Truth, history, the Church Commissioners, and reparative justice

Queen Anne’s Bounty first charter 1704

By Ian Paul

PSEPHIZO Blog

April 8, 2026

Professor Richard Dale writes: KICKING IN THE CATHEDRAL DOOR

How the Church Commissioners relied on bogus history to denounce their predecessors and vilify their own Church

It is over three years since the Church Commissioners published their controversial report on the Church’s links to the slave trade. Since then critics have challenged the Commissioners’ historical research while both the Church Commissioners and their historical advisers have published their separate responses to such riticism. However, in the light of recent academic research it is now clear beyond doubt that the Commissioners’ historical analysis is deeply flawed and their conclusions mistaken. The Commissioners therefore have a moral responsibility to withdraw their report and correct the record before a false historical narrative, to which they have lent their full authority, becomes further embedded in Google, AI and in schools and colleges throughout the world.

In February 2021 the accountants, Grant Thornton, were instructed by the Church Commissioners to review the ledgers of Queen Anne’s Bounty to “determine the extent to which the origins of the Endowment Fund may have been derived from the profits of the slave trade.”

Grant Thornton’s verdict was devastating: We found that Queen Anne’s Bounty had purchased investments in an entity called the South Sea Company which is known to have transported 34,000 enslaved persons across the Atlantic. The South Sea Company ceased trading in enslaved people in 1739 at which point the Bounty had invested £443 million (in today’s terms). These findings were incorporated into the Church Commissioners’ report on the Church’s links to slavery, publicised in the press and cited as the basis for Project Spire, a proposed £100 million impact investment fund, that was announced in January 2023.

The central argument of the Church Commissioners and their historical advisers is that Queen Anne’s Bounty profited hugely from their slavery-linked investments, derived principally from interest on its holdings of South Sea Annuities. Church leaders were understandably shocked by the Commissioners’ report. The then Archbishop of Canterbury publicly apologised for the fact that the Church had profited from slavery, and the Bishop of Manchester, who was also deputy chair of the Commissioners, wrote an open letter to Save the Parish in support of Project Spire. He said:

Having come to the full understanding of the extent of the involvement of Queen Anne’s Bounty in investing in the slave trade through research and forensic analysis…we cannot hold on to money gained so wrongly, any more than a burglar can hang on to profits from their activity. Here, then, is the historical narrative propagated by Church leaders and invoked as justification for Project Spire. However, this narrative is demonstrably false. The Church Commissioners’ historical advisers have misled the Commissioners, the Commissioners have misled Church leaders and Church leaders have misled the public at large. Because there is incontrovertible evidence that Queen Anne’s Bounty’s investments earned not one penny from the slave trade.

The Commissioners’ Report makes three related mistakes that distort its historical account.

First, although the Report refers to the South Sea Company stock splits in 1723 and 1733 that separated the Company’s trading operations from the newly created South Sea Annuities, it fails to examine the legislative framework governing the latter (9 Geo 1 c.6, 1723 and 6 Geo 11 c.28, 1733). In 1723 Parliament established a new annuity company, the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities which, according to the statute’s preamble, legally insulated investors from “future frauds, abuses, errors and mismanagement” of the South Sea Company. The Annuity certificates stated that the contracting party and issuer was the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities and not the South Sea Company. The Annuitants were entitled to receive their pro-rata share of interest from the government at a specified rate in perpetuity and were ring-fenced from the risky and generally loss-making operations of the South Sea trading Company.

The Company’s capital was split again in 1733 when, according to its chief clerk, Adam Anderson (An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, 1764), “the proprietors of the trading stock becoming uneasy on account of their late losses by the Asiento and Greenland [whaling] trades” petitioned Parliament to divide the Company’s capital 25/75 in favour of South Sea Annuities. The intent behind the legislation was made clear in a ‘general court’ (shareholders’ meeting) of the South Sea Company in March 1732 when it was proposed that three quarters of the Company’s capital be…entirely severed from the trade, and not liable to any debts or incumbrances of the Company …. and be a clear fund or annuity (cited in Armand DuBois, The English Business Company after the Bubble Act 1720-1800, 1938).

Following this second stock split there was a nominal distinction between Old and New South Sea Annuities.

The failure of the Commissioners to address the legal basis of the South Sea Annuities contributed to a second serious error. The authors mistakenly categorise South Sea Annuities as investments in the South Sea Company and the interest thereon as earnings from the slave trade. This, despite the fact that the Annuities, as the Report acknowledges, were invested exclusively in government debt and therefore equivalent to government bonds. Furthermore, Francois Velde, an authority on 18th century English finance, states in a recent paper that after the stock split of 1723 the Annuities represented the only form of liquid government debt available and that “if the Bounty wished to invest in government funds, there was no choice” (“An Institutional Investor in 18th Century Britain,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, October 2025). It is preposterous that the Bounty managers should be castigated for investing in the slave trade when they were opting for a low risk investment strategy that explicitly avoided exposure to the South Sea Company’s trading activities. Even more extravagant is the Report’s assertion that “anyone [including Annuitants] investing in the Company before 1740 was consciously investing in [slavery] voyages.” Of course, the precise opposite was the case: Annuitants could be sure that they were not investing in such voyages.

This consideration leads to the third major error—which is also the most outlandish. Although the South Sea Annuities were government bonds in all but name the Commissioners’ advisers claim to have found a direct linkage between these assets and the South Sea Company. Their wording is significant: Grant Thornton’s website refers to its research into “Annuities issued by the South Sea Company” and the Report itself refers variously to the South Sea Annuities as “South Sea Company investments”, “investments in the South Sea Company”, “South Sea Company securities” and, in the glossary, as “Annuities in the South Sea Company”. Here, the Commissioners’ advisers have confused two different companies, each with the words “South Sea” in their name: the South Sea Company and the separately incorporated annuity company, the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities. Furthermore throughout the Report the authors incorrectly refer to South Sea Annuities as South Sea Company Annuities, a descriptor unknown in contemporary records, whether this be the ledgers of the Bank of England, the Bounty’s ledgers, Chancery proceedings or the Annuity certificates themselves. Once more, the report is guilty of an elementary gaffe by conflating two legally separate entities.

From the above it is clear that South Sea Annuities had no connection whatsoever with the South Sea Company’s trading activities. As the parliamentarian and banker, John Brocklehurst, explained to the House of Commons in 1834:

the South Sea Annuities had nothing to do with the South Sea Company beyond receiving at their hands the dividends as they became due from the government. The annuities were payable at an office called South Sea House in much the same way that other publicly held government debt was payable at the Bank of England. The Bounty did, for a time, have a much more limited investment in South Sea Company stock. This was acquired in April 1720 when the South Sea Bubble was beginning to inflate, England was at war with Spain, and, with its trade suspended, the South Sea Company had become “of necessity a naked finance corporation” (John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 1960). Quantitatively, this one-off investment in stock was a small fraction of the Bounty’s Annuity investments. In the period 1708-1793 dividends from the South Sea Company represented a mere 0.1% of the Bounty’s total income against nearly 30% for Annuities, First Fruits and Tenths accounting for most of the balance. Nevertheless, though limited in both amount and duration—the stock was largely disposed of in 1728—the investment became a direct exposure to the slave trade when this was resumed in 1722—28.

However, the dividends the Bounty received from its holding of stock were not derived from profits from the slave trade because the trade was loss-making. A committee, appointed by the South Sea Company’s shareholders to examine the Company’s accounts, shows that in the period 1720 to 1732 (which covers the time when the Bounty held stock) the loss on the trade account was over £385,000 (The Report of the Committee appointed to Inspect and Examine the Several Accompts of the South Sea Company, 1733). The books of the Company have not survived but on the basis of these summary accounts Velde finds that the Company was forced to issue bonds to cover its losses and then, when in 1732 the bond debt had reached £2 million, to slash its dividend to a level below the interest it received from the government. (After the stock splits the South Sea Company continued to receive its pro-rata share of the interest paid by the government on its debt.) Stung by its losses the South Sea Company declined in 1748 to take up Spain’s offer to renew the Asiento Contract on unchanged terms.

Velde also shows that when the Bounty invested in South Sea Company shares in 1720 it did so by exchanging its existing holdings of government debt, (eg. lottery loans) for stock. This was done on terms that proved to be highly unfavourable, prompting the Bounty’s Treasurer to set out the losses the fund had incurred through this transaction. According to Velde “[the Bounty’s] involvement in the South Sea Company was financially costly and within a few years it disposed of its equity and bond interests in the company.”

In summary, the Bounty’s investments, whether in stock or annuities, earned no money from the slave trade. Additionally, the Commissioners’ advisers dropped a clanger when they assumed that it was the South Sea Company that issued South Sea Annuities. In fact the Company was neither issuer, vendor, counterparty or guarantor of the Annuities which were issued by a legally separate company with its own investor base and investment objectives. The whole point of the stock splits of 1723 and 1733 was to create a new class of asset that had nothing whatsoever to do with the South Sea Company’s commercial activities. In propagating a false historical narrative around the Bounty’s alleged earnings from and links to the South Sea Company and the slave trade, the Church Commissioners’ and their historical advisers have deluded themselves and misled everyone else.

It was not long before criticism of the Commissioners’ historical research appeared in print and on line. See my own article in the Church Times, Slavery did not benefit Bounty; The Church and Slavery: the Facts, an anonymous article in The Critic, May 30 2025; and articles on the History Reclaimed website. Nigel Biggar brings many of these criticisms together in his book Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt, 2025; see the interview with him about it here.

Criticism was also raised privately in April 2024 with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in the hope of finding a diplomatic route out of a situation that could be damaging to the Church. However, after some preliminary exchanges, the Archbishop decided to delegate the matter to Gareth Mostyn, Chief Executive of the Church Commissioners, who refused to engage with his critics. In June 2024 Mr Mostyn published a Comment piece in the Church Times in which he reiterated that the Bounty invested significant sums in, and derived a material amount of its income from, the South Sea Company (in fact dividends from the Company represented 0.1% of the Bounty’s total income in the 1700s.) He also stated that the degree of profitability was no longer the issue, a departure from the Commissioners’ original remit to Grant Thornton, and that what mattered was unspecified “historical connections”, “financial involvements”, and “tangible links” to enslavement.

But not everyone was singing from same hymn sheet. On April 14th 2025, the Archbishop of York gave a keynote address to a UN sponsored forum on historical injustices in which he focussed on the Commissioners’ research into the Church’s links to slavery: “How we invested in the South Sea Company and the very significant amounts of money we made from this.” Here again there was an assertion that the Church had made large profits from the slave trade.

The Commissioners’ historical advisers, Professor Richard Drayton and Dr Helen Paul, released their own defence of the Commissioners’ research in June 2025. However, once again there were serious errors, some of which are identified below (for a longer engagement, see here):

1. South Sea Company and annuities.

Dayton and Paul renewed the claim that the South Sea Company was a counterparty to and issuer of South Sea Annuities. Apparently, the South Sea Company “could issue a financial instrument or contract called an annuity to investors. The investors would be entitled to an annual payment (ie. an annuity payment) from the South Sea Company”. This rash assertion is contradicted by the wording of the Annuity certificates (no mention of the South Sea Company) and the stated objective of the 1723 and the 1733 stock splits which was to relieve Annuitants of any risk exposure (including counterparty risk) to the South Sea Company. The D and P assertion does not qualify as evidence based research, the authors having failed to identify a single Annuity certificate on which the South Sea Company is named as counterparty.

2. Asiento

Dayton and Paul proclaim “the myth of the unprofitability of the Asiento”. Their assertion that the South Sea Company made profits from this gruesome slaving contract relies on an (outlier) article by Price and Whatley who base their findings on the capital asset pricing model. The econometric formula makes heroic assumptions about investors (all are rational, have the same access to information, have the same expectations of future returns on all assets, can borrow without limit at the riskless rate of interest and so on) which limit the technique’s relevance even to today’s markets, let alone the unregulated mayhem of Exchange Alley in the early 1700s. In any event there is no need to rely on controversial mathematical formulae when there exists a contemporary shareholders’ report on the South Sea Company’s accounts published in 1733 (The Report of the Committee appointed to Inspect and Examine the several Accompts of the South Sea Company). As already stated this shows large losses on the Company’s trade account. Price and Whatley do not cite, mention or reference this crucial document or indeed other primary sources such as Adam Anderson’s classic contemporary account. Evidence based research surely requires that the best evidence be used, a principle which D and P have failed to follow.

3. Reciprocity

Dayton and Paul suggest that “at the level of the firm” there was “reciprocity” between the South Sea Stock and the South Sea Annuities, the one (stock) risky and the other (annuities) secure, as if we were dealing with a single corporate entity diversifying its income stream. In reality, as anyone who has read the relevant legislation should know, there were two companies with separate balance sheets, legally separated assets and liabilities, separate revenue streams and separate proprietors. There was no “reciprocity”.

4. Fungibility

Dayton and Paul claimed that money is “fungible” and that the sums to be paid out to annuity holders “was not neatly separated from other moneys held by the Company.” The South Sea Company was therefore free to divert such funds to its own use and then use profits from the slave trade [!] to pay the Annuitants. The authors have evidently not understood the relevant legislation which makes clear that interest received from the government by the South Sea Company on behalf of Annuitants was to be held separately “in trust and for the benefit of the annuitants” before passing to the Annuitant beneficiaries.

5. Administration

The government paid an annual fee of £14,500 to the South Sea Company for acting as registrar and paying agent for government debt. This sum, equivalent to less than 0.1% of assets administered, was intended to cover the enormous costs of maintaining an army of clerks: we do not know how many but no doubt considerably more than the Bank of England which, in 1720, with a much smaller balance sheet than the South Sea Company, employed around 100 clerks on a minimum salary of £50 per annum. Allowing for the higher salaries of senior clerks and supervisors, the administration fee does not appear exorbitant. However, D and P state that the annual fee provided “a steady income stream” for the South Sea Company which could be used for any purpose they chose, as if it were a net profit rather than payment for (costly) book-keeping services.

6. Scholarship

There are several lapses of scholarship in the Dayton and Paul response, notably a reference to the historian Victoria Sorsby. She is cited as authority for Dayton and Paul’s insistence that a payment of £100,000 to the South Sea Company in 1750 was not made as compensation for the Company’s losses on the slave trade. However, the abstract of Sorsby’s excellent thesis states unequivocally that “in 1750 the Asiento Contract was terminated and the South Sea Company paid £100,000 to cover their losses on the trade.” It is quite a feat to seek to rebut ones critics by citing a source that proves their point.

7. Cross subsidy

Dayton and Paul cast around for any conceivable connections between the Annuities and the South Sea Company’s slave trade. Such speculation includes hypothetical cross-subsidisation involving the South Sea Company’s administration fee and the suggestion that some clerks at South Sea House may have been tasked with book-keeping for the Company’s trading activities as well as the legally separate Annuity function. However, no evidence is offered and all is surmise. Perhaps there was even occasional sharing of quill pens? The responses of the Commissioners and their historical advisers to criticisms of their research simply serve to raise fresh questions about their version of history. Nevertheless, though the Commissioners have grossly exaggerated its connection with the slave trade the 18th century Church, in common with so many others, looked on passively while this abominable traffic in humans was in full swing. Furthermore, the Bounty managers did make one foray into the stock market during the South Sea Bubble, which, for a limited time, exposed them directly to the slave trade. Finally, the Bounty may have received significant tainted funds from benefactions as the Commissioners have alleged—though at 4–5% of the Bounty’s total income such slavery related donations were surely no greater than the tainted funds received by other charitable institutions in the 18th century. (Charles Wide has shown that the methodology used by the Commissioners to identify tainted benefactions is highly speculative. See Wide’s comments cited in Biggar, Reparations pp. 133/4.)

In short, the Church, with all its faults, was a reflection of society at the time rather than a malign actor profiteering from the slave trade.

The question that arises is why the Commissioners have shown such willingness, even eagerness, to accept an ill-founded version of history so damaging to their predecessors. Certainly church leaders may feel that by denigrating their 18th century forebears, they are placing themselves and the modern church on a higher moral plain than would otherwise be the case. Such virtue signalling has an ancient history as evidenced by the biblical warning from the Sermon on the Mount: Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your father in heaven. (Matthew 6: 1)

When the Commissioners were confronted with compelling evidence of major flaws in their research different forces came into play. No doubt convinced that they were pursuing a righteous cause, their behaviour exhibited all the signs of “cognitive dissonance”. This may arise when discomfort is triggered by beliefs clashing with new information. In the words of Leon Festinger, the eminent American social psychologist who originated the theory: “Tell them you disagree and they turn away. Show them facts or figures and they question your sources. Appeal to logic and they fail to see your point.” Another tell-tale manifestation of this condition is “Belief Disconfirmation” where those affected double-down on a belief when confronted with evidence that it is wrong.

What should happen now? Some may take the view that although the Commissioners’ research is flawed and misleading too much reputational damage would be incurred by a formal admission of error on their part. Therefore it might be better to let things stand. This however would be a grave mistake. In the first place the Church Commissioners are appointed to uphold their publicly declared principles which include a commitment to transparency, accountability and evidence-based research. Failure to demonstrate this commitment would be a betrayal of their office.

Second, the Commissioners’ allegation that the Bounty was deeply complicit in the slave trade provided their justification for launching Project Spire. It would surely be morally wrong if not illegal, to seek charitable status for such a project on the basis of a false historical prospectus.

Finally, and most importantly, the widely publicised historical misrepresentations to which the Commissioners have lent their full authority are now embedded in Google and AI and no doubt relied upon by schools and colleges worldwide. For instance, Google/AI put the Church’s earnings from the slave trade at between £400 million and £1.4 billion, the higher figure equating with the Bounty’s total revenue from South Sea Annuities.

The consequences of the Commissioners’ false historical narrative have therefore gone well beyond the remit of Church leaders and must be viewed as nothing less than a national scandal. If the Commissioners will not appoint a truly independent legal panel to look into this matter it would surely be appropriate for Parliament to intervene and conduct an investigation into how the Commissioners came to rely on deeply flawed research to damage the global reputation of the established Church and distort this country’s national history.

Dr Richard Dale is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Southampton and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His books include The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton University Press, 2016).