Nina Metz | Chicago Tribune
Few TV producers draw mass audiences as reliably as Shonda Rhimes, who correctly predicted Julia Quinn’s Regency-era “Bridgerton” romance novels would appeal to millions. Building off that success, Rhimes’ latest effort for Netflix is a prequel series that takes place several decades prior to the events of the books. This time, though, the central character isn’t fictional but very much part of the historical record.
“Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story” looks at the queen’s “rise to prominence and power,” with her 1761 marriage as a teenager to King George. As with the first two seasons of “Bridgerton,” it features a likable ensemble cast that generates smoldering earnestness with a soupcon of camp. There’s real chemistry between the central pair. The settings are opulent and vivid. I suspect anyone who has enjoyed “Bridgerton” so far will find many of the same pleasures herein.
But both series sidestep a glaring reality: The significant links to slavery among Britain’s wealthy and elite.
One of Rhimes’ primary changes to the books has been to diversify the cast of characters. That includes casting Queen Charlotte as a Black woman, played by Golda Rosheuvel in middle age and India Amarteifio as the younger queen (both appear in the new series), and that choice is a nod to some theories about the real Charlotte’s family tree. Though she was German, it’s believed she was descended from a Black branch of the Portuguese royal family, several generations removed.
Rhimes has taken this suggestion and made it overt: What if Great Britain had a queen not only with distant Black ancestry, but who was Black herself?
I understand the appeal. The premise imagines an alternate reality that chips away at white supremacy. A win for representation and inclusive storytelling, in the words of the cast in the lead-up to the premiere. It’s tough to talk about the more complicated reality in sound bites. But complicated, it is. The real British royal family has a long and brutal history — and present-day wealth — tied to the enslavement of Black people, which is at odds with “Queen Charlotte’s” version of the monarchy.
Rhimes has an answer for that. The show is “not a history lesson,” we are informed at the top of the first episode. “It is fiction inspired by fact. All liberties taken by the author are quite intentional.”
Fair enough. And yet …
Kristen Warner is a professor at Cornell University who studies race and representation in TV and film. “On one level, I fully understand and empathize with writers who are not trying to educate or not trying to teach an audience about anything,” she said.
“But I also think that disclaimer is highly disingenuous for two reasons. One, because television implicitly or not, meaningfully or not, intentionally or not, teaches us things. We are informed by what we watch. We learn about things — about people, about cultures, about history — from watching television. That’s been true from its inception.
“And the second thing is, we’re living in a moment where the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how chattel slavery actually operated, are being removed from textbooks and removed from the curriculum in certain places, by law.
“So I wonder — by saying ‘this is not a history lesson’ and asking audiences to not think about what is happening in the British Empire — if the show is unintentionally becoming strange bedfellows with the very people who don’t want the history of enslavement taught in schools.”
Audiences are smart enough to hold two competing ideas in their head. So let’s look at the history.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, “the history of Kensington Palace, the home of a succession of monarchs, and more recently the Prince and Princess of Wales, is uncomfortably entwined with the monarchy’s involvement in slavery.” A previously unseen document from 1869 was recently discovered that shows King William III received £1,000 of shares in the slave-trading Royal African Company. That’s as direct as it gets.
“Across almost three centuries, 12 British monarchs sponsored, supported or profited from Britain’s involvement in slavery,” the Guardian reported. In the lead up to King Charles’ coronation, the paper has run a series of stories under the heading “Cost of the Crown” and they are not only an investigation into the finances and private wealth of the British royal family, but also “the vast apparatus of secrecy that obscures these from the public.”
As Warner points out, one could question whether, intentionally or not, a show like “Queen Charlotte” is working in concert with that vast apparatus.
George and Charlotte had 15 children together. Their son William (who would later become king in 1830) was a vocal defender of slavery while still a prince. He claimed abolitionists had “grossly misrepresented the mistreatment of enslaved men and women in the British sugar colonies,” according to documents in the Royal Archives and Royal Library.
What about Charlotte herself? A blog from the Library of Congress had this to say:
“The marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle led to speculation about whether or not Queen Charlotte had an African ancestor. Did she? The jury is still out. She did not, in any case, choose to identify with people of African descent or with the plight of the enslaved in Britain’s colonies.”
Here’s what we know, according to Library of Congress documents:
“In 1788, as Britain’s abolitionist movement gained steam, Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had been stolen as a child in Africa, pleaded with the Queen: ‘I supplicate your Majesty’s compassion for millions of my African countrymen, who groan under the lash of tyranny in the West Indies.’
“Her response? Silence.”
That doesn’t feel like a win for anything, representation or otherwise, no matter how smoothly “Queen Charlotte” avoids this inconvenient truth about its title character.
The slave trade was abolished in 1807 during King George’s reign. And yet the exploitation didn’t end there. The blood money had already been amassed into fortunes and palatial estates, and many of Britain’s wealthiest still maintained plantations in the Caribbean that profited from enslaved labor.
The truth is ugly. “Queen Charlotte” has romanticized it instead, and it’s no coincidence that Netflix chose to premiere the series two days before the real life coronation of King Charles, even as the British monarchy has come under increased scrutiny. When Prince William insisted to a cluster of journalists that “we are very much not a racist family,” as he did in 2021, that’s a public relations problem no amount of manufactured glamour can obscure.
Charles has been facing down a negative press cycle since the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth, in September, and historians are making explicit connections between the monarchy’s whitewashed portrayal in TV and film and how this works to erase the realities of colonial racism and violence.
Where does “Queen Charlotte” fit into that?
The show glancingly and very delicately acknowledges that Britain’s aristos are resistant to accepting a Black queen, along with the elevation of other Black families to their social circle. The characters themselves refer to this shift as “the great experiment” and the new Black members of high society soon find it’s a precarious position they occupy. But their concern is devoid of context. Even in private, no one comments on the dicey source of everyone’s riches.
Consider a moment early on when Charlotte first arrives from Germany. The king’s mother gives her a once over and insists on inspecting her teeth. It’s a subtle allusion to the way enslaved people were assessed at auction. Is the subtext intentional? Maybe. But the show has nothing to say about it — Charlotte is disturbed but seems entirely unaware of the implications — and it’s gone in a flash.
“Bridgerton” and “Queen Charlotte” exist as crinoline-lined fantasies. And yet neither shy away from other unpleasant realities, including the ways in which women lacked full agency over their lives in this period. “Shonda Rhimes is very comfortable talking about gender inequality,” said Cornell’s Warner. Nor does “Queen Charlotte” avoid staging a number of barbaric mental health “treatments” inflicted upon King George. “She’s picking and choosing what she finds comfortable and what she finds resistant to the fantasy,” said Warner.
I’ve always thought “Bridgerton” could have avoided these issues if it took a cue from “Game of Thrones” and invented a fictional setting from scratch. Warner agrees. “If you want to create a world that is analogous to Regency England, build that world — but don’t call it Britain! Create the world that you wish to see. But don’t use the real world and then act like, if people check you for it, well, you’re not a history teacher.”
Warner calls these projects “fantasy with a candy coating of history.
“I wrote a piece last year about ‘Bridgerton’ asking: Can a show encapsulate both fantasy and the legacies of imperialism and colonization? And a lot of women of color and Black women in particular were like: I just don’t want to think about it. So I understand that.
“But at the same time, you can never remove yourself from this conversation. And when you do, bad things happen.”
(Nina Metz is a Chicago Tribune critic who covers TV and film.)
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