Queen charlotte who is

The Bridgerton series was based on novels by American author Julia Quinn, whose books did not include a reference on Charlotte or her ancestry. Click here to join our channel indianexpress and stay updated with the latest headlines. Yashee The author is a journalist working with The Indian Express The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.

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Street after street is named after her, and Charlotte itself revels in the nickname the Queen City - even though, shortly after the city was named in her honour, the American War of Independence broke out, making her the queen of the enemy. And the city's art gallery, the Mint museum, holds a sumptuous portrait of Charlotte by the Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay, showing the Queen of England in regal robes aged 17, the year after she married George III.

Charlotte is intrigued by its namesake. Some Charlotteans even find her lovable. Yet Charlotte has much less resonance in the land where she was actually queen. We have forgotten or perhaps never knew that she founded Kew Gardens, that she bore 15 children 13 of whom survived to adulthood , and that she was a patron of the arts who may have commissioned Mozart. Here, Charlotte is a woman who hasn't so much intrigued as been regularly damned. In the opening of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities she is dismissed in the second paragraph: "There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England.

Even her physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, reportedly described the elderly queen as "small and crooked, with a true mulatto face". Charlotte's name was given to thoroughfares throughout Georgian Britain - most notably Charlotte Square in Edinburgh's New Town - but her lack of resonance and glamour in the minds of Londoners is typified by the fact that there is a little square in Bloomsbury called Queen's Square. In the middle is a sculpture of a queen.

For much of the 19th century, the sculpture was thought to depict Queen Anne and, as a result, the square was known as Queen Anne's Square. Only later was it realised that the sculpture actually depicted Charlotte and the square renamed Queen Square. Hold on, you might be saying. Britain has had a black queen? Did I miss something? Yet the theory that Queen Charlotte may have been black, albeit sketchy, is nonetheless one that is gaining currency.

He argues that her features, as seen in royal portraits, were conspicuously African, and contends that they were noted by numerous contemporaries. He claims that the queen, though German, was directly descended from a black branch of the Portuguese royal family, related to Margarita de Castro e Souza, a 15th-century Portuguese noblewoman nine generations removed, whose ancestry she traces from the 13th-century ruler Alfonso III and his lover Madragana, whom Valdes takes to have been a Moor and thus a black African.

It is a great "what if" of history. If we class Charlotte as black, then ergo Queen Victoria and our entire royal family, [down] to Prince Harry, are also black That said, Williams and many other historians are very sceptical about Valdes's theory. They argue the generational distance between Charlotte and her presumed African forebear is so great as to make the suggestion ridiculous.

Furthermore, they say even the evidence that Madragana was black is thin. But Valdes suggests that the way Queen Charlotte is depicted in Ramsay's portrait - which US artist Ken Aptekar is now using as the starting point for a new art project called Charlotte's Charlotte - supports the view she had African ancestors.

Valdes writes: "Artists of that period were expected to play down, soften or even obliterate undesirable features in a subject's face. Valdes's suggestion is that Ramsay was an anti-slavery campaigner who would not have suppressed any "African characteristics" but perhaps might have stressed them for political reasons.

I look at it pretty often and it's never occurred to me that she's got African features of any kind. It sounds like the ancestry is there and it's not impossible it was reflected in her features, but I can't see it.

Is it possible that other portraitists of Queen Charlotte might have soft-pedalled her African features? It's quite possible. The thing about Ramsay is that, unlike Reynolds and Gainsborough, who were quite imprecise in their portraits, he was a very accurate depicter of his subjects, so that if she looked slightly more African in his portraits than others, that might be because she was more well depicted. How can you tell? She's dead!

Shawe-Taylor says that a more instructive source of images of Queen Charlotte might well be the many caricatures of her held at the British Museum. You'd expect they would have a field day if she was. In fact, Charlotte may not have been our first black queen: there is another theory that suggests that Philippa of Hainault , consort of Edward III and a woman who may have had African ancestry, holds that title.

As for Valdes, he turns out to be an independent historian of the African diaspora who has argued that Peter Ustinov, Heather Locklear, the Medicis, and the Vanderbilts have African ancestry.

His theory about Charlotte even pops up on www. Despite being thus feted, Charlotte has not yet had much attention, say, during the annual Black History week in Britain.