Yes, the monarchy was deeply implicated in the slave trade. But not the British monarchy. The biggest African slavers were not pirates or bandits. They were kings. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist. He wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. He went on, as King, to sign the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807. That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs. In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure. “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained. Contrast his attitude with that of his British fellow-monarchs. Although Victoria, as Queen, was expected to refrain from expressing political opinions, her husband was under less constraint. Albert made his very first speech as Prince Consort to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa. His words are a reminder of how determined Britain was to ensure that ending the Atlantic slave trade did not simply push the commerce eastwards. “I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant.” The difference between the British Crown and contemporary African monarchies can be glimpsed in the story of Aina, a young Yoruba girl owned by King Ghezo of Dahomey. In 1850, a naval captain called Frederick Forbes came to Dahomey to try to convince Ghezo to stop selling slaves. He was unsuccessful but, during his visit, he was offered Aina as a gift. Forbes knew that such slaves were generally destined for human sacrifice, so he accepted the child, naming her Sara Forbes Bonetta. When Sara arrived in Britain, Queen Victoria became her godmother, paid for her education and arranged for her to marry a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Are the British really the baddies here? Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt. What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts. The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives.

No one asks for reparations from, say, China (which did not abolish slavery until 1910) or Ethiopia (1942) or Saudi Arabia (1962). You know why? Because they don't encourage the shake-down artists.

The Norman Conquest was a cataclysm for the English people. After 1066, the country was clenched in a mailed fist. Castles, until then a rarity, sprang up everywhere. Many still stand, handsome and crenelated, their geographical situation advertising their grim purpose. For these were not defences against a foreign foe, but instruments of internal repression, from whose arrow-slits new proprietors peered out at a beaten people. Having put down the North with terrifying savagery, leaving stretches of country depopulated, William began to rule as an absolute monarch. Quite how absolute can be seen from his compilation, some years afterwards, of a comprehensive inventory of the kingdom he now possessed. For there was no question in his mind that England was his to do with as he would. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it: “So very thoroughly did he have the inquiry carried out that there was not a single hide of land, not even – it is shameful to record it, but it did not seem shameful to him to do it – not even one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig which escaped notice in his survey.” The resulting tome became known as the Domesday Book, for it was said that you might as well try to deceive God on the Day of Judgment as hide your goods or chattels from the king’s officers. William parcelled out almost the entire country among his mercenaries and liegemen. At least 92 per cent of England was owned by men who had been born on the other side of the Channel. Of more than 200 landowners who held their estates directly from the king, only two were Anglo-Saxons: Thorkell of Arden and Colswein of Lincoln. Equality before the law was forgotten as the new aristocracy settled down to enjoy its privileges. Men were required by law to work on their lord’s estates, and forbidden to leave without his permission. Englishness became, almost by definition, a badge of subjugation. Human nature being what it is, people soon began to adopt the names and manners of their overlords. On one English farm in 1114, records Peter Ackroyd, the workers were listed as being called Soen, Rainald, Ailwin, Lemar, Godwin, Ordric, Alric, Saroi, Ulviet and Ulfac. By the end of the century all those names had disappeared. The status of the defeated English is often illustrated with reference to the vocabulary of meat. The Anglophone farmer in the field used plain Saxon words for his livestock: cow, pig, sheep. But by the time these animals found their way onto his Norman master’s plate, they had acquired French-derived names: beef, pork, mutton. More telling, though, is the political vocabulary introduced under the Normans. Out go witan, folkmoot and folkright. In come fealty and homage, fief and vassal, villein and serf. The progress toward personal liberty, free contract and equal access to the common law was suspended. In the words of the early twelfth-century chronicler, Orderic Vitalis: “The English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed”. The idea of “throwing off the Norman yoke” was to animate English radicals for the next seven centuries. Civil War Roundheads spoke of struggling against “William’s lieutenants”, meaning that the landowners of their own time were heirs to the men who had expropriated the English. “Wurðe god se ende þonne God wylle”, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, lamenting the subjugation of 1066: May the end be good when God wills. The seventeenth century struggles may be seen – were seen by the key actors – as a belated reversal of the catastrophe. It is that reversal which truly deserves to be celebrated.

The first test of @andyburnham is the Chagos deal. Almost everyone – including, in private, almost every Labour MP – is against it, and with reason. It would mean raising taxes here to fund tax cuts in Mauritius, a country that never had sovereignty over the archipelago; abandoning the world’s most pristine marine reserve to a country with a terrible record on biodiversity; inviting unfriendly powers to establish a presence on neighbouring atolls; straining our alliance with the US; and betraying the truly wronged party, the exiled Chagossians, who do not want to be governed by Mauritius. It is hard to imagine any government pushing ahead so determinedly except one dominated by Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and the human rights lawyers. Will Burnham do the correct and popular thing? Or will he side with the most anti-British elements of the Doughty Street/Matrix Chambers clique?