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- Brooke Newman’s book, “The Crown’s Silence,” details the British monarchy’s historical involvement in and profit from the slave trade.
- The book reveals that British sovereigns, starting with Elizabeth I, sponsored and protected the institution of slavery.
- The article notes that King Charles III is a direct descendant of Virginia planters who owned enslaved people.
Southerners are painfully aware of hypocrites attempting to turn them into poster children for racism in America. The Central Park Five and George Floyd are reminders that prejudice demands scrutiny everywhere.
Fortunately, more people inhabiting the world today examine an inherited, regrettable past earnestly than attempt to use its universality to excuse lamentable legacies of epochs past.
Southerners shall feel significantly less alone after reading “The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in America.” It is not a story which the royals want told, notwithstanding King Charles III’s biracial grandchildren:
“From Elizabeth I onward, British sovereigns sponsored and protected slaving through their control of the military. They used royal proclamations and orders in council to incentivize colonists to purchase enslaved Africans. They supported the passage of colonial slave laws defining enslaved people as property that could be bought, sold, bequeathed, inherited, collected for debts, and escheated to the Crown when enslavers died intestate….They used inter-imperial wars to increase the number of plantation territories and enslaved laborers under British control and even outright owned thousands of enslaved people in the Crown’s name well into the nineteenth century.”
The author ponders whether King Charles III will “follow his mother’s example and pass the burden of silence on to future generations to carry[.] Or will Charles, speaking in concert with the British government, acknowledge and seek to redress historical injustices as a means of promoting a more equitable present?”
“The Crown’s Silence” eloquently exposes a heinous history that educated individuals should comprehend and poses probing questions that are crucial in any context. Oppression and prejudice exist across the globe. Violence directed at minorities can be contemplated anywhere. The trajectory trends toward examining the unsustainable and eliminating the delusion that master races deserve dominion over anyone defined as inferior.
Politicians who build careers disparaging truth and reconciliation face eternal damnation for perpetuating an odious past. The pantheon has scant respect for individuals denying people’s common humanity.
Monarchs have no less accountability than others, contemporaneously and historically. That inescapable reality makes Brooke Newman’s book into a landmark.
The Divine Right of Kings ceased to exist generations ago. Constitutional limitations constrain monarchies. The future shall witness increasingly diminished monarchies.
Members depart the British Commonwealth. Nations subjugated under the yoke of colonial rule cannot respect royals seen as a continuation of subject peoples’ victimization.
“The Crown’s Silence” offers a fascinating study on a multitude of levels, the commodification of people above everything else.
A friend conveyed her shock discovering an ancestor’s inventory which listed his slaves alongside his livestock. The suggestion that slaveholders were benevolent — benefitting people possessed as property — dissembles, condoning intolerable circumstances. Wounds cannot heal until slavery and racism are acknowledged to be inexcusable wrongs.
European settlement of America involved the exploitation of land, minerals and commodities and of individuals deemed heathen and inhuman.
Relevant is the revelation that Charles III, through his maternal grandmother née Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, “is a direct descendant of Virginia planters who exercised ownership over African men, women, and children and profited from their coerced labor.”
The book is not specifically written for residents of states constructed on a bedrock of enslavement. It is more meaningful recognizing that the foundations of the entire socioeconomic system demand reconsideration.
“The Crown’s Silence” documents unknown details about British history, providing a starting point from which to expand one’s erudition.
Incongruities between the past and the present are prominently displayed in Newman’s work. It unintentionally elucidates that, had the Confederacy prevailed, fundamental assumptions were nonetheless doomed:
Enslavement would have ended given international inevitability. Misguided zealots can never succeed since the world cannot tolerate national aberrations.
A review of ‘The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas’
- By Brooke N. Newman
- Mariner Books
- Hardcover, 464 pages
— Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.clarionledger.com ’
