[Shonda Rhimes’s new show imagines an interracial romance that
remakes Regency England. That sure didn’t happen.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE REAL HISTORY OF QUEEN CHARLOTTE, AND THE PROBLEM WITH NETFLIX’S
BRIDGERTON SPINOFF  
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Nylah Burton
May 5, 2023
Vox
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_ Shonda Rhimes’s new show imagines an interracial romance that
remakes Regency England. That sure didn’t happen. _

Young Queen Charlotte (India Amarteifio) with Young King George
(Corey Mylchreest) in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story., Liam
Daniel/Netflix

 

The first time I heard someone call Charlotte, Queen Consort to King
George III, the “first Black queen of England,” I thought they
were taking the piss. But even though the evidence for Charlotte’s
Black heritage is weak, many do genuinely believe it. And now,
millions more will believe it too.

The premiere of_ Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, _a Shondaland
production based on the romance novels by Julia Quinn, tries to cement
the public image of the monarch as an undeniably Black woman. The
prequel series gives Queen Charlotte (India Amarteifio in youth
and Golda Rosheuvel
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her later years) the spotlight. Here, she is a Black teenager whose
interracial marriage to the mentally ill King George III (Corey
Mylchreest in youth; James Fleet as the older version) led to an event
called “the Great Experiment.” In _Queen Charlotte_ and the
original _Bridgerton_ series, the Great Experiment refers to
Britain’s (clearly fictional) decision to fully integrate Black
people and other people of color into their society, including the
noble class. In _Queen Charlotte_, the stakes of the Great Experiment
are most vocally echoed by Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh in her later
years and Arsema Thomas as a young woman), who is revealed to be
African royalty with wealth that exceeds that of most of the British
nobles but has to fight to be accepted among British nobility.

Most people know this didn’t happen. It’s common sense that Black
people were not accepted into all levels of British society in the
18th and 19th centuries. And, if Meghan Markle’s experiences as
part of the royal family
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any indication, they’re not accepted among British nobility now.
Although people widely understand this element of the story is
fantastical, many do consider the real Queen Charlotte to be Black.
And Netflix and Shondaland are fanning that flame. Netflix even threw
a royalty-themed event with Historically Black Colleges and
Universities
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to celebrate the premiere. The messages _Queen Charlotte_ sends
about the politics of wealth, interracial relationships,
representational politics, and empire are dangerous. At the core of
its danger is the choice to double down on the likely false idea that
Queen Charlotte was Black.

The weak evidence for Queen Charlotte’s Blackness

Although Charlotte and George did not have an interracial relationship
that changed the course of history, there was public debate about
Charlotte’s appearance. Some accounts and portraits of her suggested
that she had fair skin and “European” features, others showed her
having slightly darker skin and “African” features. She was also
often called ugly and plain
[[link removed]]. In _A
Tale of Two Cities_, referring to George and Charlotte, Charles
Dickens wrote: “There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with
a plain face, on the throne of England.” Her physician reportedly
described her as “small and crooked, with a true mulatto face.”
Sir Walter Scott wrote that she was “ill-colored.” A prime
minister once said: “Her nose is too wide and her lips too thick.”

The show reconstructs the vague reports of her appearance into
Charlotte experiencing both racism and ties of kinship with other
Black people; King George III’s mother Princess Augusta (Michelle
Fairley) complains about Charlotte’s skin being “very brown” and
a minister meekly replies, “I told you she had Moor blood.” Her
brother admits that no one who “looked like” them had ever married
into the British royal family (even though Charlotte and George in
real life were related), wedding guests murmur in shock at
Charlotte’s jewel-encrusted Afro, and Lady Danbury has a wide-eyed
look of joy upon seeing the new Queen is “on our side.”

Portrait of Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, later Queen
Charlotte, from 1762.

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Even though Queen Charlotte’s contemporaries made it clear that they
thought her face didn’t meet their beauty standards, there are
almost no records of anyone explicitly saying that Charlotte, born
into the royal family of the northern German duchy of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had Black parents, Black siblings, Black
cousins, or Black ancestors on either side. In 1997, historian Mario
de Valdes y Cocom claimed his research
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she was descended from the “illegitimate son of King Alfonso I of
Portugal and his Moorish mistress [Madragana].”

However, King Alphonso I was born in 1109 or 1111, and Queen Charlotte
was born in 1744. That’s more than 600 years of distance between
Queen Charlotte and her rumored African ancestor Madragana — who
cannot conclusively be proven to be Black or related to Queen
Charlotte, as art historian Amanda Matta explains on her podcast
[[link removed]], _Art
of History_. Some amount of inbreeding might account for these
features to endure for a few generations, but not enough to be
significant. And with King George III and Charlotte sharing close
ancestors, it’s poor logic because it would mean that swaths of
British and European royalty, including Prince Harry and Mary, Queen
of Scots, would now have to also be considered Black. Are we prepared
to say that Charles, who will be crowned King on May 6, is also Black?
Should we say that any royal with full lips or wide nostrils is
presenting evidence of Madrigana’s endlessly enduring genes? It
sounds ridiculous, but that’s the road that race science and faulty
genealogical methods lead us down.

Also, while both Madragana and Queen Charlotte were called
“Moors,” the word had a vast range of meanings. Originally, it
meant the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula,
Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages. But it also meant someone
with darker skin, sometimes referring to people who would be
considered Black today and sometimes referring to people who would be
considered European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Latinx today.
Steven Pincus, historian of the Global British Empire and professor of
history at the University of Chicago, tells Vox that the term
“Moor” as a static racial or ethnic category “is subject to much
dispute,” adding that Sephardic Jews were sometimes also called
Moors.

Even though the real Charlotte was, at best, ludicrously removed from
Blackness,_ Queen Charlotte_ leans heavily into representational
politics while still making egregious errors of substance. It’s
especially hard to feel good about shallow representation when we
spend three episodes watching Lady Danbury be raped by the husband she
was forced to marry as a child, sometimes multiple times in a single
episode. This means that the only characters to have been raped in
Netflix’s Bridgerton universe are both Black
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For some Black women, this all makes the series feel emotionally
manipulative. “Shonda [Rhimes] is probably playing very heavily into
the correlation between what’s currently happening with Harry and
Meghan Markle, and what she would like us to envision was happening
back then, even though it’s not historical,” says April Morris,
editorial director of Off Colour magazine.

What it means — and meant — to force a narrative of Blackness onto
Queen Charlotte

So, if Charlotte most likely wasn’t Black, why did the theory become
so popular? The rapid expansion of the slave trade in the late 17th
century through to the end of the 18th century plays a role. Pincus
says of this time period, “Slavery became a much more prominent
feature of the British empire. It was also increasingly the source of
unbelievable accumulation of wealth.”

Slavery is notably absent from the world of Bridgerton, although vague
mentions of “the colonies” are peppered in so quickly that you’d
likely miss it. In the Bridgerton universe, none of the Black people
are concerned about human or civil rights. Rather, they want to host
balls and be invited to hunts. They want to marry white people without
sassy comments from the ton and be given noble titles and more land.
They don’t even want money — they just want the opportunity to be
treated like the monied people they already are. For Morris, these
questions of wealth and assimilation are part of “parallels that
[Shonda Rhimes] is trying to draw for the Black upper-middle class of
today.” Pincus, although he says he enjoys the show as a relaxing
watch, points out that “it is clearly a show which is targeted to
the wealthy.”

This is perhaps the most salient and cohesive political framework
undergirding the Bridgerton universe: the love of money. And the love
of money is also what defined the British Empire’s relationship to
Black people. By the time Queen Charlotte became consort, the British
Empire was struggling with slave revolts in all its colonies, and
economic concerns (which outweighed the moral arguments) pushed more
people to become interested in ending the slave trade. The heightened
discussion of slavery, slave rebellions, and abolition fueled debate
about Queen Charlotte. “In the time period in which she was Queen,
there was increasing concern regarding abolitionism,” Harris
explains. “And one of her portrait painters [Allan Ramsay] was a
noted abolitionist who may well have been interested in exploring
these ideas that she had African ancestry within the context of
discussing and debating slavery.”

Couples, inspired by Charlotte and Charles, dance together at a ball.

LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX

When Lady Danbury finally wins her battle to host the ball of the
season, it takes a while for the crowd to thaw, with white people on
one side and Black members on the other. Then, after seeing Charlotte
and George dance, more and more interracial dancing pairs join the
floor, to the tune of Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You” on the
violin. After the ball, George and Charlotte are in her bedroom and
George declares in wonder, “With one evening, one party, we have
created more change, stepped forward more, than Britain has in the
last century,” adding that with Charlotte by his side, he can do
anything. And of course, in the original Bridgerton show, interracial
marriages are now so commonplace due to George and Charlotte’s
example that no one even considers race or ethnicity something worth
mentioning.

Again, even though the series is obviously ahistorical, these messages
we receive matter; they stick with us. Viewers may logically know that
this scenario didn’t occur, but it functions as a nod toward an
incredibly deep-seated belief, one that says Britain and King George
III ended slavery out of moral concerns and altruism. When really, it
was the resistance of slaves and colonized people that led to
abolition and the withdrawal of British troops from the colonies.

According to Gerald Horne, professor of history and African-American
Studies at the University of Houston, slave rebellions were rising
during the Georgian and Regency eras, which had a tremendous impact on
Britain finally ending slavery in 1834. “The Haitian Revolution was
decisive in abolition’s fortunes ... London felt they could either
move to circumscribe the slave trade in 1807, three years after
Haiti’s triumph, or ... [run] the risk of having enslavers
liquidated physically. Wisely, they sought the option of delimiting
the slave trade, then abolition by the 1830s.”

This is a rich and complicated history. Reducing it to “interracial
love saved the world,” even for a romance, feels cheap and
intellectually bankrupt. It’s necessary to point out that Julia
Quinn’s _Bridgerton_ novels — save the one she
questionably decided to write about Queen Charlotte post-Netflix
series [[link removed]] — feature
white people only. During a panel
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Quinn once said she only wanted to write happy stories and chose not
to have Black characters because their “unhappy” stories weren’t
the kinds she wanted to tell. Given that she and other writers on the
show evidently couldn’t tell Lady Danbury’s story without a
shocking amount of marital rape proves perhaps she should have steered
clear.

To not want to write about racism is not a morally depraved stance or
even an illogical one. To not write about people with identities you
can’t relate to is perhaps a wise choice. But to refuse to write
Black characters for most of your career because you can’t imagine
them happy, and then rake in momentous amounts of money by emotionally
manipulating Black people with shallow representation years later does
feel morally bankrupt. If Netflix and Shondaland wanted to portray
Black people being happy during the Regency era, Beverly Jenkins is
just one example of an author of steamy, loving Black romances set in
the 17th-20th centuries. Why do studios not invest in developing her
stories for the screen?

The answer is clear, if depressing. _Queen Charlotte_ was never
about representation for Black people or telling Black stories. It was
about money, and about reifying empire and wealth, and placating Black
people by claiming that we too can have a place among the most
powerful. To recast a queen who — whether she was sympathetic toward
enslaved people or not — presided over a vast empire and lived a
life built on genocidal labor as a Black woman fighting for her people
is a coherent and abhorrent neoliberal political statement. It seeks,
above all, to protect the institution.

EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM IS A PUBLIC GOOD
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* bridgerton
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* queen charlotte
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* black representation
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