Why I Put Branding Irons into Royal Hands
We teach ourselves a flattering version of our history in this country, as Black Lives Matter and other campaigners have increasingly forced us to confront. One of many glaring omissions: the royal family is where slavery began in the UK. Two kings in particular — Charles II and James II — were pivotal in making the trade in humans central to England’s economy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
So in August 2020, in a guerilla style art intervention, I placed branding irons into the hands of two statues of English Kings, Charles II and James II, in Soho Square and Trafalgar Square.
I had been oblivious to the history of royal slavery, only stumbling into an awareness of it through a podcast by Afua Hirsch, called “We Need to Talk About the British Empire.” She’s right, we do need to confront the dark-side of our history.
We could do no better than to start with the Royal African Company (RAC).
The RAC was set up by Charles II, and had a monopoly of the slave trade from 1672 to 1698. At its peak in 1683, the RAC had 74% of the transatlantic slave trade. The royal monopoly only came to an end because English traders demanded their right to join the trade, not because of any realisation that this was dehumanising cruelty of the most abhorrent kind. Even after company lost its royal monopoly, it continued trading until 1731.
Close to 150,000 Africans were enslaved by the RAC, mostly sold in the British Caribbean. As historian William Pettigrew writes, the RAC “shipped more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade.” It is not just Charles II who was instrumental in the RAC. In its early years it was run by the King’s brother, the Duke of York, as Governor of the RAC, effectively its CEO. The Duke of York remained an active shareholder even when he took to the throne as James II. When he went into exile he sold his shares to fund his new life in France.
The RAC is said to have used branding irons to permanently mark these enslaved men and women as the property of the RAC or the Duke of York. Amid the many horrors of slavery, there is something so extraordinarily casual in the violence of branding, a process described by the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass as “cruel and agonising.”
To represent this, I made two branding irons, one with an “RAC” iron for a statue of Charles II in Soho Square, another with a “DY” (for Duke of York) which I inserted into a statue of James II in Trafalgar Square. On both irons I made an elephant and castle for the handle, which was the logo of the RAC, an emblem often flanked with two enslaved black men. (History is muddled about the connection to the south London neighbourhood).
The Black Lives Matter movement made the ground shift from Minneapolis to Bristol, led by the courage of black activists, artists and political leaders. My own artistic intervention is a modest contribution to our discussion about how slavery is woven into English history, and therefore to the racism of today. I had been advised by lawyers that the government might potentially try to frame this as criminal damage, but no damage was done to the statues. That wasn’t the aim: I wanted to trigger a conversation. I used lightweight materials, a leather-bound handle and a screw top for easy installation and removal. (The Trafalgar Square iron was removed within hours, but the Soho Square work remained in place for two weeks).
Campaigners have fought for decades to remove statues of those most closely tied to slavery, with figures such as Bristolian Edward Colston, a member of the Royal African Company, carrying the can for the company’s legacy. Somehow the monarchy has been mostly absent from this debate, despite creating and effectively running the RAC for years, and profiting from it for decades. Judging by the social media response to my art intervention, which generated thousands of views and interactions, plenty of people were, like me, unaware of this dismal royal back story.
As I left Trafalgar Square I noticed a bus driver filming what I’d been doing, and went over to explain myself. “So you’re one of those ‘statue people’,” he said, disapprovingly. “History is history, it should be left alone.” I can respect that point of view, not least because he was black and I’m a privileged white woman. But this is a country where historians remember Charles II as “The Merry Monarch” or the “King of Bling” and forget his instrumental role in England’s slave trade, and where we peer into every detail of Meghan and Harry’s lives but barely consider the history that winds between a descendant of slaves and the slaving of English royals.
In this remarkable time, we need to talk about royal slavery.
Postscript: The Soho Square branding iron stayed in place for two weeks, but in a strange counter-protest it was removed and replaced with a crucifix (see picture below). A Catholic royalist? Who knows, but it made for an intriguing conclusion to the work.
Rachel Reid is an artist (Instagram or website) and researcher.
