What the Royal Family’s Links to Slavery Mean in the Age of Epstein
Early on the morning of May 29, 1660, flanked by twenty thousand armed men, King Charles II arrived in London to retake the throne. Bells rang out and ships fired their guns to mark the occasion. It was Charles’s thirtieth birthday. England had been without a king for eleven years, after Charles’s father was beheaded, on a temporary wooden platform outside Banqueting House, part of the palace of Whitehall. But the country’s experiment as a republic was over. King Charles II was welcomed warmly. Bonfires were lit. Fountains flowed with wine and “Divers maidens,” dressed in “white waistcoats and crimson petticoats, and other ornaments of triumph and rejoicing,” asked the permission of the Lord Mayor to join the royal procession. Dusk was falling when the King finally entered the Banqueting House and received the formal offer of the throne.
Charles’s retinue included his twenty-six-year-old brother, James, the Duke of York. During the Civil War, James had been captured by Parliament. Aged fourteen, he escaped, from St. James’s Palace, during a game of hide-and-seek and fled to mainland Europe, where he became a soldier. James was brave but blunt. “He was not dull; but he was cut off. His mind was isolated,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, in a sympathetic character study, in 1928. “Complexity did not bewilder him, rather he missed it altogether.”
Spare princes need something to do. King Charles put the Duke of York in charge of the Navy. Five years earlier, English forces had captured Jamaica, which became the country’s portal to the Caribbean and its emerging American colonies. The Duke of York liked bold ideas. His cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, had heard of “a firm rock of gold of a great bigness” while exploring the Gambia River, on the coast of West Africa, a decade earlier. In December, 1660, James launched the first expedition of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa, to search for gold mines. The Duke also instructed his men to trade for “Negroes, hides and other goods” with Spanish and Portuguese outposts along the way.
The Royal Adventurers found no gold. But they returned to the Duke with a business case for entering—and mastering—the transatlantic slave trade instead. English sea captains, with royal patronage, had been trafficking African people to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake Bay for decades, but on an ad-hoc basis. In January, 1663, the second charter of the Royal Adventurers granted the company a monopoly for the “buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for and with any Negroes Slaves Goods wares and Merchandize whatsoever.” The same month, the Duke of York promised to supply three thousand Africans per year to Barbados and other islands in the Caribbean, at a cost of seventeen pounds per head. The company’s seal carried the Duke’s coat of arms and a Latin motto that meant “by royal patronage, trade flourishes, by trade the realm.” In time, what became known as the Royal African Company shipped more enslaved men, women, and children in the transatlantic slave trade than any other institution.
The Duke was the company’s governor, largest shareholder, and guiding spirit. Meetings often took place at his lodgings in Whitehall. James continued in his role as the governor of the Royal African Society when he ascended the throne, as James II, in 1685, and until he was sent into exile for a final time, three years later.
By then, customs duties from sugar and tobacco—produced by England’s slave economies in the Americas—accounted for a third of the Crown’s revenues. The Royal African Company had acquired forts, ships, and the necessary infrastructure to traffic more than a hundred thousand people from one continent to another. In the seventeen-twenties, long after James’s death, John Atkins, a naval surgeon, visited the Gold Coast and was struck by the initials that were branded on enslaved people’s skin. They “mark them still DY,” he wrote. “Duke of York, to perpetuate the ignominy of his headship to that trade.”
The Duke of York’s devotion to the slave trade stands out in Brooke Newman’s new study, “The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas.” There are other episodes of direct royal complicity, too: in June, 1712, Queen Anne celebrated her negotiation of the Asiento de Negros, a thirty-year contract to supply some five thousand adult males to the Spanish Empire, in a speech to the Houses of Parliament.
But for much of the rest of the time that Britain was involved in trafficking African people—a roughly three-hundred-year period between the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria—the Royal Family’s involvement was mediated by companies and officials. Newman, a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University, is dogged, and her research is important. The conclusion that emerges is that transatlantic slavery was foundational, and known to be so, during the westward expansion of the British royal realm. As Daniel Defoe observed in 1713, “No African trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no sugars, gingers, indigoes etc; no sugars, etc., no islands; no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”
Two silences permeate Newman’s book: the silence of the Crown and the silence of the trafficked. Video et taceo. “I see and keep silent,” Elizabeth I used to say. William IV, who visited New York and the Caribbean in the seventeen-eighties, as a young midshipman in the Navy, was the only monarch to witness Britain’s slave economy in operation. (He viewed Jamaica “with infinite satisfaction” and, along with his six brothers, opposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.) The views of William’s father, George III, were less sure. Left among his papers were notes that drew on Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws,” from 1748, in which George described slavery as “an inhuman custom wantonly practiced by the most enlightened polite nations in the world.” But knowing that something is wrong is not the same as doing something to stop it. During George’s reign, the British state purchased some thirteen thousand African men to serve in his Army. George ended up adopting Montesquieu’s inscrutable, circular reasoning for his own: “The true origin for the right of slavery must be found in the nature of things.”
While the country’s princes and princesses had little to say about enslaved people, they loved having them around. Newman’s book is dotted with paintings that show royal bodies juxtaposed with owned, Black ones: nameless grooms and female attendants acquired to ornament, and accentuate, the existing nature of things. “My greatness is from on high,” reads the swirling banner above the top hat of Queen Anne of Denmark, James I’s wife, in a portrait from 1617. Five hunting dogs, a horse, and a liveried Black youth adorn the scene. Later in the century, Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s most famous lover, was portrayed stuffing sausages, her breasts partially exposed, with a Black servant, in a silver collar, waiting at her shoulder. “Gwyn, a commoner and royal mistress, is of higher status than her anonymous enslaved attendant,” Newman writes. “Yet both figures represent commodified bodies available for royal consumption.”
I read Newman’s book last week, while the Crown was contending with the legacy of another people-trafficking operation, this one conducted by Jeffrey Epstein. Again, the royal protagonist was a former Duke of York. Like his predecessor, Prince Andrew (as he used to be) was a brave young serviceman. Aged twenty-two, he flew helicopters during the Falklands War. One of his tasks was to act as a decoy for Argentinian missiles fired at his mother’s Navy. When he left the military, Andrew turned his attention to foreign trade. Between 2001 and 2011, he was the U.K.’s special representative for international trade and investment, travelling the world in search of profit and adventure, with a team of equerries and a six-foot ironing board. The Daily Telegraph nicknamed him “Airmiles Andy.” Of the Queen’s four children, Andrew was considered the direct and entrepreneurial one. In 2014, he set up Pitch@Palace, a chance for startups to network and present their ideas in a royal setting.
He was not dull, but he was cut off. Andrew met Epstein in the late nineties, through Ghislaine Maxwell, the youngest daughter of Robert Maxwell, a former press baron. Epstein and Maxwell promptly became guests at Balmoral, Sandringham, and Windsor Castle. “Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?” someone describing themselves as “The Invisible Man” e-mailed Maxwell, from the “Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family,” in the summer of 2001. On trips across the Atlantic, Andrew stayed at Epstein’s houses in Palm Beach, New York, and on Little St. James, Epstein’s island in the Caribbean. Two women, including Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, accused the former prince of having sex with them when they were minors, on the island and at Maxwell’s mews house, in London.
During this period, Andrew was making inappropriate friends all over the place. He ensnared himself in relationships with the son of Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, and with Tarek Kaituni, a gun smuggler. He reportedly went goose-hunting with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the authoritarian former President of Kazakhstan, whose family later purchased a mansion from him, in Berkshire. But Epstein and Maxwell appear to have occupied a privileged role. According to the latest release of the Epstein files, Andrew would forward confidential briefings about British investment opportunities overseas to the financier within minutes of receiving them. He described Epstein and Maxwell as “my US family.” Sarah Ferguson, Andrew’s ex-wife and the former Duchess of York, called Epstein the brother she had always wished for. “When are you going to employ me,” she wrote to him, in September, 2010, a year after he was released from prison for soliciting sex from a child.
Andrew has stayed silent about his relationship with Epstein and his victims, with one calamitous exception. In November, 2019, he gave an interview to the BBC, during which he denied any sexual misconduct and insisted that he broke off the friendship in 2010, after Epstein’s conviction. The former Duke did not regret the relationship, however, because he learned a lot about the world. “You have to remember that I was transitioning out of the Navy at the time,” he said. “The Navy—it’s a pretty isolated business.” He never wondered what all the people in Epstein’s houses were doing. “I live in an institution at Buckingham Palace which has members of staff walking around all the time,” he said. “I don’t wish to appear grand, but there were a lot of people who were walking around Jeffrey Epstein’s house. As far as I was aware, they were staff.”
Since the interview, Andrew has refused at least eight requests from U.S. prosecutors and Congress to testify in its investigations of Epstein’s crimes. In 2022, he reached a financial settlement with Giuffre, in which he denied wrongdoing. (Last November, after the publication of Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, Andrew was stripped of his titles: Prince, the Duke of York, and His Royal Highness.) We now know that even when Andrew did open his mouth, it was not to tell the truth. E-mails show that he did not break off his friendship with Epstein in 2010. When a deeply incriminating photograph of Andrew, Giuffre, and Maxwell from 2001—when Giuffre was seventeen—was published, in 2011, he wrote to Epstein the following day, “Don’t worry about me! It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it!” He signed off, “Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
Unlike the portraits in Newman’s book, which were painted to glorify their sitters, many of the images in the Epstein files have a queasy, destabilizing aspect. The nature of the power that is recorded there exists both inside and outside the frame. Were the photographs made for prurience, to objectify the victims, or to blackmail the guilty? Presumably all three. In the BBC interview, Andrew questioned whether the image of him with Giuffre was real. “Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored,” he said. (The latest release of the Epstein files includes an e-mail from Maxwell, from 2015, that indicates the picture was genuine.) The portrait of the Prince and the trafficking victim—his hand on her waist; her heartbreaking smile—with Maxwell, the human factor, standing by, will always be the defining image of the Royal Family’s involvement in the Epstein case.
But a triptych of photographs that were released last month, showing Andrew apparently on the floor of Epstein’s New York town house, have a terrible directness. He kneels sockless, in jeans and a white polo shirt, while a woman lies cruciform and inert. In two of the photos, her head is either cropped or out of shot entirely. His eyes meet the camera dead-on. He puts his hands where he wants. These are images of royal consumption.
“The Crown’s Silence” has had a mixed reception in the British media. Newman, in her book, challenges the present King Charles and the government to “acknowledge and seek to redress” the injustice of transatlantic slavery. (For years, the Royal Family has spoken of its sorrow rather than of its responsibility.) Newman’s work has been welcomed by reformers and those who have been arguing, for years, in favor of British reparations to societies that have borne the legacy of its slaving activities. According to the Guardian, Buckingham Palace does not comment on books, although a source told the newspaper that the King took the matter “profoundly seriously.”
Conservative critics have been more astringent. Both the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph reviewed Newman’s book poorly, with an air of anti-woke ennui, accusing her of imposing contemporary moral standards on the vices of the past. Writing in the Times, Yuan Yi Zhu, a research fellow at Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank, chastised Newman for her “failure to distinguish the person of the monarch from the crown.” In the Telegraph, Simon Heffer described Newman’s book as “untranslated from the original American” and definitely not worth reading. “We can certainly regret that all of this happened,” Heffer concluded. “Our present King, however, has nothing to apologise for at all.”
In a way, the conservative reaction to Newman’s book has mirrored the official response to Andrew’s involvement in the life of Jeffrey Epstein. It is to insist on the distinction between the individual and the Crown. For the past fifteen years, since the photograph of the former Duke with Giuffre was first published, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, has been the subject of a prolonged, experimental de-royalling: to find out if a prince can be excised from the monarchy and the monarchy excised from him. During this time, he has lost his government job, his military titles, his royal income. More than two hundred charities shed him as their patron. Pitch@Palace folded. Andrew has left the Order of the Garter, which was founded by Edward III, in 1348, and had his banner removed from the chapel at Windsor Castle. Last week, a moving van transported Andrew’s possessions from his home in Windsor’s Royal Lodge to a farm on the King’s Sandringham estate, after he was photographed, disconsolate, riding a horse.
The attempt to expunge Andrew and his sins from the Royal Family is interesting insofar as it is doomed. It is Lady Macbeth, washing her hands: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” That is because Andrew will always be royal, in the same way that slavery will always be royal. If blood confers power, it confers other things, too. Continuity is not a feature of the monarchy. It is what the monarchy is. In 2013, the novelist Hilary Mantel gave a lecture entitled “Royal Bodies,” at the British Museum. “In looking at royalty, we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half reveal itself,” Mantel said. “Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are suprapersonal, carriers of a bloodline: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.”
Princes and princesses understood this for centuries. They are revered one minute and dissected the next. “We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all,” Mantel said. Andrew understands this now. They all do, in their bones. When James, the erstwhile Duke of York and slaving pioneer, died in exile, outside Paris, in 1701, his brain was given to the Scots College in Paris, his heart to a convent in Chaillot, and his intestines divided between the English Jesuit College at Saint-Omer and the parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It is not a coincidence that, through the centuries, people who are objectified for their bodies and blood set out to objectify others in turn, whether through the ministrations of the Royal African Company or Jeffrey Epstein’s e-mail account. It is not a mistake to draw a line from that Duke of York to this Duke of York. It is what the Crown asks us to do every day. It is simply to accept the premise that there are Dukes of York at all. ♦