What did Queen Charlotte really look like? Was she Black?
What did Queen Charlotte Look Like?
Queen Charlotte: A young girl plucked from an obscure German province, and whisked away to become the Queen Consort of Great Britain. She’s recently been popularized through Briderton’s Queen Charlotte spinoff, and today, we’ll talk about what Charlotte really looked like, including the claims that she was a woman of color, and then reveal some recreations of her appearance at the end. Let’s go ahead and get started.
Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg Strelitz was born on the 19th of May, 1744, to her Father, Charles, the Duke of Mecklenburg, and her Mother Princess Elisabeth. The small German duchy she was raised in was considered to be a bit of a backwater by the more powerful European courts.
Her upbringing was rather simple, and her education was more akin to the average country lady than a future Queen. By the age of 17, she had spent most of her time learning domestic skills and helping in her local community.
But her fortune was about to change drastically.
700 miles away in England, a 22 year old King George III of Great Britain was looking for a wife. He had recently ended a love affair with a beauty named Lady Sarah Lennox, and had resigned himself to a political match.
George had a long list of criteria he wanted in a wife.
First, she had to be Protestant. She should be young, respectable but not overly cultured, fairly intelligent but not too headstrong. She should be amiable, and eager to please. Essentially: she should be easy for George to mold into whoever he wanted her to be.
His advisors swept through Europe looking for potential candidates, and presented the idea of Sophia Charlotte, in the little German duchy of Mecklenburg Strelitz.
It’s here we get one of the first descriptions of Charlotte’s looks. Colonel David Graeme, who was sent as part of the diplomatic party to retrieve Charlotte, said that she was small but with a pretty figure, her nose is very flat, her mouth is very large but with white even teeth, her hair is curly, her eyes expressive and full of good humor, all of her animation counters her physical defects.
A very lukewarm account of the young lady. But it didn’t seem to bother George, who made a point to not be concerned about his future wife’s appearance.
So, at the age of just 17, Charlotte was whisked off to England. She arrived on the afternoon of September 8, 1761, after a long, stormy journey, she was married the very same day, without speaking a word of English.
She was so sick on the stormy journey that she had lost a lot of weight, and her heavy jewel-encrusted dress and cape was reported to look as though it was hanging off her tiny frame.
Horace Walpole, the Earl of Orford, who wrote a lot about the court during this time, gives some conflicting accounts of Charlotte’s appearance after she first arrived in England, initially saying that “Everybody was happy, everybody pleased [with her appearance]”, but later saying that she was “Not tall nor a beauty. Pale and very thin; but looks sensible and genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine; her forehead low, her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide. The mouth has the same fault, but her teeth are good.”
So let’s talk about a big quesiton. Was Queen Charlotte Great Britain’s first Black Queen?
This idea has recently been re-popularized because the new Bridgerton spinoff cast Charlotte as a black woman, including the disclaimer that the show is simply “fiction inspired by fact,”
So let’s dive into all the evidence both for and against the theory that Charlotte was biracial.
Queen Charlotte by Sir Allan Ramsay.
The idea began in the early 1900s, by those who were simply observing her portraits. German Historian Burnold Springer concluded that between her portraits, specifically those by Allan Ramsey, and the numerous descriptions of her broad nose and lips, she must have some African ancestry.
Then, J.A. Rogers expanded on this idea in his 1940 book, called Sex and Race. There was no real research conducted here - these were just early observations and assumptions by scholars.
It was only in the 1990s that her ancestry was actually looked into, by a genealogist and black history researcher named Mario de Valdes y Cocom, who presented his findings in a PBS frontline episode about Queen Charlotte.
Cocom worked from a few sources. First, he noticed that some things had been said about Charlotte by those closest to her, which supported this theory. Her physician allegedly said she had a “mulatto face” - which is an outdated and offensive way to describe someone of mixed african and european ancestry, and Sir Walter Scott wrote that she was “ill-colored”, which I take to mean anything that was outside of the norm of European Whiteness at the time.
What Cocom found is that Queen Charlotte was “directly descended” from a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. However, calling it a “black branch” is, in my opinion pretty generous, since it boasted exactly one possible black ancestor: a moorish mistress of Alfonso III named Madragana, who lived in the 13th century.
So, essentially, Cocom is arguing that Charlotte inherited her features from one woman 500 years removed. We also don’t even know if Madragana was African, since “Moor” just describes someone originating from a Muslim country, which could be Africa or many other places.
Another point Cocom makes is that the artist responsible for the most “African-Looking” portraits of the Queen was Allan Ramsay. Ramsay was a well known abolitionist, and even had a black member of his family, Dido Elizabeth Belle. So Cocom thinks it’s possible that Ramsey was more sympathetic to the Queen possibly being biracial, and may have thought she could be an asset to the abolitionist cause.
It is interesting that in portraits by other artists, like Thomas Gainsborough, her features are softened. Cocom writes:
"Artists of that period were expected to play down, soften or even obliterate undesirable features in a subject's face. [But] Sir Allan Ramsay was the artist responsible for the majority of the paintings of the queen, and his representations of her were the most decidedly African of all her portraits."
My personal take on all of this is that while I agree the Allan Ramsay portraits, to me, definitely look like they could be of a mixed race woman, the actual evidence is extremely flimsy. I don’t think there’s any possible way that Charlotte would inherit African features from one ancestor five hundred years back. If anything, there would have to be a more recent infidelity that’s been covered up.
Since Charlotte did have some features typical of African ancestry, it’s possible that her detractors resorted to racial stereotypes just to insult her. Remember, the slave trade was still alive and well in Great Britain at this time, and it was a heavily racist country.
I can’t believe that a black Queen wouldn’t be mentioned by her contemporaries. It would be one of the most notable things to happen, and there would have been much more commentary around it.
Even in unkind caricatures of the Royal Couple, like political cartoons, they depict Charlotte as a white woman. I think her detractors would be quick to caricature a racial difference if there was one.
The idea that Charlotte was a black Queen is really interesting and thought-provoking. And I see why the theory has remained popular - it’s a fun theory, but one with hardly any evidence. Most historians don’t take it seriously.
Now, let’s take a look at the face of Queen Charlotte. Since many of her portraits look different, I tried to take the common features from each and composite them into one re-creation. I also made one of her from her portraits as an older woman, which tend to look more stereotypically white.
Let’s see the face of Queen Charlotte, now:
An image of Charlotte created as a composite from several of her younger portraits.
An image of an older Charlotte created as a composite from her portraits.