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”.