The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls

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Underneath a Tontine Head at a Glasgow Museum collection, an interpretation panel about slavery has been installed to educate visitors about their slavery links. As there was almost nothing done to ensure that the Acts were obeyed, slave traders continued their activities, as did the shipbuilders. Information about this was sent to Parliament by the abolitionists, some of the captains in the Anti-Slavery Squadrons and British consular officials in slave-worked Cuba and Brazil. Investigations were held, more Acts were passed, but all to no avail, as no means of enforcement was put in place in Britain. All the government did was to set up the Anti-Slavery Squadron – at first comprised of old, semi-derelict naval vessels, unfit for the coastal conditions. To enable them to stop slavers of other nationalities, Britain entered into treaties with other slaving countries. But these were also ignored. The slave trade continued, unabated. In 2018, Prince Charles denounced Britain’s role in the slave trade as an “atrocity” but there have been calls for the Queen also to apologise on behalf of the monarchy. f) The division of Africa between the European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1885, ignoring previous historical boundaries, language groups, kingdoms – the after-affects are there today, as are those of (c) and (e).

This Act only freed the enslaved in the West Indies, Cape Town, Mauritius and Canada. Slavery continued in the rest of the British Empire. Even the importation of slaves into a British colony continued – into Mauritius, obtained from the French after the Napoleonic Wars, where importation was not stopped until about 1820. ( 23 ) Emancipation in Britain Unwin, Rayner. The Defeat of John Hawkins: A Biography of His Third Slaving Voyage. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960; New York: Macmillan, 1960.

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René Goulaine de Laudonnière, A notable historie containing foure voyages made by certayne French captaynes vnto Florida (trans. Richard Hakluyt; London: Thomas Dawson, 1587), 51–52. Elizabeth I was involved with John Hawkins, one of the first British slave traders, and Charles II encouraged its expansion.

Before becoming king, he held the title Duke of Clarence and spent time in the Caribbean, where he befriended plantation owners and boasted of contracting a sexual disease. He devoted speeches in the Lords to defending slavery, arguing that it was vital to prosperity, and he argued that enslaved people were “comparatively in a state of humble happiness”. Histories of the company overwhelmingly dwell on the “South Sea bubble” – the 1720 rise and the collapse of the company’s share price. Few focus on the nature of its business – the Asiento contract to supply 4,800 adult, healthy males to Latin America annually. Morgan, Basil (2004). "Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/12672. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) The C of E is also reviewing thousands of monuments in churches and cathedrals that contain historical references to slavery and colonialism.Parliamentarians and others who could read, or had the time to attend meetings, were well informed about slavery by the books published by two ex-slaves, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano; slightly less dramatic and emphatic anti-slavery books were published by Ignatius Sancho and Ukwasaw Groniosaw. Equiano, like Thomas Clarkson (another truly remarkable man), lectured up and down the country, and in Ireland. ( 19 )

William IV was king at the time slavery was abolished in 1833, but he had always opposed abolition. a b Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London: The Reprint Society, 1961), p. 190. In fact, the role of slavery in Britain's wealth did not diminish. Vast amounts of slave-grown tobacco were imported from the southern states in the USA, and then from Cuba and Brazil. When the amount of sugar now grown by free labour in the Caribbean colonies did not satisfy British consumers, slave-grown sugar was imported. Despite campaigns pointing out that this would increase the trade in slaves, the import duty on free-grown and slave-grown sugar was equalised in 1848. Much of the imported sugar was exported, earning Britain even more money. Journalist Peter Tatchell has argued that the institution of monarchy is itself inherently racist as there have only been, and likely will only ever be, white monarchs. He notes,

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It is difficult to estimate just how much of the current royal family’s wealth is owed to slavery, but it is understood that the profits of the slave trade funded the Treasury, as well as Britain’s industries, buildings, railways, roads and parks. Williamson, James. Hawkins of Plymouth: a new History of Sir John Hawkins. 1949. Second edition, 1969. If the royal family is not able to make similar attempts to confront the racism in its past and present, it risks falling ever further out of touch with the people it is supposed to represent. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

But this version of British history is nothing but a muddled, self-congratulatory national myth, one no less misleading and historically dubious than the myth of American exceptionalism. The history of Atlantic slavery is equally a British story and an American story. They are separate yet interdependent strands of the same sordid tale; we cannot fully understand one without the other. Hawkins’ legacy divides opinion. The historian Geoffrey Elton appraised Hawkins as "one of the founding-fathers of England's naval tradition ... he was a man of commanding presence and intellect, of outstanding abilities as a seaman, administrator, fighter and diplomat." [21] More recently he has been described as a pirate and slave trader. [22] We will soon know more about the present, too. Historic Royal Palaces are leading a review that may make it clearer than ever before how former and current royal residences are linked to the slave trade. Kensington Palace, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s London residence, will be reviewed. As will Hampton Court Palace, which is owned by Her Majesty. My upcoming book, The Queen’s Silence (published by Mariner and Mudlark), will join these ongoing investigations and make the Royal Family’s links to the slave trade and colonial slavery explicit. While this could change, of course, the treatment of Meghan and the alleged concerns over her son’s skin colour suggest the privileging of whiteness is deeply ingrained.

The interview points to a larger issue of racism in the British monarchy, both contemporary and historical. A spokesperson for the Church Commissioners said: “Like many organisations, we are looking into our past and have commissioned external research into the origins of our predecessor bodies, Queen Anne’s Bounty and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. King Charles II gave the Company of Royal Adventurers of England a royal charter. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images Charles II ( 1660-1685 ) The now pleasant court takes its names after the Virginia Mansion, which once stood on Virginia Street. The hotel made way for the city's first ever paved street outside its front door, where it has been alleged the tobacco lords would meet to discuss the price of slaves in Africa, the growing conditions of tobacco in Virginia, the sugar crop in Jamaica and the tobacco market in France.