What’s the truth about the links between the British Royal Family and the slave trade? 

Profitable links between the British royal family and the slave trade began during the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century.

The Tudor Queen was allied with Sir John Hawkins, who, as Vice Admiral, had helped defeat the Spanish Armada.

Later, in 1562, he shipped a cargo of slaves across the Atlantic. He traded the 300 Africans he had captured in Sierra Leone for pearls and sugar.

His missions were so lucrative that Queen Elizabeth I sponsored his subsequent voyages, providing ships, supplies and weapons. She also gave him a unique coat of arms depicting a bound slave,” said Royal Museums Greenwich, which also includes the National Maritime Museum.

Hawkins’ travels began a horrific period in which millions of captive men, women and children were taken from West Africa to work in the most horrific conditions in England’s American colonies.

A charter issued by Charles II in 1663 represents when the transatlantic slave trade officially began, with royal approval, according to the British Library, which holds the manuscript in its collection.

The charter granted the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading Into Africa a monopoly on the transportation of people from the west coast of Africa to the English colonies in the Americas.

The company’s successor, the Royal African Company, was founded in 1672 by Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, who later became King James II.

It held the English monopoly until 1698, when the slave trade was opened up to private traders.

Slave trader Edward Colston – whose Bristol statue was toppled in 2020 by Black Lives Matter activists – transferred a large number of shares in the Royal African Company, of which he was then deputy governor, to William III when he became king in 1689.

Queen Anne owned 22.5 percent of the shares in the South Sea Company, which in 1713 was granted a monopoly to supply African slaves to Spanish-occupied America.

Her successors, George I and George II, were governors and shareholders of the South Sea Company.

George III, usually remembered for going mad and losing the American colonies, was the first British monarch to oppose the slave trade.

The company’s successor, the Royal African Company, was founded in 1672 by Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, who later became King James II

In an essay he wrote when he was young, he described slavery as “abhorrent” and was scathing about the arguments used to justify the trade, 2021 data shows.

David Armitage, a history professor at Harvard University, told the Times Literary Supplement that before 1760, no one in the English-speaking world—except two American Quakers—had “so thoroughly debunked the pro-slavery ideology.”

As King, George signed the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807.

But Mr. Armitage said George was not in favor of abolishing the death penalty, as “his face was reportedly set against interference from legislatures anywhere in his realm and slave trade reform as ‘false philanthropy.'”

Slavery persisted in the British colonies until its final abolition in 1838, when William IV—who had previously expressed much resistance to its abolition in speeches in the House of Lords—became king.

The Royal Navy helped fight slavery in the 19th century. It established a force known as the West Africa Squadron which stopped ships operated by both illegal traders.

According to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, between 1808 and 1860 it seized 1,600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans.