Was Queen Charlotte Really Black?

Vulgar History Podcast

Was the Real Queen Charlotte Black?

May 5, 2023

Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is a special investigative report. Well, it’s more just, like, let’s have a conversation about something. 

So, I’m in the midst of planning an episode about Queen Charlotte, the queen of Great Britain who the new TV show is about, Queen Charlotte, the Bridgerton spinoff. Her character was on the first Bridgerton series, and that’s going to be coming next week. It’s going to be a regular Vulgar History style episode where I’m going to be talking about her life, and what was she really like, and you know, she was born in this year, and here’s the things that she did, sort of stuff. 

But with Queen Charlotte, there’s this other big discussion to have, which is about: Did she have African ancestry? If she did, what is the significance of that, if any? And that is a conversation that is really nuanced, it’s kind of controversial, I have learned, and it’s not something that I am personally, at all, qualified to discuss, which is why I sought out the expertise of people, two historians who specialize in two areas that can really speak to the issue. So, the Queen Charlotte, the whole situation is that there have been discussions about: Did she have facial features that might suggest African heritage? Did she have an ancestor who is potentially of African heritage? The two sorts of things are: Who was this ancestor? And then also, what did she look like, and how was she perceived in her lifetime? How did people write about her? Things like that. And so, I mean, just background for all of this. 

So, the new Queen Charlotte show is a prequel to the Bridgerton show. Bridgerton, the show, is executive-produced by Shonda Rhimes, and it’s based on the series of romance novels by Julia Quinn. So, the romance novels by Julia Quinn take place in the Regency era, which was a time period during which Charlotte was the queen because her husband was the king and her son was the regent. That’s the Regency era. But Queen Charlotte does not appear in the Bridgerton novels. She was put in the TV show, partially because… So, I was looking at this article, a New York Times article, by Julia Jacobs, from 2020, which is I think when the first season of Bridgerton came out, and so it describes how the showrunner— So, we talk about this as a Shonda Rhimes show, but the person who is the showrunner, the like, person in charge of Bridgerton the original TV series, OG Bridgerton, is a person, Chris Van Dusen. And so, Chris Van Dusen was sort of assigned to figure out how to make these novels into a show, and he was thinking like, “How can I… You know, it’s a Shondaland show, how can we make this show have the racial diversity that people have come to expect from a show executive-produced by Shonda Rhimes, who did Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away With Murder? This is a core element of what her shows are like. 

And then, Chris Van Dusen said he came across the information that some historians, some people believe that Queen Charlotte was a descendant of a Portuguese royal family with African ancestry, that’s what the New York Times says. She was maybe the descendant of… We’ll talk about it. Anyway, Van Dusen’s idea was to “Base the show in an alternative history in which Queen Charlotte’s mixed-race heritage was not only well established but was transformative for Black people and other people of colour in England.” So, this is what Chris Van Dusen said. Again, Bridgerton itself is imagining a fantasy version of the Regency in the first place because it’s based on romance novels. It’s escapist, it’s supposed to be fun, and we can all imagine ourselves there. So, what he says is “It made me wonder what that could have looked like. Could she have used her power to elevate other people of colour in society? Could she have given them titles and lands and dukedoms?” And so, then the New York Times article continues to say: 

Though it is not explained until the middle of the season, the character of Queen Charlotte, who is brought to life with towering coiffures, pet Pomeranians, and a hunger for gossip, provides the explanation for the diverse gentry. It was she who bestowed an ability on the Duke of Hastings predecessors, positioning him to inherit a dukedom.

So, Bridgerton is saying, not just like, what is Queen Charlotte had facial features that made her look like somebody descended from African people, not just what if she had this descendant who was maybe a Black person, but what if she visually was a Black person? Was seen as a Black person, and how might that have affected society? That is kind of where Bridgerton is coming from with it. 

So, why is there this concept, this, I don’t know, rumours, or myths, I don’t want to say that because that sounds like it’s not true, but when you look at any, I think I can say, any other monarch or consort in English history, there’s not a theory that maybe they were a Black person. I think she’s the only person about which that is said, really. So, where did that come from? So, these rumours, this discussion, I guess I’ll say, definitely started in the twentieth century, and I’m going to talk about, in my next— There’s two interviews in this episode. The first one is going to be talking about who is this ancestor, and the second chat is going to be talking about where did the information, this idea, this concept come from?

So, the first person who I am speaking to is Stacey Murrell, who is at Brown University. She is a PhD candidate in the history department, where she works on the western Mediterranean throughout much of the Middle Ages with a particular emphasis on the relationships between gender, sexuality, and power. So, specifically, she’s really interested in the status of the situations of concubines in medieval Iberia, which is exactly where this ancestor of Charlotte was. 

So, I was so delighted to talk to her, and I was so delighted to find someone who is an expert in this. She was such a great person to talk to, and I think you will enjoy this as much as I did when she told me. After I had invited her to be on the podcast, she was looking up, as anyone should, what is this podcast? She saw that I had done the episode on Njinga, and she liked it, and then she assigned it to her students in one of the classes that she’s teaching because we talk about in the Njinga episode about how Njinga had concubines who were of different genders. She assigned that to her students. So, shoutout to those students if they’re listening right now, but also, I’m feeling very scholarly at the moment. 

Anyway. So, the first chat that I’m going to play for you right now is with me and Stacey Murrell talking about medieval Iberian concubinage, and the family tree of Queen Charlotte and its connections to the Portuguese royal family.

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Ann: Okay. I’m joined by Stacey Murrell, who I’m so excited to talk to you about what we’re going to talk about, I don’t even know how to describe it. But you were just telling me before we started recording about how you kind of got interested in the topic of Madragana, this like, when is it 13th century, Iberian concubine? 

Stacey: Yeah! 

Ann: How did you land there? 

Stacey: Well, so my professional study, my dissertation, if you will, is about concubinage more generally in the Mediterranean. So, I have this broad interest in concubines, because I find them to be really interesting in the sense that they exist outside of these structures of marriage in a way that still is empowering for some of them. So, there’s this tension between sometimes coercion, sometimes violence, and at the same time, there’s also these possibilities. So, that is, like, a general interest in concubines. 

But Madragana in particular is interesting to me, because, of course, I had seen Bridgerton already, and I already knew of this connection. That was when, yeah, when my dad, who’s a teacher, was hearing all these questions from his colleagues who were like, “Your daughter must be a historian who can give us all of the answers.” So, I want to try to talk about it because there’s a lot tangled up in Madragana and her relationship to Charlotte. So, in terms of genealogies, there’s like, a pretty straightforward connection that we can trace through various records, both in Portugal but also in Germany, where her descendants went. But there’s a lot more like bound up in Madragana herself than just, is she genetically related to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz? 

So, there’s not just a dearth of sources – because there are not a lot of sources, let me tell you, I have looked for them far and wide – but there’s also, in some ways, like, a misunderstanding or a disconnect between how race works now, and how race works in the Middle Ages. That difficulty also finds its way into the sources because people, you know, mostly chroniclers and royal genealogists, have come back to her again and again, and again, and again, for, you know, 700 years, and each time they slightly change how they write about her, how they present her. Because of that, she’s come into the historical record with a lot of baggage. And so, each of the terms that she comes with have these tangles. They’re super interesting to me as a historian. 

So yeah, that’s how I got to Madragana and why she is, I think, really illuminating for how race works over time, how it changes, and the ways that it can appear in the sources by following one individual. 

Ann: And you were saying this before we started recording that you were in Spain, as well? 

Stacey: Yeah, I was living in Spain on a Fulbright during the tail end of the pandemic, so I went there at the beginning of 2021. So, the reason that she is really interesting to me is because she has a counterpart in Spain, whose name is Saida. And what has to be kept in mind about both Madragana and about Saida is that the name that they possess is not in fact their names. So, no one really knows Madragana’s name; she never gets a name in the sources. And so, Madragana is a much later creation of historiography. She’s sometimes also called Ouroana, and sometimes she’s also called Maior, which is supposedly the name she took after converting to Christianity. In the case of Saida, Saida in Spanish is just the romance version of Saidah, which is a title in Arabic. 

And so, basically, these women have been very, very uncomfortable; they make people uncomfortable, because it’s proximity of a particular type of group to kingship, to monarchy. Ao, the reason that Spanish people are so taken with these ideas is because if you call someone a Muslim, that’s one thing, but many of them have tried to refer to both of them as either Moriscos or as Mozarabs. And Mozarab is really, really bound up in Spanish nationalism, Portuguese nationalism, and because of that, I was, like, really interested in why concubinage would be connected to something like nationalism, or ideas about who belongs in medieval past and who doesn’t. 

I think that that’s quite true about how people understand the Middle Ages in the US, which is that the Middle Ages are the super white, very masculine time period, and there’s not really much space for anybody else. Or that, like, Christianity is always, always throughout the Middle Ages, paramount, that it’s dominating the entire sphere of what would be considered the Western world. And that’s just, like, not true. And so I was like, “Let’s use this concubine to turn ideas about belonging on its head,” because she does show that, you know, one, identities are unstable, as they’re understood historically, but also, that the past matters, that there’s a fundamental connection between past and present, and that it has power. 

Ann: And that’s one of the questions that I wanted to learn what you have to say about. So, just the term, she’s describing some sources as a Moor, and that can mean lots of different things. Can you explain all the different things that could mean and what you think it means in her instance? 

Stacey: Yeah, absolutely. So, Moor is a really complicated term. Anytime you ask a historian something, their answer will be, “It’s complicated.” And yeah, that’s totally true, because Moor changes also over time. So, the origins of the word ‘Moor’ are connected to the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Muslims of a very large and diverse group in the seventh, like, the beginning of the eighteenth century. So, there’s this movement across North Africa from the Arabian Peninsula into Iberia. And so, the word ‘Moor’ comes out of that encounter. There is an earlier usage, it comes from, like, a Latin word, which is ‘Maurus,’ and it refers to those from Mauritania, or North Africa, so Roman Mauritania. 

So, most historians will tell you that Moor just means, very basically, Muslim. And then, there are historians, primarily historians of England, who call it Blackamoor, very specifically giving it a racial connotation. In the Iberian Peninsula, from my research, what my research has basically shown is that ‘Moor’ refers to a specific group of Muslims rather than just Muslimness very generally. It means Muslims from North Africa. Now, the problem for many moderns is that the residents of North Africa in the present do not necessarily bear strong historical resemblance to those who occupied North Africa in the past. So, there’s sort of a naturalization of people who colonized North Africa as sort of being the Indigenous group, because they themselves were also colonized by Europeans later in the early modern period. 

So, ‘Moor,’ some people will tell you, ‘Moor’ means Berber. Now, ‘Berber’ is also a super complicated word, because it was invented just out of nowhere in the seventh century and the eighth century, the very end of the seventh century into the beginning of the eighth century. It means the Arabs used it to refer to the people in North Africa, who are not Roman, who are not Byzantine, and who are not Arab. That leaves Africans, right? It’s the continent of Africa. If it’s not being used to describe those who are Europeans who have come, or Arabs who are also coming in as conquerors, that leaves Africans. And so, when this conquering force goes into the Iberian Peninsula, that word is picked up into various vernaculars. So, you might see it as ‘Morro’ in Castilian, or you might see it as ‘Mauro,’ which is what becomes Portuguese. And so, that is often how Madragana is described. And this is the eighth century, right? This is really when it comes together, is the eighth century. But its usage changes, of course. 

So, by the time of, let’s say, 15th century, when the Catholic kings conquered the last emirate of Granada in 1492, the majority of the people who are living as Muslims in Iberia aren’t North Africans. There was, like, plenty of replenishments of North African Muslims coming to the peninsula before that, particularly, you know, reaching its peak in the 12th, 13th centuries. But later, not so much. And so, because of that, later, when sources say Morro, it does in fact mean just Muslim, because then they add the colour word negro. So, a Morro Negro is a Muslim who is dark-skinned; a Morro is just a Morro who’s a Muslim. 

So, that’s a really big answer, and a lot to take in. But that means that the very first appearances of Madragana – which are from the 13th century, that’s when she would have lived, she was supposedly the concubine of Alfonso III, who’s ruling at the end of the 13th century – at that time, Morra would have carried the connotation of North African Muslim. That is really telling because a lot of North African Muslims and Muslims in general who appear in Christian sources, many of them are enslaved, because it is super legal to have Muslims as slaves in the Iberian Peninsula if you are a Christian. It’s also licit for Jews and vice versa. So, Muslims can take both of the other communities as slaves if they wish, although, you know, it obviously is not as large scale in some circumstances. 

So, yeah, she most likely, because of this first appearance, right, and she’s not named, she’s just described as like a Moura, and she’s the mother of possibly two children, and so that’s how we know her from the beginning: a Moura without a name from the 13th century. 

Ann: And why did her descendants… You don’t need to get at the whole family tree of it all, but like, why did her descendants… How do we trace it back to her? Like, who was a notable person who was one of her descendants that the, like, German royals came from? 

Stacey: She is, I’m going to just— I’m not a German historian, so I had to make this genealogy. I’m going to pull it up really quickly, because there’s one particular person that I want us to be able to think about. The connection between them is through Madragana’s son, Martim Afonso Chichooro. He is the son of a king, and even though he’s not the son of a queen, he’s entitled to a certain status, to a degree of mobility. So, he himself ends up contracting marriage with a relatively well-off noblewoman from Portugal. 

Now, not until four generations later, so we’re already in the 1440s, a descendant whose name is Margarita, she marries this random German guy, Jean, Jean of Neufchâtel. And this the 15th century, so there’s quite a bit of looking to the continent by Iberians. And because they have this connection to the royal house, descended through Martim Afonso, there’s this sort of like, “Okay, you’re noble, but you have this connection. So yeah, we’re going to send Margarita away, she’s going to marry this guy, Jean.” 

Now, I don’t know very much about Margarita. She was given a decent dowry, because the Portuguese are very, very… The way that they do dowries in noble marriages is very regulated. There’s a pretty consistent practice, and usually, they’d be allowed to, like, administer their own properties, their own goods, stuff like that. So, that follows her to the Holy Roman Empire, which becomes Germany, and then several, several generations later, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz is born. So, there’s not a ton of close connection with Portugal after that. The descendants of Margarita are all married into, like, princely families of the empire. And that’s really the sort of like, end, I guess you could say, of the connection to her place of origin to Margarita’s place of origin.

Ann: And is it through Margarita that we know about the connection to Madragana? I think I saw that somewhere. Who was the first person to look at this family to figure out this connection? 

Stacey: So, in my research, the first person that has pointed it out is a historian in the ‘90s, whose name is Mario de Valdes y Cocom. He was just sort of interested because there’s some art from the 16th century, that’s about, like, Margarita’s entourage. So, who comes with her into Germany, into the empire? There are depictions of what look to be Black Africans. And so, then there’s this connection of like, well, who is Margarita then? Is she connected to them? Like, how does she know these people? So, basically, is it like, are these slaves that are being taken recently? Are they descendants of some sort of noble family and therefore in a position of not slavery, but servitude? Sort of like ladies-in-waiting who have not a lot of standing, but some? Or are they actually just like slaves who’ve been taken? Because Portugal is a huge slave trading center in the 1500s. And so, that was the question that sort of arose. And then falling back, like, who is Margarita, she herself? And then it comes to this connection. 

Now, I couldn’t actually tell you, I mean, there’s just historians, so I’m not sure who the first historian to coin Madragana as her name is. But that’s just how historians refer to her. And so, then they just followed it up to this guy, Martim, and the sources at that time say, he’s the son of a Moura. 

Ann: So, can you tell more about what we know about Madragana and how she wound up in the role, becoming the concubine to the king? 

Stacey: I wish I could, I really do. [both chuckle] So, I study concubines generally in the Middle Ages, in the Iberian Peninsula, and almost never is there clear evidence of how it began. So, there are a couple of cases— Actually, I saw that you did a podcast about Inês de Castro, which is really interesting to me, because she’s a fun story. But in her case, of course, she followed an entourage of another person and then ends up becoming a concubine in that way. But most other concubines, there’s a reason that they become a concubine, which is that they might have membership in a strategic family line, and therefore, they’re going to leverage that vis-à-vis the king and assure some sort of relationship between the crown and their family, but also act as, like, the extension of willpower. That’s for noblewomen. 

Madragana… It’s difficult, because there’s two descriptions of who she is. Is she just a slave? Some of the sources from the 18th century, which are genealogies by royal genealogists, say, basically, she’s a slave. She’s just, like, a Moura who was enslaved. But then later, there’s people who are like, “No, she’s noble. She’s the daughter of this al-Qadi,” which is like the governor of a place called Faro, which is like very, very, very southern Portugal. Now, if she is in fact – so, it’s unclear if she is the daughter of that person, because the first source she appears in does not describe her that way. It’s a little bit later, the giving of nobility. 

So, if that’s the case, that could be connected to the, like, morisca thing. Because if they’re saying she’s a morisca, that implies she converted to Christianity, whether that’s her herself or her ancestors, converted from Islam to Christianity. So, if she is the daughter of this guy, it makes sense, in some ways, as forming an alliance between the king and the al-Qadi to have this intimate relationship between the al-Qadi and his daughter with the king. So, if that’s true, that’s probably some of the logic behind it. 

So, part of what I have to do in this case is rely on examples, similar examples that I have slightly more information about. In Spain, Saida, who’s also a Muslim, who becomes the concubine of the king. She is fleeing war, essentially. There’s quite a bit of infighting going on between various city-states in the southern part of Spain, and then some conquerors who are coming from below the straits, so like, from North Africa, and she flees. She leaves the city that she’s born in, and she ends up in, you know, in the city where the king is, and she ends up becoming his concubine. 

Now, did she initiate it? Did he initiate it? Did she consent? Who knows? Who really knows? It’s a really, really tangled-up question. But what is something has to be kept in mind is that these women who are Muslims are coming from a culture where concubinage works super differently than it does among Christians. Concubinage is not necessarily, like, illicit, it’s not hidden. It’s not… I mean, even in the Middle Ages, concubinage of kings is not, you know, it’s not on the side. It’s not like, “Oh my God! We have to hide from everybody else. No one wants to know that I’m a concubine.” It’s pretty straightforward. Like, “We’re at the court, this is my concubine, this is what it is, these are our children.” So, for these women to come from a context where men have lots of concubines, and concubinage is the number one form of social mobility. So, in the Islamic world, that is the number one form of social mobility for women specifically. 

How she comes to be the concubine of Afonso III… Did she think about, sort of like, how to leverage herself if she’s from a slightly lower status, if she’s not the daughter of the al-Qadi and sees this opportunity? That’s absolutely possible. Afonso had eight other concubines aside from Madragana, and many of them are noble Christian women, and so that obviously is functioning differently. Just for very, you know, lots of reasons that I could talk about because this is my thing, I love concubines as my students, and literally anyone who’s been in graduate school with me will tell you. 

For me, I think what’s really important is that we have to also see Madragana and Afonso as it’s an interfaith, cross-cultural encounter. And race can function in ways that resemble biology in the Middle Ages, but it doesn’t have to. It’s not biological race in the 12th, 13th centuries; it’s functioning along faith lines. So, if you think about race as sort of like a structural relationship – I’m a structuralist, I’m sorry, I have to admit to that – but if you think about race like this as creating these sort of differences to create a point about hierarchy, then it functions really intensely along religious lines in the Middle Ages. So, you see Christians thinking about Muslims in a way that we would call race thinking, that’s sort of like how to treat them in a specific way based on these characteristics that have been assigned to them as a group. And so, we have to see it as two people negotiating a sexual relationship from their own cultural perspectives. 

So, yeah, I wish I could be like, “Here’s this contract that they both signed,” but there’s only one contract of concubinage from the Middle Ages, one, from Iberia, and it’s not this one, sadly. 

Ann: So, I mean, with that being said, what on earth are you using as sources to figure out any of this? 

Stacey: [laughs] A great question, a great question. Really, all we have is chronicles and genealogies. So, the first appearance that she makes in the historical record is a chronicle written by an observer, but also someone who is very critical of Afonso III. 

So, he’s just writing a chronicle, and from there, it’s just sort of… She appears in a section where this, his name is João Gil, and I will totally send you a list, by the way, of Portuguese names, because they don’t sound how they look. So, this guy, João Gil, is writing a list of like, “Okay, here’s all the concubines of Afonso III.” He does it with other monarchs. So, he does all the Christian noblewomen, and then he sort of like, “Mmm, there’s these other people,” and then there’s like, he sort of makes this claim that Afonso is so… He’s like, hypersexual, he’s licentious, he’s lush, like all of these things. He’s like, “Yo, this guy is the worst. And he had sex with people who are from different faith communities.” He says that Afonso had a Jewish concubine, and this Muslim concubine, and that is her first appearance. So, it’s just a chronicle, like, “Here’s what’s happening. Here’s who he knows. Here’s who he’s sleeping with,” and then he moves on. He’s like, “She’s the mother of these of these kids,” and then it’s just ready to sort of like move to the next. And then yeah, chronicles over time. You have a question, you have a question. 

Ann: No, no, I’m just trying to picture… So, you’re finding, like… Do you read medieval Portuguese handwriting? 

Stacey: Oh. [laughs] Well, so yes. Paleography is the, like, practice of reading medieval manuscripts, and it is… hard. If you ever went to the doctor and you saw your prescription, and it was like, “What the hell does this say?” that’s what reading medieval manuscripts is like. They’re very, very difficult because they have a lot of abbreviations. So, it’ll be like, one word that has, you know, let’s say the word moura, it might be written M-R-A, and O-U have been omitted because it’s too long for the monks to write, or for the copyists to write, so they just put a bar and they’re like, keep it moving. 

And then they also, of course, in addition to the abbreviations, there’s just the survival of the manuscripts. So, some of them, they don’t have the original copies of. So, the work by João Gil, we don’t have… There is, like, a 13th century copy, but there’s also a bunch of other copies from the early modern period. So, people who are like, “Oh, yeah, we love this chronicle, let’s make it. Let’s make sure everybody can read it. Let’s make a bunch more copies,” all handwritten, of course. 

And then, there are printed versions from like the 18th century. So, then you’re like, “Oh, great, I can check my transcription against this 18th century version of a 13th century manuscript.” I’ve looked, of course, I’m a medievalist, I have to read Latin, many of my sources are in Latin. And then, of course, I have to read Old Castilian, which is, you know, old Spanish. The documents leave something to be desired, and I think that that’s true anytime you’re studying someone. Obviously, I’ve studied lots of kinds of concubines from various social statuses, but there’s just always the sort of desire for a better source. 

Ann: I’m so appreciative of you and people like you who do this work, so the people like me [Shelley laughs] can read an article or a book, and I don’t have to do the decoding myself. Wow. I wanted to ask you, like, in terms of just this whole conversation we’re having, the discussion, I think is your father had asked you about this in the first place, the discussion of, like, what do you see the significance of? You traced this family tree, you kind of you found what can be found about Madragana, but the significance of that, in terms of Queen Charlotte? Like, what do you think about that as a discussion? 

Stacey: Yeah, I think two things. One of them is specifically about Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton. So, like, I’m going to separate Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton and then Queen Charlotte as Queen Charlotte. The reason that I think that it’s interesting is people’s reactions to Madragana – whether that’s scholars, whether that’s the real family, whoever it is – it tells you a lot about how they think about the proper or ideal relationship between Blackness, Muslimness, and monarchy. There’s this idea that’s sort of like, “Well, monarchy is a white thing. Monarchy is a Christian thing.” And so, you can sort of see these fault lines in institutions where there’s sort of these assumptions about who gets to be there and who doesn’t get to be there, and I think that that’s super true for history. Who gets to be in these grand narratives that we spin, that people treat as sort of foundational to who they are? If you have a Black queen of the British Empire in the Regency period, that’s going to throw into a lot of questions like, “Okay, but they’re a slave trading empire. They’re super colonial. What are they doing with their subjects?” 

And so, when I found this out, I was so excited. I have to tell you, it was probably one of my favourite days as a historian, because one of my other concubines that I study who I mentioned, Saida, is supposedly related to Queen Elizabeth II, according to this apologia written by these British guys right after her accession in the ‘50s. And they were like, “Because she’s descended from this woman, Saida, she is descended from the Prophet Muhammad, and therefore, she can rule over any Muslims in the Commonwealth.” It’s called “Blood Royal” is the name of this apologia. It’s wild to me to think that that’s— So, that’s an even greater genealogical connection, so it’s 19 generations between Elizabeth II and Saida. Then, you know, Madragana and Charlotte are only 15 generations separate. So, there was all of this sort of, like, justification for why a white British woman can rule over Muslims, “Oh, it’s because she has a genealogical connection to this concubine.” This particular concubine did convert to Christianity and took a new name, and you know, married a king, and like they had a child who died, they had a daughter, so whatever. That’s a whole thing. 

But the point is, is that if it’s this super distant connection that can be put in whiteness, like in a safe white body, it’s totally okay. Muslimness, as long as it’s transformed by Christianity and whiteness, it’s totally okay. No problem. Elizabeth II, you’re great. You have this connection and we love it. But Charlotte, it’s like, okay, there’s a connection to Blackness in addition to a connection to Muslimness, and that’s not okay. And that is really interesting to me, because that tells you a lot about the ways in which these, like, patterns of race thinking of who gets to be where, who gets to say what, who gets to have what power, it tells you a lot about it. It tells you a lot about what people think. So, the British public are like, “Yeah, of course, Elizabeth can rule the Commonwealth!” And then you have people when Meghan Markle is like, getting married to Harry, and they’re like, “No way, Black people in the monarchy! We don’t like that!” And then it’s like, “Wait, there’s Charlotte. We don’t like that either!” 

I got really excited, I got so loud. People who know me know my voice is normally loud because I get excited. So, I think that that’s why it’s an interesting thing to think about, because these two, they’re very similar connections, and they’re both, you know, these concubines who have connections to the Muslim world, and then they have these connections to these queens. 

Now, my second answer – I’m a historian, so I talk a lot. I’m very sorry about that. 

Ann: No, no, no. This is like… I have a podcast [both laugh] because I have so much to say. So, I’m happy to talk to someone who also has lots to say. Yeah. 

Stacey: But what I do think about Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton, I have a lot of opinions generally about Bridgerton, and you know, there are flaws in all shows. But one thing that I think that’s really important that they do is to insist upon the presence of Black people in the past in these grand narratives that have been constructed as part of these national identities, national myths. I really like that they insist upon that presence and also the proximity of Blackness to power, because that is a historical truth. And so, I’m very here for that. Even though, you know, in the first season of Bridgerton, very few Black characters speak; they’re sort of like in the background. So, although I think that there’s room to do more, I do… Part of my work as a historian is to sort of excavate these histories of people who have been, you know, removed from the historical record or treated as sort of, like, meaningless to these ideas of progress or whatever. And so, I understand the sort of impetus behind the show, and yeah, I’m here for it. 

Ann: So, when you were inspired in the first place, partially by your family and people asking you for questions, knowing your specialty and talking about Queen Charlotte, how do you explain this to non-historian people? If they’re like, “Oh my god, was she really Black?” Like, what would you say? 

Stacey: I’ve been asked this question before. What I usually say is, “It’s complicated, but probably.” I say probably because, you know, I’m only working on certain kinds of sources, and those certain kinds of sources are written by people who have this close connection to the crown. Are they always being truthful? Are they always telling me everything that I want to know? For sure, no. They’re presenting a particular understanding of their lives and the people that they’re writing about, whether that’s contemporaries or people in the past. So, this guy, João Gil, in the 13th century, like, was he lying? Was he telling me everything? Who knows? Who knows? 

But that’s why I say, like, it’s complicated, to sort of signal that there’s these really, really tangled up histories that sort of attend or accompany that question. But at the same time, on the basis of the sources that I do have, probably, because, you know, if she’s a moura, she’s being described as a North African Muslim, and North African Muslims are Black. And Black comes in a range of hues and phenotypes, then, the Middle Ages as now. 

And then, people are always like, “What do you mean, it’s complicated?” And then I try to like, not the way that I did it here, because I got really excited, and got in depth. But usually, I try to give that like streamlined version of like, “Well, this is what it means,” because so many people have baggage of terms that apply to the pre-modern period, they sort of walk around with them. They’ll say “the reconquest” about Spanish history, and like, that word was never used in the Middle Ages, and so it’s super bound up in nationalism, but they don’t know that because they have just this sort of pop culture understanding. 

That, I think, one, says people are super interested in the past, for them to carry those things through, even though so many people are like, “I hated high school history, it’s just a bunch of dates.” You know, obviously, history, as we know, is so much more than dates. But I think it’s important to latch on to those things that are in the public imaginary, because that’s the place where you can sort of be like, “Here’s these really cool things that have meaning.” Because, you know, the past interacts with us, it’s not just, like, dead. I mean, obviously, they’re physically dead, but like, it is alive with us. So, yeah. 

Ann: Yeah, I think that’s… Oh, everything you said, I’m so glad I was able to connect with you about this. But yeah, the question for me is, just the whole discussion about Queen Charlotte, and like, who are her ancestors and stuff? It’s not a gotcha question; it’s not a yes or no question. It’s just like, what are the issues that come up? And why are we discussing this? That’s why I’m doing a whole episode. I’m doing an episode next week that’s, like, Queen Charlotte and her life, like, she was born in this year, here’s what she did. But I was like, this whole conversation is so much bigger than that, and that’s why I brought in you and other experts, just to parse out what this discussion is, why it’s important, and why it’s interesting. 

Stacey: Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, at the end of the day, people are curious. People might be like, “Oh, it seems… I’ll just take this.” I’m not explaining it very well, but what I mean is that like… Sometimes I feel this way about, like, the news. The news is like, people don’t want to learn complicated stuff. Those people in their white towers and their critical race theory and their craziness, we need to keep that away from, like, us. I think that’s often not true. People actually do want this kind of in-depth conversation about things that they don’t know a lot about that are curious or, like, have this interest. So, yeah, I think it’s really important to encourage that kind of exploration. 

Ann: You’re obviously not on Twitter constantly, or much, and neither am I, but if people want to follow you, you have an academic page. Tell everybody where you’re working, where you’re doing your research. 

Stacey: Yeah, absolutely! So, my Twitter handle, my academic one, is @TheAmyrlinSeat. So, for those of you who are into Wheel of Time, yes, I had @TheAmrylinSeat handle before the show came out. Yes, people tried to take my handle. [chuckles] If you want to find me on Twitter, that’s where I can be. 

But I’m doing a PhD in history at Brown, and so I’m always available through Brown’s connections, through their networks, whatever. But yeah, I mean, I’m around. I’m in that weird, dark place of a late-stage graduate student who is going to graduate soon; I’ll graduate in a year. And where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing after that, who knows? But yeah, my research is mostly in Spain, Portugal, some Sicily, and that’s where I’ll be this summer, trying to do some last-minute research… Yeah. I wish I could say, like, I’m super active on medieval Twitter, but I’m not. I can’t lie. [laughs] 

Ann: Well, thank you so, so much for talking to me. 

Stacey: Thank you. 

—————

So, another part of the discussion of Queen Charlotte and her proximity to blackness, the discussion of her race, and maybe what she looked like, gets into the way that she was perceived during her lifetime, which includes how she was presented in portraiture, and how the people who met her described her. So, this is where some of the discussions circle around some specific portraits where some people see in her some facial features that might align with a person of African descent, like a nose shape, the lip shape as well. And then, there’s a couple of descriptors that were written… this is the thing, she lived for a really long time, and in that lifetime, there are maybe four or five descriptions written by some people, and the words that they used could be construed to mean that they were describing somebody who maybe has African-looking features. This is where I turn to Dr. Brooke Newman. 

So, she is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with a current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family. She’s also somebody who has… she’s done so much research about Queen Charlotte and imagery. So, some of the things we talk about are not just the official portraits, but also caricatures, like political cartoons. What facial features did Charlotte have that people might have exaggerated? People who were trying to make fun of her, and what did that look like? 

So, some of the descriptions – and I think we go through all of these in this discussion – there’s somebody who describes Queen Charlotte as having… something about the shape of her nostrils, which could be construed as talking about the shape of a nose of somebody of African descent might have. But Brooke describes how that can also have applied to what’s a typical German nose, which also has distinctive nostrils. And also her complexion, that also occurred when she was incredibly ill. 

Anyway, this was a really interesting discussion I had with Dr. Brooke Newman, talking about just kind of the imagery surrounding Queen Charlotte and what that may indicate about what she looked like. Yeah, just continue on this discussion about Queen Charlotte and race issues.

—————

Ann: Okay. So, fresh off of her success of running a 10K race, it’s Brooke Newman! [laughs] 

Brooke: Yay! Thanks for having me. 

Ann: Yeah, thank you for running all the way to this interview. [Brooke laughs] Can you just first, like, I’m going to put in an introduction and stuff explaining about what this episode is, but could you explain what your historical expertise is and how it relates to the topic of Queen Charlotte’s ancestry? 

Brooke: Sure! So, I’m an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I work on early modern Britain and the British Atlantic. I’m currently writing my second major book on the topic of the British monarchy’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and in the expansion of colonial slavery over multiple centuries. Queen Charlotte plays, you know, not a central role, but she is definitely an important historical figure as the wife of George III and as someone who gave birth to 15 royal children during her reign. You know, more power to her, I can’t even imagine. I think she is someone who has been overlooked in some ways by history, but also is having a renaissance to some extent because of her, you know, new spinoff in Bridgerton. So, I think she’s definitely someone that people are interested in. 

Ann: So, just in terms of, not her role directly in the colonization of America, but there’s a lot of places named, like, there’s Charlotte, North Carolina. Her name is all over the place in the US. 

Brooke: Yes. And actually, it’s Charlotte, North Carolina, that is one of the reasons why there are so many different rumours about the ancestry of Queen Charlotte. You know, a lot of this has to do with the fact that in Charlotte, North Carolina, people in the 20th century wanted to push back against white supremacy and against racism. And there, you know, they have a town named after George III’s wife, and obviously, she is the British queen during the height of the British Empire, when the British Empire is at its peak in terms of its involvement in the slave trade. But at the same time, there is a push to really, I think, rehabilitate her to some extent because she is the patron queen of Charlotte, North Carolina. 

So, in the 1980s, there was a new statue that was unveiled in Charlotte, this was around 1989, and there were some people who said initially, they were writing letters in to the editor of newspapers, you know, “This statue is lacking the features that have been seen in some of the images of Queen Charlotte that make her look African.” At the time, I think this was a bit surprising to some people in Charlotte because they hadn’t really heard any of these rumours before. And also, this is, granted, before the internet, so it’s not like this was something that you could easily look up. But there had been some previous claims that perhaps Queen Charlotte had African ancestry, but this was primarily based off of a couple of images of her that were painted or reproductions that were made in the early 1760s when she was 17, 18 years old, right when she married George III. And because of these depictions and the reading of them hundreds of years later, that, you know, maybe she might be this, maybe she might be that, there was a sense that her ancestry, to some extent, was potentially up for grabs. 

I think that the sort of general pushback against yet another white figure that was being memorialized came from a good place. But it wasn’t necessarily from a historically accurate place in the 1980s in Charlotte, North Carolina. But that is really where some of these ideas began to take off in the United States, actually, not in Britain. 

Ann: And so, it’s sort of, I don’t want to say reverse evidence, but it’s like, you look at the portrait, think you recognize some features and think, “Well, let’s retroactively figure out why maybe that’s what she looked like.” It’s not finding the evidence… I don’t know. So, it’s not going from genealogy and making… It’s looking for the genealogy, hoping it will provide a specific answer, it’ll confirm your suspicion. 

But can you talk about images of her? So, you’re saying there were some images of her that have been interpreted as having African facial features. And there’s other images of her that haven’t, that don’t. 

Brooke: Right. So, there are hundreds of images of Queen Charlotte. These are portraits that she sat for, reproductions of those portraits, commemorative coins that were minted when she married George III, and even also, later when she died. There are many, many caricatures of her from her life, and in those caricatures, she is always very thin, sometimes she has missing teeth, she has a very long, pointy nose, she looks sort of witchlike, but extremely pale. 

From my experience working on this time period, if you were known or had a reputation for having what they would have considered a “swarthy” complexion, you would have been viciously mocked in the press because they love to mock whatever they could potentially find that they could exaggerate in some way. In her case, it was what we would now consider a German nose. It was still racial in the sense that they were mocking this nose; they were pointing out that her nose, her nostrils flared, that she had a large nose. As she got older, she became more frail and thin, and her nose was exaggerated in the caricatures as being even more pointy. Also, another thing to consider, too, is that she had 15 children, so she was constantly pregnant. I mean, this poor woman, for 20 years, basically, of her life, she was pregnant. So, her weight fluctuated dramatically because she was pregnant so much. 

So, by the time she eventually was older and started to lose weight, particularly when George III was ill, mentally ill, that took a real toll on her, and she started to lose weight, and so the images of her change over time. But what the images that were painted in, you know, really early 1760s, when she was only 17, so there’s two, one was by a man named Allan Ramsay, and she did actually sit for that portrait, and then later there was a mezzotint, which is like a copy that was made. You know, when I look at those portraits, I don’t see African features. I see the features that I see in all the other paintings and caricatures of her. But that is also because I have been working on this family for years now. I was about to say centuries, oh my god. [both laugh] I am immortal! 

For centuries and years, and the main thing I’ve noticed is that, you know, these portraits in the 18th century, you know, they vary slightly, but they tend to have similar… Like, there’s a repetition in terms of features, and you can see them if you lay them side by side, hundreds and hundreds of images. But if you take just a couple of them and you are looking at them and you want to see a particular type of feature, it’s not that hard to, you know, use your imagination and think, “Well, what if maybe,” you know, her nostrils or the description of her nostrils by one, you know, one person at the time in this particular painting, “What if it actually hints at something else that the royal family doesn’t want anyone to know?” You know, what if there’s actually a lot more exciting, you know, behind-the-scenes story here? 

I think that that is something that makes her more interesting to people; it makes her more appealing. And it also, to some extent, rehabilitates her in the popular consciousness. But as a historian, my question is, why do we want to rehabilitate Queen Charlotte? I just don’t understand. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around wanting to rehabilitate her into someone that she wasn’t. 

Ann: Well, and the question – and this is why I’m having you and another expert on to talk about this – that occurs to me is if she was… The other interview I’m doing is, like, what her ancestry was. But let’s say, if she did have some amount of DNA that had an African, you know, she had some ancestry, she did not move in the world, she was not treated the way that Black people were treated in England at that time. So, if she was Black, that’s kind of beside the point, right? 

Brooke: Right. I mean, regardless of what her ancestry may have been 15 generations before, so hundreds of years before, this was a woman who was raised in what they considered at the time, what we consider, a rural, sort of backwater in a German province. She, at a very young age, was married off to George III, who was one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe; he was the monarch over an expanding empire. She was treated like a queen, she was a queen, she gave birth to many future members of the royal family, and she lived a life of extreme privilege, a life that, actually, she complained about quite a bit. 

you read her letters that have survived in the royal archives and that, you know, were sent some of her friends and her brother who was living in German provinces, she talked about the tedium of her life, that she was always being schlepped from, you know, Buckingham Palace, to Kew, eventually to Windsor, and that she was at the beck and call of whatever George III wanted her to do. And that was her life. She was socially conservative, she was someone who did not want to go against the established hierarchies and against established order. 

She didn’t do anything remotely positive for enslaved people or on behalf of people of African descent during her lifetime, despite being appealed to by abolitionists, including Black abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano, who wrote her a letter beseeching her to fight on behalf of the abolitionists, to support the abolition of the slave trade. He actually published the letter that he wrote her in his book, The Interesting Narrative, in 1789. And so, not only did we have some manuscript copies of this letter that survived, he wanted the British public and the wider world to know that he had appealed directly to the monarchy and to the Queen and got no response as well. 

And so, I think that the question really is less significant in terms of: What was her ancestry, et cetera? It’s: What did she actually do during her reign? And the answer is not much. 

Ann: So, okay, I’m going to frame this question by the first time I heard about— I’m in Canada, so I don’t know a lot about George and the colonies, and I didn’t know his wife was Charlotte. But the first time I heard about her as a person, and it piqued my interest, and this was pre-Bridgerton, the series, was, I don’t even know, five or six years ago, the first Lifetime made-for-TV movie about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, or if you know what I’m going to say. 

Brooke: I’ve heard it, but I haven’t seen it. But my students have told me about it. 

Ann: Yeah. So, there’s a scene, just to recap for those who haven’t seen this movie, where Meghan Markle goes for the first time to meet Queen Elizabeth II, and she’s, you know, worried and stuff. And then, Queen Elizabeth II is like, “Well, this is a portrait of my royal ancestor, Queen Charlotte,” and it’s one of the portraits you’re talking about. It’s the one that some people see African features in, a light-skinned person, but with African features. And Queen Elizabeth II in this movie says, you know, “So, apparently, she was mixed race, but most portrait painters would hide that in their portraits. So, really in that way, the British family has been biracial for many years.” And I was just like, “What is happening? What?!” Like, first of all, like, I’m not here, and I don’t know anyone is here saying like, “Oh, the modern Windsor family are actually biracial.” I’ve not heard even the most monarchist person suggest that. 

So, my question for you, based on that anecdote, is, and I’ve heard other people say this, too, the theory that she did have African-looking features, but all portrait painters, except for one or two, were instructed to hide that and to paint her differently. 

Brooke: That’s ridiculous. [Ann laughs] I mean, I just don’t even know what to say to that, to be honest. It’s just not true. It’s not true because, yes, the royal family had a significant amount of influence over their official portraits. But that is about it. I mean, we’re talking about in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when people in the royal family were viciously mocked, I mean, to a significant extent. They were depicted in the nude; they were depicted having sex. Even George III, when he was ill, was depicted ill in his bed, and this really upset George, the Prince of Wales. He actually tried to threaten to sue the people who are producing these caricatures. So, they don’t have the level of control over their image that we might want to imagine that they did. I mean, sure, if there was an official portrait that they didn’t like, they would just not purchase it, or they would not have it replicated. But they couldn’t control the press to the extent that we might imagine.

The other thing that I think is important to emphasize is that, you know, we don’t really necessarily know what people looked like in the 18th century. I mean, other than looking at these paintings, I mean, I’m going back to Elizabeth I. There’s always been all this debate about what does she really look like? And there are a few portraits of her that survived from when she was young, and then when she took the throne. And then, after that, there was just this industry of reproductions of her, over and over and over again, to where she was in some ways immortal and never aged, even when she was, like, nearing death, she looked about the same. 

But with Charlotte, there are actually some images of her, some depictions of her, that are painted when she’s young, when she’s middle-aged and then when she’s older. Actually, there’s a painting of her, that actually she did not like, and George III didn’t like either, painted not long after his really serious illness in 1788, where she looks tired, she looks frail. It is a very honest-looking depiction of her that the royal family did not like, and they did not want it to be reproduced. None of those features that people have been fixating on are, you know, seen in this image. So, I think that in some ways, we’re reading too literally into visual representations in the 18th century. 

The other thing I wanted to mention, because I forgot to mention earlier, is that King William IV, he was the only member of the royal family as a teenager who was in the Royal Navy and actually travelled around the Atlantic world; he visited Jamaica and places like that. And he was rumoured, and there were eyewitness accounts that he had sexual relationships with enslaved women of colour. These relationships and the rumours of them got back to the press in Britain, and he was mocked, and there were caricatures of him, you know, in a hammock with a Black woman. This, at the time, would have been truly shocking to depict a member of the royal family, you know, with a Black woman, in a sexually suggestive manner. And there’s more than one of him in this particular depiction. 

If Queen Charlotte had had even a remote resemblance to someone of African descent at the time, she would have absolutely been mocked in that way. During the abolition debate, the royal family was mocked, including her. And particularly during… There was a sugar boycott in 1792, and allegedly, the royal family claimed that they were going to participate in this boycott because it was so popular across the country, and there were thousands and thousands of people boycotting sugar that was produced by slave labour. But the caricatures, that were by Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank, that were produced of the royal family show them around a tea table, and, you know, essentially George and Charlotte are telling their daughters, you know, “Don’t put sugar in your tea. It’s so great without it.” The daughters are moping, and they’re essentially mocking the royal family, saying, you know, “These people are just pretending to care about slavery when, really, they’re just excited they can finally tell their daughters, ‘Oh, you don’t need sugar’ and save money.” So, they were mocking them for that. But in those depictions, both of them look, you know, Germanic, essentially, is what I’m saying. 

Ann: I was listening to some other podcast discussing this issue just to kind of get a sense of what the conversation is. And so, another concept that I’ve encountered is that the royal family… I’m just like, I know you’re going to explain why this is wrong, but I’ll just explain it to you first, that the royal family wanted the queen to be depicted looking like a Black person on the coinage and on the portraits that were sent to places like Jamaica, so that they would support the monarchy more. 

Brooke: That’s a myth. That is not true. That is definitely not true, and actually, I’ve looked at the depictions of the queen on the coins and so forth, and she does not look like she is African or of African descent. I’m not exactly sure, that rumour, I’m not sure where that came from. I’ve actually been digging into this, and I just cannot figure out where it came from. 

But I will say that, I mean, and I think people may be surprised to hear this, these rumours about her potentially being of mixed race began prior to Harry and Meghan dating, but they resurfaced with a vengeance once they became engaged. In my opinion, one of the main reasons why this narrative came back with such force was to undermine Meghan and to undermine the historic nature of her marriage into the royal family. Because here, you have a woman who actually is descended from enslaved ancestors marrying for the first time into the royal family. And not only that, she identifies as someone who is mixed race; she identifies as someone who, you know, grew up in this scenario. And it was a really important moment.

But around the time the engagement was announced, I started seeing, percolating around the internet, “Oh, well, maybe she’s not really the first mixed-race person to marry in. Maybe the Windsor family is already this and that.” And I was thinking, well, that’s very interesting, because what is really happening here is that Meghan is being attacked by the press, particularly in the UK in the tabloids, for not being white on one hand. But on the other hand, they’re saying, “Oh, but also she’s not really that special either, because there’s this other woman hundreds of years ago who probably maybe was of African descent, and probably maybe really did look Black, but that was all hidden, and it was all conspiracy.” 

So, there was a lot going on there that needed to be unpacked, that ultimately boiled down to a lot of misinformation and its replication. Unfortunately, I have to say, I will blame, and I hate to do this, but I will blame a lot of journalists for this, because they took an idea and they ran with it, and it became sensationalized, and it ended up on Wikipedia. If you Google “Queen Charlotte Ancestry,” or “Queen Charlotte Black,” or “Queen Charlotte African,” it is an explosion of findings, none of which are based on the actual historical record. That is problematic, because when you have misinformation spreading in this way on the internet, it gets to the point where when you actually say, “Wait a minute, let’s stop and unpack these claims,” people get angry because they think you’re just trying to attack her identity, or attack the fact that maybe she was Black, and what does that mean? Rather than “Let’s really look at these claims and see if they’re legitimate.” As a historian, I don’t take things for granted. I tend to sit with them and dig as much as I can to see where did this come from and why? 

Ann: Well, and it’s really interesting that we’re having this conversation now, like, the Queen Charlotte Bridgerton series is just coming out when this episode airs, I think that same day. But we’re also in a moment where I think that same day or the next week, there’s the new Cleopatra series. So, there’s that discussion happening now, which I’ve seen so much. It’s not the same discussion, but it’s a similar discussion except for… I don’t know. I don’t know. This isn’t a Cleopatra podcast. But I saw somebody say that Cleopatra is one of the women in history about whom we can almost guarantee exactly who her ancestors were because the Ptolemys kept marrying its own family. 

Brooke: Each other, exactly.

Ann: Yeah, that was their whole deal. It’s like, what was her ancestry? Well, it’s like “Just this.” It’s like, there’s not in-laws, it’s just Macedonian. So, with Charlotte, it’s a similar conversation. I guess it’s different because the Cleopatra, that’s a documentary, and that’s presenting… It’s not presenting “What if Cleopatra was a Black woman?” It’s presenting “Cleopatra was a Black woman” in a documentary format. Whereas Bridgerton is already an elevated fantasy. 

Brooke: Right. And Bridgerton never claimed to be historic and true. I mean, I’ve read the novels. This is a fluff historical romance. It’s fun. The novels are fun, the series is great. I’m a fan of the series, I can’t wait for the spinoff. But we’re reading way too much into fantasy, and actually, Shonda Rhimes said, you know, in her mind, this was an alternate universe to some extent. Let’s imagine an alternate universe where people of African descent actually have a position of privilege and power in this society, where actually, a woman is queen in this scenario, where there are members of the aristocracy who are Black. And yet, they still have to contend with some prejudice, but they have reached the higher echelons of society. 

I have a number of historian friends who have found Bridgerton really problematic because they believe that Bridgerton, in some ways, takes away from the reality of what it was like to actually be of African descent in the 18th and early 19th centuries. That it was an enormous struggle, that it was extremely hard to be accepted in this time period. Obviously, this is the moment when you have formerly enslaved people pushing against slavery and slave trade and really being ignored for a number of years. And so, there’s some sense that, “Well, maybe this is going to give people a false impression.” 

My response to that is mixed to some extent, because on the one hand, I agree, and even these rumours about Charlotte and her ancestry, it has troubled me a little bit about, why are we trying to rehabilitate and change Charlotte, when there are so many other people of African descent around the world who deserve to have their stories told, who actually identified as a person of mixed racial ancestry or African descent? We should be focusing on telling those stories, versus this white woman who was a queen during this time. But on the other hand, I think Bridgerton is a good show; it has diverse casting, it’s a fun show. And I’m hoping it’ll lead to more interesting historical depictions and also more diverse casting like Hamilton, which I personally am a huge fan of, and I would like to see more of. 

So, I think the main message really is the public should be receptive to these sorts of shows, but they should also do a little digging to see, you know, what’s the real story for people living in this time period? How hard would it have really been for someone like Queen Charlotte to actually be of African descent and or identify as a Black woman? It would have been impossible in the 18th and early 19th centuries. I mean, look at what happened to Meghan Markle in the 21st century. That is really, I think, what we should be thinking about. 

Ann: That’s a really good point, and I really do want to emphasize that to anyone who’s listening. Like, both you and I are fans of Bridgerton. We’re not here to be like, “Boo!” We’re both here to be like, “Can’t wait to watch this new Queen Charlotte series, the costumes look amazing.” Like, I’m into it. I have no problem with changing historical things to make a more fun, fluffy, you know, TV story. 

It’s such a nuanced thing, like, the difference between you mentioned Hamilton, or there was recently, like in the last couple of years, there was a show in England or in Britain that was about Anne Boleyn, and they cast Jodie Turner-Smith. Or there was the Mary, Queen of Scots movie and Gemma Chan was cast as Bess of Hardwick. That’s not being like “What if Bess of Hardwick was Chinese?” They were just like, “Let’s just cast people.” And I think more and more nowadays, in a good way, I think television programming, if you have a cast that’s all white people, that just feels uncomfortable, I think. You want to have a representation that kind of looks more diverse, like what contemporary society is like. So, if you’re doing a historical thing, you can either do the Hamilton approach, where it’s like… Hamilton is not being like, “What if Aaron Burr was a Black man?” No, it’s just like, we just cast a bunch of people, and they’re in these roles, and they’re good at it. 

And then, what Bridgerton is doing is kind of that, but not really, because they’re saying, “Well, if Queen Charlotte was a Black woman and she was accepted as a Black woman? Okay, then what would the trickle-down effects of that be a couple of decades later?” and that’s how they are able to bring more diversity into their show. So, it’s different from just being like, “We’re just casting ‘colour blind’” like Brandy as Cinderella, if people know that, where it’s just kind of like, “Well, the king is white and the queen is Black and their son is Filipino, and let’s just do it. Who cares?” Bridgerton, the fact that it hinges on someone who there’s already has, like, these kind of rumours about, I think it was very canny and a very smart way to do it. 

Brooke: Absolutely. 

Ann: Because yeah, like, is it a possibility? 

Brooke: I mean, I can absolutely see not only why the show, you know, turned out the way it did and has now decided to do an entirely different spin-off focused on Queen Charlotte, but also these rumours, whether they have any legitimacy or not, doesn’t really matter, because if the public is in any way confused about the actual story, or interested in it, or just they don’t really know, that gives you a hook. You can then turn it around and change it into whatever you want. And I mean, as someone who appreciates creativity and film and all the rest of it, I think it was a brilliant idea, and I think it’s going to do really well. I do hope people will be more interested in, you know, the Georgian era and the Regency era that this represents, but I also think there is a real difference between fantasy, you know, alternate realities, historical fiction and history. 

History was a lot bleaker, and more violent and depressing than we want it to be. It wasn’t, I think, this fantasy reality that people would like the 18th century to be, and I think that’s probably the hardest thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around, even in the arguments about slavery now, talking about slavery, about acknowledging this history. You know, what next steps should be, particularly for Britain and the British monarchy, which is what I work on. And it’s mainly that there is a real sense that this is in the past, and for some people, they’re all, “Well, this really wasn’t that bad anyway.” 

And my response to that, after having spent years working in the archives, was that it isn’t past. We’re still dealing with the legacies now. Many people are grappling with these legacies on a day-to-day basis. It’s affecting their actual everyday lives through racism, structural underdevelopment in places like the Caribbean. But also, it’s impacting the way we think about the world and our place in the world and why we want to look back and reimagine that maybe the world could have been a little bit better. Maybe there are secrets in the past that have been hidden. I think there’s a genre of history, like history’s mysteries, that people are so fascinated by. People love stories of like unsolved crimes, unsolved historical mysteries, and this idea that maybe this queen really had a secret history, or a secret identity, or a secret ancestry that we don’t know about is very appealing in a time when, you know, we want to look forward and not dwell on all the negative aspects, the brutal aspects of slavery, in particular, and imperialism. 

Ann: Yeah, it’s just making me think, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with Paterson Joseph, the actor and now writer. He wrote this novel about Charles Ignatius Sancho. 

Brooke: Brilliant novel.

Ann: Yeah. And so, he was saying when I was chatting with him, you know, to him, because Charles Ignatius Sancho, like that’s the Georgian period as well. So, he was, you know, in the archives of whenever and reading about like, this is what it was like for this exceptional Black man at this time, who was able to vote and all these things. 

Brooke: He was the first Black man to vote in Britain. 

Ann: Yeah. So, what that story is, and how that resonates with him, and how we wanted to share it, versus something like Bridgerton, which, again, is not presenting historical fact, but you see Regé-Jean Page, like, swanning around, everyone’s swooning over him at a ball. So, to him, to Patterson, he was saying, I don’t think these are his words, but there’s just such a disconnect there, being like, “Well, imagine Black people like this in this era,” and he was just like, but why? [chuckles] Like, they weren’t. 

Brooke: Right. They didn’t have this experience. It was actually a constant challenge. 

Ann: Yeah. So, it’s interesting. When you were talking about how the claims kind of got a new win when Meghan Markle married into the royal family and stuff, but also the sort of sense of like, what if history wasn’t so bad? This is, again, Bridgerton, Shonda Rhimes, I love you, like nothing against this or the show, it’s just what this what the discussions that are sort of unfolding about this are. Is there some sort of risk, I guess, to not just like, what if the past wasn’t…? There’s cool things about the past, but like, you know, the role of Black people in Georgia and England was not one of those; that was not a good time or place to be a Black person. But also, it’s kind of showing like, what if the British royal family is actually really woke? Like, what if they’ve been like, “Don’t worry about it.” The whole thing that came out recently about Kate Middleton’s ancestor was an abolitionist and stuff, where it’s like, what if this family is like, they’re so not racist that they’ve been, like, back even before it was cool, they had… You know, it’s kind of revamping the royal family’s reputation as well. 

Brooke: Exactly. Yeah. As someone who works on the royal family, I’m opposed to that. I mean, I don’t think this is something that they deserve. I think we should be really, you know, reasonable and restrained when we think about the royal family, and when we think about the fact that this is a thousand-year-old institution that is based on hereditary privilege, definitely on whiteness, hereditary wealth, and hereditary status. Everything about the royal family is based on an accident of birth. 

I’ve been asked recently by, you know, a number of journalists in the wake of King Charles saying, you know, “Oh, I support research into the connections between the royal family and the slave trade,” because of the evidence that I gave to the Guardian, and they shared it with the palace. You know, which is exciting that he responded to this, and it is a big deal. But at the same time, it doesn’t really mean much because, you know, this is evidence that’s been around for a while. People have been in the archives working on the history of slavery for decades now. The company that was founded in the 17th century was called the Royal African Company; it’s not a huge surprise. 

So, to take this family and this institution that gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade, that invested in it, that profited from it, that expanded it dramatically, and then defended it all the way through the abolition movement into the 19th century and then claim, “Oh, and by the way, secretly, George III’s wife was actually of African descent and was, like, a closet abolitionist,” and all this other stuff, it’s giving them too much credit and it’s allowing them in some ways to turn that narrative around and create, yet again, an alternate reality where they were on the right side of history. And, you know, we might do that with Bridgerton, but we need to understand that that is not real. That is fantasy. That’s great, and it’s fun to watch, but it is not real. And Meghan Markle, I’m sure, would be the first person to point out that that was absolutely not her experience marrying into this family. She was not protected by this institution, and they didn’t really understand what she was going through as a woman of mixed ancestry. 

That is one of the claims— Because obviously, I’ve read about all of this and what she went through. I’ve heard – you know, it’s always hard to confirm this – but I’ve heard that William said to her and to Harry, you know, “We’ve all had to deal with the press. We’ve all had to deal with… Kate was attacked for her weight, you know, all her alleged weight problems,” and various things. And then Meghan’s response was, ” Yes, but this is racial, and it is a different level of attack.” It’s a different level of hatred, and hostility, and violence essentially inflicted against her in the press. And the palace didn’t protect her, didn’t respond in a way that made her feel safe. They just didn’t get it. And I don’t think they do even now. 

I don’t think, after all this time has passed, that the royal family, or even the tabloids, really understand what Meghan went through, and what anyone would go through who is not white and is in the royal family. I mean, the racism and the extreme hostility that Meghan faced, the fact that she actually felt suicidal. I mean, I think that is a really important story, and it’s in some ways the real story, right? It’s not this fantasy reality of, “Oh, maybe they were actually a lot nicer than we like to imagine.” 

Ann: Well, no. And even when I’ve been sort of describing the situation to, like, friends who are not involved in history and stuff like, or they saw the statement that Charles was like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to look into the connection between the British royal family and the slave trade,” like people who have not been in the archives are just like, [scoffs] “Obviously, there’s a connection.” It’s like, “You think?” Like, of course! How could they have not have had? Like, that’s… Anyway. 

Brooke: And actually, they’re not looking into anything, and they’re not really doing anything because all that was, was the palace saying at this point, “We recognize that the connections are irrefutable. There is a historical paper trail that we have to acknowledge,” which it is good that they at least acknowledge it, because Elizabeth II would not have even responded. So, I do think we have to give Charles some credit for that. 

But that’s it in terms of how far I’m willing to go, because beyond that, we are talking about someone who is the head of what is essentially a multibillion-dollar corporation, the royal family. They have, you know, immense wealth, immense resources, the ability to assemble a team of people to create an independent commission to look into the links between the monarchy and slavery, to hold a summit. He’s also head of the Commonwealth; he could reach out to CARICOM, to people in African countries, to people in Britain, and, you know, really investigate, and acknowledge, and address these links in an important and historically significant way that has not happened. I would be shocked if it does happen. 

I do have to say, though, I’m trying to be moderately optimistic in that I’m hoping there’ll be some changes in the future. But at the same time, I’ve seen, you know, what’s happened since 2018, what’s happened in the wake of 2020, and that, generally speaking, the monarchy is very good at releasing statements that sound really great, that don’t really mean anything, and then kicking it down the line a few more years into the future and saying, “Well, we’ll just wait a few more years and see what we discover.” Or, you know, “We won’t refute possible claims that one of our ancestors might have been of African descent,” because at this point, why would they? It’s not going to make them look good either way. So, they’re better off remaining silent on that issue. 

Ann: And I guess just sort of like, as a final question, I wanted to ask you: What do you think this significance is— Well, first of all, like yourself as an American, working at an American university. The fact that Bridgerton, this is not a BBC show, this is a Netflix series produced by Shonda Rhimes, it’s American, and I believe Julia Quinn herself is American. So, it’s very much like England reimagined through an American lens. And you were saying a lot of the stuff with Charlotte kind of started in Charlotte, the city in America. So, it’s weird because now we’re in more of a… I don’t know, just talk about that. Like, the America versus UK and how she’s seen as a Black person. Like, do the people in the UK think about this? Or is this entirely an America, Americas thing? 

Brooke: I can’t speak entirely to what they think in the UK, but I will say I do think it is more of a focused issue in the United States. That is partially because we rejected the monarchy, you know, with the American Revolution. But at the same time, Americans now are fascinated with the royal family. There are so many Americans who love British history, who love the Tudor period, who love the Regency period, the Austen novels, all of the historical recreations of these time periods, mostly based on novels, not on history. And because of that, we’ve romanticized British history, the British royal family, to an extent that we’ve even imagined, you know, entirely new worlds that they operate in in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

I think that there is this romanticization of British history and an attempt to, in some ways, project onto Britain the fantasies that Americans have and even, you know, African Americans, too, of being royal, being part of the royal family. And someone like Meghan, who was, she left! She actually walked away from that and rejected it. And so, maybe that fantasy is over, and so let’s turn back to Queen Charlotte, because that is pure fantasy, and we can just indulge that fantasy and not have to actually deal with the racism, the sexism, the death threats, you know, the suicidal thoughts, and all of that that Meghan Markle actually experienced. 

So, there is a sanitization of the historical record in this fantasy world. But I also think Americans, we really love fantasy, and it really appeals to our sensibilities and our desire to escape just the constant negative news and our own, you know, political issues over here. We can all just fixate on the royal family and imagine swanning around in a castle, or on an estate, or having all these beautiful men that are also wealthy, who are desirable, and we can go and dance with them at balls. I mean, you know, that is definitely a trope; it goes all the way back to the Disney princesses stuff, which is also incredibly popular and still is, and not just among children, adults, too. [laughs] So, I do think there’s a connection between how we romanticize the royal family and also just the way we digest film, stories that are fantasy. 

Ann: I think, well, when you were talking, talking with Bridgerton as a fantasy and people in the ballroom and stuff, I’m just like, yeah, this really just brings me back to the Cinderella with Brandy from the ‘90s, which was my first experience as a young person watching colourblind casting, and I was like, “Oh, this is cool. This is great.” Like, imagine a world where it’s just kind of like everyone is just whatever, it’s like, you know, here are two sisters and one is Black and one is white, whatever. It’s like, I don’t know. Thinking of Bridgerton in that way, it’s just kind of like, “Oh, look, imagine a world where everyone… It’s kind of like Regency England, but it’s also like more diverse.” So, you can imagine yourself. And I love that about Bridgerton. 

Getting back to like, nothing against Bridgerton, I love that they’re giving, you know, cosplayers of colour, like opportunities of people you can dress up as. I love to think of people you can see yourself like the heroes and the heroines, like, Shonda Rhimes does in her contemporary shows, too, such a good job of having a cast that represents the full viewing audience, and I think that’s really great for Bridgerton. And we can see it as a fantasy situation. 

Brooke: Right. And the world of fantasy shouldn’t just be white. That is also something that I’ve seen; there’s been a backlash to science fiction novels and science fiction and fantasy stories if, you know, there’s a diverse cast or if, “Oh my god, there’s a white elf or something,” it’s like, “I didn’t know you knew that all elves were white. I didn’t realize that was a thing. I guess somebody dug around the archives, and they discovered a hidden treasure trove of elf letters, and they all said, ‘We’re all white, and we always have been since time immemorial.’” But all of that always makes me so frustrated, you know, imagining that here is this, you know, in the actual world where we should be able to be whoever we want, and people should be able to see themselves represented in shows, in films, and to have that be attacked by essentially white supremacists is horrific. 

I think that that’s also why this issue of Queen Charlotte’s ancestry is so contentious, because if you question it, there’s a sense that you are basically acting like those white supremacist people who are critiquing, you know, “Oh, you watched or read something in Tolkien, and it wasn’t all white characters. So, that’s not right.” But that never was supposed to be real. That was always fake, that was always a fantasy. Why can’t it be diverse and more interesting? And Bridgerton is also a fantasy, and it should be diverse and interesting. 

But the actual Queen Charlotte, I mean, I’m not saying she wasn’t interesting, but she’s definitely not as interesting as people want her to be. And actually, she herself, if she was here, would probably tell you that her life was not that interesting. She complained bitterly about how bored she was, how her life was tedious. You know, she was into botany and she loved music, but she also was under the thumb of George III most of her life, and she did not like to go against him because the number one reason he married her because was that she had a reputation for being compliant; smart, but not political, not philosophical, not anyone who might be radical, not someone who was a free, independent thinker. She was someone who did what she was told and did what George III wanted. So, when George III was not supportive of the abolition of the slave trade behind the scenes, neither was Charlotte. 

Ann: This is where I feel like Bridgerton, as much as Bridgerton, the OG series, is a fantasy, I think this new Queen Charlotte series, like everything you just described, is like that is not the character in the trailer that I have seen. 

Brooke: Not at all. 

Ann: No. So, this is where I appreciate, as like a sliding glass doors moment, of like, “Okay, let’s do Bridgerton and what if Charlotte was a Black woman?” Okay. And then they create this fantasy world around that. And Queen Charlotte is, like, taking it even one step further. That wasn’t even a book. Julia Quinn has since written a book about Queen Charlotte, but that was a breakout character people want to see, and I love the imagery of her with her afro and everything. I’m like, “This looks like a cool fantasy show that’s the prequel of Bridgerton, which is also a fantasy show.” 

Brooke: Yeah, it’s not based on the actual Charlotte’s personality, on her character. Imagine a show where the main character is just pregnant for two decades and is constantly writing letters talking about how she’s so sick of, she called it my “my campaign,” which was just being pregnant, being pregnant. And that was her job, was to ensure the succession. But she did it and then some, to where they had so many children they didn’t even know what to do with all these children. 13 of them survived into adulthood, which was pretty amazing, I mean, amazing for that then and now, to think that she survived, her children survived. But I don’t think that she had a life that she truly enjoyed. I think she was pretty unhappy, based on the letters that I found. I think she tried to put on a good face and to be cheerful, but she also was someone who was very much about exhibiting complete self-control as much as possible. That’s what George III valued, and that’s also what he wanted the rest of his family to be like, and they were constantly disappointing him. 

And so, the real story of the royal family in the 18th century, in some ways, is a story of a dysfunctional, toxic family with all kinds of weird, daddy-son issues and other things, daughters that were never allowed to go off and marry for years and years because they didn’t want them to be independent and to be free of them. But it’s not a story about diverse people, diverse ideas, diverse worldviews. This is a conservative, extremely wealthy, privileged family. 

Ann: Yeah, it’s really interesting to see. I’m curious because there’s a book that just came out, it’s called The Real Queen Charlotte, and I’m just in the midst, I’m going to be reading this. And I think people who watch Queen Charlotte, the series, or Bridgerton, who are like, ”Let’s read about this real-life person,” are going to be disappointed. It’s not like, “Oh, here’s this badass woman from history that no one’s told you about.” It’s like, no. Here’s this quite typical queen who was like… The reason we don’t know a lot about her is because the stuff that she did was not scandalous. She did her job; she married the king, she had children, like, that was top tier. That was what was asked of her, and she did it. But that’s not that’s not the Anne Boleyn story. You know, that’s not the Elizabeth I story. It’s not some person, sort of like stepping out of line with expectations. 

Brooke: No, she’s not some proto feminist or a rebel or anything like that. She’s a conservative queen who was constantly pregnant, and did what her husband told her to do (in the majority of cases), and took care of him when he was ill, and then was his guardian later in life. 

I just wanted to mention one thing because I think it’s significant. So, one of the quotes that’s used to back up this claim that she was actually of African descent was a quote from a physician made about her when she was basically on her deathbed. He said that she had “A mulatto complexion.” But what he meant by that was yellow because she was dying. At the time, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, mulatto was a racial term, this was a racial comment, but it could mean many things. And one of the things that it meant in terms of complexion was yellow, and I think a lot of people now don’t realize that. So, when we look at historical evidence, even letters and quotes and books that were published at the time, we have to not read into them our 21st-century understandings of even terminology, because it’s often not the case that what we think something means is exactly what it meant at that time. It might be similar, but there’s often variations. 

So, I think this is another reason why, I mean, at least as a historian, I’d like to make a push to say this is why history education is so significant, because people have to not only understand the history itself and read and understand the context, but they also need to understand what terms people used. And so, if you find certain, you know, random pieces of evidence and you just point to go, “Aha! This one image means X,” well, that’s not how historians work. We never make claims based off of just one piece of evidence because we need more than that; we need to corroborate the claim, and sometimes there’s contradictory evidence. And I think all of those things are really important. And it’s not always easy for people who are amateur historians to get into the complexity of studying history, that it’s time-consuming and that it requires a lot of knowledge to understand what something means, and maybe different ways you can read it. 

Ann: I think that’s so important to point out as well. Like, you’ve looked at what is it? Hundreds, thousands of images of Queen Charlotte? 

Brooke: Hundreds. 

Ann: Hundreds. So, you really have a sense in your head, like, you can see what features carry over from image to image. But if someone has only ever seen the one that people perceive as having African features, and then you’ve also read so much about Queen Charlotte, I’m sure lots of people describe what she looks like. 

Brooke: And then when you have someone who then puts this on the internet and says, “Oh, well, here’s this quote, here’s this other quote, and here are these two images,” and then Wikipedia takes it and makes a little story, and then journalists start to take that and turn it into a story, and then it gets replicated over and over again and it ends up on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs, in news stories… Well, no wonder people are confused! I mean, I’m not at all surprised that people believe that this is true. 

I mean, the New York Times contacted me, and they said, “Can you help us legitimize these claims?” And I said, “Well, unfortunately, I can’t help you legitimize them because they’re not true.” I think they were surprised because they had heard, “Oh! Well, we thought this was true.” And so, even at the highest levels of investigative journalism, they’re not really sure. And it’s because it is that easy for claims to multiply and take on a life of their own on the internet in a way that in, you know, the 20th century, when Charlotte, North Carolina, had the statue and there’s some letters to the editor, most people probably didn’t know anything about Queen Charlotte or anything about her ancestry. It’s really only since the birth of the internet and social media that we now even have this rumour going around that has become so contentious. 

Ann: Well, and I think it all comes— It doesn’t all come down to… One of the things that comes down to is just people wanting to see themselves like people who are like, say, an African American person in the United States, is a fan of British history, to find someone that you can see yourself in. Like, I can see how that would be appealing, to find yourself in a story. Like myself, we’re talking on video chat. One of the reasons why I got interested in Tudor England was I visited England as a child, and I was like, “Oh, who’s that pale, red-haired person with a long nose that kind of looks like me? That’s Elizabeth I? Great.” So, that’s my privileged white person take on it. But it’s like, yeah, to see someone who looks like you is powerful. And so many people want to see that. 

Brooke: No, I totally agree. I can sympathize with that, and I also think that’s why there are all these new shows, and obviously, we need that. But I also think there are historical, actual historical figures that are real and that did far more for the greater good than someone like Charlotte. But if people want to continue to imagine who she could have been in an alternate reality and in a fictitious world, then, you know, I can totally embrace that, and I do. But I do think we have to stop at some point and say, okay, what is this based on? And why are we so keen to have her not be, you know, this white Germanic woman that she was in her time period, and as she was seen and treated by the people around her and the extreme life of privilege that she led? 

Ann: So, if people want to keep up with you and your work, can you just share, do you have social media or a website where people can read more of what you’ve written or see what you’re talking about? 

Brooke: Yeah, I’m on Twitter @DrBrookeNewman, and I’m working on a book called The Queen’s Silence, which is on the links between the monarchy and slavery, which will be out in 2025. And I’m currently working on my website with an amazing website designer, and that will be out sometime in May. So, I’ll have to circle back to you on the URL for that. 

Ann: Yeah, for sure. No, let me know when that’s there so I can let people know, because this is obviously… The stuff that you’re working on, could you ever have imagined it would be so pertinent to contemporary life? 

Brooke: Well, what’s funny – I was just talking to someone about this yesterday – I came up with this book project in 2017 on the monarchy and slavery. At the time, nobody was working on that, and nobody really cared. And I thought, “Well, I don’t know if this is going to go anywhere,” and I was a little nervous. Like, what if I can’t find anything? And, you know, “Is this a dead end?” But I never thought it would— This was prior to Meghan Markle becoming a huge sensation. 

It was really, honestly, really, it was Meghan Markle marrying the royal family, everything happened to her, the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, and then just the push across the Caribbean in particular for, not only reparations, but to potentially separate from the monarchy and remove the monarchist head of state, and the royal tour, which was a complete disaster. All of that snowballed into my book going from being this kind of esoteric, interesting topic to being relevant politically, socially, and historically. And so, it’s been really exciting, but it’s also really stressful because of the fact that this is a book that it’s going to be pored over and torn apart and funneled through the culture wars, because people are so anxious about, you know, in their minds, rehashing the past, and bringing all the stuff about slavery, ” and all the rest of it. And so, I’m excited about it, but I’m also… It’s making me need to really buckle down and get it done, and also just be really careful with it. 

Ann: God, I didn’t even think about that. Because usually, usually – and I’ve interviewed a lot of people in my podcast – an academic writing a book, it’s going to get a nice audience of other academics and just people who like reading history. But just because of the profile you have and the topic, yeah, you’re writing this knowing it’s not going to be like, “Oh, other historians will read this,” but like, eugh! People are going to look at this in a really different way. 

Brooke: Right. And you spend, I mean, writing these kinds of books, years just sitting in a corner by yourself, digging around the archives, transcribing things, writing up your findings. I mean, it’s a pretty lonely, tedious job, very time-consuming. And then, just suddenly realize, “Wow, the king of Britain has actually heard about my research, and people are talking about it, and the Daily Mail is attacking me.” It’s like, oh, my god! It really puts a lot of pressure on you. I think the only way to deal with it is to try to just tune it out and just tell the story. 

But I also have to say that this has been the most fun project ever. I went to a conference years ago, around, like, 2019 or so, and somebody said, “Who’s excited about their second book project?” and my arm shot up, and I was the only person who was excited. And I think that shows because I was excited about my topic, I thought it was interesting, I thought, “Why isn’t anybody writing on this, and why doesn’t the book already exist?” And now, I realize that other people feel the same way, and as a writer, there is nothing better than knowing that there’s an audience out there that actually wants to read your work and engage with it. Whether or not that engagement might be, like, toxic to some extent, you know, you can’t control all of that, but it is really motivating and exciting. 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. To know that people, for any writer, to know that there’s a bunch of people who are waiting with bated breath for your book to exist, and a lot of that is in a good way. Yeah. 

Brooke: That’s true. Yeah. There’s always going to be some people who are just anti-history, anti-talking about empire, slavery, race; we’re having the same issues in the United States that they’re having in the UK. But I’m hoping, and I do believe that the public is eager for this history, and they want to know more. The more that they learn, the more skeptical they’re going to be of these claims that none of this matters, or that we should all just move on and not talk about it. I think people are going to realize, “Wait a minute, there’s actually a lot here. And we do need to engage with it and address it.” 

Ann: And I wonder, too, what effect, not your book specifically, but just like, culture kind of moving in that direction might have on maybe people are going to stop romanticizing, you know, English history, English royal court in past eras. Maybe we can romanticize somewhere else in some other time. 

Brooke: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don’t know if they will anytime soon, because I mean, there’s still, like, Jane Austen spinoffs constantly. 

Ann: Oh gosh, yeah. 

Brooke: I heard Hilary Mantel, before she died, was working on a Jane Austen compilation novel of various— And everyone was like, “Oh, I wish I could read that!” I mean, I would have read that, too. It sounds really great. But at the same time, I think the more people know, the more they’re going to be able to separate between fantasy and history. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I was so excited. Honestly, I was thinking about the Queen Charlotte thing, and I saw something you tweeted, and I was just like, “Could I ever get her on my podcast?” And you agreed, and I was so excited! [laughs] 

Brooke: [laughs] Yeah, no, this was great. It was really fun. 

Ann: Yeah. Thank you so much! 

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Honestly, I learned so much. I learned so much talking with both Stacey Murrell, Dr. Brooke Newman. Thanks again to both of them for taking the time to just teach things to me and to all of you as well, because this conversation, it’s really interesting and it’s not a simple thing to talk about. It’s not as easy as: Was she Black? Yes or no? As you heard in this hour-plus episode, there’s so much nuance to this, the connotations it has to the contemporary royal family. I think this episode is coming out the same day as Queen Charlotte, the Bridgerton series, is on Netflix. I was trying to time it to that just because I would imagine people would be especially interested in Queen Charlotte at this point in time. 

And then, next week, so this Wednesday coming up, I’m going to have another episode, like a traditional Vulgar History episode about Queen Charlotte herself, her life and times, what was it like? But I really didn’t want to do that without getting into this discussion of her race, and I wanted to give this the time and the nuance and the expertise that it deserves. 

So, both Stacey and Brooke are on Twitter, and I’ll put their handles in the show notes as well. I’ll also put a link to both of their academic websites if you’re looking for an expert to consult about these things. Clearly, they both are top of the game to talk about these sorts of issues. I’m going to also put a link in the show notes to get to the, and I’ll share it on social media as well, to Stacey Murrell’s YouTube presentation about, if you want to get even more into the Madragana of it all. 

So yeah, this was a special investigative report of Vulgar History, I’m just here facilitating, really. I’m just letting them explain all these things to me and also to you. You can keep up with this podcast; I’m on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod, I’m on TikTok @VulgarHistory. I have the new and improved merch store. If you go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, you can see all that stuff there. We’ve got… I’m slowly incorporating merch back in. There was so much in the previous merch store. Now I’m having a more curated selection of things. All of the art in there is done by real human artists who I have compensated to make these designs. There’s T-shirts and mugs, I think there’s phone cases and stickers. Lots of stuff there. So, if you go to vulgarHistory.com/Store, it’ll take you over to my cute, new TeePublic store. 

I also have a Patreon, which is at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, if you want to help financially support this podcast. I appreciate it, and that really… It’s a really fun community, it’s a fun place. When you join the Patreon for at least a dollar a month, you get early, ad-free access to all the episodes of Vulgar History, and we have nice little chats about the episodes there before they come out to everybody, so I can sort of get a sense already of what the reaction might be. 

But also, if you join the Patreon for at least five dollars or more a month, then you can get access to Patreon-specific special bonus podcast episodes, like Vulgarpiece Theatre, where I’m joined by Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson to talk about costume dramas. Those episodes are, like, three and a half hours long. I don’t think we’ve had an episode of Vulgarpiece Theatre that was not itself longer than the movie being discussed; they are wide-ranging conversations. And then also, I do episodes there about every month or so, called So This Asshole… where I talk about men from history, most of whom are terrible, some of whom are okay. I also just did a non-asshole discussion, so I had Allison Epstein on, and we were talking about bushranger, who are Australian, kind of cowboys, kind of highwaymen. That’s just called So These Guys. So, I don’t know, just things that I want to talk about that don’t fit in the schedule, the publication schedule for Vulgar History, the OG podcast. 

Anyway, thank you all for listening. If and when you watch the new Queen Charlotte series, let me know what you think about it, and let me know what you think about this discussion, this investigative report. Thank you so much for listening, and keep your pants on and your tits out.

Vulgar History is hosted, researched, and written by Ann Foster, and edited by Cristina Lumague. 

References:

Learn more about Stacey Murrell and her work

YouTube video of Stacey’s presentation on Madragana (her part is from 1:00:15 to 1:26:46)

Follow Stacey on Twitter @theamyrlinseat

Dr. Brooke Newman is an Associate Professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with a current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family.

Learn more about Dr. Newman and her work

Follow Dr. Newman on Twitter @DrBrookeNewman

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