<p><strong>Stuart Jeffries: </strong>Queen Charlotte was the wife of George III and, like him, of German descent. But did she also have African ancestry?</p>
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But the critic and historian Lisa Hilton has pointed out that this portrait is far from conclusive.
“The Ramsay portrait shows a reddish-haired woman with blue-grey eyes, a large nose, heavy chin and full lips,” she says. “Such features were considered unattractive according to the standards of beauty of the age and since royal portraiture is not known for its harsh realism, these features may certainly have been softened by other painters, without any necessary disguising of the colour of Charlotte’s skin.”
She also notes: “None of the other considerable body of portraiture, for example works by Zoffany and Gainsborough, is suggestive of ‘mulatto’ blood. It seems unlikely that in an age when cartoonists depicted the royal family in the most scurrilous of situations (having sex, defecating), there should be no other visual reference to what, after all, would have been a fairly startling feature.”
Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Netflix s Bridgerton
Credit: LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX
It’s starting to become a habit. Netflix has found itself caught in another controversy over historical accuracy, this time over its romping Regency drama, Bridgerton.
At first blush, it seems the bodice-busting show has plumped for colour blind casting. It’s an established practice in theatre – and is starting to become more popular in films, such as Armando Iannucci’s recent Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield.
But the casting of black British actress Golda Rosheuvel, 49, as Queen Charlotte appears to have been a deliberate nod to a tenuous historical theory – that George III’s consort was Britain’s first black queen. This is especially telling as Queen Charlotte is the most prominent real-life figure in the show; the duelling families around which the drama swirls are fictitious.