One autumn day in 1786, an unexpected parcel arrived at Carlton House, the London residence of George, Prince of Wales. Inside the package were pamphlets describing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the brutal treatment of enslaved people in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. In Britain, the transatlantic slave trade had not emerged accidentally or at the margins of power. Yet as the descendants and beneficiaries of England’s first major investors in the slave trade, George III and the royal family set a corrupt example for the nation to follow. Unless George III intervened to end Britain’s slave trade, he said, divine retribution would follow.