Queen Charlotte

Artwork by Natalie Eldred

In my previous post on Bridgerton I commented on the anachronistic presence of black characters in British high society in 1813. This strikes me as a pleasing fantasy, slightly marred by the attempt to give it a rational explanation: that the marriage of the English king, George III, to a black woman, Charlotte, has brought about racial equality and harmony. Here I’d like to focus on the precise point in Bridgerton where history intersects with fantasy, the figure of Queen Charlotte.

Played by biracial British actress Golda Rosheuvel, Charlotte is clearly central to the vision of the show’s creators. Showrunner Chris van Dusen has been quoted as saying: “Queen Charlotte opened up an entirely new world for us. What really struck me with the books [the novels by Julia Quinn on which the series is based] from the beginning is that this was an opportunity to marry history and fantasy in a really exciting, interesting way. So in Queen Charlotte, that was the history.” What he doesn’t mention is that while many of the other black characters are reimaginings of white characters from the source novels, Queen Charlotte does not feature in the books at all. So why has she been introduced? Another comment by van Dusen sheds further light on this: “[…] working closely with historians, I learned this really fascinating fact that Queen Charlotte was England’s first queen of mixed race. That’s something that many historians believe there’s evidence for today.” 

Historically, this is highly questionable. The real Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was a fair-skinned German princess, born of a long line of German dukes. She was brought to England in 1761 at the age of seventeen, not speaking a word of English, to marry a man she had never met, the young king George III. The wedding contract was signed by her brother; history does not tell us what Charlotte thought about it. Fortunately the couple got on well and evidently led a contented domestic life for over twenty years, until the onset of George’s mental illness. They produced fifteen children, from whom the current royals are descended.

Where did the rumour of Charlotte’s African heritage come from? It was first raised in the 1940s, inspired by this portrait of Charlotte by Allan Ramsay, and a comment by one of Charlotte’s contemporaries that her nostrils and mouth were too wide. In the 1990s, Charlotte was the subject of an article written for American broadcaster PBS, part of a series looking at “blurred racial lines” in the genealogy of various figures in European history.  According to the author, Mario de Valdes y Cocom, his research had revealed that Charlotte was “directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House”. In a subsequent article Valdes is quoted as mentioning an even earlier possible ancestor, a black Moor called Ouruana (also known as Mandragana or Madragana), mistress of the thirteenth-century Portuguese king Afonso III.

Valdes’s assertions have been convincingly refuted in a number of online articles. See for example history writer Lisa Hilton, anthropologist Jill Sudbury, or this very detailed anonymous essay. The latter text actually examines and publishes some of Valdes’ purported sources. And it includes both formal portraits of Charlotte and contemporary caricatures, none of which give any suggestion of the “conspicuously negroid” features identified by Valdes. Surely such a striking aspect of her appearance would have been picked up and emphasized by the ruthless caricaturists of the time? As well as noting the silence of her contemporaries on this issue, most critiques of Valdes’s theory point out the lack of evidence for the ethnicity of the De Souza family. But ultimately the crucial point is that even if Valdes is right, these ancestors lived hundreds of years before Charlotte. So, to borrow a turn of phrase from Wikipedia, “it’s unlikely that [this] genetic inheritance would have been significant enough to have any noticeable effect on her appearance.”

The surprising thing here is that a sketchy idea put forward by one person in an online article has taken on such a life of its own. If you look up “Queen Charlotte” online, you are more than likely to come away with the impression that she was of African heritage. A Google search produces, as the second hit after Charlotte’s Wikipedia entry, a Guardian article from 2009 entitled “Was this Britain’s first black queen?”. Add “ancestry” as a search term and this moves to the top of the list. Numerous online articles state that “some historians” or even “many historians” believe Charlotte was mixed-race, biracial, or black.

The makers of Bridgerton have picked up this theory and run with it. It’s easy to see why: the notion that Charlotte was England’s “first black queen” or “first mix-raced monarch” fits nicely into their project of celebrating diversity. Is there any harm in this? On a certain level it can be regarded as harmless, perhaps even beneficial. For black viewers who seldom see themselves in Regency dramas, and for black actors who seldom secure leading roles in them, it’s a breakthrough. Golda Rosheuvel, who plays Charlotte, says “I'm biracial. I was brought up in England. My mother was crazy about period dramas, which made me crazy about them. I never thought that I'd be able to be in one. It was something that was far away. I couldn't touch it. Now we can rewrite that story for the little girl who's sitting at home.”

Is it not small-minded and ungenerous for a white viewer who hasn’t had that particular experience of invisibility to begrudge black viewers and actors this sense of euphoria at black visibility? Surely, in the name of diversity, equality, and/or poetic licence, the makers of televised fiction can do whatever they want with history? Caitlin Moran, in her witty review of Bridgerton, lampoons the hypocrisy of anyone complaining about the historical inaccuracy of including black characters in the nineteenth-century British aristocracy. Why, she wonders, does no one ever criticize costume dramas for showing characters with perfect, twenty-first-century teeth?

This seems, on the surface at least, a fair point. It is unreasonable to expect an escapist television show to offer a reliable history lesson. But does this mean that any attempt to criticize fictionalized depictions of history is fundamentally misguided? My feeling is that television has a strong influence on public discourses about all kinds of things, including history, and that this power brings a certain responsibility.

The problem is not so much Bridgerton itself as the way it interacts with the public discourse about Charlotte. Far from admitting that the depiction of the queen is essentially fictional, the show’s makers have perpetuated the idea that it is (probably) a historical truth. As mentioned above, Chris van Dusen has referred to Charlotte’s African ancestry as a “fascinating fact”, and stated that “many historians” believe there is evidence for it.

This is misleading. For most of us non-historians, depictions of historical figures on TV and in film may well be the only insight we have into who they were, what they did, and what they were like. Inevitably, historically inaccurate depictions of such figures leave us with inaccurate perceptions of history. And our perceptions of history – our beliefs about what has happened in the past – have a significant influence on the way we feel and act in the present. All over the world, countless modern-day conflicts are based on resentment about historical injustices.

By feeding into the notion that there really was a mixed-race woman on the British throne in the past, and that this has somehow been hushed up, Bridgerton confirms the idea of a whitewashing of history. I’m not suggesting that the history of black people in Britain and elsewhere hasn’t been suppressed, overlooked, or misrepresented. Undoubtedly it has, along with other aspects of history. But why base the right argument on the wrong evidence? Why not focus on true stories that have been concealed or forgotten? Or create fictional characters whose stories reflect the real historical background?

Frothy and frivolous as Bridgerton is, it raises some interesting questions.

Artwork by Natalie Eldred, https://natalieeldred.uk/