A headline from the Netherlands puts a figure of nearly half a billion on one dynasty’s earnings, in the same week the King prepares to speak in the Caribbean
Monarchies and the Slave Trade: Two Approaches
Royal news from abroad seldom has much bearing on our own. This week one item did.
A daily digest of royal coverage from around the world carried, in its summary for Friday 2 October, a line under the Netherlands: a Dutch news site reporting that the Dutch royal house earned nearly half a billion from slavery.
I have only the headline, and I am not going to describe findings I have not read. But I know the background, and it makes an instructive comparison with what is happening here. The same day’s digest listed, under the United Kingdom, reports that the King will acknowledge the darkest days of colonial rule on his Caribbean tour and will not apologise. I wrote about that last week.
Two monarchies. The same history. Rather different ways of facing it.
What the Dutch Did
The Netherlands was one of the great slave-trading powers. Dutch ships carried several hundred thousand Africans across the Atlantic. Its colonies in the Caribbean and South America ran on enslaved labour until 1863.
In recent years the country has examined that past with unusual directness. The Prime Minister apologised on behalf of the state. Then, on the anniversary of abolition in 2023, the King went further. He apologised in person, in a public speech, and asked forgiveness for the failure of his forebears to act.
Before that he had commissioned independent research into the role of his own family, the House of Orange-Nassau, in colonial history. Not the state’s role. The dynasty’s.
An earlier study, commissioned by the government, had already estimated what the ruling princes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries received from the colonies, as shareholders and office-holders. The figure reported at the time, converted into today’s money, was of the order of half a billion euros.
Whether this week’s headline refers to that estimate or to new work, I cannot say. The point is that a number exists. Somebody looked in the archives and added it up.
What Britain Has Done
Less, and more quietly.
The links are not in doubt. The Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other single institution, was founded under a royal charter. Its governor was the King’s brother, later king himself. People were branded with his initials. Monarchs invested in it and in its successors.
The present King has expressed personal sorrow on several occasions. He has spoken of the appalling atrocity of slavery. And in 2023 the Palace indicated that it was supporting academic research into the monarchy’s historical links with the trade, giving a researcher access to the Royal Archives and the Royal Collection.
That is not nothing. But it is a doctoral project, not a commission. There has been no figure. And there has been no apology, for the constitutional reasons I set out last time: the King speaks on the advice of ministers, and ministers of every party have declined to authorise one, fearing it would be taken as an admission of legal liability.
Why the Difference?
Several reasons suggest themselves.
The Dutch King is a constitutional monarch too, and his apology was made with his government’s agreement. The difference is that the Dutch government had already apologised. The King was following, not leading. In Britain no government has taken that step, so the monarch cannot.
The scale of the possible claim is different. Britain’s former Caribbean colonies have, through their regional body, set out a formal case for reparations. The sums discussed are very large. Dutch ministers faced similar calls and decided to apologise and establish a fund for education and remembrance without conceding compensation. British ministers have judged the risk differently.
And there is the Commonwealth. The King is head of an association that includes most of the countries concerned. Some remain his realms. What he says in Kingston is heard in fourteen other capitals.
The Case for Counting
Leaving aside apology, which is a matter for governments, there is a narrower question. Should the Royal Household commission a full, independent account of what the monarchy gained?
The argument for is strong. The facts are in the archives. They will come out anyway, through historians and journalists, one uncomfortable document at a time. An institution that commissions the work itself controls nothing about the findings but a great deal about how it is seen. It appears confident and honest. One that waits to be exposed appears to have been hiding.
The Dutch example suggests the sky does not fall. Their monarchy’s standing was not damaged by the research or the apology. If anything, the King gained credit.
And there is a matter of simple consistency. The monarchy draws much of its authority from continuity with the past. It cannot claim the inheritance of a thousand years and disown the parts it would prefer not to discuss.
The Case for Caution
The counter-arguments deserve a hearing.
A figure is a hostage. Once there is a number for what the Crown earned, there will be a demand that it be repaid. The Dutch sum, whatever its exact basis, is now quoted in every argument about reparations there. Ministers here may reasonably fear the same.
The accounting is also treacherous. How do you separate the monarch as a person from the Crown as the state? Was a royal charter a personal profit or an act of government? What rate do you use to convert a seventeenth-century dividend into modern pounds? Different assumptions give wildly different answers, and any single figure will be both attacked and misused.
Some would add that the present family is not responsible for what its predecessors did three centuries ago, and that singling out the monarchy distracts from the far larger role of merchants, banks, insurers and Parliament itself.
I find the first of these the most persuasive, and none of them sufficient.
Where I Come Down
On apology, I hold to what I wrote before. It is not the King’s to give unless his ministers allow it, and they have their reasons.
On research, I think the Palace should go further than it has. A proper independent study, with full access, published in full. Not because it would satisfy the critics, but because an institution that believes in its own history ought to want to know it.
The King will say something in the Caribbean about the darkest days. It would mean more if he could add that he has asked for the accounts to be opened.
For a view of royal bookkeeping that is short on reverence, The London Prat offers its English satirical news on royal apologies and its UK satirical news about what the archive shows. Bohiney Magazine covers a republic with a few ledgers of its own.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
