An imposing bronze statue stands tall on the manicured lawns at Kensington Palace, a formidable tribute to William III, who built the palace as a royal residence in the bustling heart of London. William’s namesake, the current Prince of Wales, grew up there with his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, and today it is his official London residence with his wife, Catherine.
Awareness has grown in recent years of William III’s personal investment in the transatlantic slave trade at the time he built Kensington Palace, and of successive English monarchs’ involvement in the industrial-scale enslavement and exploitation of Black people.
King Charles III and Prince William have made public statements recently expressing “profound sorrow” at the “appalling atrocity of slavery”, which they said “forever stains our history”. However, neither has explicitly acknowledged the full extent of the monarchy’s role.
At Kensington Palace, in the stories of kings and queens told on the information boards on the public tour, and outside on the William III statue, there is not a word about their links to slavery.
But now a document found in the archives by the historian Dr Brooke Newman, and published for the first time by the Guardian, highlights the involvement of the British monarchy in the appalling trade. The publication of the document has added impetus to calls for the royal family to thoroughly investigate their historical links to transatlantic slavery.
Four lines of elaborately ink-written scrawl state that £1,000 of shares were given to William III in 1689. The shares were in the Royal African Company (RAC), which captured, enslaved and transported thousands of African people, with the monopoly power of a royal charter. The document clearly bears the handwritten name of the now notorious Edward Colston.
‘I doe accept of the transfer’
Once revered as a philanthropist in his home city of Bristol, Colston has since been exposed by modern campaigners for his slave-trading business, and protesters toppled his statue in June 2020.
After Colston transferred the RAC shares, King William III became governor of the company and earned further wealth from it. The royal charter gave the RAC a forcibly protected monopoly to trade in enslaved people from west Africa.
The Slave Voyages database, which collects information from historical research, states that in the 60 years of its operations, the RAC transported 186,827 enslaved people, including almost 24,000 children, to the Americas. More than 38,000 people died during the journeys.
Newman, who is writing a book, The Queen’s Silence, on the British monarchy’s historic involvement in slavery and modern failure to acknowledge it, found the Colston transfer in the National Archives in Kew on a research trip to London in January. She was commissioned as a consultant on the monarchy’s links to slavery by the Guardian’s Cotton Capital project, which has investigated the newspaper’s links to slavery.
Cost of the crown is an investigation into royal wealth and finances. The series, published ahead of the coronation of King Charles III, is seeking to overcome centuries of secrecy to better understand how the royal family is funded, the extent to which individual members have profited from their public roles, and the dubious origins of some of their wealth. The Guardian believes it is in the public interest to clarify what can legitimately be called private wealth, what belongs to the British people, and what, as so often is the case, straddles the two.
Newman said: “This document offers clear evidence of the British monarchy’s central involvement in the expansion of the slave trade, and the huge importance of crown support for the enslaving voyages to Africa. Edward Colston has become notorious now due to historians’ dedicated research and campaigners in Bristol, but in fact he was a far less significant figure than the successive kings and queens who invested and gave royal backing to slavery and the slave trade.”
Above Colston’s handwritten name, the document states: “I doe transfer one thousand pounds part of my stock in the RACE [Royal African Company of England] unto his highness William Henry Prince of Aurange [sic].”
Below that, the king affirmed: “I doe accept of the transfer of Mr Colston of one thousand pounds above said.”
This shareholding was given to the king; Colston was reimbursed by the company. In return, King William III agreed to serve as the RAC’s governor, and to act with “kindness” towards the company. Soon the RAC shares quadrupled in value, and dividends were paid to William and his wife, Queen Mary II, who also owned RAC shares.
Just a few months after William was given the shares, the site for Kensington Palace was bought with funds provided by parliament to the new king. William and Mary commissioned the architect Sir Christopher Wren to build a residence fit for a king. The palace became home to successive monarchs who were involved in the slave trade, including Queen Anne, who expanded Britain’s involvement by securing the right to supply Spain’s colonies with enslaved people.
‘Bust of an enslaved man’
Overlooking the statue of William III are royal apartments, in the private section of Kensington Palace where today William and Catherine and three other royal couples have their London residences and headquarters. A memorial playground to Diana, who stayed at Kensington Palace with William and Prince Harry after her 1996 divorce from Charles, is nearby in Kensington Gardens.
The section of the building open to the public is managed by Historic Royal Palaces, a royal charter body responsible for maintaining the unoccupied parts of several royal palaces, including Hampton Court and the Tower of London.
In the public tour of Kensington Palace there is information about how William III built the palace, and how he was devastated at Mary’s death from smallpox in 1694.
But on a visit earlier this year, the Guardian could not find a mention of his or any monarch’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade on the information boards, in the official guidebook, or on the statue of William III.
The only representation of slavery was a statue displayed in the Queen’s Gallery. It was a bust of a Black man with a metal collar clamped around his neck. For years, HRP and the Royal Collection Trust, which owns the bust, described the figure as “a favourite personal servant of William III”.
Now the sculpture is described as a “bust of an enslaved man”. The change was made in 2021, according to HRP, after a curator carried out an audit of its collections relating to Black history. But there is still only a limited explanation of what this artwork represents. The Royal Collection Trust said there were “no conclusive records” as to who commissioned it, or why.
A spokesperson for HRP said there was a “room guide”, a folder of information accompanying the bust, that included the detail that “William III had a personal investment in slavery as a shareholder in the Royal African Company, which traded in enslaved Africans”. The room guide information also noted that William arrived in England “accompanied by 200 enslaved Africans from the Dutch colony of Surinam”.
HRP said the bust was no longer in the palace as it had been loaned to another venue. The room guide is no longer on the public tour.
‘Profoundly seriously’
Many British institutions, including the Church of England, are now acknowledging their historical involvement in the slave trade.
In December, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands commissioned research into the Dutch royal family’s role in slavery and colonialism. This means that William III’s involvement in the slave trade as a Dutch prince will be researched by an official inquiry outside the UK. .
In October 2020, it was widely reported that HRP was preparing for a review of its properties’ slavery links when it advertised for a “curator for inclusive history”. At the time, the organisation’s joint chief curator Lucy Worsley said in an interview with the Times that the National Trust, which had commissioned a review of its own properties’ slavery connections, was “ahead of the game”.
Worsley acknowledged at the time that “anything to do with the Stuarts” – the line of British monarchs from James I in 1603 to Queen Anne, who died in 1714 – “is going to have an element of money derived from slavery within it”. One view of Queen Anne, Worsley said, was that she made Britain “the most successful slave-trading nation in the world”.
HRP said Worsley had been “misinterpreted” and that the organisation had never intended to commission a review.
HRP is a partner with Manchester University in an independent PhD research project by the historian Camilla de Koning. Her project is looking into the crown’s involvement in the slave trade and its engagement with the empire. De Koning is due to complete the PhD by 2026.
A HRP spokesperson said: “This research will provide a greater understanding of the subject and will inform our future approach.”
A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said it was supporting the research through access to the royal collection and the royal archives. “This is an issue that His Majesty takes profoundly seriously,” they said. “As His Majesty told the Commonwealth heads of government reception in Rwanda last year, ‘I cannot describe the depths of my personal sorrow at the suffering of so many, as I continue to deepen my own understanding of slavery’s enduring impact.’”
