The Contemporary Controversy
The recent portrayals of Queen Charlotte in popular shows like Bridgerton have caused quite a stir. For many viewers, depicting an eighteenth-century British queen as a woman of colour felt like yet another woke attempt to rewrite European history.
After all, isn’t the royal lineage supposed to be the last untouched bastion of whiteness?But what if it isn’t? What if the idea that Europe and its monarchies were exclusively pale,uniformly white, and unchanging is itself a modern myth?
Today, we are going to look at Queen Charlotte as you have seen her, but perhaps never truly considered her. In contrast to the doctored and publicised porcelain doll, we reveal a woman whose ancestry, appearance, and reception in England point to something far more complex, exotic, and interesting.
This is the true face of England’s mulatto queen. And at the end of this documentary, I will reveal a reconstruction of Queen Charlotte that I believe reflects the most likely interpretation of the evidence we
actually have.
Let us begin.
Arrival in England and Early Impressions
When Charlotte arrived in England in 1761, seventeen years old, nervous and far from home, she was met with thousands of eager onlookers. And what they saw was someone who was not in step with our modern understanding of a modern-era princess.
There are only a couple of literary descriptions of the queen that were contemporaneous to her life. These descriptions should provide us with an objective view of how the queen was perceived by her peers. One of these observers was Horace Walpole, the fourth Earl of Orford.
In volume five of his letters, published between 1760 and 1764, he described her as pale and very thin. “Her hair is darkish and fine, her forehead low. Her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide. Her mouth also has the same fault,” that is spreading too wide.
According to another observer, Charlotte also had a most agreeable countenance without being ravishingly beautiful. Lord Harcourt, sent by George III to collect her from her childhood home, describes her very pretty eyes, but comments that she is no regular beauty. However, she had her charms, including white and even teeth.
The “Mulatto” Description
Another contemporary observer, Baron Stockmar, recorded his visualisation in his memoirs. He was unequivocal in his poignant but brief analysis, describing her as small and crooked with a true mulatto face. Mulatto being a term which, in the eighteenth century, was reserved for individuals of mixed ancestry.
Regarding the same word mulatto, which has been falsely associated with the word mule, historian J. A. Rogers provides us with the true etymology of the term. He states, “Mylitta, queen of the gods, was originally Assyrian, also worshipped in Greece, was black and associated with miscegenation. From her comes the word mulatto.“
From these eyewitness accounts, we can summise a light-skinned individual with broad facial features, which presented to onlookers as mixed race, a description that I am sure some may find surprising.
However, as we will go on to discuss, this phenotype would have been more common than we are led to think, particularly for the Iberian and Germanic aristocratic ancestry from which she hailed.
Literary and Poetic Associations
The historian Mario de Valdes later noted that multiple eyewitnesses remarked on her African-looking features. Even more intriguing is a coronation poem referencing her Moorish origins, citing the Numidian plains and Andalusian fields their name retains.
Together, the literature suggests the rumours of the partial Africanity of her appearance are not a modern revisionist conjecture, but an association that followed her throughout her life, which raises a question. Was Queen Charlotte’s mixed appearance ever a matter of controversy based on racial epithets alone?
More importantly, why is it considered a matter of controversy for modern historians and commentators? Are we projecting racial ideals that were perhaps less present in continental Europe during this time?
The Politics of Royal Portraiture
To understand the visual record of Queen Charlotte, we must remember that royal portraiture continues to be extremely political. Since the eighteenth century, portrait painters have often followed the protocol to soften or correct features, to default toward whiteness, and to mute aesthetics that might provoke public commentary.
With royalty, whose images circulate globally, this pressure was enormous. Painters like Thomas Lawrence produced softened, smoothed, and visibly whitened images that are still widely reproduced today. And with every iteration, the sitter moves further from the reality of their appearance.
The anachronistic interpretation of what the artist believes should have been replaces what observably was.
For an example, one can look at the royals.org reinterpretation of the Allan Ramsay portrait of the queen. The visible diluting of her original appearance is a sad testament to a two-hundred-plus-year unbroken trend.
Allan Ramsay and Unsoftened Depictions
But Allan Ramsay, the artist responsible for the majority of her early portraits, was a man known to paint his subjects with greater honesty. It is his portraits that show Charlotte with fuller lips, observably kinky textured hair, heavier eyelids, and the distinct broader nose shape that so many observers described. It seems that Ramsay’s artworks retained details that were either later or contemporaneously sanitised by artists who were given the direct instruction to whiten the appearance of the monarch.
However, was her appearance politically inconvenient to an increasingly racialised empire? Did Ramsay’s honesty quietly challenge Britain’s rapidly forming racial hierarchies?
It is telling that later royal portraiture trends systematically abandoned these features in favour of a paler, smoothed, ideally white queen.
Anomalies and Erasure
During this time, portraits seem to take on porcelain, almost impossibly white complexions. They did not reflect realistic skin tones, but political ideologies.
The anomalies of these revisions are not restricted to skin tones. An abundance of royal portraits, including the queen herself, appear to take on impossibly vertical, often kinky textured upstyles that are simply not replicable even in modern times without the aid of Afro or Afro-mixed genetic contribution.
These are largely written off as artistic hyperbole or entirely ignored by art historians who apparently have decided that no explanation is better than an unsatisfactory one. The presence of these anomalies perhaps provides researchers with a beacon of where the true visages of monarchs and nobles may have been altered.
There is no better example of this unrealistic whitewashing than in the family of Charlotte herself, the Mecklenburgs.
Genealogical Foundations
Phenotype alone can be misleading. So let us turn to the genealogical question, where things get even more compelling.
Queen Charlotte’s family tree traces back to the Portuguese royal houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, specifically to King Alfonso III and his mistress Madragana, a woman consistently described in contemporary sources as a Moor.
Mario de Valdes y Cocom argues that Madragana belonged to a Black or Afro-Islamic lineage and that her descendants, including the noblewoman Margarita de Castro e Sousa, passed that ancestry into the Mecklenburg line.
Charlotte’s parents have often been cited in attempts to debunk claims of a mixed lineage, but claims on both sides are often anachronistic, relying on clearly defined racial binaries which were not the reality of seventeenth-century or indeed modern Europe.
Iberian and Germanic Context
In the early modern era, European noble lineages were deeply imbricated with Moorish and swarthy nobility. In addition to this, the presence of swarthy, brown-toned, mulatto, and veritably ambiguous characters like Charlotte was endemic at all levels of society.
Available portraits of her father, mother, and siblings all bear the peculiar hallmarks of potential whitewashing, otherwise known as softening, seen in the presentation of impossibly vertical hair, hair that is normal for those with Afro ancestry, portrayed alongside impossibly pale skin.
Even if Madragana was not African or Moorish, medieval Iberia covered a wide ethnic spectrum.
Centuries of Moorish occupation had left the population largely mixed between Visigothic and direct African ancestry. Berbers of differing hues, Vandals, melanated Europeans; it was a veritable mixed population shaped by centuries of migration and intermarriage.
Broader European Evidence
This is evidenced in a sixteenth-century painting of Lisbon in which more than half the depicted participants are of Black ethnic stock and seen at all levels of society from beggar to noble.
This is crucial. Southern European nobility was genetically and culturally porous, especially in Portugal, Andalusia, and much of mainland Europe,regions with at least eight centuries of undisputed documented African,Berber, and pan-Mediterranean noble exchange.
What had been normal in her lifetime became unthinkable only a century later. Sadly, this whitewashing continues today, as seen earlier on the royal website, opting to circulate this whitewashed reproduction of the queen in contrast to the delicately brown and kinky-haired portrayal of the original. Rogers writes, “Persecution based on simple difference of colour was extremely rare. Lisbon in the eighteenth century had a higher percentage of Negroes than New York in the twentieth century.”
But Charlotte’s German ancestry is equally as fascinating.
Germanic Black Nobility
One of the oldest and most significant confirmations of Blacks in European nobility can be found in fourteenth-century Bavaria. The Wild Men and the Moors Tapestry details an indisputably black-skinned royal lineage believed to be the Wartbergs defending what is believed to be Wartberg Castle from an invading horde of wild men.
Significantly, this places Black people at the helm of a Germanic monarchy in the Middle Ages.
Her Mecklenburg lineage prominently features heraldic symbols such as the black bull’s head, which is linked by many historians to Moorish influence in medieval German courts. This very symbol is commemorated to this very day in Spain as the Osborne bull. This same bull is ritually slain at the hands of the matador, a practice linked directly to the moors of Iberia in Latro Makia, which recognizes Moors as the first to lance a bull.
Cultural Continuity
Coats of arms across Germanic territories to this day proudly hearken to their once Black nobility with crowned nobles and rulers in the form of Saint Maurice, the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. Such iconography spread widely across medieval Germany.
Charlotte was born into this cultural world, a world where melanated people were integrated, not foreign, not unusual, and not yet erased. They were present and uncontroversially associated with leadership and nobility.
The biggest myth about European history is that it was uniformly white. But many surviving artifacts tell us this perhaps was never the case. African migration into Europe and vice versa was a continuous and unbroken trend of history. The very matriarchs of European myth, Europa and Scotia of Scotland were long understood in classical and medieval imagination as Afroasiatic matriarchs. Whether one considers these fables to be describing genetically literal ancestors or not, the cultural origins that reveal how Europeans once perceived themselves was never devoid of Africa. In this context, the idea that a Portuguese descended German princess in the 18th century might display what we determine to be a mixed phenotype is not implausible. It is both logical and likely.
Whiteness as a Victorian Project
By the nineteenth century, Britain had become heavily invested in imperial whiteness. The Victorian period aggressively recast European history as racially pure, erasing depictions of diversity that earlier centuries had taken for granted.
Queen Charlotte, whose own portraits had once circulated, became just another casualty of this whitening project.
Mainstream historians worked quietly to remove any reference to Black or African ancestry from royal genealogies. And where the evidence of melanated ancestry did exist, it was explained away.
When we combine the eyewitness accounts describing her mulatto face, wide features, and visible Moorish ancestry along with the portrait evidence showing a stark contrast between her unsoftened image, such as the portraits of Ramsay, versus the more widely circulated softened paintings, her confirmed Portuguese Moorish lineage alongside her Mecklenburg German sigil with possible Iberian influence, along with centuries of sustained Afrouropean exchange, the broader historical reality is that Europe was not monolithically white, especially not its continental royal lines. The conclusion being that the reality of Queen Charlotte’s controversial depiction becomes difficult to avoid. Queen Charlotte was a beautiful representation of the complexity of Europe’s mixed history, and she embodied this kaleidoscope of diversity phenotypically, visibly, and culturally. Her depictions, far from being a political fabrication like her later softened portraits, were an 18th-century reality.
The Reconstruction
What you are viewing is a reconstruction which bypasses modern assumptions about European royalty in favour of the descriptions, portraits, cultural context, and ancestry explored today.
A Queen Charlotte with rich but light, even pale brown skin. Her original and regularly referenced full mouth and lips. A nose to match her carefully depicted naturally kinky textured hair and the unmistakable features her contemporaries repeatedly noted.
This is not a reimagining. In my view, it is a restoration.
Conclusion
The question is, why is it so hard for some to accept this as a plausible rendition of this modern-era queen?
It not only compliments her least tampered artworks and descriptions of her appearance, it provides a natural and rational explanation for the oddities in the way she has been presented.
In a less controversial world, this would be considered a logical depiction of one of England’s most iconic queens.
Here is Queen Charlotte, England’s forgotten mulatto queen.
Authored by Andrew King Adedetun
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