Justin Welby and his slave owning ancestor...

The Church's determination to self flagellate over dubious findings of 'institutional racism' and the decision to pay reparations for slavery has taken a new turn..

His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury claims the Church of England is ‘deeply institutionally racist’ and what’s more, he’s got the slave owning ancestor to prove it!

Regular readers know that I like to approach my subject at a tangent…so, here we go.

The night of the 13^th February 1692 was particularly cold and frozen at the clachan (village) of Glencoe where Alasdair Ruadh MacIain, the 12^th Chief of Clann Iain Arbach, and his people lived. February in the Highlands is particularly cold, in the steeper sided glens the low sun often never reaches the bottom and all is bathed in frost and snow that can last for days, deep frozen, hidden from sunlight, twigs on the bare trees grow coats of frost inches thick, blades of individual grass become white fingers sparking with frost.  When the weather is like this the smoke from peat fires only rises until it is cooled sufficiently to match the warmer sun filled air higher up, forming a hazy mist that sits over the villages below. It’s easy to see where there is such geography in Britain, there are also the tales of mystical dragons breath. It is both beautiful and deadly and it is in the microclimates of these winter glens where we see our lowest temperatures, -15C and colder for days on end.  Enough to kill anyone without shelter or appropriate clothing within an hour. 

The 13^th February was a busy time in Glencoe because for several days the Clan had been hosting a relative of Alasdair,  Robert Campbell of Glenlyon and a company of The Campbell Militia, of whom he was captain. Robert’s niece married Iain of Glencoe, one of Alasdair’s middle sons.  That a company of Campbell Militia would be hosted by another Clan was not unusual, the previous summer, a company of MacIain Militia were billeted on the Campbells in Argyll, when on King’s Business. And there was the ancient custom of hospitality in the Highlands, common enough in places where inns were few and far between and where the weather can kill you. Under which, hospitality, if asked, was freely given and it wasn’t uncommon for bitter rivals and feuding families to host each other. So essential was this tradition to travel around the Highlands that those who broke the truce of hospitality with violence would bring shame for generations. Glen Lyon, that most peaceful and gentle of the Perthshire glens is a long day’s march from Glencoe so the Campbells would have been grateful for the warm hearths, salted herring, oat bannocks and whisky of their MacDonald neighbours. What their hosts didn’t know was that Robert Campbell was under orders from the Edinburgh Government to ‘deal’ with MacIain and his people. 

Some of you will have already guessed the event I am referring to because Clann Iain Arbach is also known as Clan MacDonald of Glencoe. What happened next and why it happened. Well, I’ve already mentioned that breaking the bonds of hospitality in the Highlands would bring shame that would last generations but that is exactly what Robert and his men did, in the middle of the night they quietly rose and proceeded to murder their hosts. Alasdair, his wife and several children and another 30 of his clan were killed by dirk, broadsword and bayonet and most of those who escaped ran into the freezing hills, most to perish from exposure.

 I’m not going to examine why this happened here, there are many history books. Suffice to say that Robert Campbell, an impoverished junior landowner of that powerful family, was ordered to commit the crime by nefarious political machinations in Edinburgh and London, this was 3 years after the Glorious Revolution and the new government under William of Orange and his wife, Mary Stuart, were wary about the loyalty of the Highland Clans, especially the Catholic and Episcopalian ones, MacIain was known to be a curmudgeon who was both influential and uncomfortable with the coup that removed James VII and II. The English Government had already intercepted a large sum of silver collected in Catholic Yorkshire en route to Appin to arm the Clans in a revolt against the new government. (This happened on the Northumberland farm where I now live, the Jacobite agent, taken wounded to the farmhouse, to expire in the very room where I am typing this tale). It was inevitable that the Edinburgh government would take an action to show its loyalty to the new monarchs.  

Why Robert Campbell agreed to murder is uncle by marriage is anyone’s guess, he would have known the penalty for this, forever he would be condemned as an oath breaker, his name forever sullied. He had a personal grudge against the MacIains, he’d inherited his father’s debts on the Glen Lyon farm and, to compound this in 1689 the MacIains of Glencoe had raided his lands and stolen his cattle forcing him further into debt.  He was impoverished and forced to join the army aged the 59 to feed his wife and children. He also probably saw it as an opportunity to improve his standing in the Campbell hierarchy, which was as complex and had as bitter infighting as any Italian renaissance dynasty or modern Casa Nostra. 

The public reaction to the macssacre was angry and immediate despite an attempt to cover up government involvement.  The outrage wasn’t so much about the killing of the  members of another Clan, raiding and feuding was part of Highland life at the time, it was that Robert broke the ancient laws of hospitality and did it  for money and influence from the hated Lowlanders. Always suspect of siding with Edinburgh over their extended relations across the Highlands, the Campbells would never  shake their involvement,  and even today, those with the surname may find themselves the subject of mutterings in Glasgow pubs and Edinburgh drawing rooms alike. 

This week Justin Selby, the Archbishop of Canterbury is back in the news, wringing his hands that one of his ancestors was a slave owner. Given slavery was abolished some 150 years ago and the slave trade over 200 years ago, one cannot help thinking that Welby’s statement is more about justifying his modern liberal guilt to support his high controversial anti racism and reparations policies in the Church of England. If there is one institution in the British Isles which can hold its head up with no shame about slavery it is the Church of England which was instrumental in the campaign against slavery. But no, Welby seems set upon cherry picking his ancestors for appropriate shame. 

You’re probably wondering, like my ever so patient editorial team, what on earth the link is between the Massacre of Glencoe and Justin Welby’s latest virtue signal? Well, the thing is that  Alasdair Ruadh MacIain, was my great great great great great great  great grandfather. I’m descended from his son, Iain (John) - the same Iain who married Robert Campbell’s niece, both off whom  who escaped from the massacre. Many times in my life friends, (especially English liberal women for some reason) have been sympathetic when its come up in discussion. One even suggested that my sister, having married a Campbell, must have ‘awoken painful memories’. All this leaves me rather bemused. My brother in law may be a Campbell but he wasn’t responsible for the events in 1692 and furthermore, remember whilst MacIain is my 10^th great grandfather Robert Campbell of Glen Lyon is my 10^th great uncle, through the niece that married Iain. History, you see, is complicated. Things aren’t black and white, ‘goodies and baddies’ no matter how much revisionists obsess with trying to make it so.

 None of this is unusual, as a Northern European, I share similar ancestry with Justin Welby with the same collection of heroes and villains. The genetic isopoint is the point at which we all share a common ancestor for indigenous Northern Europeans is about 900AD. There are about 1 million of us alive today descended from MacIain and Robert Campbell individually. My ancestry isn’t anything unique or special, I’m only able to track it because of the historical Highlander’s obsession with pedigree to compensate for their poverty - Dr Johnson famously commented on his visit to Scotland that every bare legged crofter living in a hovel will proudly recite their descent from kings. 

Having mapped out our family tree of about 5000 individuals to date it is easy to cherry pick the kings and heroes while ignoring the silent majority, who were not famous or wealthy enough to be recorded in history. The tens of millions of ancestors whose lives were brutal, miserable and short. This is the reality for all of us, for every king in your ancestry (and we all have them) there are hundreds of thousands whose lives were not those of luxury and you don’t have to go back very far to discover this. My great great granny was a formidable lady, an Ulster woman, she and her husband emigrated to Lanarkshire from Antrim during the potato famine and he got a job as a coal miner.  So miserable and impoverished was their accommodation that in the 1920s it was cited in a government report on the state of housing in Scotland. Meanwhile in London, another great granny, a fishwife, died in the poor house in Holborn. We know about the 19^th century poor because we have the records. We don’t know about the 14^th Century ancestors because there are no records. 

All of us are descended from slave owners, we are also all descended from slaves. That is the reality. None of us is responsible for the conduct of our ancestors and none of us has the right to claim that the suffering of an ancestor is our suffering. No one living today lived through the Atlantic Slave Trade either as a slaver or a slave. Welby has cherrypicked an ancestor from over 200 years ago and decided to adopt the guilt of that ancestor. He’s ignored his other ancestors, those who didn’t own land and therefore didn’t get written down anywhere, those who lived and worked in poverty, in favour of this one. 

The concept of genetic guilt for crimes was developed during the French Revolution and was honed to an art by Stalin, the North Koreans still do it.  In a strange flipping of the trope, the concept of genetic sin seems to be a uniquely first world liberal phenomenon and is the driving force behind modern political campaigns like reparations. Victimhood is everything in 2024 and if you haven’t got it in the present then find it in the past and those seeking to justify indulging the increasingly vocal demands search our history and their own ancestry for culpability. This is very odd and it really highlights the self loathing of the new western elite classes. What makes it even more extraordinary in Welby’s case is that t is  a direct contradiction to  Christian belief, the Sins of the Father do not pass to the son. (Ezekiel 18), which begs the question, why is the Archbishop. again, ignoring the tenets of his own faith? 

The Church of England has tied itself in knots since the death of George Floyd, and seems set on self flagellation led by virtue signaling bishops like the Archbishop, who also expect the long suffering parishioners to pay for it all in reparation funds, this push back is probably why Welby decided to personalize the debate by cherry picking a nefarious slave owning ancestor. Frankly, trying to justify your current political and ideological position by citing such an ancestral scoundrel who died a long time ago is, frankly, pretentious. 

Well what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If Welby is going to cherrypick his ancestors to justify his actions today, then I would advise that those long suffering parishoners to do exactly the same thing and cite genetic poverty from their family trees. Welby’s ancestor of choice may have lived in luxury in Antigua or somewhere but my ancestor of choice is that widowed grandmother who brought up a family of 8, alone, in a mining cottage on a Lanarkshire hillside in the 1920s with no damp proof course, no plumbing and an open sewer in the street, on charity because her husband was killed at 32 from black lung. 

It is extremely important that we call out the likes of Welby when they parade the concept of holding the son guilty for the sins of the father. We don’t do this in our society for very good reasons including the principle of individual responsibility. Allowing those peddling genetic guilt as a norm must be challenged and shut down for the collectivist nonsense it is.