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.