through his mother, and his wife was therefore his first cousin. Mary died in 1694 and William in 1702. They had no children so the throne passed to her sister Anne. Anne had seventeen pregnancies but none survived more than a few days and when she died in 1714 the throne passed to George of Hanover who was a great grandson of James I through his mother. From then the succession passed from father to son, to George II, George III and George IV. George IV had no legitimate heirs so the throne passed to his brother William IV, who also died childless and was succeeded by his niece Victoria, who married Albert of Saxe Coburg, and it is from them that our present king is in direct descent. It may be seen, therefore, that even if we accept the biblical admonition about the sins of the fathers, those sins bypass Charles III by a very wide margin indeed.
In any case, slavery is as old as civilisation. Those of us living today may well have inherited some connection with, and profited from, slavery. Many of us in the UK, Europe and the USA have some Viking traces in our DNA and the Vikings were slavers, those slaves taken largely from England and Ireland. Athens, the so-called cradle of democracy was a slave state, as was Rome. The Parthenon, the Colosseum, the pyramids of Egypt were all built with slave labour, and it was slaves who hewed the marble used to produce the Elgin marbles. States on the north coast of Africa captured American ships and enslaved their crews, which led to the raising of the US Marines (‘…to the halls of Tripoli’) and the Barbary Wars, which only ended when HMS Queen Charlotte bombarded the harbour of Algiers in 1816. Clearly it would be ridiculous for the UK to demand compensation or apologies from Italy or Greece, or Scandinavia for their ancestors’ participation in making slaves of inhabitants of the British Isles, or for the USA to demand compensation from the governments of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Similarly those who suggest that Britain should pay compensation to the descendants of African slaves are curiously silent when it is suggested that they might first approach the descendants of their own chiefs who sold them into slavery in the first place, as a well-paying alternative to slaughtering them. Indeed it could be argued that the present day descendants of slaves, if they can genuinely prove that descent, are only here because their ancestors were sold into slavery – African chiefs otherwise simply killed prisoners of war or those thought to be undesirable, until Arab traders offered the alternative of buying them for onward sale as slaves. While Britain was, like everyone else at the time, involved in buying and selling slaves, it was Britain who in 1807 declared the trade illegal and who for sixty years stationed a squadron of the Royal Navy off the west coast of Africa to prevent it, and whose ships pursued slavers off the coasts of Brazil and Cuba, losing many sailors in battles with those slavers and from diseases caught in an unhealthy climate.
The Prime minister has recently repudiated suggestions that Britain should pay compensation for the slave trade (to whom, one might ask), but the argument is bound up with the attempt to ‘decolonise’ our history, whatever that may mean. The British Empire did not get everything right, but in the main it was a force for good, bringing order where there was chaos, an incorruptible judiciary and administration and non-political armed forces, to say nothing of medicine, railways and education. It is a great sadness that in some of our former possessions it did not take long after independence for a reversion to internecine fighting, corruption and savagery, but that cannot be laid at the door of those who strove , in the main unselfishly, to develop the Empire, as Disraeli demanded, for the benefit of its inhabitants.
[*] Mary Tudor, Mary I, married Philip of Spain and parliament granted him the title of King of England, but it was to last only as long as his wife lived; he was forbidden to initiate any laws or make any appointments without his wife’s approval, and he could not take England into military operations in support of Spain.