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Few television producers attract as reliable an audience as Shonda Rhimes, who correctly predicted that Julia Quinn’s Regency-era Bridgerton romance novels would draw millions. Building on that success, Rhimes’ latest effort for Netflix is a prequel series that takes place decades before the events of the books. This time, however, the central character is not fictional but is part of the historical record.
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story watches queens rise to prominence and power, with her 1761 marriage as a teenager to King George. As with Bridgerton’s first two seasons, it features a likeable ensemble cast that generates a smoldering seriousness with a hint of campiness. There is real chemistry between the central pair. The decors are opulent and lively. I suspect anyone who has enjoyed Bridgerton thus far will find many of the same pleasures here.
But both series avoid a glaring reality: the significant links to slavery among Britain’s wealthy and elite.
One of Rhimes’ major changes in Quinn’s books was to diversify the cast of characters. That includes casting Queen Charlotte as a black woman, played by middle-aged Golda Rosheuvel, and India Amarteifio as a young queen (both appear in the new series), and that choice is a snap. to certain theories about the true family tree of the Charlottes. Although she is German, it is believed that she is descended from a black branch of the Portuguese royal family, several generations further back.
Rhimes took that suggestion and made it open-ended: what if Britain had a queen not only with distant black ancestry, but who was black herself?
I understand the call. The premise imagines an alternate reality that erodes white supremacy. A win for representation and inclusive storytelling, in the words of the cast ahead of the premiere. It’s hard to talk about the more complicated reality in the sound bites. But complicated, it is. The real British royal family has a long and brutal history and current wealth linked to black slavery, which is at odds with Queen Charlotte’s version of the monarchy.
Rhimes has an answer to that. The show is not a history lesson, we are told at the top of the first episode. It is fiction based on fact. All liberties taken by the author are entirely intentional.
Fair enough. And even
Kristen Warner is a professor at the University of Alabama who studies race and representation in television and film. On some level, I completely understand and sympathize with writers who don’t try to educate or teach an audience anything, she said.
But I also think this disclaimer is very dishonest for two reasons. First, because television, implicitly or not, significantly or not, intentionally or not, teaches us things. We are informed by what we watch. We learn about people, about cultures, about history by watching television. This has been true since its inception.
And the second thing is that we are living in a time when the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the actual workings of chattel slavery are being taken out of textbooks and removed from the school curriculum in some places, by law.
So I wonder saying this isn’t a history lesson and asking the audience not to think about what’s going on in the British Empire if the show unwittingly becomes strange bedfellows with the people who do not want the history of slavery to be taught in schools.
The public is smart enough to have two competing ideas in mind. So let’s look at the story.
According to British newspaper The Guardian, the history of Kensington Palace, seat of a succession of monarchs, and more recently the Prince and Princess of Wales, is uncomfortably linked to the monarchy’s involvement in slavery. An unpublished document from 1869 has recently been discovered which shows that King William III received 1,000 shares of the Royal African Slave Trade Company. It’s as direct as possible.
Over nearly three centuries, 12 British monarchs have sponsored, supported or profited from Britain’s involvement in slavery, the Guardian reported. In the lead up to the coronation of King Charles, the newspaper has published a series of stories under the title Cost of the Crown which are not just an investigation into the finances and private wealth of the British Royal Family, but the vast apparatus of secret that obscures these from the public.
As Warner points out, one might wonder whether, intentionally or not, a show like Queen Charlotte works in concert with this vast apparatus.
George and Charlotte had 15 children together. Their son William (later to become king in 1830) was a strong proponent of slavery while still a prince. He claimed abolitionists had grossly misrepresented the mistreatment of enslaved men and women in Britain’s sugar colonies, according to documents from the Royal Archives and the Royal Library.
And Charlotte herself? A blog from the Library of Congress had this to say:
Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle has led to speculation as to whether or not Queen Charlotte had an African ancestor. Has she? The jury is still out. In no way did she choose to identify with people of African descent or the plight of slaves in the British colonies.
Here’s what we know, according to the Library of Congress documents:
In 1788, as Britain’s abolitionist movement was gaining momentum, Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had been stolen as a child in Africa, pleaded with the Queen: I beg Your Majesty’s compassion for millions of my fellow Africans, who groan under the whip of tyranny. in the West Indies.
His answer ? Silence.
It doesn’t look like a win for anything, performance or otherwise, no matter how easily Queen Charlotte avoids this awkward truth about her title character.
The slave trade was abolished in 1807 during the reign of King George. And yet the exploitation did not stop there. Blood money had already been amassed in lavish fortunes and estates, and many of the wealthiest Britons still maintained plantations in the Caribbean that profited from slave labor.
The truth is ugly. Queen Charlotte fictionalized it instead, and it’s no coincidence that Netflix chose to premiere the series two days before the actual coronation of King Charles, even as the real-world British monarchy comes under scrutiny. increased surveillance. When Prince William insisted to a group of reporters that we really aren’t a racist family, as he did in 2021, it’s a PR issue that no manufactured glamor can obscure.
Charles has faced a negative press cycle since the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth, in September. Historians have drawn explicit connections between the whitewashed portrayal of the monarchy on TV and film and how it works to erase the realities of racism and colonial violence.
What is Queen Charlotte’s place in this?
The show acknowledges at a glance and very delicately that British aristocrats are reluctant to accept a black queen, as well as the elevation of other black families into their social circle. The characters themselves refer to this change as the Grand Experiment, and the new black members of high society soon find it a precarious position they occupy. But their concern is devoid of context. Even in private, no one comments on the risky source of everyone’s wealth.
Consider a moment early on when Charlotte first arrives from Germany. The king’s mother gives him one more time and insists on inspecting his teeth. It’s a subtle allusion to how slaves were valued at auction. Is the subtext intentional? Maybe. But the show has nothing to say about it Charlotte is disturbed but seems totally unaware of the implications and it’s gone in a flash.
Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte exist as crinoline-lined fantasies. And yet, neither fears other unpleasant realities, including how women lacked agency in their lives at that time. Shonda Rhimes is very comfortable talking about gender inequality, the University of Alabamas Warner said. Queen Charlotte also doesn’t shy away from staging a number of barbaric mental health treatments inflicted on King George. She picks and chooses what she finds comfortable and what she finds fantasy-resistant, Warner said.
I always thought Bridgerton could have avoided these issues if he had taken inspiration from Game of Thrones and invented a fictional setting from scratch. Warner agrees. If you want to create a world analogous to Regency England, build that world but don’t call it Britain! Create the world you want to see. But don’t use the real world and then act like people are checking you out, well, you’re not a history teacher.
Warner calls these fantastic projects with a sweet layer of history.
I wrote an article last year on Bridgerton asking: can a series encapsulate both the fantasy and the legacy of imperialism and colonization? And a lot of women of color and black women in particular were saying, I just don’t want to think about it. So I understand that.
But at the same time, you can never back out of this conversation. And when you do, bad things happen.
Nina Metz is a critic at the Tribune
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