The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy

Brooke N. Newman, 2026. Harper Collins/Mudlark, 469 pages

It was inevitable that the British monarchy would come under the critical gaze of cultural revisionists searching for evidence of exploitation. Brooke Newman’s new book [[1]] does not disappoint. Sweeping through centuries of history, Newman sketches out how the British monarchy sanctioned, invested in, and profited from transatlantic slavery – from Queen Elizabeth I through to Queen Victoria. These 13 monarchs, she contends, supported enslavers, built a slave empire and embedded slavery at the core of their imperial system, but, at the end, kept a deliberate silence on its iniquities whilst reshaping the nation’s collective memory after abolition. It is unclear why the author did not start with the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, who reportedly were responsible for up to 30% of the English population being kept as slaves in 1068. Perhaps the slavery of our own people was not the point Ms Newman wanted to make?

While carefully researched, written in a popular style, and often very engaging, the work nevertheless feels ‘a day late and a dollar short’ in its pursuit of the now-receding ‘critical race’ tide, particularly in its tendency toward over-simplification and insufficient contextualisation. Much of the author’s charge sheet depends on a conflation of the monarch as a guilty actor with the government as a malevolent organisation. That approach may be arguable in the pre-1688, pre-Glorious Revolution period, but it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain thereafter – quite apart from questions of how much effective control either the monarch or the government realistically exercised in the early modern ‘small-state’ world, or how much the monarch would even have known about slavery.

Indeed, one headline charge is that ‘the Crown bought 13,400 enslaved men to serve in the West India Regiment … making the king the single largest purchaser of enslaved people in the British Empire’. This might surprise readers, as it also surprised the abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who, in 1804, wrote to his friend, the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, having just learnt about something that had been running for a near decade. Wilberforce asked

‘that their situation as soldiers would be beyond comparison preferable to that of plantation slaves cannot be doubted; but how can we justify buying slaves for that desirable and even humane purpose [?]’[[2]].

He was referring to the 1-12th West Indian Regiments (WIR), which were established, with pragmatism overcoming principle, in 1795 during the desperate Napoleonic Wars and seven years after the Pitt had noted in the House of Commons that ‘It had been pretty generally thought that the African slave-trade ought to be abolished’[[3]]. Their story is instructive and provides the sort of context that is too often missing in Brooke Newman’s account.

A Private of the 5th West India Regiment, 1812, in Charles Hamilton Smith, Costumes of the Army of the British Empire (1813)

As a solution to the high island death rates for British soldiers, the WIR initially sought freemen, but ended up purchasing slaves for five year periods with freedom granted at the end of service. The regiments purchased 13,400 slaves over the period 1795-1808 for £925,000 from the ultra-secret, and still extant, Army Extraordinaires fund [[4]]. The black soldiers, largely ‘new negroes’ rather than West Indian blacks, had equal pay, allowances, medical care and pensions, although their ambiguous legal status was threatened by hostile colonial legislatures until the imperial government formally emancipated all slaves in uniform in 1807, thirty one years before the rest of the island slaves were freed. The WIR, a formal part of the British Army, went on to win battle honours in Guadeloupe, the Anglo-Ashanti Wars, Sierra Leone, East Africa and Palestine before being disbanded in 1921.

As this example demonstrates, the history of slavery is often more complex and certainly more nuanced than Brooke Newman’s account suggests.

By way of general context, and on the subject of the league of infamy, the distinguished slavery historian, David Eltis, notes ‘that in 1804 there were 45 million slaves labouring across the globe’, that 3 millions of these were of African descent and living in the Americas (6.6%), and of these, about 750,000 were slaves on British islands (1.7%). 10.7 million slaves survived Atlantic transportation and British dominance of the trade was restricted to 1730-1800, during which period British traders carried 1.73 million slaves. The focus of the business was the South Atlantic rather than the Caribbean, in fact, peaking in 1829, two decades after the British abolished their slave trade. The majority of slave voyages began in the Americas rather than Europe, and almost two thirds of all Africans ending up in Iberian America [[5]].

The role of the English—and, after 1707, British—monarchy in the slave trade varied considerably over the centuries. Elizabeth I, the ruler of what was then a second-rank power and a monarch burdened by substantial inherited debts, readily granted charters, marques, and licences to merchants, and regulated trading companies and privateers, while simultaneously enforcing the fiscal and regulatory apparatus of customs duties and, later, the Navigation Acts. As Newman notes, Elizabeth did sanction the three slave-raiding voyage syndicates led by John Hawkins in the 1560s, conducted in small galleons and carrying perhaps 1,200 enslaved Africans in total. She held a profit share in two of these expeditions and received charter rent for one vessel—the Jesus of Lübeck—which she lent to the enterprise. The Queen profited from the second voyage and suffered losses on the third. It is also worth noting, however, that during the same period she likely lost more than 1,200 English subjects to enslavement by Barbary pirates.

The Crown’s Silence then turns to the 1618 Guinea joint-stock company licensed by James I to secure gold on the West African coast. Despite the King lending three ships and promising to subscribe capital, the venture proved a financial disaster. Control of the company passed to Sir Nicholas Crispe, who secured a new charter in 1631 authorising trade in gold, redwood, and sugar.

Newman notes that the Company factor, when asked if he would like to buy slaves responded ‘We were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes’ and, when told other white men bought slaves, he replied ‘They were another kinde of people different from us’ [[6]]. Newman strikingly suggests – with little evidence – that this answer was ‘far from the truth’. The company’s principal objective then was gold ‘and at that moment human beings were not on the list’, she writes, but would be later.

By 1640, when the company lost its monopoly charter, Newman observes that the company had acquired land in Barbados and were owed debts there, ‘presumably for the purchase of enslaved Africans’, a presumption she treats as sufficient confirmation that the company had engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. However, other historians have argued that it was Crispe’s three partners who, competing against the company, were undertaking slave trading contrary to the charter. It is also suggested that this was a conflict between the Royalist anti-slaver Crispe, and the Puritan slave-trading Parliamentarians [[7]].

The next chartered enterprise was the Royal Adventurers into Africa, established in 1660. Like its predecessors, it set out primarily in search of African gold and was led by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, alongside a board of inept and inexperienced aristocratic directors and shareholders. The company quickly became insolvent as ‘the whole venture was more reminiscent of an aristocratic treasure-hunt than of an organised business’[[8]].

Newman suggests the directors reconstituted the company and secured a new charter from King Charles II chiefly for slave trading, supported by gold and sugar. In reality, the Royal Adventurers lost 90% of their capital and the remaining assets were bought by the newly formed 1672 Royal African Company (RAC) which was led by more experienced merchants and funded by a much wider base, though one that did include the King, the Prince of Wales, Prince Rupert, and most of the chief ministers.

Initially, the RAC performed well, largely on the back of gold and goods’ trading, until around 1692. Thereafter, however, the company drifted into insolvency, propping up dividend payments through increasingly dubious, Ponzi-like borrowing on credit, and it finally collapsed in 1708. Newman notes that James II, a company Governor and the largest shareholder at 2.7%, made a profit on his shares of ‘at least £6,281’. Yet the company’s foremost historian, Kenneth Davies [8], suggests that James II’s £3,000 of stock received dividends of £3,480 and was sold after he fled for France in 1689 for £5,730, realising an annual return of 12%. However, Davies goes on to point out that those, unlike James II or Prince Rupert, who failed to get out before 1691 lost £350 per £100 capital of stock.

Another early seller was the notorious Bristol merchant Edward Colston, who disposed of part of his RAC stock in 1689. Contrary to Newman’s claim that Colston gave his shares away, he in fact sold them to William III at £191 per share, having originally paid approximately £150 [[9]].

Leaving aside its disastrous financial performance, the RAC did get the Asiento slaving sub-contract and, according to the Slave Voyages database, was responsible for transporting 99,177 slaves across the Atlantic. Newman correctly notes that the RAC transported more slaves ‘than any other institution during the period’ 1672-1688, but this on its own is misleading as to the scale and responsibility for this horrific trade.

This was 37.3% of the total of slaves transported in this period. The Nieuw West Indische Compagnie (Dutch West India Co.) had a 21.7% share, followed by others like the Swedish Africa Company, the Danish Africa Company and the Brandenburg Africa Company (Prussia). Monarchs, or the ruling institutions, across European maritime nations then engaged directly or tangentially with slavery and licensed or promoted slaving companies. The responsibilities and numbers are still being researched.

Scott Stawski argues, for example, that Denmark was integral to transporting ‘more than 600,000 African slaves to the Americas from 1671 until 1825, making Denmark, not the 7th but the 5th largest slave-trading nation, only surpassed by Portugal, Great Britain, and France’[[10]].

In a wider perspective, Eltis concludes that ‘Overall, a total of at least 40,000 transatlantic slave voyages occurred over the 350-year-long transatlantic slave trade era. State sponsored company ventures could have accounted for only 5 per cent of these’. On this view, the trade was overwhelmingly one of private enterprise rather than one driven primarily by avaricious monarchs.

Newman is keen to portray the monarchs after James II as active governors of chartered companies, personally directing their affairs for private profit. Yet there appears to be no evidence that any of them ever presided over a Court of Directors or a General Court of Proprietors [[11]]. Their role is more accurately described as one of patronage, “largely honorary or nominal”, as John Brocklehurst explained to the House of Commons in 1834 [[12]]. She also argues that Queen Anne appointed her husband, Prince George of Denmark, as Lord High Admiral and that, in this capacity, he was particularly helpful to the RAC by instructing Royal Navy vessels to protect its trade. This claim is difficult to take seriously. Effective power within the Navy at the time rested with George Churchill, while Prince George’s role was widely regarded as ceremonial—he perhaps was, after all, ‘the very stupid and insignificant husband of Queen Anne’, as Queen Victoria later described him.

The RAC’s Asiento sub-contract was granted by the South Sea Company (SSC). The SSC itself had obtained the Asiento—previously held successively by the French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Genoese—under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, agreed during Queen Anne’s reign. Newman gives the impression that Queen Anne personally negotiated the treaty, rather than it being the product of policy and diplomacy led by her chief minister, the ‘blue-water’ Tory Robert Harley, in opposition to the Whigs’ continental strategy. Newman recognises that the SSC, established two years before the treaty,  was ‘created to address Britain’s national debt’ and the prospect of the future Asiento ‘bolstered the perceived value of the stock’, which was underwritten at 6% by the Treasury. The scheme was a response to Queen Anne’s appeal to Parliament in 1710 that ‘the Navy, and other offices, are burdened with heavy debt which so far affect the public service that I must earnestly desire you to find some way to answer these demands’[[13]].  What Newman does not address, however—having detailed the scale of royal and governmental involvement in the venture—is the longstanding debate over whether, in financial terms, the South Sea Company’s involvement in the slave trade amounted to very much at all.

The Queen’s Speech, 1710

This issue has recently been examined in detail in relation to the Church Commissioners and their Queen Anne’s Bounty fund. In short, the evidence strongly suggests that the 1712 ‘investment’ in the SSC was in fact a forced conversion of holders of public debt into SSC shareholders. This is borne out by the 1723 division of the company’s shares, prompted by debt subscribers’ demands to separate the risky trading ventures of the ‘money subscriber’ from the secure government annuities. The monarch’s and the government’s holdings remained in the form of fixed SSC annuities, ultimately paid by the Exchequer, while the tradable SSC stock—representing only around 10 per cent of the company’s capital—generated what was described as ‘a paltry return’ from goods trading rather than from slave trading [[14]]. Nevertheless, the SSC was responsible for transporting an estimated 34,000 slaves to Spanish South America, representing 1.64% of slaves delivered to Spanish South America, or 0.32% of the total transatlantic slave trade over the period 1525-1867 [[15]].

Newman also points out that the public revenue, and hence the monarch’s Civil List, was partly funded by ‘custom taxes on slave-produced sugar’ and that the royal family liked eating sugar: in the case of George II, apparently 110 lbs of sugar in November 1758 alone. She notes that ‘sugar had emerged as the most valuable British import, funnelling more tax revenue into the Exchequer annually than any other commodity’ without drawing out the distinction that sugar was not subject to excise tax as opposed to spirits, wine and tobacco which were taxed under both customs and excise to a higher yield. Moreover, her analysis does not recognise that the economic gain was far exceeded by the cost of defending the colonial sugar plantations and that the customs revenue went on military costs rather than enriching the monarchy, as per the Sugar Act 1764. Indeed, one suggestion in this contested history is that sugar, at its peak, contributed no more than 2.5% to the British economy [[16]].

Newman’s later chapter turns to abolition, but the account is ultimately unsatisfactory, placing disproportionate emphasis on figures who were not central to bringing abolition about. Sir William Dolben’s 1788 Slave Trade Act, for example, is presented as having been prompted by Olaudah Equiano, a West African former slave, rather than as a measure shepherded by William Wilberforce, driven through the Commons by William Pitt’s political threats, and skilfully forced through the Lords by Charles Stanhope. Regulation was seen at the time as an interim step towards full abolition, but progress was thwarted by fears provoked by the French Revolution of 1789 and the slave revolts in St. Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. The remarkable oratory of Wilberforce, Pitt and Fox failed to convince the sullen majority in the Commons until Pitt led the momentous debate of 1792 asking ‘how is the enormous evil ever to be eradicated’[?] [[17]]. This secured the first Commons majority in favour of abolition – albeit ‘gradual’ – an event Newman reduces to the observation that the motion ‘passed the Commons but was subsequently defeated in the House of Lords’.

Newman notes, correctly, that George III’s public position on abolition was neutral, but she nevertheless suggests that the royal family as a whole was strongly opposed to freedom, citing in particular the active defence of slavery by his son, Prince William, Duke of Clarence, later William IV. Far less attention is given to contrary evidence: the possible abolitionist sympathies of Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (the 6th son and 9th child of George III), and the clear abolitionist positions of George III’s nephew and son-in-law, William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and of Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales and the estranged wife of George IV.

Others have concluded that the ‘king’s concern for order and stability, and his desire to protect the strength of the British Empire against a backdrop of revolutionary changes in Europe and America, disposed him towards maintaining the status quo in regard to slavery’ although he exhibited clear contradictions that were also ‘inherent in the views and behaviour of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on the issue of slavery’[[18]].

The tortuous and difficult political route from the Regulated Slave Trade Act 1788 and the 1792 resolution through to the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Act 1806, the Slave Trade Act 1807, and finally to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 is not really covered by Newman either. The final ‘buying off’ of the opposition by the £20 million compensation, then about 40% of annual public spending, is dismissed by her as failing to compensate slaves when abolitionists of the time thought it a huge price worth paying to end ‘that atrocious traffic in human beings … the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe’, as Albert, Prince Consort described it [[19]]. That compensation, in conjunction with the Royal Navy’s costs in enforcement from 1815, has been described as ‘the most costly international moral action … in modern history’[[20]] at nearly 2% of GDP for sixty years, or about £3.47 trillion of today’s economy. It would appear that Newman is inviting Britain to repeat the gesture.

View of English Harbour, Antigua. Thomas Major 1756.

George III Collection. Royal Archives.

A historian looking over the ‘documentary record that stretches across four centuries’ should bear in mind, for example, that the last woman legally burnt alive in Britain as a witch was executed in 1727 and the practice abolished in 1735, and the last man inhumanely ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ died in 1782 and the practice was abolished as late as 1870. The immorality of slavery, and indeed the modern concept of human or natural rights, were themselves relatively recent entrants into the political lexicon, emerging with real force only in the late eighteenth century. The more interesting historical question is therefore why such ideas arose so abruptly in British political consciousness in the 1770s and 1780s – a question that does not fall within Newman’s analytical framework, given her determination to assemble evidence in support of a pre-established case.

This results in an inevitably inconsistent and contradictory narrative. On the one hand, the monarchs are portrayed as leading government and personally enriching themselves from slave trading. Oon the other hand, the monarchs are said to have failed to deploy royal prerogative against ‘parliament’s avowed dominance’, while simultaneously being reduced to a ‘symbolic linchpin of the eighteenth-century British Empire’, obliged to remain ‘above the political fray, as [their] constitutional position required’.

Newman’s partisan account is reminiscent of only having a hammer and seeing problems as nails. Contested events are often presented as settled facts, novel interpretations are treated as established narrative, and the focus remains narrowly fixed on the British transatlantic trade, largely detached from its broader Atlantic and global context. While the UK edition would also have benefited from more careful proofreading—not least the inclusion of footnote numbers in the text—the book’s trajectory is clear from the outset, culminating in the claim that after abolition ‘generations … would pass as free people of African ancestry waited for the British sovereign to acknowledge and atone …’. Newman has long argued that ‘it’s time for the British royal family to make amends for centuries of profiting from slavery’ [[21]]. Whether one accepts that conclusion depends less on the evidentiary record than on the prior assumptions brought to it – assumptions that this book does little to interrogate.

The Crown and its governments, over the period 1561-1838, did licence and occasionally invest in slave trading, did tax commodities produced by slave labour, and did look to seize territory characterised by plantation slavery. The Royal Navy undoubtedly used slave labour for building and running its two main dockyards in Antigua and Jamaica, impressed both freemen and former slaves into service, and protected commercial shipping in the Caribbean – alongside the Navy’s later role in slave trade suppression. None of this is hidden, nor was it exceptional among European maritime crowns or governments in the periods concerned.  The Crown and its governments sometimes profited from these activities, but in the British case they more often did not, operating within a system that, as Adam Smith famously concluded, “derives nothing but loss from the dominion” [[22]]. Whether there was any overall economic gain remains highly contested, and there must also be limits to how far present circumstances can realistically be attributed to decisions taken generations or centuries earlier.

Professor Newman of Virginia University, a historian of Atlantic slavery, may care to reflect on the fact, as Eltis points out, that most slaves were born into servitude and, in the US case,

‘fewer than half a million captive Africans arrived via the maritime slave trade over 250 years. But by 1865 at least 10 million people had experienced slavery on the North American mainland. More than 90% of them were born into bondage, rather than captured, and then sold’ [5].

None of this excuses the actions or moral failings of the British Crown and its governments when judged by modern standards. It does, however, raise a legitimate question as to why culpability for the atrocities of the Atlantic – and indeed Indian Ocean – slave systems is not more evenly or comparatively examined across the full range of state powers involved.