Queen Charlotte and the Creation of Bridgerton’s Multiracial Elite

Based on Julia Quinn’s best-selling eight-novel series set between 1813 and 1827, Netflix’s Bridgerton covers the courtship stories of the wealthy white family, the Bridgertons, and their children as they come of age. Season one’s adaptation of the first Bridgerton novel The Duke & I adds new Black characters like Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe), a Black boxer based on the real life of slave-turned-boxing star Bill Richmond. Madame Genevieve Delacroix (Katheryn Drysdale), a dressmaker for London’s high society who pretends to be French in order be taken seriously as a modiste, is another new addition (Fremont). Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (Golda Rosheuvel), the German consort to King George III, is not in the Bridgerton books but appears in season one. She judges the new debutantes and rules over ‘the season,’ an annual series of social events for London’s elite.

Most of the black characters in the first season, however, are Julia Quinn characters cast as Black for the Netflix series. In Shondaland’s Bridgerton, Simon is the Black Duke determined never to marry or have children until he meets Daphne. Marina Thompson (Ruby Barker) is the titleless, mixed-race distant cousin of the Baron and Baroness Featherington. Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh), a woman of wit, command, and influence in London’s high society, rescues Simon from his domineering father and councils him in his love life.

Bridgerton’s romance and multiracial ruling class reflects Shonda Rhimes’ consistent efforts to include, in her words, “people on television who look like me, and…who look like my friends” (Wittmer). Inspired by research on the real Queen Charlotte’s African Islamic ancestry, Bridgerton creator, showrunner, and executive producer Chris Van Dusen wondered, “what that could have looked like. What would this queen have done? Could she have used her power to elevate other people of color in society? Granted them titles? Lands? Dukedoms?” (Lambe).

To answers these questions, Shondaland created an alternative history where Queen Charlotte’s Blackness has elevated some Black Britons to top of social hierarchy known as “the ton” or le bon-ton, those few who lived in what author Jennifer Kloster describes as “the fashionable mode…of extraordinary excess, extravagance and indulgence” (Kloster 2-3). As Lady Danbury tells Simon in the first season’s fourth episode, “We were two separate societies, divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us. Love, your grace, conquers all.”

Shondaland’s Regency London, therefore, is a world where racial identity is not a factor, but does that make for good storytelling?

Fiction v. Reality: A Royal History of Racism and Slave Trading

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There are merits to Bridgerton reimagining the importance of Queen Charlotte’s African ancestry in Georgian-era Britain. While the era is named after the four Hanoverian kings, George I-IV, her prominence in this series challenges 18th and 19th-century dramas focused mostly on white Britons.

Bridgerton is set during a sub-period of that era known as the Regency, when George, the son of Queen Charlotte and the ailing and mentally unfit King George III, rules as prince regent (aka a “proxy ruler”) before he ultimately becomes King George IV (Romeo). Queen Charlottte’s presence as a Black woman who, by royal marriage, has uplifted Black Britons to the elite classes means that the show is providing a previously unrepresented narrative of nineteenth-century Black experiences, one rooted in the era that was a “holiday time for people intent upon promoting the greatest happiness of the smallest number,” according to author Winifred Hughes (Romeo). 

However, the reality of Regency London and the 19^th century Atlantic is more compelling and empowering than Bridgerton’s well-intentioned but misguided alternative history. Bridgerton’s portrayal of aristocratic interracial marriage as a means of achieving racial equality also absolves the reality of the Georgian era. During King George III’s reign, Britain was, according to historian and Bridgerton adviser David Olusoga, “the most prolific slave-trading power in the North Atlantic” (Olusoga 150; Akbar).

The Crown’s support of slavery and the slave trade out of West Africa dates back to the 16th century. From the 1500s-1600s, the European superpowers Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands grew their wealth through trade with West Africa for gold and other natural resources and enslaved Africans (“Reasons for the development of the slave trade”). Eager to elevate a much less powerful England to that status and greater, Queen Elizabeth I sponsored the profitable 1560s expeditions of John Hawkins, English forefather of the English slave trade who trafficked the enslaved from the middle passage to European colonies in the Americas (“Who was John Hawkins?”). She also gifted him a coat of arms picturing a captive, enslaved African for his successful seizure of hundreds of enslaved Africans from the Portuguese (“Hawkins”).

According to the Royal Museum Greenwich, Hawkins’ “four voyages to Sierra Leone between 1564 and 1569 took a total of 1200 Africans across the Atlantic to sell to the Spanish settlers in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola” (“Hawkins”).

The Beginnings of a British Slave Trade

As European powers spread slavery throughout their colonies in the Americas in the 1600s, England invested more in the slave trade. By the middle of the seventeenth century, King Charles II founded the “Royal Adventures into Africa” company, to which he, eager, along with the rest of the royal family, to benefit from the immense profits of the growing trade, then granted a 1000-year monopoly on the British slave trade (“Slavery”). Upon reorganizing and renaming it the Royal African Company in 1672, King Charles declared:

We hereby for us, our heirs and successors grant unto the same Royal African Company of England…that it shall be and may be lawful to…set to sea such as many ships, pinnaces, and barks, as shall thought fitting…for the buying, selling, bartering and exchange of, for or with any gold, silver, negroes, slaves and goods wares and manufactures (“Slavery”).

The company’s monopoly lasted until 1712, allowing traders from ports like Bristol and Liverpool to compete and grow profits from the trade (“Reasons”). Under the control of the governor of the Royal African Company, King Charles II’s brother, James, the Duke of York, “The Royal African Company of England,” according to William Pettigrew, “shipped more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade” (11).

Decades later, when King James II, formerly known as the Duke of York, was dethroned in the Glorious Revolution, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly protection, and slave trading entered its laissez-faire era by the early to mid-18th century (Newman).

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

During reign of King George III in the late 18th to early 19th century, the abolitionist movement and the Haitian Revolution and other slave uprisings challenged Britain’s support of the slave trade and slavery itself. Yet King George III and his sons, with the exception of his son-in-law Prince William Frederick, held on to pro-slavery views (Newman).

The slave trade was abolished in 1807, and the abolition of slavery was delayed for two more decades. Not until slavery ended in the British Empire in 1838 did the royal family, under the reign of Queen Victoria, officially support abolition. Queen Victoria had close friendships with her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim and supported an orphaned Yorba child named Aina, later renamed Sarah Forbes Bonetta.

Yet, according to historian Brooke Newman, Queen Victoria also “oversaw an expanding empire rooted in the racial subjugation and exploitation of subaltern populations in the Americas, India, Africa, and Asia throughout the Pacific” (Newman). As we have continued to see in the most recent interracial royal marriage between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, interracial romances and friendships are not synonymous with the end of racism or with the acknowledgment of Britain and the Crown’s centuries-long endorsement of systemic racism.

The Real Black Elite in Georgian-Era Britain (1714-1837)

People of African descent were in the British Isles since ancient Rome, but the royal family’s proslavery history explains increased Black presence in Britain since England’s slave trade. As Olusoga establishes in Black and British: A Forgotten History, “Britain had been home to small communities of black Edwardians, black Victorians, and a larger population of black Georgians. There had been black Stuarts and black Tudors…” (13). However, “In the last decades of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, Africans arrived as slaves and as free people in greater numbers than in any previous period” (Olusoga 76).

The enslaved and their descendants made permanent changes to British society. The mixed-race Georgian-era heiress Dido Elizabeth Belle is credited with influencing her uncle, William Murray, the 1^st Earl of Mansfield and England’s most powerful judge, in his legal decision in the Somerset v. Stuart case that freed a Virginia enslaved African, James Somerset (“Slavery and Justice at Kenwood House, Part I”).

Lord Mansfield found that no enslaved person could be forcibly removed from British soil and sold into slavery elsewhere, a decision which was widely, if incorrectly, interpreted as a declaration that the enslaved were emancipated in England (“Slave or Free?”). Nevertheless, the decision still indirectly paved the road toward abolition. An American in London, Francis Hutchinson, remarked that Lord Mansfield’s decision came as no surprise since he “keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family” (Jefferies).

As the daughter of Lord Mansfield’s brother Captain John Lindsay and an enslaved African woman named Maria Belle, Dido Belle grew up, according to Historic England, “on a semi-public stage, at the heart of elite society” at Mansfield’s fashionable estate, Kenwood House (“Slavery and Justice”). She appears in a 1770s double portrait with her cousin Elizabeth not as a servant but an equal dressed in a white silk gown. Her life is fictionalized in the Amma Asante movie Belle (2013).

Dido Elizabeth Belle and the Somerset Decision

Dido Elizabeth Belle and her potential influence in the Somerset v. Stuart decision affected the future of Black British life in England and Black American life in the United States. The Somerset decision spread across the Atlantic, and, according to Olusoga, it was “regarded by some as a direct attack on the slave system” (143-5). On the other hand, the enslaved Africans in the American colonies were elated by the news that they could potential be free in Britain. While this is a generous misinterpretation of Mansfield’s decision, his judgment meant that slaves could run away from their owners, and, thus, free themselves in Britain (Olusoga 140).

Image by Redleaf_Lodi from Pixabay

The Somerset judgment was in the back of the enslaved Africans’ minds during the Revolutionary War a few years later. In 1775, near the end of the war, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and the Royal Governor of Virginia, proclaimed “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels)” would be freed if they joined “His MAJESTY’s Troops” (Olusoga 147). Two weeks afterwards, three hundred slaves escaped their rebel masters to join Lord Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment and were given arms and badges with the slogan “Liberty to Slaves” (Olusoga 147).

The rebels, fearful that armed Black people would destabilize their economy and incite more slave insurrections, responded with threats of slave patrols and other violent acts of control. Undeterred, enslaved people continued to escape, forming additional units like the Black Pioneers and the Black Brigade (Olusoga 148-50). Although Black Royalists were betrayed at Yorktown and by the final peace agreement at the end of the war, the British finally evacuated twenty thousand Black loyalists and sent them to settle in Canada, the Caribbean, and Britain. As Olusoga notes, “the sudden arrival of the black loyalists constituted a mass migration,” particularly in late 18^th-century Britain (158).

A year before the events in season one of Bridgerton, Black Refugees became the second group of formerly enslaved Black people to escape their masters in the U.S. and to gain freedom in exchange for supporting the British during the War of 1812.  However, they faced new difficulties in Britain and elsewhere in the empire (“Black Loyalists;” Olusoga 188).

Black Georgians: Entrprenuers, Activists, and Authors

There were a few Black Georgians who, like Dido Elizabeth Belle, were able to find financial stability and influence with the support of wealthy families. As Olusoga explains,

The social mobility that underwrites the incredible lives of the most famous of the black Georgians – Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Francis Barber and Bill Richmond – owed much to the education and opportunities opened up for them by the well-connected families within which they were ensconced, as well as to their own remarkable talents (80).

The Black elites in Georgian-era Britain included formerly enslaved African writers and abolitionists Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, who were friends and colleagues who formed the famous Sons of Africa, a group of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants fighting for abolition. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) and Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) were widely read (even possibly by proslavery King George III) and helped gain support for the end of the slave trade in 1807 (Olusoga 211).

Another famous figure was Ignatius Sancho, who, born on a slave ship, would later become the first Black Briton to vote in a general election in 1774 and 1780 because he owned property, a house, and a shop in Westminster (“Record of Ignatious Sancho’s Vote”). His works were also published posthumously as The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1784); its first edition sold out (Olusoga 112). In 1773, Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon and patron to Black British authors like Equiano, gave financial support to an enslaved African woman named Phillis Wheatley (“Phillis Wheatley”). Algate, a London publishing company, published Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, making her the first African-American and only second woman to be a published author (Michaels). At the end of the Georgian era, Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831), transcribed in England, was one of the few women’s slave narratives to recount the horrors of slavery in the British Caribbean (“Mary Prince”).

This is the real world Queen Charlotte lived in. In 1813, the year Bridgerton’s first season is set, at least 70% of the people in the British Empire were non-white (Colquohoun 7). It was an era shaped by abolitionist sentiment, which, in Olusoga’s analysis, “forced the issue of slavery and the contested humanity of black people into the centre of British politics, where it remained long after the slave trade and slavery had been abolished” (200). Black Britons were writers, enslaved and freed. They were heiresses and abolitionists.

Yet none of this rich history, of which I mention only a fraction, is part of Bridgerton‘s multiracial London.

Bridgerton‘s Blindspots and the “Caribbean Problem”

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Although Bridgerton is invested in Black representation, the series fails to acknowledge any of the aforementioned Black British history and the much larger, more diverse world of Black experiences within and beyond the small sphere of the Bridgertons, Featheringtons, and Lady Whistledown. 

In “Why Did Bridgerton Erase Haiti,” Dr. Marlene L. Daut critiques Bridgerton for this myopic offering of what she calls “mere visibility – Black actors inserted into a white storyline.” Such visibility may not feel “mere” if you have seen whites-only period dramas, but in Bridgerton’s case, specifically associating a royal interracial marriage with the end of institutional racism is creative but deceptive and robs its audience of not only an understanding of history but of better storytelling.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, France’s wealthiest and most brutal slave colony Saint Domingue erupted as enslaved Africans rose up during Haitian Revolution, the first and only successful slave revolt in the Americas. When the French were defeated in 1804, Saint Domingue became Haiti, the first independent Black republic outside the continent of Africa.

For Daut, Bridgerton suffers from “a Caribbean problem,” one that naturally arises in the show’s neglect of any conversation about race. Given the importance of the Caribbean to British and European empires, Daut admits that while watching Bridgerton, “I kept thinking how easy it would have been instead to draw upon the many complexities of elite Black life in the nineteenth century–the kind that was at the heart of the Caribbean’s only modern Black kingdom.” Daut proposes a TV show set not in Britain but in 19^th century Haiti, “a luxurious nineteenth-century Black kingdom created by and for Black people.”

Instead of the aristocratic Bridgertons, this show would star Haiti’s first and only royal family, the Christophes. Henry Christophe and his wife Marie-Louise Coidavid ruled Haiti from 1804-1820. Daut notes that not only does their reign overlap Bridgerton’s timeline, but also one of the Christophe’s six palaces, Sans-Souci, was completed in 1813, the same year the first season of Bridgerton takes place.

A period drama about Black characters in the 19th-century Caribbean and specifically in Haiti would not only unearth untaught histories about the region’s people and their seminal roles, but it also would be a creative boon to the genre itself and liberate it from its Eurocentrism.  

A New Hope for Period Dramas?

Daut concludes that “by having taken up precious industry spaces with a fantasy of Black aristocracy in England, [Bridgerton] might make it harder to produce a series about real-life Black aristocracy in the Caribbean.” I understand her pessimism. Miniseries like Vanity Fair (2018) and Sanditon (2019) have highlighted Black characters in their original Thackeray and Austen texts while fleshing out their perspectives. However, the most recent polished yet still whitewashed adaptations of Little Women (2019) and Emma (2020) prove the entertainment world remains determined to cling to a white-centric vision of the past. Historian Dr. Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors: The Untold Story, clarifies that “Productions based on how they were originally conceived by the author will only ever have other ethnicities in minor roles” (Flint). Or in the case of 2020’s Emma, they have no roles at all.

Yet I hope for and expect that to change. Bridgerton‘s success has proved that there is a large audience for period dramas featuring characters who are part of the Black elite. The source material for these storylines and more is also surprisingly abundant. There are a wealth of biographies from the 18th and 19th-century Black elite mentioned above. Nineteenth-century novels — the anonymously-written The Woman of Colour (1808) and Zelica, the Creole (1820), Claire de Duras’ Ourika (1823), Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), Alexandre Dumas’ Georges (1843), and Cirilo Villaverde’s Ceclia Valdes or El Angel Hill (1882) among many other works — present Black and mixed-race characters in everything from romance to revolution. 

Twentieth and 21st-century historical fictions revisit and rewrite dramas originally centered only on white characters, often to the dehumanization and silencing of characters of color. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) rewrites Jane Eyre from Bertha’s perspective. Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights (1995) adapts Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but with a focus on Creole characters in Cuba and Guadeloupe. Condé’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986) presents an alternative narrative to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) by focusing on the story of a West Indian enslaved woman accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. Steven Martin’s Incomparable World (1996), Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2009), and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) look at centuries of Atlantic history from African and Indigenous perspectives.

As Hannah Flint explains in “Is it time all-white period drama was made extinct?,” theatre has adopted this revision of white-dominated classics and historical narratives, “from Glenda Jackson playing King Lear to Lin-Manuel Miranda turning the life of US founding father Alexander Hamilton into a rap musical with a predominantly ethnic minority cast.” These perspectives have affected film and television casting from British Asian actor Gemma Chan’s role as the white historical figure Bess of Hardwick in Mary Queen of Scots (2018) to Dev Patel cast as David Copperfield in The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019). 

Director and producer Emma Holly Jones confirms, diverse casting “not only expands [a film’s] audience, it emphasizes the universality of its love story beyond its Georgian England confines” (Flint). Jones also affirms that this moment gives filmmakers “an opportunity to completely reimagine the British period drama in a mold hopefully others will follow. More importantly, it’s nice to think that we might make the day of many people who studied the literature, who imagined themselves to be Mr. Darcy or Lizzy Bennet, but never saw themselves or their cultures reflected on screen” (Flint).

The critiques of Bridgerton’s first season can be catalysts for its improvement in season two, which focuses on the eldest Bridgerton heir, Andrew (Jonathan Bailey), and his love interest of Indian descent, Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley), originally named Kate Sheffield in Quinn’s second Bridgerton novel The Viscount Who Loved Me.

As Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh declares:

My mother is a history teacher and I have spent my whole life being cross about the history we see in period dramas. With Bridgerton, we are just putting the history back in history, with bells on. It’s welcoming everybody, whether you’re gay, feminist, a person of colour. It recognises you were there (Akbar).

Bridgerton, like many period dramas, is a fantasy, a fairytale. Audiences of all kinds deserve to see themselves in such fantastical, escapist storylines. However, Bridgerton claims to be corrective history, placing a multiracial England back into British history. Is it possible for a series to be both escapist and realist? Bridgerton’s shortcomings at being both is an opportunity for other shows to build on what Bridgerton has presented.

I await season 2 of Bridgerton, hopeful its ability to improve. Yet, I more eagerly await period dramas, whether they are set in 18^th and 19^th century Haiti or London, that strive to balance romance and adventure with the gravity, multitude and fullness of Black, Asian, and Indigenous histories and lived experiences in the Atlantic.