Writing back to power

26 October – 29 November • Bishop Terrick’s drawing room

Fulham Palace has worked with Parents Action and Resource Centre (PARC) to review archival material held in the ‘Fulham Papers’ at Lambeth Palace Library, to reflect on what that material says about the role of the Church of England and the Bishop of London, culminating in a temporary exhibition in autumn 2026. A group of young people from PARC worked with PhD student Eleanor Hex, storyteller Grace Quansah and filmmaker Jair Tavares to explore the involvement of the Church of England in colonialism and transatlantic slavery, but also to give voice to the enslaved people through a mix of interpretation and imagination by the group.

This exhibition has been co-curated with the young people of PARC.  The exhibition will include a project film, the young people’s work and poetry, alongside images and analysis of the archival sources they interrogated.

For many of the young people, this was their first encounter with the Fulham Papers and the history of the Bishops of London. Through Writing Back to Power, the history was brought to life through storytelling and performance. They explored enslavement, freedom, faith, power and voice, including John Punch and the 1723 “Secrets” letter. Although we know little about its writers, the letter shows how they used their voice to question power and ask for freedom.

The young people responded creatively and chose three themes for the exhibition: Power, Freedom, and Voice – Standing Up for What Is Right.

This project was funded by Museum Development London Diversity Matters Grant.

Historical context

History allows us to properly understand the world around us. To look arounds and consider why things are the way they are. Fulham Palace is a building with history. Not just that which we can see through the architecture and the beautiful grounds: but that which is hidden to the naked eye. This palace quietly tucked away in West London is part of a story which ricochets across the world. That encompasses the lives not just of bishops and their families; but of parishioners of all kinds not just here in London but in the ‘colonies’ too.

Bishops are clergy who each oversee a part of the church known as a ‘diocese’. These are made up of a collection of smaller areas known as ‘parishes’, each of which is presided over by their own ordained vicar. These vicars look after their own individual congregations, and report back on this to their bishop. In the eighteenth-century there were 24 bishops in England, 22 of whom had a seat in the House of Lords and had political sway as well as power over the direction of the church. This made them extremely powerful men, and many of them had interests outside of the church that effected the lay in which they led.

In the early modern period, imperialism began to expand at an extremely quick pace. As trade routes started to spread across the globe, so did the Anglican communion with ministers being sent to every place where there were English merchants in order to provide them with spiritual guidance. London was the ‘metropole’, the mother city of the growing empire and so the Bishop of London took on a central role on the Board of Trade and were involved in making important decisions about commerce and industry. In 1675 Bishop Henry Compton became the Bishop of London and under approval of King Charles II took on the title of ‘Bishop of the Colonies’. This gave them power not only just over the London diocese, but over the rest of the world where the Anglican church had a base. This meant that they oversaw not only the clergy and parishes within London, but also those in far-flung places like ‘The Americas’.

Clergy members were sent by the Anglican Church to places from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in Canada, out to places such as Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies. Communication from these colonies was sent to the bishop- often directly to Fulham Palace- and a collection of these papers was compiled. These papers are now known as ‘The Fulham Papers’ and are kept at Lambeth Palace Library which is the national archive for the Church of England. In these volumes are thousands of documents which allow historians to better understand how the church work in the colonies from the firsthand account of those who lived there. None of the bishops of London ever visited the colonies and so they relied on letters, reports, maps and other information from their clergy, their commissaries and colonial governors to gain a picture of these places.

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

3,000 miles away from the plantations of Virginia, Fulham Palace was a hub of colonial activity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Decisions made by the ‘Bishop of the Colonies’ here in London at the ‘centre’ of the Empire had drastic repercussions on the running of the church, and on the lives of its parishioners – free and unfree – across the British Empire.

With funding from the Museum Development London’s Diversity Matters Grant we were able to work with Parents Action Resource Centre to reinvestigate this long history of colonisation, racism and enslavement.

Young people critically engaged with the 1640 Virginian court case of African Indentured servant John Punch, who was entered into a lifetime of enslavement due to the colour of his skin, whilst his white counterparts were given lesser sentences.

We read the 1723 letter of ‘Secrett’, a person enslaved by their own brother, using the words of scripture to petition Bishop Edmund Gibson for their freedom.

The goal was to question who really had the power and what that means for us today.