The consort of King George III.
As Queen, Charlotte was a model of gracious royal patronage. She supported Johann Christian Bach and met Mozart as a young boy and he dedicated his Opus 3 to her. She also supported Joseph Haydn, built orphanages, hospitals for expectant mothers and supported women's education. She also dabbled in botany, founded Kew Gardens and supported a number of artists. She had a very loving relationship with her husband and herself suffered greatly as he descended into madness because of his porphyria. She also maintained a long-distance friendship with the French Queen Marie Antoinette, the two being pen pals. Queen Charlotte worried alot about her French counterpart with the onset of the Revolution and prepared a place for the Bourbon royal couple should they be forced to escape to England. When the French queen was executed Charlotte was deeply disturbed and depressed by the news.
Queen Charlotte looked after her husband for the rest of her life, being his legal guardian, never failing in her devotion until her death on November 17, 1818 with her son the Prince-Regent holding her hand. Although she was not given the warmest welcome when she first arrived in Britain she won the hearts of the people by her warmth, generosity and unfailing devotion to her husband and family. She was, in many ways, the ideal queen consort.
I love Helen Mirren's portrayal of Queen Charlotte in
The Madness of King George.
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The consort of King George III.
11 comments:
hi,
i liked this post very much.
can you tell me who did the portrait?
I am not certain, Emmeline. Perhaps you could ask The Mad Monarchist.
http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2009/12/consort-profile-charlotte-of.html
Queen Charlotte holds a special place in my heart as I lived for four years in the city named after her, Charlotte, North Carolina (complete with little crowns on all the street signs). And the county is Mecklenburg County since she was a princess of Mecklenburg. There are statues of her both downtown and at the airport. I doubt that many Charlotteans care about this as much as I did. When I left Charlotte in 2008, the Charlotte Symphony cello section gave me a large framed portrait of her as a going-away present.
Hi, it's a great blog.
I could tell how much efforts you've taken on it.
Keep doing!
Elena Maria; I never knew that there was any correspondence between the Queen of Great Britain and the Queen of France. I was right when I said I learn so much through your lovely website! Queen Charlotte was an amazing woman; an ideal wife, mother and queen. Thank you again Elena Maria; it is always a great day when I start reading Tea at Trianon.
Yes, Marie-Antoinette wrote to Queen Charlotte saying how sorry she was about the war. The Queen of France did not think it wise to help the colonists rebel; she thought it was setting a bad precedent.
So true, Elena. If only Louis XVI listened to his wife and refused to give aid to the American rebels so many calamities would have been avoided. France would not go bankrupt, the French Revolution would not happen and the French Monarchy would still exist.
Queen Charlotte was a very moral and outstanding woman in her own right. Her devotion to her husband and country, her generosity, her tenacity, her fine sense of culture and the arts, her relationship with the most famously misunderstood and tragic 'last' Queen of France and her staunch anti-slavery campaign makes her, in my opinion, one who deserves respect.
I quite agree.
Another interesting tidbit is Queen Charlotte was a "mulatto."
To quote PBS:
"Queen Charlotte, wife of the English King George III (1738-1820), was directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. The riddle of Queen Charlotte's African ancestry was solved as a result of an earlier investigation into the black magi featured in 15th century Flemish paintings. Two art historians had suggested that the black magi must have been portraits of actual contemporary people (since the artist, without seeing them, would not have been aware of the subtleties in colouring and facial bone structure of quadroons or octoroons which these figures invariably represented) Enough evidence was accumulated to propose that the models for the black magi were, in all probability, members of the Portuguese de Sousa family. (Several de Sousas had in fact traveled to the Netherlands when their cousin, the Princess Isabella went there to marry the Grand Duke, Philip the Good of Burgundy in the year 1429.)"
Wikipedia:
"Mario de Valdes y Cocom, historian of the African Diaspora, suggests that Charlotte may have had distant African ancestry; she descended from Margarita de Castro e Souza, a 15th-century Portuguese noblewoman, who traced her ancestry to King Afonso III of Portugal (1210–1279) and one of his mistresses, Madragana (c. 1230–?).
In a 1996 episode of the PBS TV series, Frontline, Valdes speculated that Scottish painter Allan Ramsay emphasized the Queen's alleged "mulatto" appearance in his portrait of her to support the anti-slave trade movement, and noted that Baron Stockmar had described the Queen as having a "mulatto face" in his autobiography and that other contemporary sources made similar observations.
Critics of Valdes's theory point out that Margarita's and Madragana's distant perch in the queen's family tree – nine and 15 generations removed, respectively – makes any African ancestry that they bequeathed to Charlotte negligible. It is uncertain whether Madragana was even black, and Charlotte shared descent from Afonso and Madragana with a large proportion of Europe's royalty and nobility.
In 2017, David Buck, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson, was quoted by the Boston Globe as saying "This has been rumoured for years and years. It is a matter of history, and frankly, we've got far more important things to talk about.""
Sources:
(1) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/royalfamily.html
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_of_Mecklenburg-Strelitz#Ancestry
(3) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Margarita_de_Castro_e_Souza_genealogy_and_descent.JPG
Just my findings and my personal opinion. You need not to agree with me. Adieu.
I would like to know how you know what Marie-Antoinette wrote to Queen Charlotte! I have been trying to uncover anything about their correspondence and am having no luck!
Becky, all I know is that Marie-Antoinette apologized to Queen Charlotte for making war upon the British and helping them lose their colonies.
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