Introduction
Ever since the Church Commissioners announced, in January 2023, that they would set aside £100 million in answer to a newly discovered connexion between Queen Anne’s Bounty and the Atlantic slave trade, I have been unable to share either the confidence with which the scheme was launched or the haste with which it was endorsed. Project Spire, as it was known within Church House before it acquired the grander style of the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice, seems to me to fail on four counts. Its history is mistaken on the very point from which it set out; its legal footing is, on the most generous estimate, weak; its moral reasoning mistakes lament, which a Church may offer on behalf of its forebears, for guilt, which it cannot inherit from them; and its imprudence, at a time when the parishes have far more pressing claims upon the Church’s purse, is apparent. I should regard any one of these defects as sufficient reason for the Commissioners to pause, and taken together they persuade me that the scheme ought to be abandoned.
I take the historical case first, then the legal, then the moral and theological, and then the prudential, before turning to the objections that may fairly be pressed against me and to what I think the Church might do instead.
I. What Project Spire is
Since the argument turns on particulars, it is as well to set them down before passing judgment upon them.
The Commissioners published an interim report in June 2022, and a final report on 10 January 2023, into the links between Queen Anne’s Bounty and transatlantic chattel slavery, the Bounty’s ledgers having been examined by the forensic accountants Grant Thornton with historical assistance from Professor Arthur Burns and Dr Helen Paul.³ The Bounty itself, chartered in 1704 under an Act of the previous year to augment the livings of the poorer clergy, was absorbed into the new Church Commissioners in 1948.²³ Two findings carried the weight of the report. The first was that the Bounty had held securities associated with the South Sea Company, which shipped enslaved Africans under the Asiento; in 1739, when the Company gave up that trade, the Bounty’s holding of what the report termed South Sea Company annuities was put at about £204,000, or something near £443 million in present money. The second was that benefactions, which supplied a little over 14 per cent of the Bounty’s income between 1708 and 1793, had come in part from donors who were, or may have been, connected with slavery, Edward Colston among them.⁴ Grant Thornton reckoned the income generated by these investments at £1.4 billion in present terms.⁵
On the same day the Commissioners pledged £100 million, to be accumulated over nine years, for a programme of investment, research and engagement in communities affected by historic slavery,³ the sum to be built up across three triennia ending in 2031 alongside indicative distributions of some £3.6 billion for the ordinary work of the Church.¹² An Oversight Group under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett, reported in March 2024. It gave the scheme its present name, thought £100 million “very small” when set against the injury, proposed a target of £1 billion to be raised with outside partners, and recommended that the programme should in time be owned and run by Black communities. The Commissioners accepted its report in full.⁶
Nothing has yet been launched. The Commissioners have said that, should the Charity Commission consent, they intend to settle income from their general fund upon a new charity through which the scheme would be delivered.⁸ The launch planned for 2024 did not take place.¹ At the General Synod in July 2026 members were told that some £1.15 million had already been spent, that the project had not been abandoned, and that a legal challenge had been received;⁹,¹⁰ and in October a churchwarden, Dr Bijan Omrani, and a parish priest, the Revd Dr Jamie Franklin, asked the Charity Commission for leave to bring proceedings.¹¹
II. The historical foundation
My first objection is that the scheme mistook what kind of income the Bounty received, and therefore what kind of connexion with slavery that income could bear.
It should be said at once that the Commissioners never claimed the Bounty had financed slaving voyages. Their interim report described the principal holding as South Sea annuities and conceded that the Bounty enjoyed no capital appreciation upon them.²¹ The dispute is therefore not about what the ledgers record but about what the annuities were, and on that question the evidence has grown considerably firmer since 2023.
The South Sea Company was chartered in 1711 to absorb a mass of unfunded government debt, and it obtained the Asiento two years later. When Parliament reconstructed the Company after the collapse of 1720, it converted half of the capital in 1723 into a separate Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities, and a further reconstruction in the early 1730s turned three-quarters of the remaining trading stock into annuities as well.⁷ The most careful study of the Bounty’s investments, published in October 2025 by François Velde, an economist and historian of public finance at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, treats these annuities as government annuities that happened to be paid at an office called South Sea House, and declines to count them among the Company’s liabilities.⁷ His conclusion agrees in substance with the case Professor Richard Dale, the historian of the Bubble, had pressed since 2024: the annuitant’s interest was a charge upon the public revenue, paid much as Bank annuities were paid at the Bank of England, and the annuitant took no share in the Company’s trading profit or loss.⁴⁸,¹⁴
Velde’s reconstruction of the ledgers also disposes of the point on which the Commissioners have chiefly relied. The £13,907 of Company stock which they cite as a purchase¹⁹ was not bought in the market at all; the Bounty acquired it in 1720 by exchanging government debt it already held, under the conversion scheme of that year.⁷ It lost heavily by the exchange, some 14 per cent of its portfolio, held the stock thereafter for its dividends, and disposed of almost the whole of it in November 1728, after which, for the better part of half a century, the annuities were its only active investment.⁷,¹⁶,¹⁷ On Dale’s reckoning, dividends on Company stock amounted over the whole period from 1708 to 1793 to about a tenth of one per cent of the Bounty’s income.¹⁵ Velde concludes, as Dale had done, that the Company never made a profit from the slave trade at all, its trading account running at a deficit and its dividends being sustained by borrowing.⁷
The Commissioners’ advisers, Professor Richard Drayton and Dr Helen Paul, have answered Dale, and their answer should be put as they would wish it put. They hold that the Company was an organ of the early modern state, designed from its foundation for the slave trade.¹³ They deny that the report ever alleged the Bounty took profits from the trade; what it alleged, they say, was an institutional connexion, the Bounty having held securities issued and administered by a corporation whose chartered business included the carrying of slaves.²¹ And they argue that to separate annuities from stock is unreasonable, since money may have passed between the two, citing an Act of 1751 which speaks of the interest upon the capital stock of the Company.²⁰
I grant a good deal of this. The Company was a slaving concern as well as a fiscal one, the Bounty did for eight years hold a modest quantity of its stock, and Colston, whose money reached the Bounty, was a slave trader. Yet the reply, once examined, does the Commissioners’ cause more harm than good.
In the first place, the ground has shifted. The original findings spoke of income drawn from “slave trading entities” and put a figure of £1.4 billion upon it,⁵ and the Bishop of Manchester, writing as deputy chairman of the Commissioners to the campaign group Save the Parish a week after the announcement, said that the Church could no more keep money so wrongly gained than a burglar could keep the proceeds of his trade.²² The analogy of the burglar presupposes a theft and an enrichment by it. If what the Bounty received was in truth interest on the national debt, there was neither, and the retreat to “linkage” concedes as much, since a relation of that kind, however regrettable, is not a gain, and without a gain restitution has nothing to restore.
In the second place, the theory of cross-subsidy on which the advisers now rely is one that the Commissioners themselves acknowledge to be unresearched.²⁰ Trustees who would think twice before buying a building on an untested survey ought to think a great deal longer before committing £100 million, and embracing an ambition of £1 billion, on a hypothesis nobody has tested.
In the third place, the larger contention, pressed by some of the scheme’s academic defenders, that the public revenue of Georgian Britain was swollen by duties on sugar, tobacco and rum proves altogether too much. If interest paid out of such duties tainted those who received it, then every holder of the public funds, every Crown pensioner and every officer paid from the Exchequer was tainted with them, the officers of the West Africa Squadron who afterwards hunted the slavers not excepted. A principle under which everybody is implicated distinguishes nobody, and it cannot bear the weight of a particular liability laid upon a particular charity. It will be said that the Company stood nearer the trade than the Exchequer did, having been chosen by the state to work the Asiento. The answer is that the annuitant’s interest was never drawn from the Company’s trade, but was charged upon the general revenue, which is precisely why it continued to be paid whether the trade prospered or, as it generally did, failed.⁷
The benefactions stand on firmer ground, though they are a smaller matter. They provided about 14 per cent of income, and the report itself says no more of many of the benefactors than that they were, or may have been, connected with slavery.⁴ Colston’s gifts are beyond dispute; a good deal of the remainder is conjecture. The money was, moreover, applied as its donors intended, to the purchase of land and property for the augmentation of poor livings.⁵ A modest and partly conjectural taint upon a fraction of an eighteenth-century revenue is a reason for candour and for further research, but I cannot see that it is a reason for treating the present endowment as though it were stolen property.
III. The juridical objection
My second objection is that money held on trust for one purpose is being turned toward another, and that the Commissioners’ own conduct suggests they are aware of it.
The Bounty received the first fruits and tenths in perpetuity for the augmentation of the maintenance of the poor clergy, and its governors were directed in the first instance to livings worth less than £50 a year.²³ In 1948 its assets passed to the Church Commissioners, a body constituted by Measure and registered as a charity.²⁴,²² The statutory direction governing the application of the Commissioners’ funds is older, and more pointed, than is commonly remembered. Section 67 of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Act 1840, still in force, requires that additional provision be made “for the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required”.⁴⁰ That priority has been reaffirmed more than once. The National Institutions Measure 1998 obliges the Archbishops’ Council, when it applies money made available by the Commissioners, to have particular regard to section 67,⁴¹ and in February 2025 the General Synod amended the draft National Churches Governance Measure so as to lay the same duty upon the new national body.⁴²
Against that background the scheme’s beneficiaries are not easily placed. A fund for communities defined by descent from enslaved Africans, whose returns are to be applied in large part overseas and whose governance is in time to pass to those communities, is not on any natural reading provision for the cure of souls in the parishes of England where such assistance is most required.³,⁶ The Commissioners themselves describe their response as a missional activity supporting the ministry of the Church of England in England,¹³ a description not easily reconciled with a programme of investment and grants abroad, and one they have never troubled to explain. Counsel for the Commissioners would doubtless reply that section 67 also speaks of what is most conducive to the efficiency of the Established Church, and that the Church’s witness forms part of its efficiency. I doubt that the draftsman of 1840 meant anything so elastic; and if the phrase will bear a reparations fund, it is hard to think of anything it will not bear. Charles Wide KC, formerly a judge at the Central Criminal Court, has concluded that the scheme is ultra vires,²⁹ and the challenge now before the Charity Commission is reported to turn upon the same questions: whether the Commissioners have authority to disburse the money at all, whether doing so can be reconciled with their duty to the Church and its parishes, and whether they may spend abroad.¹
The two leading cases on ethical investment do not assist the scheme. In Harries v Church Commissioners for England, the Bishop of Oxford’s case, Sir Donald Nicholls V-C allowed trustees some room to exclude investments on moral grounds where the charity would not suffer by it, but held that they may not use property held for investment as a means of making moral statements at the charity’s expense.²⁵ Butler-Sloss v Charity Commission (2022) widened that room, yet kept the charity’s purposes paramount and counselled caution where supporters and beneficiaries hold differing but legitimate moral views.²⁶ Both cases, however, concern the choice of investments, and neither touches what is proposed here. To settle income from the general fund upon a new charity is not an investment by the Commissioners but an application of their income to another body’s purposes; whatever impact investing follows would be done by the recipient, not by them, and the latitude allowed in Butler-Sloss does not reach the transfer itself.
The route the Commissioners have announced is accordingly instructive. They do not propose to run the scheme from the endowment, but to settle income upon a new charity with the regulator’s authority.⁸ They have not said under which power they will ask, and I do not presume to say it for them. If it is the ex gratia jurisdiction of section 106 of the Charities Act 2011, as recast by the Charities Act 2022, under which the Commission, subject to the supervision of the Attorney General, may authorise what trustees could not otherwise do where they could reasonably be regarded as under a moral obligation to do it, then the application concedes the principal point, namely that the trustees lack the power of their own authority.²⁷,²⁸ If it is some other power, the Commissioners ought to say which, and how a reparations fund falls within it.
Either way the regulator’s question becomes a moral one, and here the scheme is at its weakest. The leading authority, Re Snowden, permits such payments only where it can fairly be said that, were the charity an individual, it would be morally wrong of him to refuse, and Cross J warned that the power is not to be exercised lightly or on slender grounds.³⁸ The Commission’s own guidance, revised in November 2025, locates the basis of a moral payment in the charity’s having been unjustly enriched.⁴⁶ Nor may any ex gratia payment to recipients overseas be made without the Commission’s consent, whatever its size.⁴⁷ The present scheme offers neither an identifiable claimant nor an undisputed enrichment. It offers instead an obligation said to be owed to an indeterminate class, founded upon a historical finding that the most careful recent study contradicts. Were the Commission to treat that as sufficient, it is difficult to see which statutory charity possessed of an eighteenth-century ledger would be more than a single board resolution away from a scheme of its own. At the very least the regulator ought to require, before any authority is given, that the historical question be settled by scholars who have taken no part in the controversy.
IV. The moral and theological objection
My third objection is that the scheme confuses guilt, which is personal, with lament, which may properly be corporate, and then proposes to pay for the confusion.
On the first of these points the Law and the Prophets speak with unusual plainness. Deuteronomy forbids that the fathers be put to death for the children, or the children for the fathers (24:16), and Ezekiel gives a whole chapter to overturning the proverb of the sour grapes, concluding that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (18:20; compare Jeremiah 31:29–30). No Commissioner now living, and no living Anglican, had any hand in managing the Bounty in 1723. When the General Synod apologised in 2006, Archbishop Rowan Williams put the contrary case at its most persuasive. The Body of Christ, he argued, exists across history and not at any one moment only, so that its present members “share the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors”.⁴³ This is the best theological argument the scheme possesses, and I do not dismiss it. One should notice, however, what Williams himself drew from that premise, which was a duty of prayerful acknowledgement of failure, not a transfer of property. Shame may well be shared across the generations of a single body; culpability, which attaches to agents who have chosen, cannot be, and the prophets are explicit that it does not descend with the inheritance.
The more serious philosophical case for obligations that outlast the generations does not depend upon inherited guilt at all. As Janna Thompson has argued with some care, it rests upon the continuity of institutions that make and keep commitments over time, and upon the injustice of retaining what was wrongly acquired.³⁵ Joined to Williams’s ecclesiology, that argument yields the strongest form of the case for Spire: the Commissioners simply are the Bounty under another name, and whatever the Bounty gained is theirs to answer for. I accept the premise without reservation, since a corporation that still holds stolen goods must give them back however often its officers have changed. But the principle carries conditions, and I cannot see that the scheme satisfies any of them. There must have been a wrongful gain; that gain must be traceable into the present fund; and there must be someone to whom restoration is owed. Zacchaeus undertook to restore fourfold to those he had defrauded (Luke 19:8), not to a class defined by descent some three centuries afterwards. Everything therefore turns upon the gain, and the second section of this essay has shown that the evidence for it does not survive examination. Jeremy Waldron’s argument that historic entitlements may be superseded by altered circumstances adds a further caution, since what particular descendants would now possess, had particular wrongs not been done, lies in the nature of the case beyond calculation.³⁴
Nor does a class of beneficiaries drawn on lines of descent sit comfortably with the Church’s own confession. The Oversight Group described itself as Black-led and recommended that the fund be owned and run by Black communities.⁶ I have no reason to doubt the good faith of anyone concerned. A Church which holds that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free (Galatians 3:28) ought nevertheless to think long before it distributes trust money according to ancestry. Its tradition of almsgiving has always looked to need wherever need is found, and I know of no precedent within it for looking instead to lineage.
There is also the matter of proportion. Slavery was an ancient and almost universal institution, and British ships carried some 3.26 million of the roughly 12.5 million Africans embarked for the Atlantic crossing, a little over a quarter of the whole.⁴⁴ None of this excuses a single voyage, but it does bear upon the suggestion, implicit in the Oversight Group’s talk of the scale of the “moral sin”, that the Church of England stands in some singular relation of indebtedness.⁶ The same Church gave the abolitionist cause Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, and the evangelicals of the Clapham circle, while the Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, counted the suppression of the trade in Africa among its labours. Biggar is right to insist that an account which records the sins and omits the repentance is no moral reckoning at all.³³
The strongest theological argument on the other side appeals to the penitential prayers of Daniel and Nehemiah, both of whom confessed the sins of their fathers as though they were their own (Daniel 9; Nehemiah 1:6), and I take it seriously. A Church may lament, may confess in solidarity with those who went before it, and may pray for those who were wronged; these are acts of worship and of memory, and the Church of England performed them in 2006 and has repeated them since.³⁰ What Daniel did not do was dispose of property held on trust for others in order to discharge a debt that the Law and the Prophets alike deny he owed. Repentance ordinarily costs the penitent something, whereas the cost of this scheme would fall upon the poorer clergy and the parishes for whom the endowment exists, and who had no part in the wrong.
V. The prudential and ecclesial objection
My fourth objection is that the scheme, even were it lawful and its history sound, would still be imprudent.
I begin with a concession that the scheme’s critics have not always been ready to make. The Church states that its support for churches and clergy has risen by 36 per cent, to £1.6 billion, in the current triennium,¹ and it would be an exaggeration to say that the parishes are being starved to pay for Spire. That was never quite the question, however. The question is whether money held for the Church’s ministry may be applied to some other end, and whether that end represents the wisest use of it at a time when many parishes struggle to meet their contributions and many church buildings stand in want of repair; and an opportunity forgone remains a cost even where nobody goes without.
Anglicans are, besides, divided on the matter, and division among those for whom a charity exists is itself something its trustees must weigh. A poll of 500 churchgoers conducted by Merlin Strategy at Biggar’s instance found 81 per cent preferring the money to be spent on the parishes, and 61 per cent saying they might reduce their giving.³²,¹ The Guardian has reported, in fairness, that another question in the same poll found a majority who would maintain or increase their giving were the £100 million committed.¹ The honest conclusion is that the faithful are divided over the scheme rather than united against it; and since Butler-Sloss counsels particular caution where supporters hold differing legitimate views,²⁶ a body holding an endowment for the whole Church would be wise not to spend it upon a cause that divides that Church.
Nor has the conduct of the project done much to inspire confidence. Some £1.15 million had been spent by July 2026, before any regulatory authority had been obtained.⁹ The document the Commissioners issued in reply to their critics under the title Independent Responses was compiled from contributions by Drayton and Paul, the former a member of the Oversight Group.¹⁸,²⁰ At a Synod fringe meeting in July 2025 a member of the project’s staff accused the critics of disinformation, which Biggar has, reasonably enough, taken as an imputation of bad faith;³² and the Bishop of Norwich told the Synod a year later that the Commissioners’ staff had been subjected to vile abuse.¹⁰ Both are to be regretted, though neither advances the argument in the slightest degree. What has been wanting throughout is the one measure that might lower the temperature, namely an examination of the historical question by economic historians who have taken no side.
There remains the Church’s public testimony. The Commissioners told the world that the Church’s endowment was founded in part upon the profits of slavery, and if that claim is mistaken the Church owes a correction which ought to come before any question of money. A Church that will not correct its own record can hardly expect its other testimony to be received without discount.
VI. Objections and replies
I should not wish to rest the case without meeting the strongest objections to it, of which I count six beyond those already answered in the course of the argument.
1. That the fund is an investment, not a payment of reparations
Drayton has said that nothing in the scheme amounts to paying reparations in the sense of discharging a debt owed to the past.²⁰ The Commissioners said as much at the outset: the Bishop of Manchester’s letter of 16 January 2023 described the label of reparations as “inaccurate and misleading”.²² I accept that the instrument is an impact fund and not a cheque. Yet the same letter justified the commitment by the analogy of the burglar who must surrender his takings, the Commissioners announced it as a response to past wrongs, and the Oversight Group measured its sufficiency against the gravity of the sin.³,⁶ One cannot comfortably disclaim the name of reparation while invoking its rationale in the same breath. A scheme justified in the language of restitution must answer the questions that restitution raises, and to call it investment alters the instrument while leaving the justification exactly where it was.
2. That Scripture enjoins corporate repentance
Scripture commends corporate lament and confession, and I have argued that the Church ought to practise both. I have also argued that confession in solidarity is a different act from the alienation of trust property, and that the prophets who furnish the model for the one are the same prophets who forbid the sons to be charged with the fathers’ guilt.
3. That the sum is under one per cent of the endowment and the parishes lose nothing by it
The sum is indeed small beside an endowment of some £10 billion, and I have already conceded the increase in support for the parishes.¹ But smallness is not a principle of trust law, and a trustee who applies a modest sum outside the purposes of the trust has applied it outside them none the less. It should also be remembered that the Oversight Group’s own ambition is ten times as large.⁶
4. That the critics are a funded campaign in the culture war
Some of them may well be partisans, as some of the scheme’s defenders no doubt are, but neither observation has any bearing upon the Bounty’s ledgers or the terms of the legislation of 1723. The Guardian itself reports that the most prominent of the alleged paymasters denied funding the campaign, and that Biggar has no part in the legal challenge;¹ Biggar, for his part, has answered the insinuation in terms.² The sources of a campaign’s money are a proper subject of inquiry, but such an inquiry does not dispose of the campaign’s arguments.
5. That the Church is implicated elsewhere even if the Bounty is acquitted
This is the weightiest of the objections, and it should be met candidly. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel owned the Codrington estates in Barbados, and on emancipation it was compensated for some four hundred enslaved people held there.⁴⁵ Ninety-six Anglican clergy appear among the claimants under the Act of 1833.³⁷ Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter is often named in this connexion, although the Legacies of British Slavery database records that he appears as a trustee and executor of the Earl of Dudley’s will, and finds no evidence that he owned slaves himself.³⁶ These are real and discreditable facts. But they concern other bodies and other persons. The Commissioners themselves stress that USPG, the Society’s successor, is a separate and independent organisation,¹³ and USPG has made its own response, pledging £7 million in 2023 for work in Barbados.³⁹ If the Commissioners’ case is to rest upon different ground, it must be made afresh and on its own evidence, and the report of January 2023 corrected in the meantime, for a decision taken on one premise is not rescued by another premise found after the money was pledged.
6. That silence would be taken for indifference, at home and in the Caribbean
The concern is natural, and the more so on the eve of a Commonwealth summit in Antigua at which reparations are expected to be prominent. It should be observed, though, that British government policy, as reported at the end of October 2026, rules out both a formal apology and financial reparations.³¹ Nor are the scheme’s critics counselling silence. What they ask for is truthfulness, without which no reconciliation is likely to endure.
VII. What the Church might rightly do
To oppose the scheme is not to recommend indifference, and I should like to close by suggesting a course that would cost the Church less in money and rather more in candour.
The Commissioners should begin by correcting the record, inviting economic historians who have taken no part in the dispute to examine the Bounty’s ledgers and the settlement of 1723, publishing their findings in full, and amending the report of January 2023 to accord with them. Until that review is complete they should suspend their application to the Charity Commission and spend nothing further on the scheme’s machinery. The Church may, and I think should, keep the memory of slavery and of its own part in it alive in its prayers and its liturgy, as the Synod did in 2006, without supposing that lament can be priced. Its support for the Anglican provinces of the Caribbean and West Africa can be strengthened through the ordinary channels of mission, directed by need wherever need is found. And it might turn a larger share of its energies to the slavery that exists today, whose victims are living, identifiable and capable of being helped, a field in which the Church already has work on which to build.
Conclusion
Project Spire began as an act of conscience, and I do not doubt that many of those who support it act in good faith. A conscience must, however, be informed, and this one was misinformed on the decisive point. The Bounty’s income came overwhelmingly from the clergy’s own first fruits and tenths and from interest on the national debt, and its brief venture into South Sea stock ended in loss. The Commissioners hold their endowment for the ministry of the Church of England, and they have found it necessary to seek a new charity and an ex gratia authority in order to do what their own powers will not permit. The moral reasoning behind the scheme confuses the inheritance of guilt, which Scripture denies, with the duty of restitution, which presupposes a gain and a claimant that cannot here be shown. And a fund that bears the word healing in its title has divided the very Church it was meant to heal.
The Church of England has a great deal to repent of, as has every Church. It does not follow that it should repent of what it did not do, still less that it should do so with money that is not its own to give. Nemo dat quod non habet: the maxim binds a Church no less than it binds anyone else. The honest course is to correct the record, to keep the memory, and to preserve the endowment for the poorer clergy and the parishes for whom Queen Anne intended it.
Notes
John Collingridge, “Lobbying, lawyers and a media blitz: the fight to kill the Church of England’s £100m slavery compensation fund”, The Guardian, October 2026 (as republished 13 October 2026: link).
Nigel Biggar, “My Answer to The Guardian’s Smear Campaign”, The Biggar Picture, October 2026; see also his reply in the Daily Telegraph.
“Church Commissioners to set aside £100 million to compensate for slave-trade links”, Church Times, 10 January 2023.
“Church Commissioners pledges £100m to atone for links to chattel slavery”, Civil Society, 11 January 2023.
Grant Thornton, “Investigating the Church’s links to slavery”.
“Church Commissioners look for partners to boost reparatory-justice fund to £1 billion”, Church Times, 4 March 2024; Diocese of Norwich, “Church Commissioners for England warmly welcomes Oversight Group’s report”; “Report recommends £1bn fund”, Christian Today, March 2024.
François R. Velde, An Institutional Investor in 18th-Century Britain, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper 2025-20 (October 2025), esp. pp. 13–18.
Written answers, Marsha De Cordova MP for the Church Commissioners, Church in Parliament, 4 July 2025.
“Church of England moving forward with slavery reparations fund despite legal challenge”, Christian Today, 18 July 2026.
“Bishop of Norwich defends research underpinning Project Spire”, Church Times, July 2026.
“Church warden and rector lead legal challenge against Church of England’s Project Spire”, Christian Today, 15 October 2026.
“Should the Church Commissioners pay slavery reparations? Further questions”, Anglican Ink, 10 April 2025.
Church Commissioners, “Frequently asked questions” on historic links to enslavement.
Richard Dale, “The problems with the C of E’s ‘reparations’ project (‘Spire’)”, Psephizo.
History Reclaimed, “Church Commissioners slavery reparations”.
Anglican Ink, 2025 (the 1720 conversion into stock and its loss); compare Velde (note 7).
“The Church of England’s Historic Links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, Psephizo.
“Church Commissioners hit back at critics of slavery research”, Church Times, 6 June 2025.
Church Commissioners, Links to African Chattel Enslavement: Frequently Asked Questions (February 2025).
“Historians call for Church Commissioners to scrap £100-million slavery justice fund”, Church Times, 11 July 2025; R. Drayton and H. Paul, Independent Responses to Claims Criticising the Historical Basis of the Church Commissioners’ Research (May 2025).
“Truth, history, the Church Commissioners, and reparative justice”, Psephizo (quoting the Commissioners’ interim report of June 2022 and the advisers’ reply).
David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, Deputy Chair of the Church Commissioners, letter to Save the Parish, 16 January 2023.
The National Archives, catalogue entry C240, Queen Anne’s Bounty; Queen Anne’s Bounty Act 1703 (2 & 3 Anne c. 20).
Church Commissioners Measure 1947 (10 & 11 Geo. 6 No. 2).
Harries v Church Commissioners for England [1992] 1 WLR 1241 (Ch); see the summary in Withers, “Charity Commission consultation on responsible investment guidance”.
Butler-Sloss v Charity Commission for England and Wales [2022] EWHC 974 (Ch); case note, Cambridge Law Journal (2023).
Charities Act 2011, s. 106; on the Attorney General’s supervision, Farrer & Co..
Charities Act 2022, ss. 15–16; ICAEW, “Ex gratia payments”; Foot Anstey, “New power to make ex-gratia payments gets the green light”.
Charles Wide KC, ConservativeHome, February 2025; and his “The curious case of Project Spire”, The Critic, 2025.
“Church of England apologises for slavery”, Irish Times, February 2006.
Reuters, “King Charles says Commonwealth to confront slavery’s injustices”, 29 October 2026.
Nigel Biggar, “The case against Project Spire”, The Critic, 14 April 2026.
Nigel Biggar, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (London: Forum, 2025).
Jeremy Waldron, “Superseding Historic Injustice”, Ethics 103 (1992): 4–28.
Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
Legacies of British Slavery, UCL, “Rt Rev. Henry Phillpotts”.
“Clergy gained compensation equivalent to £46 million today at abolition of slavery”, Church Times, 26 June 2020.
Re Snowden [1970] Ch 700, 707 (Cross J); the passage is quoted in Brabners, “Charity Ex Gratia Payments”.
“Christian charity ‘deeply ashamed’ of past slavery links and pledges £7m reparations”, Civil Society, 2023.
“Governance Measure amended to specify provision for cure of souls in poorer parishes”, Church Times, 17 February 2025.
Rowan Williams, address to the General Synod, February 2006, as reported in The Guardian and quoted at Opinio Juris, 20 September 2006; see also the Church of England’s statement on the 2006 apology.
SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Estimates, by flag of carrier.
Legacies of British Slavery, UCL, estate record for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Barbados.
Charity Commission, Ex gratia payments by charities (CC7), revised 27 November 2025, as summarised in “Ex gratia payments explained”, Conventus Law, and Withers, “The Charities Act 2022: final provisions implemented”.
Mills & Reeve, “Charities Act 2022: ex gratia powers update”, February 2024.
Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
