Writing Back to Power: Letters, ‘Secretts’ and the Bishops of London

Written by Eleanor Hex, PhD researcher

History provides us with the context to understand the world in which we live: allowing us to explore how the past impacts us in the present. This has been a huge motivator for us as a team as we have been working on our upcoming exhibition Writing Back to Power: Letters, ‘Secretts’ and the Bishops of London.

This project, kindly funded by the Museum Development London’s Diversity Matters Grant, is all about this intersection between history and today. History is something that is alive: it is not static. Working together with Parents Action and Resource Centre (PARC) storyteller Grace Quansah and videographer Jair Tavares, we were truly able to showcase this and bring history to life today.

Throughout this project, it has been so important for us to remember the humanity that underpins historical narratives. This project has been rooted in my research as Fulham Palace’s PhD student looking into the relationship of the Bishop of London with colonialism and slavery in late seventeenth, and early eighteenth-century Virginia. To contextualise this period in our workshops, we worked with two primary sources from the time: the John Punch Court Case of 1640, and a letter written to the Bishop of London by an enslaved person in 1723. Focusing on these sources in our workshops with young people, we encouraged them to be creative, engaging with them through art and poetry, which you will be able to view at our exhibition which runs in Bishop Terrick’s drawing room at Fulham Palace from 26 October to 29 November 2026. This has been a project based on storytelling, contextualising the story of the Bishop of London – the Bishops of the Colonies – within the wider narrative of transatlantic enslavement.

Each person matters: from enslaved people like John Punch, who entered into a lifetime of enslavement due to the colour of his skin, and ‘Secrett’ who wrote a petition for freedom to Edmund Gibson (Bishop of London 1723-1748); to the Bishops of London themselves, who held one of the most important ecclesiastical positions in the Church of England; to our young people sitting in the classroom with us today grappling with these histories. Everyone deserves our attention: everyone’s voice deserves to be heard. History does not need to be something which is divided into a set of different retellings and narratives, neatly boxed into genres and themes. It is a tapestry woven across divides and boundaries. When working with the young people it was important to not see this as two separate tales but to recognise that all human history is bound together. That decisions made by a man in a palace in a London Borough had an impact on the lives of enslaved people three thousand miles away in colonial Virginia. By showcasing structures of power in this way the young people were really able to interrogate their chosen themes of Power, Freedom and Voice, deeply considering who has the ability to write back to power and stand up for what is right and just today.

Come and see our exhibition Writing Back to Power: Letters, ‘Secretts’ and the Bishops of London running in Bishop Terrick’s drawing room at Fulham Palace from 26 October to 29 November 2026.