Many Shiny Things! And A Few Curious Facts!
Being a bunch of thoughts and links in re: ‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story‘
But first a few random things that I might otherwise, given a healthy Twitterverse, have simply tweeted:
Y’all, the new Spider-Man movie is as good as you’ve heard. Maybe better.
Today I learned that I am three years younger than Keanu Reeves. This troubles me chiefly because I definitely cannot do my own stunts.
When you need a mental-health moment: This NYT column offers a few easy-to-incorporate suggestions for activities that can help you recharge and reset. Me, I personally recommend horseback riding if you’re lucky enough to have access. Or maybe just volunteer to muck stables or groom a nice low-drama mare at a local horse-related nonprofit. Just being around the beasts can be a tonic for the soul.
And now for the main event
Corey Mylchreest, left, and India Amarteifio play George III of England and his consort Queen Charlotte in the Shondaland/Netflix series ‘Queen Charlotte.’ More on which in a minute. Photo: Nick Wall/Netflix
A colleague I admire argues pretty firmly that there are no guilty pleasures — only things that please us, in ways that are quite real and shouldn’t be apologized for. I generally agree, which is what makes me want to unpack a few things now that I’ve finally gotten around to finishing Netflix’s Queen Charlotte, the impossibly glossy, agreeably heartwarming sister show to the streamer’s jewel-toned Regency romance Bridgerton.
This isn’t an essay, which I hope will come as a relief. It’s mostly just some stuff I’ve been thinking about and reading. There will be bullet points, and they may or may not support each other.
But first: If somehow you haven’t been made aware, Queen Charlotte is a prequel to the events in Bridgerton’s two extant seasons, in which various members of high London society navigate the English aristocracy’s intricately ritualized annual marriage market circa 1813, all under the knowing (and judging) eye of, well, Queen Charlotte — tastemaker, wig-wearer, formidable longtime consort to George III. (Yes, that George III. The one from Hamilton and American History 101 and The Madness of King George, more on which in a bit.) Queen Charlotte, set in roughly 1761, is the story of how the great lady got from her youth as a minor German princess into her major-league royal groove.
More precisely, it’s a story: Netflix and show creator Shonda Rhimes have been super-clear that they’re not making a documentary here. They even begin with a disclaimer: The prequel series is “not a history lesson. It is fiction inspired by fact.”
And the most obvious fictional fact about both Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton is that their shared world is populated by an upper crust that’s anything but all-white-bread English: Black and brown and Asian aristocrats mingle with paler peers at George and Charlotte’s court and vie for dominance on the London social scene. Charlotte herself is played by the Guyanese-British actor Golda Rosheuvel (and as her younger self by India Amarteifio, a Brit with Ghanaian and German ancestry). It’s a glittering fantasy of a fairer world, inspired by cherry-picked historical truths — a fantasy that brushes up against but never deeply engages the realities of the British Empire that George and Charlotte ruled.
Golda Rosheuvel as the mature Queen Charlotte; the wigs get more formidable as the show outlines the personal and political bulwarks she’s obliged to build. Photo: Liam Daniel/Netflix
Which is great! I love me an alternative history! Escapism rules! Candy-colored soirées where rainbow-hued rich people waltz to faux-classicalized pop songs are totally things that might exist in the multiverse, and I would be there for them!
Now, there’s been plenty written about the questions of race and class and exploitation as depicted in these two shows. And at this point, a 55-year-old queer white dude from the Deep South hardly needs to be heard on the matter. (He is content to encourage you to enjoy this conversation with actor Arsema Thomas, who plays the younger version of a character pivotal to both shows. Not least for the reading list.)
I am, however, intrigued by the way Queen Charlotte’s portrait of a young King George III dovetails with recent scholarship on the actual monarch — and how firmly its depiction of an intelligent, engaged queen consort and her deeply loving relationship with the king hews to history.
I’ve also been noodling a bit on the way biographers and political commentators have treated George’s mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta, and the parliamentarian Lord Bute, as opposed to how Rhimes and her show’s writers handle them for the purposes of dramatic tension.
With that, the promised bullets:
George wasn’t really that awkward around his people. At least not when he was younger — which is the time Queen Charlotte mostly examines. Even after his coronation, he was known (as was his father, who’d been a regular at his local pubs) to go walkabout incognito like an 18th-century Undercover Boss. And not just occasionally: “[T]he basic pattern and sheer volume of these stories about George all tend to show a kindly monarch who was at ease among his people, was delighted by the opportunity of not being recognized and took pleasure in being generous,” writes the prominent (if conservative and occasionally problematic) historian Andrew Roberts in his sprawling biography The Last King of America, which draws on a massive trove of Georgian papers that became available online in 2017.
His mother didn’t choose Charlotte to be his queen, nor did she arm-twist him into marriage. In fact, George knew his duty, drew up his own shortlist, and eventually picked Charlotte from it himself.
He may well have been a better fellow than we’ve been led to believe. More cultured. And smarter. George III collected fine art, built an enormous library, and patronized Handel. And he wrote long essays on everything from philosophy to politics to advanced agricultural theory and practice. Roberts argues that George was actually kind of a broad-minded fellow, keen on the idea of popular freedoms and profoundly influenced by the Viscount Bolingbroke’s tract The Idea of a Patriot King. The “tyrant” and “Royal Brute” depicted by American revolutionaries — most memorably in the Declaration of Independence — was a politically useful fiction, Roberts writes, or at least a knowing strategic exaggeration informed in large part by the king’s political enemies in London, not just the facts on the ground in the colonies.
He almost certainly didn’t suffer from porphyria. He did pee blue, probably because he took an herbal medicine derived from the gentian flower. But modern researchers — and this is the part I find fascinating, as a word nerd — have dug into how he used language, contrasting letters written when he was well with those written when he was ill. Their findings suggest behaviors consistent with bipolar disorder. (“A sentence containing 400 words and eight verbs was not unusual. … [A]t the same time his vocabulary became much more complex, creative and colourful,” notes this essay for the BBC.) That the king’s bouts of “madness” might have been part of a psychological condition we’d recognize and treat compassionately nowadays is a thread of medico-historical theory with which Queen Charlotte weaves especially gently and well: The show’s picture of an inquisitive mind overcome by its own busyness is genuinely affecting — especially considering the real George and Charlotte’s personal fascinations with the natural sciences.
He didn’t hide his illness from his bride. George’s first recorded bout of illness came in 1765, four years after Charlotte married him, and it was relatively mild. (Though both he and Parliament were concerned enough to make legal plans for a regency in case of his incapacitation.) It wasn’t until 1788 that he became desperately ill; by 1810 he was permanently incapacitated.
His mother wasn’t the power behind his throne. “No petticoat ever governed less,” said the wit Horace Walpole of the Dowager Princess, before he got annoyed with Lord Bute over something else and flip-flopped on the topic. What he meant, in his earlier and probably more honest assessment, was that Augusta wasn’t in fact the bossy, string-pulling Machiavellian portrayed by the political opposition (and embodied in Queen Charlotte with an eminently pleasing tartness by Game of Thrones veteran Michelle Fairley). Walpole and many others would go on to gossip nastily about a supposed affair between the princess and the sometime prime minister, but it was probably more political smear than anything, and not every modern historian is convinced.
Lord Bute and Princess Augusta weren’t quite the antagonists we see in Queen Charlotte. In fact Bute was young George’s tutor and mentor, friendly with his parents, and later his favored prime minister. Nor was Bute a bully, either to George or Augusta — George called him his “dearest friend,” relying heavily on his guidance both before and after ascending the throne. Bute even picked the architect the king employed to renovate Buckingham House as a gift for Charlotte. (Another historical truth that QC employs to substantial dramatic effect.) And as noted above, Bute was close enough for long enough to the king’s mother that London’s wags insisted they were closer than they should be. But a good costume drama like this one needs someone for Augusta (and George and Charlotte) to square off against, so Lord Bute (Richard Cunningham) becomes a pressure point rather than a supportive confidante.
Wait, if she’s the king’s mother, why isn’t Augusta the Dowager Queen? Because her husband Frederick was still only the Prince of Wales when he died at age 44. Not every monarch is born of a queen anyway — consider Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, the granddaughter of George III and Charlotte, but daughter “only” of their fourth son, Edward, and his wife the Princess Victoria. Even Queen Elizabeth II was the daughter of a “mere” royal duchess, who’d actually been a commoner (heavens!) before she married the Duke of York, who’d eventually become George VI. When it comes to Augusta, Queen Charlotte gets the title right. Bonus fun fact: George III was the longest-reigning British monarch until Queen Victoria, who was the longest-reigning British monarch until, yup, Queen Elizabeth II.
The Shondaland fantasia on a multiracial British ton is gratifying in many ways, but the real thing wasn’t nearly as diverse. One statistic records there were 20,000 people of African heritage in Georgian England, most of them in some form of domestic or military service — or slavery. There were notable exceptions, though: Do please check out the film Belle, if you haven’t. It stars the terrifically gifted Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and it’s based on the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose life gets this helpful precis at the English Heritage site. And while he was probably of “passing” complexion, and it’s unclear how many people knew about his African grandmother Catherine Phipps, James Townsend, MP was eventually both Lord Mayor of London — during George and Charlotte’s reign — and the lord of the manor at Bruce Castle in Tottenham.
Queen Charlotte may or may not have “looked Black.” For the sake of this show, that hardly matters. This ‘90s-vintage explainer from PBS’s Frontline was written by the historian who’s primarily cited as advancing the case for a British queen with “Moorish” roots and “conspicuously African” features. A more recent essay from Smithsonian magazine shares other historians’ doubts and supplies more context. But I think the facts of the case — while they certainly matter to history and our understanding of Georgian England, to say nothing of the German principalities of the era — don’t matter for the sake of this show because, to circle back to the beginning, it’s an exercise in imagination. (George and Charlotte didn’t dine lavishly when they were home alone, for instance; they kept a modest kitchen. In fact as a general rule, they saved their displays of British wealth and power for public consumption.) And look, we need these kinds of hopeful, aspirational imaginings of societies and eras to which we at least partly owe our own characters. (See also the 2022 film of Persuasion, which presents a multiracial Regency Britain without commenting on it in the ways Queen Charlotte does, and the recent remake of The Little Mermaid, in which the Caribbean setting provides a frame for an island ruled by a Black queen — and King Triton’s command of all the oceans makes perfect fairy-tale sense of his multiracial array of daughters.) (See also also, this meditation on Mary Tyler Moore and her substantially more feminist alter ego, Mary Richards; our stories can successfully champion progressive ideals, it argues, even when the people behind them aren’t as bold or transgressive.)
George and Charlotte really did love each other like that. At least until his illness robbed them of their closeness. I think that’s what I enjoyed most about watching Queen Charlotte. For the most part a brittle, even waspish character in Bridgerton, Charlotte gets her human due in the prequel. We get to watch her fall in love with the man she’s essentially been sold to. We get to watch him fall just as much in love with her. So it’s nice to know that the real king and queen were a solid couple. They hit the town together! They entertained themselves with musical duets! They made 15 babies! They both loved the fine arts, had compatible views on religion, and enjoyed decorating their homes together, according to Andrew Roberts: “It became a genuine love match because [George] adored everything about his wife except her addiction to snuff.” And the novelist Fanny Burney, part of Charlotte’s court for a while, “found that the King was all fondness and tactile affection for the Queen, giving her frequent pecks on the cheek.”
A final observation: While I absolutely wallowed in the lavishness (and the emotional tides) of Queen Charlotte, I’m conscious that there’s something gross about the way enormous corporate entertainment factories keep churning out diversions that almost seem designed to make us sympathize with the misfortunes of enormously wealthy and powerful people who presided over some of our ugliest history. Netflix alone has served up not just Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte, but The Crown and The Empress and Young Royals and more.
And I’m honestly not sure how to feel about that. I mean yeah, on the one hand, gross. On the other hand, Shakespeare got rich doing the same thing.
Maybe the frame is less important than the portrait that gets painted in it? Maybe the ways these shows handle tough sociopolitical questions can (slowly, gradually) make a difference?
Maybe y’all have some thoughts?