There are so many misprisions and false assumptions in this book – never mind the omission of certain key points that might make the argument more balanced – that one hardly knows where to start. As mentioned, much done in the name of sovereigns since George I happened without his or her explicit approval. And while European slavers undoubtedly raided the African coast to round up human merchandise, why such scant mention of black African chieftains who exchanged prisoners captured in conflict for goods offered by the visitors? And there is a fundamental point that every historian must understand, or it is hardly worth writing history: it is foolish to apply the standards and conventions of Western society in the first half of the 21st century to the 16th, 17th or 18th.
The author professes outrage that England, then Britain, should have engaged in the slave trade to raise money to fight wars. Yet this was an age before the United Nations and “mutually assured destruction”: a time in which countries frequently started wars; in which the pursuit of riches for security and self-aggrandisement happened with little regard for those who were exploited in the process; and in which life was, as Hobbes correctly put it, nasty, brutish and short. Slaves had a horrific time, of course; but it wasn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute to be a member of the labouring classes in pre-20th-century Britain, with the 14-hour day, the poorhouse, a ferocious penal code and rampant disease. Then again, if perspective is what you’re after, this is not the book for you.
None of this criticism diminishes the enormity – and I use that word in the correct sense, as Newman does not, her book being untranslated from the original American – of slavery. But this account is sheer propaganda. The King and the Prince of Wales have repeatedly denounced slavery. Their respective mother and grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, was devoted to the cause of the Commonwealth, and to the lives of those descended from once-enslaved people. In the early pages of The Crown’s Silence, the author tells a story of Her late Majesty visiting Jamaica in 2002 for the Golden Jubilee, and being unable to act on a request from a Rastafarian to pay reparations. But of course, she was powerless to do anything else. To talk, as Newman does, of the monarchy’s “foundational” role in slavery is highly questionable.
We live in a free society, and if people wish to prostrate themselves in guilt about the evils of centuries past, then good luck to them. (Doing so, I believe, is a fast way to gain preferment in academia, especially in the United States.) But the rest of us need not read it. Elizabeth I, Charles II and William IV each endorsed the slave trade, or pretended it was not there, or refused to support attempts to end it; we can certainly regret that all of this happened. Our present King, however, has nothing to apologise for at all.
The Crown’s Silence is published by Mudlark at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
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