Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has revealed that one of his ancestors owned enslaved people on a Jamaican plantation and received compensation from the British government upon the abolition of slavery.
Welby discovered this ancestral link while researching his family history, particularly that of his biological father, Sir Anthony Montague Browne, who was a descendant of Sir James Fergusson, the plantation owner.
Fergusson received compensation after slavery was abolished from a £20m British government package for former slave owners. The Fergusson family shared over £3,500 in compensation in 1836, a sum equivalent to more than £3m today.
The archbishop said Browne was the great-great-grandson of Fergusson, the fourth Baronet of Kilkerran, who owned enslaved people at the Rozelle plantation in St Thomas, according to a statement to the media.
The Rozelle plantation at its peak housed around 200 enslaved people.
The archbishop learned in 2016, through a DNA test, that he was the son of Browne, who had been a private secretary to Winston Churchill. The revelation came as a shock to him as he had believed his father was Gavin Welby, who married his mother Jane shortly after his birth.
Welby has expressed deep remorse for these historical ties and reiterated the church’s commitment to funding initiatives aimed at repairing the harms caused by slavery, including a pledge of £100m with aspirations to reach £1bn.
In a report released last year, the church revealed that a portion of its £9bn endowment came from Queen Anne’s Bounty, a financial initiative established in 1704 that was linked to transatlantic chattel slavery.
At the time, Welby said: “I am deeply sorry for these links. It is now time to take action to address our shameful past.”
In Tuesday’s statement, the archbishop reiterated the Church of England’s commitment to a “thorough and accurate research programme, in the knowledge that archives have far more to tell us about what has come before us – often in a very personal way”, the Guardian reported.
“While I sadly only discovered my relationship to Sir Anthony in 2016, three years after his death, I did have the delight of meeting my half-sister and her son,” he said.
