Home Page


Thursday, March 12, 2009

We Know That America Now Has A President of Color But Did The UK Ever Have A Black Queen-Exploring Queen Charlotte



How I find this stuff remains a mystery.....is it divine happenstance or incessant googling-probably a little bit of both! Anyway, let's keep it simple-Britain's Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (wife of George III) was reputed to possess "mulatto features" and that contention just has not gone away in the annals of history. The Libertarian presidential nominee in the 2008 election, Bob Barr comes to mind-I'm just sayin.' We thought Carol Channing looked a little suspect and we all saw how that turned out. My blackdar (rule of thumb, when you have to ask about one's Black identity..that answers the question) very rarely fails me. But back to the story at hand. Here's an excerpt from Buzzle.com on the Queen Charlotte supposition:

Charlotte's name was given to thoroughfares throughout Georgian Britain - most notably Charlotte Square in Edinburgh's New Town - but her lack of resonance and glamor in the minds of Londoners is typified by the fact that there is a little square in Bloomsbury called Queen's Square. In the middle is a sculpture of a queen. For much of the 19th century, the sculpture was thought to depict Queen Anne and, as a result, the square was known as Queen Anne's Square. Only later was it realized that the sculpture actually depicted Charlotte and the square renamed Queen Square.

Hold on, you might be saying. Britain has had a black queen? Did I miss something? Surely Helen Mirren played Charlotte in the film The Madness of King George and she was, last time I looked, white? Yet the theory that Queen Charlotte may have been black, albeit sketchy, is nonetheless one that is gaining currency.

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

It is a great "what if" of history. "If she was black," says the historian Kate Williams, "this raises a lot of important suggestions about not only our royal family but those of most of Europe, considering that Queen Victoria's descendants are spread across most of the royal families of Europe and beyond. If we class Charlotte as black, then ergo Queen Victoria and our entire royal family, [down] to Prince Harry, are also black ... a very interesting concept."

That said, Williams and many other historians are very sceptical about Valdes's theory. They argue the generational distance between Charlotte and her presumed African forebear is so great as to make the suggestion ridiculous. Furthermore, they say even the evidence that Madragana was black is thin.

But Valdes suggests that the way Queen Charlotte is depicted in Ramsay's 1762 portrait - which US artist Ken Aptekar is now using as the starting point for a new art project called Charlotte's Charlotte - supports the view she had African ancestors.

Valdes writes: "Artists of that period were expected to play down, soften or even obliterate undesirable features in a subject's face. [But] Sir Allan Ramsay was the artist responsible for the majority of the paintings of the queen, and his representations of her were the most decidedly African of all her portraits."


For more of the Buzzle piece, click on the link below:

Was This Britain's First Black Queen?

And then there's Wiki's take on the Queen Charlotte debate:

Wikipedia-Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

No comments: