Hundreds of enslaved African people had the letters “DY” burned into their flesh in the late 1600s to identify them as the property of the then-Duke of York, the man who would become King James II.

Britain’s slave trade was a hugely lucrative commerce carried out with the unequivocal backing – and literal stamp – of the British monarchy.

From Elizabeth I’s loan of ships for early voyages to royal investment in trafficking companies, generations of monarchs spent 300 years funding, profiting off or supporting slavery.

It is this grim history that is behind calls for King Charles III to apologise during his Caribbean tour, and for the British Government to begin financial reparations for what a United Nations resolution this year described as the “gravest crime against humanity”.

As the figurehead of an institution once complicit in the branding of enslaved human beings, Charles faces a personal pressure to account for the royal family’s extensive entanglement with the slave trade.

The Royal African Company (RAC) – a de facto collaboration between the City of London and royalty – was responsible for transporting 150,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic, more than any other single institution in the history of the slave trade.

As well as “DY” branded into the skin of so-called “castle slaves” kept in the RAC’s forts and factories in West Africa, others sent to Britain’s nascent colonies and beyond by another royalty-backed slaving enterprise – the South Sea Company – were scarred with a symbol of the royal crown.

Charles under the spotlight

The King today acknowledged the monarchy’s links to the transatlantic slave trade in an emotional address to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting. He described it as a “shameful chapter of history” that fills his soul “with the most profound personal sorrow”.

But he stopped short of a formal apology – something that Prime Minister Andy Burnham has signalled he is “open” to. As a constitutional monarch, Charles can only act on the Government’s say-so.

While Downing Street has promised plans for a “debt reset” for Commonwealth countries, ministers have made clear that compensation to the victims of slavery – reparations – were off the table.

Charles instead signalled that he was “finding ways for us to work in modern partnership to address the wrongs of the past with action for the future.”

He said: “Through improving access to education, investing in jobs and opportunities, encouraging intra-Commonwealth trade, and inspiring vital climate resilience measures across the world, I have always felt that there is so much that can be done to help lift up those who struggle against hardship and disadvantage.”

While he has arguably gone further than his forebears – including his mother – in expressing “regret” for the wrongdoings of British colonialism, Charles is nonetheless surrounded by evidence between the monarchy and the slave trade.

His London residence, Clarence House, was commissioned in 1825 by the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, who actively campaigned against abolitionists by arguing for the retention of slavery prior to its final abandonment in the British empire in 1833. 

As a member of the Windsor dynasty, descended from Germany’s House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Charles does not share a direct lineage with many of his slavery-linked predecessors.

But, like thousands of other Britons, a direct line can be traced between the King and ancestors who bought and exploited enslaved people. In 1686, one Edward Porteous, a tobacco plantation owner in Virginia, took a share in a delivery of 200 slaves from the RAC. Later, after the plantation and its labourers had been sold by Porteous’s son, a direct descendant – Frances Smith – married an English aristocrat, Claude Bowes-Lyon.

Their granddaughter – one Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – was the late Queen Mother. 

The monarchy’s ‘silence’

Professor Brooke Newman, an American academic at Virginia Commonwealth University who has chronicled the involvement of British royalty in slavery, told The i Paper the historical evidence of royal complicity in slavery is “unambiguous… and impossible to ignore”. 

“The British monarchy was deeply embedded in the political and commercial structures that enabled and sustained the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery. It cannot simply detach itself from that historical inheritance.” 

Newman, author of The Crown’s Silence, argued that the monarchy has failed to acknowledge its past built on links with slavery, having barely evolved since Prince Albert – the husband of Queen Victoria – became the first senior royal to express regret in 1840 for the legacy of slavery.

From then, “silence on that history and on the involvement of the British and also the British monarchy became policy”, Newman said in a speech earlier this year. “That strategy persists to this day. The past is constantly being framed as something to move beyond.”

Modern British life has roots in slavery

Academic research is also increasingly exposing the way in which slavery remains interwoven with British life. Among keystone projects is the Register of British Slave Traders, a compilation of 13,000 key investors, ranging from monarchs to plumbers, whose money facilitated enslavement. It is estimated that Britain was responsible for the trafficking of 3.3m slaves and that nine in ten enslaved Africans transported to America did so on British ships.  

Professor William Pettigrew, a historian at Kings College London who led the project, said Britain has spent 200 years using its role in the abolition of slavery to fail to adequately account for its actions in the very trade it came to abhor.  

In a new book, , Pettigrew argues that much of what makes the UK distinctive and progressive  – from endowments to hospitals for the sick and poor, to the building of docks and canals, to the founding of the British Museum – has its roots in the profits and ethos of slavery.  

It is a sombre legacy in which the monarchy was front and centre, he said: “The backing that the institution of the monarchy gave to African chattel slavery is explicit… The monarchy went further than the nation as a whole in backing the trade, and wasn’t in advance of the nation in condemning it.” 

Pettigrew noted that when the English monarchy sought to rebrand itself as an innovative institution under the Restoration of Charles II in the mid-1600s, it actively chose the backing of slavery as one means of enhancing its reputation. 

Prior to that, Elizabeth I had kickstarted the elision between the state and slavery by loaning Royal Navy vessels to the slave trader John Hawkins in return for a share of the profits from his voyages. 

‘If you want economic growth, you need a monarchy and you need a slave trade’

But James II, whose statue in the style of a Roman emperor stands to this day in Trafalgar Square, set the bar for regal involvement in the selling of human beings. The Catholic monarch, who eventually fled into an exile partly funded by his earnings from slavery, attended and even hosted the vast majority of meetings for the forerunner to the Royal African Company, which was granted a monopoly on English slave trading from West Africa.

“James II’s connection with slavery is the deepest of any British monarch. I regard him as the most important British slave trader of the 17th century,” Pettigrew said. 

The academic pointed out that the RAC’s Latin motto – translated roughly as “business is flourishing due to royal patronage, and the Kingdom is flourishing due to business” – cemented the relationship between the organisation’s key source of profits and its largest shareholder.

“The implication [of the motto] is if you want economic growth, you a need a monarchy and you need a slave trade,” he said.

Researchers have established that royals thereafter expended considerable energy in perpetuating slavery until abolition. 

In 1713, Queen Anne signed a deal with Spain to deliver 4,800 enslaved African men every year to its American colonies. 

William IV – who as Duke of Clarence argued that slaves in British colonies lived in “humble happiness” – reluctantly signed abolition into law in 1833 only after opponents of the move secured agreement for a compensation package for slave owners of the staggering sum of £20m, estimated to be worth some £22bn today.

As recently as 2023, a sculpture entitled “Bust of an Enslaved Man” – in which the subject is portrayed wearing a slave collar – had remained on display at Kensington Palace after having previously been misidentified as depicting a favourite servant of William III, Newman said.

Calls for Palace reparations

Newman told The i Paper that the sheer depth of the British monarchy’s engagement with slavery meant there was an obligation on Buckingham Palace to set up its own reparation fund, similar to the Church of England’s £100m fund in 2023 to address its own links to profits from the slave trade.

“In my view, there is a strong case for the monarchy to issue its own apology for slavery and establish its own reparative fund, independently of anything the British Government might eventually decide to do,” she said.

“An apology without concrete action risks being little more than another symbolic gesture, no more substantive than a statement of regret.”