Queen Charlotte, History, and Netflix: What's Real? (ep 38)

What was the Regency really like? That’s a question we can answer
only in parts. We can learn something from the music and
literature, something from the architecture. We can know
something of the elite and powerful. We can learn from reports
that praise national leaders and from caricatures that poke fun
of those in power. Because this time is full of people, the
Regency (like today) is complicated. That’s true of the people
who filled the streets and shops of London. It’s true of the
people who farmed and harvested and never saw a city. We can’t
know everything. If we keep an open mind and stay curious, we can
learn something.

And the same is true about Queen Charlotte. With the splashy new
Netflix drama Bridgerton hitting the airwaves in the last couple
of weeks, the questions surrounding Queen Charlotte are bubbling
to the surface once more.

The most significant thing that adding Queen Charlotte allowed
the show to do was make race part of the theme. The casting is
not color-blind but color-conscious, as the show’s creators
explain that they wanted to make questions about race one of the
defining features of the program, along with questions about
gender and sexuality. Van Dusen said, “It’s something that really
resonated with me, because it made me wonder what could that have
really looked like. And what would have happened? What could she
have done? Could the queen have elevated other people of color in
society and granted them titles and lands and dukedoms?” In the
world of Bridgerton, the choice to make Queen Charlotte visibly
Black opened doors. “That’s really how our Simon Bassett, our
Duke of Hastings, came to be. We get to explore it in a really
interesting way. And it goes to the idea of what the show
does—we’re marrying history and fantasy in a really exciting,
fascinating way.”

So who is this Queen that Bridgerton decided to pull into the
story?

The questions about Queen Charlotte’s race seem to have started
with Joel Augustus Rogers in 1940 when he wrote that portraits
and contemporary descriptions of Charlotte clearly show a Black
strain (Sex and Race, volume 1). In 1967, Mario de Valdes y Cocom
began researching the Queen’s ancestry. This is when the theory
began to draw attention.

Some people disagree. Kate Williams, a current popular historian,
says that the story raises “important suggestions about not only
our royal family but those of most of Europe, considering that
Queen Victoria’s descendants are spread across most of the royal
families of Europe.” But she is skeptical about the theory, as
are other historians.

History. It’s complicated. The answers aren’t easy, and they
often are not clear. But we need to keep asking the questions.


History shows us what's possible.