Daily Mail

How Eugenie and Jack are related . . . to same slave-trading conman

- by Christophe­r Wilson

THE second royal wedding of 2018 takes place on Friday and — just like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s nuptials — it won’t be a parsimonio­us affair.

There have been 850 invitation­s to the wedding of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank, even though St George’s Chapel seats only 800. More rooms will be opened up in Windsor Castle to accommodat­e the numbers.

And, though a traditiona­l wedding breakfast will follow the ceremony, there will be a second day of celebratio­ns, with a champagne evening party for 400 at Eugenie’s family home, Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park.

The cost of policing and security has been conservati­vely estimated at £2 million, while the bill for the ceremony will be met by the Queen, with the entertainm­ent paid for by Eugenie’s father, Prince Andrew.

The lovebirds are a handsome couple — but I have discovered an intriguing twist to this latest royal romance.

For Eugenie and Jack have an ancestor in common — a rascally, 18th-century wheeler dealer who borrowed, stole, fraudulent­ly converted and otherwise misused government money to enrich himself.

Edward Lascelles was slave-trafficker who made an incalculab­le fortune from buying and selling men and women out of Africa. He then locked them up for months on so- called factory ships, from which they were eventually dispatched to the New World. Many died on the voyage from Africa to Barbados, while countless others were murdered or executed when they rose in rebellion at their savage treatment upon arrival.

Edward is the couple’s seven- times grandfathe­r, whose grandchild­ren, in the 18th century, each created a family line that descends to this day.

His granddaugh­ter, Lady Mary Anne Lascelles, married Richard York and it’s through this connection that Jack Brooksbank descends.

His grandson Henry, the second Earl of Harewood, is the ancestor of Sarah, Duchess of York and Princess Eugenie.

EDWARD

and his half- brother, Henry Lascelles, created another fortune from stealing vast sums from the government, as well as from their work as money-lenders, charging interest at pernicious rates.

Often, the money they lent was not even theirs — but the Crown’s.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the pair had another scam which made more money than all their other activities — flagrant profiteeri­ng from replenishi­ng British ships during wars that involved extensive naval activity in the Caribbean.

Edward and his brother claimed respectabi­lity on account of their lineage — the family came to Britain with William the Conqueror and establishe­d itself in Yorkshire in 1315.

Camouflagi­ng their activities in this august ancestry, the brothers acted like the most ruthless of modern City traders.

By the mid-18th century, they’d set up a slave transporta­tion business centred at Anomabu on the coast of Ghana in West Africa, where they had the king of the Fante tribesmen in their pocket. With his connivance, a ‘floating factory’ ship, the Argyle, lay offshore as a slave-holding pen to supply transatlan­tic sailing ships bound for the West Indies.

In the Caribbean, plantation owners struggled to find enough workers to meet the demand for sugar around the globe, so between 500 and 1,000 slaves a month were shipped out of Anomabu, each bringing a handsome profit to the Lascelles brothers. In Barbados, the Lascelles acquired sugar plantation­s, which were worked by the slaves they transporte­d.

After a small initial investment, their property portfolio was increased at an exponentia­l rate by stealing or borrowing vast sums of government cash.

This was easy to do, because first Henry, and then Edward, was appointed by the Crown to collect customs for the island.

The pair were as resourcefu­l as they were rotten. One trick employed to grow the funds they’d appropriat­ed was to lend to slave merchants and then demand exceptiona­l interest on the loans they’d just granted. This money was used to buy more slaves — shipped from Africa at yet more profit to the Lascelles.

For his part, Henry contented himself by stealing around 30 per cent of customs duty collected.

And when Edward took over, he saw no reason not to make it 50 per cent. The blatant way in which the rapacious Lascelles brothers helped themselves to public money inevitably drew attention to their activities and, in 1743, an eager inspector, Robert Dinwiddie, was sent to Barbados to look into their activities.

The punctiliou­s Glaswegian’s findings led him to have Edward suspended. He then brought ten charges against Edward, including insider trading, pocketing vast sums in a complex fraud and using government money he’d collected to lend to others, on which he charged a vast percentage interest.

So long had the brothers been on the fiddle that Dinwiddie surcharged them £40,000 (the equivalent of £4 million today) over discrepanc­ies in accounts submitted ten years earlier — the inference being that, in each subsequent year, the Lascelles accounts had been falsified and that their liability could stand at the present- day equivalent of

£40 million. At a hearing in London, Edward was found to have ‘essentiall­y, if not totally, disregarde­d’ government anti-fraud rules and he was found an ‘improper person’ to continue as Collector of Customs.

Yet, somehow, he escaped prosecutio­n, evading punishment by lobbying fellow West India merchants to say what a jolly good fellow he was. Edward’s brother, Henry, had seen what was coming and bolted back to Britain, buying himself the parliament­ary seat of Northaller­ton — though he had to pay three times the going rate to acquire it, so unwelcome was he back home. He finally clinched the deal by procuring the outgoing MP, William Smelt, a goldplated Customs job in Barbados. By now, the brothers were bulletproo­f. So, despite the compelling evidence against him of corrupt activity , Edward sailed back to Barbados unimpeded by the law and was given back his post as Collector of Customs. So complete was his forgivenes­s that he was even elevated to the all-powerful Barbados Council. Enriched and emboldened, the Lascelles family now sought honours to legitimise its activities. First, Edward’s nephew, Edwin, was created the 1st Baron Harewood, but when he died without an h eir, Edward’s son (also Edward) was granted an even greater honour — being created 1st Earl of Harewood. Before his death, Edwin had called in the celebrated designer Robert Adam to build a grand stately home, Harewood House, now considered one of Britain ’s top ten historic houses. Capability Brown land - scaped the grounds and the Lascelles family felt they had finally arrived. Of course, in 1807, Britain abolished the slave trade — but not until 1834 was slavery outlawed altogether. By this time, Edward’s son had inherited five plantation­s and more than 1,000 slaves but — knowing how to bilk the government system like no other — when they were freed from slavery, he received £22,473 17s 11d (£2.5 million today) in compensati­on. In addition, in the wake of the American Revolution, he had acquired a vast portfolio of West Indian property as planters began defaulting on his loans and surrenderi­ng their property to him. Between 1773 and 1787, more than 27,000 acres and 2,947 slaves came into his ownership — altogether worth £293,000 (£29 million today). Perhaps it is no surprise that, as the years passed, the Lascelles family moved quickly to distance itself from its rapacious antecedent­s. By 1922, its ascent of the social ladder culminated in Henry, Viscount Lascelles, heir to the earldom, proposing to P rincess Mary, the daughter of George V and aunt of our present Queen. The marriage establishe­d the direct link into the House of W indsor and thus to Princess Eugenie, the Queen ’s sixth grandchild. Had the family entirely ditched its piratical past? Perhaps not — Henry Lascelles is said to have proposed to the plain-looking princess only for a bet. But when his two distant relatives — Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank (whose line comes down from Edward Lascelles’s daughter) — kiss at the St George’s Chapel altar, it would be fascinatin­g to know the innermost thoughts of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, as she watches over the ceremonial. She is, after all, herself the descendant of an African slave.

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 ??  ?? Shameful trade: Slaves being shipped to the New World, as shown in the film Amistad. Below: Jack Brooksbank and fiancee Princess Eugenie in a new photograph released yesterday
Shameful trade: Slaves being shipped to the New World, as shown in the film Amistad. Below: Jack Brooksbank and fiancee Princess Eugenie in a new photograph released yesterday

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