As many of you discussed over the weekend, the Mail published a curious piece, all part of the media’s punishment for Prince William and Kate over this Forest Lodge forever-home debacle. The Mail examined, in quite vivid and horrifying terms, the past of the Forest Lodge property, which goes back centuries. First, the Mail asked if William and Kate had done their “due diligence” on the property’s history, then they revealed this (this is only a partial excerpt):
But how much due diligence did the couple do when it came to the history of their 18th-century pile before agreeing to move in? Not too much, it would appear. For I can reveal that Forest Lodge is a house full of dark secrets.
To discover what these are, we must go back to the late 1700s when the lodge was built by Sir Jeffry Wyatville, the architect who rebuilt parts of the ancient Windsor Castle during the reign of King George IV. Sir Jeffry was so taken by his creation, which was originally adorned with an Indian-style cupola, that he considered making it his own home. Instead, the Georgian mansion was bought by a rather less distinguished character, a London-based Scot called Spencer Mackay. Mackay made his money from coffee and rum plantations in Guyana, South America, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Mackay’s priority was to extract as much profit as possible from his lands half a world away and, to this end, he bought hundreds of slaves. They experienced horrendous privations during their long journey by sea from West Africa and, once they arrived on Guyana, even worse horrors awaited them. Brutal whippings were common, as plantation managers sought to force the maximum amount of labour out of exhausted slaves.
In 1823, there was a slave rebellion in the Guyanese region of Demerara, triggered by a mistaken belief that the British parliament had abolished slavery and their freedom was being blocked by colonial rulers. Between 9,000 and 12,000 slaves joined the uprising, dozens of them from Mackay’s plantations. …In the process of putting down the rebellion, up to 500 slaves were killed. And after the insurrection had been defeated, a further 27 slaves were executed on the orders of the British governor, John Murray, with their bodies left to rot in the sun for months as a deterrent to any other slaves considering a fight for freedom. Despite this butchery, when slavery was abolished in 1834, Mackay was compensated for the loss of his slave workforce to the tune of £10 million at today’s prices.
Nobody knows how many died on his watch but, by the time he received the money, he’d moved on from Holly Grove House (the original name of Forest Lodge) to a smart London residence in Harley Street.
This piece of history, if William doesn’t already know it, may come as an unwelcome reminder of the troubled West Indies tour, which he and Kate undertook in March 2022. During a stop at Trench Town, the district of the Jamaican capital of Kingston best-known for being the childhood home of the king of reggae Bob Marley, the royal couple were photographed shaking hands with local children as they pushed their hands through a chain-link fence. The optics were not good as, to some eyes, it looked as if they were greeting people in a prison camp.
It was criticised as a ‘PR misstep’ and a ‘white-saviour parody’ amid the ongoing debate over slavery reparations and increasingly vocal calls for Jamaica to throw off the monarchist yoke. Indeed, the island’s prime minister told the royal couple in an awkward meeting that the country would become a republic, and a government committee in the Bahamas urged the royals to issue ‘a full and formal apology for their crimes against humanity’.
Yes, whatever is happening with William and Kate, it’s gotten so bad that the Mail is openly discussing the Caribbean Flop Tour of 2022, a tour which went so badly, Kate refused to ever travel to a Commonwealth or British-realm country again. And few royalists even speak about it anymore – it’s the Tour Which Cannot Be Mentioned (and also the Tour Which Changed Everything). As for this bloody history of Forest Lodge ownership… it’s horrible, and it feels like Forest Lodge is probably cursed. Now do the royal family’s history in the slave trade, and talk about how much stolen loot they still have.
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Photos courtesy of Instar, Cover Images.
