In this adapted excerpt from The Crown’s Silence, which examines the royal family’s links with slavery from Elizabeth I to the present, Ottobah Cugoano directly appeals to the monarchy – but is met with silence
One autumn day in 1786, an unexpected parcel arrived at Carlton House, the London residence of George, Prince of Wales. The sender was Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, a free Black man living in London, one of roughly 4,000 people of African descent in the city at the time. Inside the package were pamphlets describing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the brutal treatment of enslaved people in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. The accompanying letter, signed “John Stuart,” Cugoano’s alias, urged the heir to the British throne to read the “little tracts” enclosed and to “consider the case of the poor Africans who are most barbarously captured and unlawfully carried away from their own country”.
Africans, Cugoano warned, were treated “in a more unjust and inhuman manner than ever known among any of the barbarous nations in the world”.
At the time, Cugoano was employed as a domestic servant by the fashionable painters Maria and Richard Cosway, whose home stood just two blocks from Carlton House. Richard Cosway had recently been appointed principal painter to the Prince of Wales, and his residence at Schomberg House on Pall Mall had become a gathering place for artists, aristocrats and politicians. Weekly salons and concerts drew members of the highest society – events sanctioned by the prince himself. Through this employment, Cugoano gained something rare for a former enslaved man: regular, direct proximity to Britain’s elite and to the royal family.
