She’s widely believed to be Britain’s first biracial royal.
You’ve probably figured out by now that Bridgerton isn’t exactly based on a true story. String quartets (unfortunately) didn’t play “thank u, next” at formal balls in the 1800s, and young ladies of the time wouldn’t have dared push back on their families’ plans for them. There’s also the fact that the Netflix series is based on a series of romance novels by Julia Quinn, who has described the process of building the Bridgerton family’s world herself.
Still, there’s plenty that the period drama does get right about the Georgian era of the early 1800s (thanks in large part to Quinn’s heavily researched world-building and historical consultant Hannah Greig’s contributions to the TV adaptation). The social season and “marriage market” were very real, as were Regency-era ladies’ lack of sex education and the birth of anonymous gossip columns and scandal sheets. Another historically accurate tidbit? Bridgerton‘s portrayal of Queen Charlotte, who isn’t actually included in Quinn’s series. Here’s everything you need to know about the fascinating real-life wife of King George III.
Queen Charlotte may have actually been Black.
Many historians believe that the royal, born Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1744, did indeed descend from African ancestry. Claims that Queen Charlotte was of mixed race were initially sparked by historian Joel Augustus Rogers, who wrote in 1940’s Sex and Race, Volume 1 that portraits and contemporary descriptions of Charlotte “clearly [show] a Negro strain.”
More recently, a Frontline investigation by historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom traced Charlotte’s ancestry via six separate lines back to Margarita de Castro e Souza, a 15th-century noblewoman whose own lineage leads back to Madragana, a mistress of King Afonso III of Portugal who many historians believe to have been a Moor of Northern African descent.
For the record, after the Frontline series was published in 1999, a spokesperson for the royal family—that is, Charlotte’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II—reportedly told the Boston Globe of Queen Charlotte’s potential mixed-race heritage, “This has been rumored for years and years. It is a matter of history, and frankly, we’ve got far more important things to talk about.”
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