As early as 1558, the first year of Elizabeth Tudor's reign, the Guinea Company was granted a royal monopoly of trade with West Africa for ten years. John Hawkins began his human trafficking activities four years later in 1562. Although it has been reported that in conversation with him Elizabeth Tudor is supposed to have warned, "if any Africans should be carried away without their free consent, it would be detestable, and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers," she clearly knew the nature of his maritime activities and invested in them herself [1]. Elizabeth Tudor, like many monarchs who succeeded her, was fully engaged in the enslavement and human trafficking of Africans.

The Emancipation Statue standing in Bridgetown, Barbados.

The monarchy's appetite for the human trafficking of Africans was greatly increased the following century after the introduction of sugar production in the newly acquired colonies in the Caribbean. The demand for enslaved African labour soared and soon became the major preoccupation of the English state abroad. After 1655, when England seized Jamaica from Spain, several state monopolies were established to conduct the trafficking of Africans to the new colonies, the most well-known being the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading in Africa, established after the restoration of the monarchy in 1663 and the Royal Africa Company established in 1672. In the ten years following 1663 at least 10,000 Africans each year were trafficked across the Atlantic. The wealth that flowed from this great crime and the "Africa trade" led to the creation of a new coin, the golden "guinea", first minted in 1663 and afterwards stamped with the elephant and castle, the crest of the Royal Africa Company. The Stuarts retained the same interest in human trafficking as their predecessors. The Duke of York, the brother of the monarch, became the first president of the Royal Adventurers, while Charles Stuart and many of those close to the royal family were its main investors.

When the Royal Africa Company was formed, the Duke of York became its first governor and had his initials branded on African men, women and children. In 1677 "several members" of the Royal Africa Company asked for a legal opinion as to whether human trafficking was in keeping with the Navigation Acts, mercantilist laws which required all trade to be carried out in British ships. The Solicitor-General reassured them that "negroes ought to be esteemed goods and commodities within the Acts of Trade and Navigation," thus dehumanising Africans in the process [2].

British Slave ship Brookes, 1788, showing how the slaves were stowed in the ship.

The creation of the Bank of England and the National Debt, in 1694, were the necessary means for raising the finance for carrying out the major trade and colonial wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, waged mainly against France. These wars led in 1713 to the famous Treaty of Utrecht, by which Britain secured Gibraltar from Spain but even more importantly secured the asiento to supply Spain's American colonies with enslaved Africans. Queen Ann even boasted of the fact that "I have insisted and obtained that the asiento or contract to supply the Spanish West Indies with negroes shall be made with us for thirty years" [3]. The government promptly sold the rights for £7.5m to the South Sea Company, an early and ultimately unsuccessful rival to the Bank of England, whose first governor was also employed as the Chancellor of the Exchequer [4]. In 1720 over five hundred members of both Houses of Parliament were shareholders in the South Sea Company, so too were the Royal Family.

Just as the monarchy was one of the most zealous defenders and beneficiaries of slavery so too was it one of the most determined opponents of the abolition of that great crime. The future William IV made one of his most notable speeches on the subject in the House of Lords in 1799. Therein he presented an entire history of human trafficking not hesitating to point out the involvement of every British monarchy in this great crime, in order to show that the monarchy had since the time of Elizabeth Tudor always supported the enslavement and trafficking of Africans. Amongst other things His Royal Highness made the following remarks:

This map shows what was transported between Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and North America at the height of the slave trade. As well as enslaved people, British traders took products such as gold, ivory and spices, from Africa.

"I have declared, and I always shall declare, that I have been, that I am, and that I always shall be, a sincere friend to wise and humane regulations in transporting the Negroes from Africa to the West Indies... it is humane, it is wise and praiseworthy of this Great Commercial Nation, to prevent diseased and infected Negroes from being imported into the British West India Plantations."

"...In the year 1788 the British property in the West Indies amounted to £70,000,000 sterling. Admitting that the price of Negroes, since the commencement of the war, has risen from £50 to between £80 and £90 sterling per head, the improvement of property in the same period much more than counter-balances the advance; and hence I am perfectly well warranted in saying, that the whole capital of the Old British West India property amounts to at least £80,000,000 sterling. If allowed to add the value of the New West India property, namely, the conquests from the French, Spaniards, and Dutch, amounting to at least £20,000,000, I may safely assert, that the present British Capital in the West Indies, is equal, upon a fair calculation, to ONE HUNDRED MILLIONS STERLING! A sum, my Lords, which demands your most serious consideration, before you consent to the Abolition of a that Trade without which it could not exist." [5]

Such was the nature of the monarchy and no doubt the source of some of its great wealth.

Notes
1. Quoted in H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (London: Papermac, 1997), p.156.
2. "America and West Indies: July 1677, 16-31", in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 10, 1677-1680, ed. W Noel Sainsbury and J W Fortescue (London, 1896), pp. 116-138. British History Online
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol10/pp116-138
3. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 236.
4. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 235.
5. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Substance_of_the_speech_of_His_Royal_Highness_the_Duke_of_Clarence,_in_the_House_of_Lords

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