![]() He argues that her features, as seen in royal portraits, were conspicuously African, and contends that they were noted by numerous contemporaries. ![]() If you google Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, you'll quickly come across a historian called Mario de Valdes y Cocom. 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. Only later was it realised that the sculpture actually depicted Charlotte and the square renamed Queen Square. 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. "One courtier once said of Charlotte late in life: 'Her Majesty's ugliness has quite faded.' There was quite a miaow factor at court."Ĭharlotte's name was given to thoroughfares throughout Georgian Britain - most notably Charlotte Square in Edinburgh's New Town - but her lack of resonance and glamour in the minds of Londoners is typified by the fact that there is a little square in Bloomsbury called Queen's Square. "She was famously ugly," says Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen's pictures. Even her physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, reportedly described the elderly queen as "small and crooked, with a true mulatto face". In the opening of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities she is dismissed in the second paragraph: "There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England." Historian John H Plumb described her as "plain and undesirable". Here, Charlotte is a woman who hasn't so much intrigued as been regularly damned. We have forgotten or perhaps never knew that she founded Kew Gardens, that she bore 15 children (13 of whom survived to adulthood), and that she was a patron of the arts who may have commissioned Mozart. ![]() If she is known at all here, it is from her depiction in Alan Bennett's play as the wife of "mad" King George III. Yet Charlotte (1744-1818) has much less resonance in the land where she was actually queen. "As a woman, an immigrant, a person who may have had African forebears, botanist, a queen who opposed slavery - she speaks to Americans, especially in a city in the south like Charlotte that is trying to redefine itself." "We think your queen speaks to us on lots of levels," says Cheryl Palmer, director of education at the Mint museum.
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