One of the British royal family’s carriages has a painting on the side showing black people kneeling before and offering gifts to a white woman on a throne.
This carriage belongs to the Dutch royal family, not the British.
A post on Facebook claims that a gold carriage featuring a side panel depicting black and Asian people kneeling and offering gifts to a white woman on a throne belonged to Queen Elizabeth II.
The carriage pictured, which also features an image of a white man handing a black child a book, does not belong to the British royal family, but the Dutch one.
It was presented to Dutch Queen Wilhelmina in 1898 as a gift from the people of Amsterdam. The panel in question, called ‘Homage of the Colonies’ was painted by Nicolaas van der Waay, and can be seen in detail here.
The Dutch took significant wealth from the translatlantic slave trade and presided over an extensive empire with significant holdings in what is now South Africa, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, to name a few.
The golden coach, or ‘Gouden Koets’ in Dutch, was restored and then displayed at the Amsterdam Museum between June 2021 and February 2022.
In January 2022 the Dutch King Willem-Alexander, who used the carriage at his 2002 wedding, said in a public address that the carriage would not be used in an upcoming September celebration for Prince’s Day.
He said (translated from Dutch by Google): “The Golden Coach will only be able to drive again when the Netherlands is ready for it and that is not the case now.”
He added: "We cannot rewrite the past. We can try to come to terms with it together. The same goes for the colonial past."
Image courtesy of Minister-president Rutte
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the carriage did not belong to the late Queen Elizabeth II, but the Dutch royal family.
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