00:07:23.200this like when is it 13th century iberian concubine yeah like how did you how did you
00:07:29.840land there um well so i my professional study my dissertation if you will is about concubinage
00:07:36.460more generally in the mediterranean so i have this like broad interest in concubines because
00:07:41.940i find them to be really interesting in the sense that they exist outside of these structures of
00:07:47.360marriage in a way that still is empowering for some of them so there's this like tension between
00:07:52.620sometimes coercion, sometimes violence. And at the same time, there's also these possibilities.
00:07:58.260So that is like a general interest in concubines. But Madragana in particular is interesting to me
00:08:03.720because of course I had seen Bridgerton already and I already knew of this connection. And that
00:08:09.220was when my dad, who's a teacher, was like hearing all these questions from his colleagues who were
00:08:15.560like, your daughter must be a historian who can give us all of the answers. And so I want to try
00:08:20.480to talk about it because there's a lot tangled up in madragana and her relationship to charlotte so
00:08:28.700in terms of genealogies there's like a pretty straightforward connection that we can trace
00:08:33.320through various records both in portugal but also in germany where she where her descendant went
00:08:39.480but there's a lot more like bound up in madragana herself than just is she genetically related to
00:08:47.680of charlotte of mecklenburg strelix so there's not just uh a dearth of sources because there
00:08:54.940are not a lot of sources let me tell you i have looked for them far and wide but there's also
00:09:00.360in some ways like a misunderstanding or a disconnect between how race works now and how
00:09:07.560race works in the middle ages and that difficulty also finds its way into the sources because
00:09:13.580people you know mostly chroniclers and royal genealogists have come back to her again and
00:09:18.700again and again and again for you know 700 years and each time they slightly change how they write
00:09:24.900about her how they present her and because of that she's come into the historical record with
00:09:29.780a lot of baggage and so each of the terms that she comes with have these tangles they're super
00:09:34.940interesting to me as a historian um and so yeah that's how i got to madragana and why she is i
00:09:41.380think really illuminating for like how race works over time how it changes and the ways that it can
00:09:46.760appear in the sources by following one individual and you're saying this before we started reporting
00:09:52.040that you were in spain as well yeah i was living in spain on a fulbright during the like tail end
00:09:58.960of the pandemic so i went there at the beginning of 2021 and uh well so the the reason that she
00:10:06.040is really interesting to me is because she has a counterpart in spain whose name is saida and
00:10:12.220what's what's what has to be kept in mind about both madragana and about saida is that the name
00:10:17.660that they possess is not in fact their names so no one really knows madragana's name she never
00:10:26.460gets a name in the sources and so madragana is a much later creation of historiography she's
00:10:32.240sometimes also called Urwana, and sometimes she's also called Mayor, which is supposedly the name
00:10:37.480she took after converting to Christianity. And in the case of Saida, Saida in Spanish is just
00:10:43.800the romance version of Saida, which is a title in Arabic. And so basically, these women have been
00:10:52.220very, very uncomfortable. They make people uncomfortable because it's proximity of a1.00
00:10:58.760particular type of group to kingship to monarchy and so because the reason that Spanish people are
00:11:04.880so like taken with these ideas is because if you call someone a Muslim that's one thing but
00:11:12.380many of them have tried to refer to both of them as either moriscas or as moserabs and moserab is
00:11:22.680really really bound up in Spanish nationalism Portuguese nationalism and so because of that
00:11:27.220I was like really interested in why concubinage would be connected to something like nationalism
00:11:33.420or ideas about who belongs in the medieval past and who doesn't and I think that that's quite true
00:11:39.740about how people understand the middle ages in the U.S. which is that the middle ages are the
00:11:44.840super white very masculine time period and there's not really much space for anybody else
00:11:50.980or that like Christianity is always like always throughout the middle ages paramount that it's0.54
00:11:56.760like dominating the entire sphere of what would be considered the Western world. And that's just
00:12:01.700like not true. And so I was like, let's use this concubine to turn ideas about like belonging on
00:12:09.540its head, because she does show that, you know, one, identities are unstable, as they're understood
00:12:15.600historically, but also that the past matters, that there's like a fundamental connection between past
00:12:21.700and present and that it has power. And that's one of the questions that I wanted to learn what you
00:12:28.500have to say about. So just the term, she's described in some sources as a more, and that
00:12:34.340can mean lots of different things. Can you explain all the different things that could mean and what
00:12:39.760you think it means in her instance? Yeah, absolutely. So more is a really complicated
00:12:44.900term. So anytime you ask a historian something, their answer will be it's complicated. And that's,
00:12:51.440Yeah, that's totally true, because more changes also over time. So the origins of the word more are connected to the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Muslims of a very large and diverse group in the seventh, like late, the end of the beginning of the eighth century, basically.
00:13:11.840So there's this movement across North Africa, from the Arabian Peninsula into Iberia. And so the word more comes out of that encounter. There is an earlier usage, it comes from like, a Latin word, which is modus, and it refers to those from Mauritania, or North Africa, so Roman Mauritania.
00:13:32.280And so most historians will tell you that more just means very basically Muslim. And then there are historians, primarily historians of England, who call it Blackamore, very specifically giving it a racial connotation.
00:13:50.380And in the Iberian Peninsula, from my research, what my research has basically shown is that more refers to a specific group of Muslims rather than just Muslimness very generally.
00:14:05.240And so it means Muslims from North Africa.
00:14:08.480Now, the problem for many moderns is that North Africa, the residents of North Africa in the present do not necessarily bear strong historical resemblance to those who occupied North Africa in the past.
00:14:22.540And so there's sort of a naturalization of people who colonized North Africa as sort of being the indigenous group because they themselves were also colonized by Europeans later in the early modern period.
00:14:33.560So more, some people will tell you more means Berber. Now, Berber is also a super complicated word because it was invented just out of nowhere in the 7th century, in the 8th century. So the very end of the 8th century into the beginning of the 8th century.
00:14:51.640And it means those people, so the Arabs used it to refer to the people in North Africa
00:14:57.200who are not Roman, who are not Byzantine, and who are not Arab.0.82
00:15:38.980So by the time of, let's say, 15th century, when the Catholic kings conquered the last emirate of Granada in 1492, the majority of the people who are living as Muslims in Iberia aren't North Africans.
00:15:54.520There was like plenty of replenishments of North African Muslims coming to the peninsula before that, particularly reaching its peak in the 12th, 13th centuries, but later, not so much.
00:16:05.100And so because of that, later when sources say Moro, it does in fact mean just Muslim, because then they add the color word Negro. So a Moro Negro is a Muslim who is dark skinned. A Moro is just a Moro who's a Muslim.0.89
00:16:20.500So that's a really big answer and a lot to take in.0.84
00:16:24.940But that means that the very first appearances of Madhragana, which are from the 13th century,
00:24:29.020She leaves the city that she's born in
00:24:30.900and she ends up in the city where the king is.
00:24:34.040And she ends up becoming his concubine. Now, did she initiate it? Did he initiate it? Did she consent? Who knows? Who really knows? It's a really, really tangled up question. But what something has to be kept in mind is that these women who are Muslims are coming from a culture where concubinage works super differently than it does among Christians.
00:24:55.200And so concubinage is not necessarily like illicit. It's not like, it's not hidden. It's not, I mean, even in the Middle Ages, concubinage of kings is not, you know, it's not on the side. It's not like, oh my God, like we have to hide from everybody else. No one wants to know that I'm a concubine. It's pretty straightforward. Like, this isn't, we're at the core. This is my concubine. This is what it is. These are our children.
00:25:17.820so for these women to come from a context where men have lots of concubines and concubinage is0.63
00:25:24.320the number one form of social mobility so in the islamic world that is the number one form of
00:25:29.120social mobility for women specifically and so how she comes to be the concubine of afanso the third
00:25:36.200did she think about sort of like how to leverage herself if she's from a slightly lower status
00:25:41.860and she's not the daughter of the Al-Qaeda
00:28:17.840So he does all the Christian noblewomen.
00:28:20.080And then he's sort of like, there's these other people.
00:28:23.000And then there's like, he sort of makes this claim that Alfonso is so, he's like hypersexual.
00:28:29.860he's like licentious he's lush like all of these things he's like yo this guy is the worst and he0.97
00:28:37.800had sex with people who are from different faith communities so he says that alfonso had a jewish0.98
00:28:41.880concubine and this muslim concubine and that is her first appearance so it's just a chronicle like0.99
00:28:46.660here's what's happening here's who he knows here's who he's sleeping with and then he moves on he's0.91
00:28:51.500like she's the mother of these of these kids and then it's just ready to sort of like move to the
00:28:56.460next and then yeah chronicles over time you have a question you have a question no no i'm just
00:29:03.080trying to picture so you're finding like do you do you read medieval portuguese handwriting oh
00:29:10.300well so yes paleography is the like practice of reading medieval manuscripts and it is
00:29:20.260hard because if you ever went to the doctor and you saw your prescription and it was like
00:29:25.320what the hell does this say that's what reading medieval manuscripts is like they're very very
00:29:30.480difficult because they have a lot of abbreviations so it'll be like one word that has you know let's
00:29:37.680say the word mora it might be written m-r-a and o-u have been omitted because it's too long for
00:29:43.980the like monks to write or for the copyists to write so they just put a bar and they're like
00:29:49.580keep it moving. And then they also, of course, in addition to the abbreviations, there's just
00:29:55.120the survival of the manuscripts. So some of them, we don't have the original copies of.
00:30:00.000So the work by Joao Jou, we don't have, there is like a 13th century copy, but there's also a bunch
00:30:07.020of other copies from the early modern period. So people who are like, oh yeah, we love this
00:30:10.460chronicle. Let's make it, let's make sure everybody can read it. Let's make a bunch more copies,
00:30:14.560all handwritten, of course. And then there are printed versions from like the 18th century.
00:30:19.340So then you're like, oh, great. I can check my transcription against this 18th century version of a 13th century manuscript. I've looked, of course, I'm a medievalist. I have to read Latin. Many of my sources are in Latin. And then, of course, I have to read Old Castilian, which is, you know, Old Spanish.
00:30:35.660So the documents leave something to be desired.
00:30:41.880And I think that that's true anytime you're studying someone.
00:30:45.560So obviously, I study lots of kinds of concubines from various social statuses, but there's0.86
00:30:51.120just always the sort of desire for a better source.
00:30:55.700That's I'm so appreciative of you and people like you who do this work so that people like
00:31:00.620me can read an article or a book and I don't have to do the decoding myself wow I wanted to ask you
00:31:09.260like in terms of just this whole conversation we're having the discussion like what I think
00:31:13.600your father had asked you about this in the first place like the discussion of like what do you see
00:31:18.880the significance of like you trace this family tree you kind of you found what can be found
00:31:24.180about Madrigana but the significance of that in terms of Queen Charlotte like what do you think
00:31:29.880wrote that as a discussion yeah i think i think two things and one of them is specifically about
00:31:36.160queen charlotte and bridgerton so like i'm going to separate queen charlotte and bridgerton and
00:31:40.060then like queen charlotte as queen charlotte so the reason that i think that it's interesting
00:31:44.660is people's reactions to madrigano whether that's scholars whether that's the royal family whoever
00:31:51.360it is it tells you a lot about how they think about the proper or ideal relationship between
00:31:58.700blackness, muslimness, and monarchy. And there's this idea that's sort of like, well,
00:32:06.220monarchy is a white thing. Monarchy is a Christian thing. And so you can sort of see these fault0.71
00:32:14.900lines in institutions where there's sort of these assumptions about who gets to be there and who
00:32:20.300doesn't get to be there. And I think that that's super true for history. Like who gets to be in
00:32:26.060these grand narratives that we spin that people treat as sort of like foundational to who they0.87
00:32:30.620are if you have a black queen of the british empire in the regency period that's gonna throw
00:32:38.700into a lot of questions like okay but they're a slave trading empire they're super colonial what
00:32:44.560are they doing with their subjects and so this is when i found this out i was so excited i have to
00:32:50.120tell you it was probably one of my favorite days as a historian because one of my other concubines
00:32:55.880that I study, who I mentioned, Saida, is supposedly related to Queen Elizabeth II,
00:33:02.060according to this like apologia written by these British guys right after her accession in the
00:33:07.48050s. And they were like, because she's descended from this woman, Saida, she is descended from the
00:33:16.300Prophet Muhammad. And therefore, she can rule over any Muslims in the Commonwealth. And I was like,
00:33:23.100it's what's called blood royal is the name of this apologia and it's wild to me to think that
00:33:29.680that so that's an even greater genealogical connection so it's 19 generations between
00:33:35.360elizabeth ii and saida then you know madrigana and charlotte are only 15 generations separate
00:33:41.080so there was all of this sort of like justifications for why a white british woman can
00:33:48.620rule over muslims oh it's because she's a genealogical connection to this concubine but
00:33:54.180they were always like so this particular concubine did convert to christianity and took a new name
00:33:59.740and you know married a king and like they had a child who died they had a daughter so whatever
00:34:06.000that's like a whole thing but the point is is that if it's this super distant connection that
00:34:13.320can be put in like whiteness like in a safe white body it's totally okay muslimness as long as it's
00:34:20.940like transformed by christianity and whiteness it's totally okay no problem elizabeth ii you're0.77
00:34:27.860great you have this connection and we love it but charlotte it's like okay there's a connection to
00:34:33.380blackness in addition to a connection to muslimness and that's not okay and that is really
00:34:38.600interesting to me because that tells you a lot about the ways in which these like patterns of
00:34:44.940race thinking of who gets to be where, who gets to say what, who gets to have what power.
00:34:51.060It tells you a lot about it. Like it tells you a lot about what people think. And so like the
00:34:55.000British public were like, yeah, of course, Elizabeth can rule the Commonwealth. And then0.99
00:35:00.320you have people when Meghan Markle is like getting married to Harry and they're like, no way black0.92
00:35:06.080people in the monarchy we don't like that and then it's like wait there's charlotte we don't
00:35:10.100like that either and so i got really excited i got so loud people who know me know my voice is
00:35:15.240like normally really relaxed they get excited but so i think that that's why it's an interesting
00:35:20.260thing to think about because these two they're very similar connections and they're both you
00:35:26.180know these concubines who have connections to the muslim world and then they have these connections
00:35:30.520to these queens now my second answer i'm a historian so i talk a lot i'm very sorry about
00:35:36.280that but no no no this is like i have a podcast because i have so much to say so i'm happy to
00:35:44.200talk to someone who also has lots to say yeah but what i do think about queen charlotte and
00:35:48.980bridgerton and i i have a lot of opinions generally about bridgerton um and you know
00:35:53.240there are flaws in all shows but one thing that i think that's really important that they do
00:35:57.640is to insist upon the presence of Black people in the past,
00:36:04.600in these grand narratives that have been constructed
00:36:07.500as part of these national identities, national myths.
00:36:11.720And so I really like that they insist upon that presence0.93
00:36:14.400and also the proximity of Blackness to power0.83
00:36:16.580because that is a historical truth.1.00
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00:45:36.840So another part of the discussion of Queen Charlotte and her proximity to Blackness, the discussion of her race and maybe what she looked like, gets into the way that she was perceived during her lifetime, which includes how she was presented in portraiture and how the people who met her described her.
00:45:57.340So there's a couple, this is where some of the discussions circle around some specific portraits, where some people see in her some facial features that might align with a person of African descent, like a nose shape, the lip shape as well.
00:46:15.160And then there's a couple of descriptors that were written. This is the thing. She lived for like a really long time. And in that lifetime, there are like maybe four or five descriptions written by some people. And the words that they use could be construed to mean that they were describing somebody who maybe has African looking features.
00:46:34.360and this is where I turn to Dr. Brooke Newman. So she is an associate professor at Virginia
00:46:42.080Commonwealth University. She's a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic
00:46:46.500with a current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British
00:46:50.700royal family. So she's also somebody who has, she's done so much research about Queen Charlotte
00:46:57.080and imagery. So some of the things we talk about are not just the official portraits, but also
00:47:01.580So caricatures, like political cartoons, you know, what facial features did Charlotte have that people might have exaggerated people who were trying to make fun of her?
00:47:12.080So some of the descriptions, and I think we go through all of these in this discussion.
00:47:17.240So some people mentioned that there's somebody who describes Queen Charlotte as having something about the shape of her nostrils, which could be construed as talking about the shape of a nose that maybe somebody of African descent might have.
00:47:31.580But Brooke describes how that can also have applied to what's a typical German nose, which also has distinctive nostrils, and also her complexion that also occurred when she was incredibly ill.
00:47:48.840Anyway, this was a really interesting discussion I had with Dr. Brooke Newman talking about just kind of the imagery surrounding Queen Charlotte and what that may indicate about what she looked like.
00:48:02.180And just, yeah, just continue on this discussion about Queen Charlotte and race issues.
00:48:09.380Okay, so fresh off of her success of running a 10K race, it's Brooke Newman.
00:48:16.580Yeah, thank you for running all the way to this interview. Can you just first, like, I'm going to put in an introduction and stuff explaining about what this episode is, but could you explain what your historical expertise is and how it relates to the topic of Queen Charlotte's ancestry?
00:48:34.500Sure. So I'm an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I work on early modern Britain and the British Atlantic.
00:48:43.120And I'm currently writing my second major book on the topic of the British monarchy's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and in the expansion of colonial slavery over multiple centuries.
00:48:54.560And Queen Charlotte plays, you know, not a central role, but she is definitely an important historical figure as the wife of George III and as someone who gave birth to 15 royal children during her reign.
00:49:09.680You know, more power to her, I can't even imagine. I think she is someone who has been overlooked in some ways by history, but also is having a renaissance to some extent because of her, you know, new spinoff in Bridgerton. So I think she's definitely someone that people are interested in.
00:49:27.240And so just in terms of not her role directly in the colonization of America, but there's a lot of places named like there's Charlotte, North Carolina, like there's places, there's a lot of her name is all over the place in the US.
00:49:42.140Yes. And actually, it's Charlotte, North Carolina, that is one of the reasons why there are so many different rumors about the ancestry of Queen Charlotte. And, you know, and a lot of this has to do with the fact that in Charlotte, North Carolina, people in the 20th century wanted to push back against white supremacy and against racism.
00:50:06.140and they're you know they have a town named after George III's wife and obviously she is the British
00:50:14.820queen during the height of the British empire when the British empire is at its peak in terms
00:50:21.020of its involvement in the slave trade but at the same time there is a push to really I think
00:50:28.140rehabilitate her to some extent because she is the patron queen of Charlotte North Carolina
00:50:33.880And so in the 1980s, there was a new statue that was unveiled in Charlotte. This is around 1989. And there were some people who said initially, and they were writing letters in to the editor of newspapers, well, you know, this statue is lacking the features that have been seen in some of the images of Queen Charlotte that make her look African.
00:50:57.200And at the time, I think this was a bit surprising to some people in Charlotte, because they hadn't really heard any of these rumors before. And also, this is granted before the internet. So it's not like this was something that you could easily look up.
00:51:11.080But there had been some previous claims that perhaps Queen Charlotte had African ancestry, but this was primarily based off of a couple of images of her that were painted or reproductions that were made in the early 1760s when she was 17, 18 years old, right when she married George III.
00:51:32.720and because of these depictions and the reading of them hundreds of years later that you know
00:51:38.820maybe she might be this maybe she might be that there was a sense that her her ancestry to some
00:51:45.860extent was potentially up for grabs and I think that the the sort of general pushback against
00:51:54.680yet another white figure that was being memorialized came from a good place but it
00:52:00.680wasn't necessarily from historically accurate place in the 1980s in charlotte north carolina
00:52:06.180and but that is really where some of these ideas began to take off in the united states actually
00:52:12.900not in britain and so it's sort of i don't want to say like reverse evidence but it's like you
00:52:18.980look at the portrait think like you recognize some features and think well that let's retroactively
00:52:24.200figure out why maybe that's what she looked like. It's not finding the evidence. I don't know. So
00:52:31.160it's not going from genealogy and making it's like looking for the genealogy, hoping it will
00:52:34.960provide a specific answer. It'll confirm your suspicion. But can you talk about images of her?
00:52:41.280So you're saying there were some images of her that have been interpreted as having African
00:52:45.860facial features. And there's other images of her that haven't that don't.
00:52:50.120Right. So there are hundreds of images of Queen Charlotte. And these are portraits that she set for, reproductions of those portraits, commemorative coins that were minted when she married George III and even also later when she died.
00:53:06.520there are many many caricatures of her from her life and in those caricatures she is always
00:53:14.520very thin sometimes she has missing teeth she has a very long pointy nose she looks sort of
00:53:22.360witch-like but extremely pale and you know from my experience working on this time period
00:53:29.100if you were known or had a reputation for having what they would have considered quote a swarthy
00:53:34.220complexion, you would have been viciously mocked in the press because they love to mock whatever
00:53:40.980they could potentially find that they could exaggerate in some way. And in her case,
00:53:47.280it was what we would now consider a German nose. It was still racial in the sense that they were0.94
00:53:54.700mocking this nose. They were pointing out that her nose, her nostrils flared, that she had a large0.89
00:53:59.840nose as she got older she became more frail and thin and her nose was exaggerated in the
00:54:07.060caricatures as being even more pointy but when she was younger and also another thing you consider0.99
00:54:13.860too is that she had 15 children so she was constantly pregnant i mean this poor woman for1.00
00:54:19.94020 years basically of her life she was pregnant so her weight fluctuated dramatically because she1.00
00:54:26.200was pregnant so much and so by the time she eventually was older and started to lose weight
00:54:32.100particularly when George III was ill and mentally ill that took a real toll on her and started to
00:54:38.080lose weight and so the images of her change over time but what the images that were made or that
00:54:45.040were painted in you know the really early 1760s when she was only 17 so there's two one was by a
00:54:52.020man um named alan ramsey and she did actually sit for that portrait and then later there was
00:54:58.140a mezzotent which is like a copy that was made and you know when i look at those portraits i
00:55:04.460don't see african features i see the features that i see in all the other paintings and
00:55:10.460caricatures of her but that is also because i have been working on this family for for years
00:55:17.000now I was about to say centuries oh my god hopefully I am immortal now for centuries um
00:55:23.360and years and what I've the main thing I've noticed is that you know these portraitures um
00:55:29.180these portraits in the 18th century you know they vary slightly but they tend to have similar like
00:55:36.320there's a repetition in terms of features and you can see them if you lay them side by side
00:55:41.540hundreds and hundreds of images. But if you take just a couple of them, and you are looking at
00:55:47.900them, and you want to see a particular type of feature, it's not that hard to, you know,
00:55:53.800use your imagination and think, well, what if maybe, you know, her nostrils or the description
00:55:59.080of her nostrils by one, you know, one person at the time in this particular painting, what if it
00:56:04.680actually hints at something else that the royal family doesn't want anyone to know? You know,
00:56:09.980what if there's actually a lot more exciting, you know, behind the scenes story here. And I think
00:56:14.660that that is something that makes her more interesting to people, it makes her more appealing.
00:56:20.880And it also, to some extent, rehabilitates her in the popular consciousness. But my as a historian,
00:56:28.260my question is, why do we want to rehabilitate Queen Charlotte? I just don't understand that
00:56:33.240I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around wanting to rehabilitate her into someone that
00:56:38.540she wasn't well and the question that I and this is why I'm having you and another expert on to0.65
00:56:43.840talk about this that occurs to me is if she was the other interview I'm doing is like what her
00:56:50.780ancestry was but let's say like if she if she did have some amount of DNA that like had an African
00:56:57.120you know she had some ancestry she did not move in the world she was not treated the way that
00:57:02.580black people were treated in England at that time so if she was black that's kind of beside the0.54
00:57:08.040point. Like she, right? Right. I mean, regardless of what her ancestry may have been 15 generations1.00
00:57:15.200before, so hundreds of years before, this was a woman who was raised in what we, what they
00:57:21.640considered at the time, what we consider a rural sort of backwater in a German province. She,
00:57:27.180at a very young age, was married off to George III, who was one of the most powerful monarchs
00:57:33.060in Europe. He was the monarch over an expanding empire. She was treated like a queen. She was a
00:57:41.020queen. She gave birth to many future members of the royal family, and she lived a life of extreme
00:57:47.440privilege, a life that actually she complained about quite a bit. If you read her letters that
00:57:52.880have survived in the royal archives and that were sent to some of her friends and her brother who
00:57:58.840was living in German provinces. She talked about the tedium of her life, that she was always being
00:58:04.780schlepped from Buckingham Palace to Kew to eventually to Windsor, and that she was at
00:58:10.620the beck and call of whatever George III wanted her to do. And that was her life. She was socially
00:58:16.560conservative. She was someone who did not want to go against established hierarchies and against
00:58:23.500established order. She didn't do anything remotely positive for enslaved people or on behalf of
00:58:31.240people of African descent during her lifetime, despite being appealed to by abolitionists,
00:58:36.980including Black abolitionists like Elato Equiano, who wrote her a letter beseeching her to fight on
00:58:44.740behalf of the abolitionists to support the abolition of the slave trade. And he actually
00:58:52.140published the letter that he wrote her in his book, The Interesting Narrative in 1789. And so
00:58:58.060not only did we have some manuscript copies of this letter that survived, he wanted the British
00:59:02.820public and the wider world to know that he had appealed directly to the monarchy and to the
00:59:08.280queen and gotten no response as well. And so I think that the question really is really less
00:59:14.380significant in terms of what was her ancestry, et cetera. It's what did she actually do during
00:59:20.040her reign? And the answer is not much. So, okay, I'm going to frame this question by the first time
00:59:26.200I heard about I'm in Canada. So like, I don't know a lot about like, George and like the colonies.
00:59:32.340And I didn't know his wife was Charlotte. But the first time I heard about her as a person,
00:59:36.440and it piqued my interest, and this is pre Richardson, the series was, I don't even know,
00:59:41.280five or six years ago, the first lifetime made for TV movie about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
00:59:46.860I don't know if you've heard about this, or if you know what I'm going to say.
01:00:05.300And it's one of the portraits you're talking about.
01:00:06.900It's the one that some people see African features in.
01:00:09.900A light-skinned person, but with African features.
01:00:11.860And Queen Elizabeth II in this movie says like,
01:00:14.480you know, so apparently she was mixed race,
01:00:17.900But like most portrait painters would hide that in their portraits. So really, in that way, the British family has been biracial for many years. And I was just like, what is happening? What? Like, first of all, like, I'm not here. And I don't know anyone is here saying like, Oh, the modern Windsor family are actually biracial. I've not heard even the most monarchist person suggests that. But so my question for you based on that anecdote is, and I've heard other people say this to the theory that
01:00:47.900she did have african looking features but port but all portrait painters except for one or two
01:00:53.680were instructed to hide that and to paint her differently that's ridiculous i mean i just i
01:00:59.960don't even know what to say to that to be honest it's it's just not true it's not true because
01:01:06.560yes the royal family had a significant amount of influence over their official portraits but
01:01:14.300that is about it i mean there we're talking about the 18th and early 19th centuries when people in
01:01:20.860the royal family were viciously mocked i mean to a significant extent they were depicted in the nude
01:01:27.880they were depicted having sex they were even george iii when he was ill was depicted um ill
01:01:34.220in his bed and this really upset george the prince of wales and he actually tried to threaten to sue
01:01:40.860you know the people who are producing these caricatures so there's they don't have the level
01:01:46.200of control over their image that we might want to imagine that they did i mean sure over if they if
01:01:53.640there was an official portrait that they didn't like they would just not purchase it or they would
01:01:57.680not have it replicated but they couldn't control the press to the extent that we might imagine
01:02:02.440the other thing that i think is important to emphasize is that you know we we don't really
01:02:08.680necessarily know what people look like in the 18th century. I mean, other than looking at these
01:02:15.500paintings, I mean, even I'm going back to Elizabeth I, there's always been all this debate
01:02:20.480about what does she really look like? And there are a few portraits of her that survived from
01:02:25.600when she was young. And then when she took the throne, and then after that, there was this
01:02:29.860industry of reproductions of her over and over and over again, to where she was in some ways
01:02:34.340immortal and never aged even when she was like nearing death she looked about the same but with
01:02:39.600Charlotte there are actually some images of her that were painted some depictions of her that are
01:02:44.780painted when she's young when she's middle-aged and then when she's older and actually there's
01:02:50.400a painting of her where um that actually she did not like and George III didn't like either
01:02:55.280painted not long after his really serious illness in 1788 where she looks tired she looks frail
01:03:03.240and it is a very honest looking depiction of her that the royal family did not like and they did
01:03:09.640not want it to be reproduced none of those features that people have been fixating on
01:03:14.580are view you know seen in this image so i think that in some ways we're reading too much we're
01:03:21.280reading too literally into visual representations in the 18th century the other thing i wanted to
01:03:27.900mention just because i forgot to mention earlier is that so king william the fourth he was the
01:03:32.480only remember the royal family as a teenager who was in the royal navy and actually traveled around
01:03:37.000the atlantic world he visited jamaica and places like that and he was rumored and their eyewitness
01:03:42.840accounts that he had sexual relationships with enslaved women of color these relationships and
01:03:49.540the rumors of them got back to the press in britain and he was mocked and there were caricatures of0.51
01:03:55.620him you know in a hammock with a black woman this at the time would have been truly shocking to
01:04:01.360depict a member of the royal family, you know, with a black woman in a sexually suggestive manner.0.80
01:04:07.120And there's more than one of him in this particular depiction. If Queen Charlotte had had even a0.55
01:04:14.800remote resemblance to someone of African descent at the time, she would have absolutely been mocked0.89
01:04:22.460in that way. During the abolition debate, the royal family was mocked, including her. And
01:04:28.560particularly during there was a sugar boycott in 1792. And allegedly the royal family claimed
01:04:35.520that they were going to participate in this boycott because it was so popular all across
01:04:39.300the country. And there were thousands and thousands of people boycotting sugar that
01:04:43.860was produced by slave labor. But the caricatures that were by Gilray and Isaac Cruikshank that
01:04:51.260were produced of the royal family show them around a tea table. And, you know, they're
01:04:56.800essentially George and Charlotte are telling their daughters, you know, don't put sugar in
01:05:02.000your tea. It's so great without it. And the daughters are moping. And they're essentially
01:05:06.440mocking the royal family saying, you know, these people are just pretending to care about slavery
01:05:11.380when really they're just excited they can finally tell their daughters, oh, you don't need sugar
01:05:15.420and save money. And so they were mocking them for that. But in those depictions,
01:05:21.160both of them look, you know, Germanic essentially is what I'm saying.
01:05:25.840There's another, I was listening to just some other podcasts discussing this issue,
01:05:30.240just to kind of get a sense of what the conversation is. And so another concept that
01:05:35.840I've encountered is that the royal family, I'm just like, I know you're gonna explain why this
01:05:42.520is wrong, but I'll just explain it to you first. That the royal family wanted the queen to be
01:05:47.140depicted looking like a black person on the coinage and on the portraits that were sent to
01:05:52.560places like jamaica so that they would support the monarchy more that's a myth okay yeah that
01:05:59.040is not true that is definitely not true and actually i've looked at the depictions of the
01:06:04.020queen on the coins and so forth and she does not look like she is african or of african descent
01:06:10.260and i'm not exactly sure where that rumor i'm not sure where that came from i've actually been
01:06:15.140digging into this and i just cannot figure out where it came from but i will say that i mean
01:06:21.940And I think people may be surprised to hear this, but so these rumors about her potentially being of mixed race began prior to Harry and Meghan dating, but they resurfaced with a vengeance once they became engaged.
01:06:37.480And in my opinion, one of the main reasons why this narrative came back with such force was to undermine Meghan and to undermine the historic nature of her marriage into the royal family.
01:06:52.680Because here you have a woman who actually is descended from enslaved ancestors, marrying for the first time into the royal family.
01:07:00.980And not only that, she identifies as someone who is mixed race.
01:07:04.320She identifies as someone who, you know, grew up in this scenario.
01:07:08.920And I know it's a really important moment.
01:07:11.160But around the time the engagement was announced, I started seeing percolating around the Internet.
01:07:17.400Oh, well, maybe she's not really the first mixed race person to marry.
01:07:21.440And maybe the Windsor family is already, you know, this and that. And I was thinking, well, that's very interesting, because what is really happening here is that Meghan is being attacked by the press, particularly in the UK and tabloids for not being white on one hand.0.53
01:07:37.280But then on the other hand, they're saying, oh, but also she's not really that special either, because there's this other woman hundreds of years ago who probably maybe was of African descent and probably maybe really did look Black, but that was all hidden and it was all a conspiracy.
01:07:53.420And so there was a lot of, a lot going on there that needed to be unpacked that ultimately boiled down to a lot of misinformation and its replication.
01:08:04.100and unfortunately I have to say I will blame and I hate to do this but I will blame a lot of
01:08:10.000journalists for this because they took an idea and they ran with it and it became sensationalized
01:08:16.360and it ended up on Wikipedia and if you google Queen Charlotte ancestry or Queen Charlotte Black
01:08:22.100or Queen Charlotte African it is an explosion of findings none of which are based on the actual
01:08:29.560historical record. And that is problematic because when you have misinformation spreading in this way
01:08:35.780on the internet, it gets to the point where when you actually say, well, wait a minute, let's stop
01:08:40.200and unpack these claims, people get angry because they think you're just trying to attack her
01:08:47.540identity or attack the fact that maybe she was Black and what does that mean, rather than let's
01:08:54.160really look at these claims and see if they're legitimate. And as a historian, I don't take
01:09:00.020things for granted. I tend to sit with them and dig as much as I can to see where did this come
01:09:05.700from and why. Well, and it's really interesting that we're having this conversation now, like
01:09:10.060the Queen Charlotte Bridgerton series is just coming out when this episode airs, I think that
01:09:14.080same day. But we're also in a moment where I think that same day or the next week, there's the new
01:09:18.400Cleopatra series. So there's that discussion happening now, which I've seen so much. It's
01:09:24.000not the same discussion but it's a similar discussion except for i don't know i don't know
01:09:31.760this isn't a cleopatra podcast but it's like it's i saw somebody say that cleopatra is one of the
01:09:36.200women in history about whom we can almost guarantee exactly who her ancestors were because the
01:09:41.940ptolemies kept marrying its own family yeah exactly no that was their whole deal it's like0.75
01:09:49.520what was her ancestry well it's like just this it's like there's not in-laws it's it's just
01:09:55.100macedonian so with charlotte it's a similar conversation well i guess it's different
01:10:00.420because the cleopatra that's a documentary and that's presenting it's not presenting what if
01:10:06.120cleopatra was a black woman it's presenting cleopatra was a black moment woman in a documentary
01:10:10.220format whereas bridgerton is already an elevated fantasy right and bridgerton never claimed to be
01:10:16.360historic and true yes i mean i've read the novels this is a fluff historical romance it's fun the
01:10:24.480novels are fun um the series is great i'm a fan of the series i can't wait for the spinoff but
01:10:31.140we're reading way too much into fantasy and into um and actually shonda rhimes said you know in
01:10:38.420her mind this was an alternate universe to some extent let's imagine an alternate universe where
01:10:44.540people of African descent actually have a position of privilege and power in this society,
01:10:50.480where actually a woman is queen in this scenario, where there are members of the aristocracy who
01:10:56.140are Black, and yet they still have to contend with some prejudice, but they have reached the higher0.63
01:11:02.240echelons of society. And I have a number of historian friends who have found Bridgerton
01:11:07.600really problematic because they believe that Bridgerton, in some ways, takes away from the
01:11:14.420reality of what it was like to actually be of African descent in the late 18th and early 19th
01:11:19.380centuries. That was, you know, an enormous struggle, but it was extremely hard to be accepted
01:11:24.020in this time period. Obviously, this is the moment when you have formerly enslaved people0.93
01:11:29.540pushing against slavery and the slave trade and really being ignored for a number of years.
01:11:35.520And so there's some sense that, well, maybe this is going to give people a false impression. And my response to that is mixed to some extent, because on the one hand, I agree. And even these rumors about Charlotte and her ancestry, it has troubled me a little bit about why are we trying to rehabilitate and change Charlotte when there are so many other people of African descent around the world who deserve to have their stories told,
01:12:02.380who actually identified as a person of mixed racial ancestry or African descent, who, you know,
01:12:09.340we should be focusing on telling those stories versus this white woman who was a queen, you know,
01:12:14.540during this time. But on the other hand, I think Bridgerton is, you know, it's a good show. It has
01:12:19.700diverse casting. It's a fun show. And I'm hoping it'll lead to more interesting historical
01:12:26.000depictions and also more diverse casting like Hamilton, which I personally am a huge fan of.
01:13:31.280like in the last couple of years there was a show in England or in Britain that was about Anne Boleyn
01:13:36.240and they cast Jodie Turner-Smith right yeah or there was the Mary Queen of Scots movie and Gemma
01:13:41.360Chan was cast as Best of Hardwick like that's not being like what if Best of Hardwick was Chinese
01:13:45.300like that was not right they were just like let's just cast people so that this and I think more and0.99
01:13:50.300more nowadays in a good way I think television programming if you have a cast that's all white0.80
01:13:57.260people that just feels uncomfortable i think you want to have like a representation that kind of0.95
01:14:01.600looks more diverse like what contemporary society is like so if you're doing a historical thing you
01:14:06.340can either do the hamilton approach where it's like hamilton is not being like what if aaron burr
01:14:11.200was a black man no it's just like we just cast a bunch of people and they're in these roles and
01:14:15.480they're good at it and then what bridgerton is doing is like kind of that but not really because
01:14:22.120they're saying well what if if queen charlotte was a black woman and she was accepted as a black
01:14:26.980woman okay then what would the trickle down effects of that be a couple decades later
01:14:30.780and that's how they are able to bring more diversity into their show so it's different
01:14:35.460from just being like we're just casting quote-unquote colorblind like brandy cinderella
01:14:39.700if people know that where it's just kind of like well the king is white and the queen is black and
01:14:44.360their son is filipino and like let's just do it who cares like bridgerton so it's the fact that
01:14:50.380it hinges on someone who there's already his like these kind of rumors about i think it was a very
01:14:56.100canny and a very smart way to do it because it's absolutely like it's a possibility i mean i can
01:15:03.080absolutely see not only why the show you know turned out the way it did and has now decided
01:15:10.220to do an entirely um different spinoff focus on queen charlotte but also these rumors whether
01:15:16.900they're have any legitimacy or not doesn't really matter because if the public is in any way
01:15:23.600confused about the actual story or interested in it, or just, you know, they don't really know
01:15:28.780that gives you a hook, you can then turn it around and change it into whatever you want.
01:15:34.780And I mean, I, as someone who appreciates creativity, and film and all the rest of it,
01:15:42.400I think it was a brilliant idea. And I think it's going to do really well. And I do hope people will
01:15:47.780be more interested in the, you know, the Georgian era, and the Regency era that this represents.
01:15:53.160But I also think there is a real difference between fantasy, you know, alternate realities, historical fiction and history. And history was a lot bleaker and more violent and depressing than we want it to be. It wasn't, I think, this fantasy reality that people would like the 18th century to be.
01:16:11.340And I think that's probably the hardest thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around, even in the arguments about slavery now, about talking about slavery, about acknowledging this history, you know, what's next step should be particularly for Britain and the British monarchy, which is what I work on.
01:16:28.180And it's mainly that there is a real sense that this is in the past.
01:16:33.940And for some people, they're all, well, this is really wasn't that bad anyway.
01:16:37.660And my response to that, after having spent years working in the archives, was it isn't
01:16:55.560but also it's impacting the way we think about the world and our place in the world and why we
01:17:02.740want to look back and reimagine that maybe the world could have been a little bit better maybe
01:17:08.440there are secrets in the past that have been hidden and i think there's a there's a genre of
01:17:14.200history like history's mysteries that people are so fascinated by you know like people love
01:17:21.140stories of like unsolved crimes, unsolved historical mysteries. And this idea that
01:17:27.260maybe this queen really had a secret history or a secret identity or a secret ancestry that we
01:17:33.560don't know about is very appealing in a time when, you know, we want to look forward and not dwell on
01:17:40.200all the negative aspects of the brutal aspects of slavery in particular, and imperialism.
01:17:46.000Yeah, it's just making me think a couple weeks ago, I was talking with Patterson Joseph,
01:17:49.980the actor and now writer and he he wrote this novel about charles ignatius sancho yeah and so
01:17:56.660he was saying when i was chatting with him you know to him because charles ignatius center like
01:18:00.780that's the georgian period as well so he he was like you know in the archives or whatever and
01:18:05.220reading about like this is what it was like for this exceptional black man at this time who was
01:18:09.720able to vote and all these things and so he was the first the first black man to vote in britain
01:18:15.980Yeah. So what that story and how that resonates with him and how we wanted to share it versus something like Bridgerton, which, again, is not presenting historical fact, but you see Reggie Jean Page like swanning around, you know, I've been swinging over him at a ball where it's just kind of like so to him, to Patterson, he was saying like, he just I think I don't think these are his words, but there's just such a disconnect there being like, well, imagine black people like this and in this era.
01:18:41.480and he was just like but why like they weren't so right he didn't have this experience it was
01:18:48.480actually a constant challenge yeah so it's it's interesting to um when you were talking about the
01:18:55.540how the claims kind of got a new wind with when Meghan Markle married into the royal family and
01:19:00.200stuff but also this sort of sense of like what if history wasn't so bad and this is like again
01:19:04.560like Bridgerton Shonda Rhimes like I love you like nothing against this or the show it's just
01:19:09.980what this what the discussions that are sort of unfolding about this are is there's some sort of
01:19:14.880risk i guess to just like well what if not just like what if the past wasn't there's cool things
01:19:20.820about the past but like you know the role of black people in georgian england was not one of those
01:19:24.880that was not a good time to be time or place to be black person but also it's kind of showing like
01:19:31.120what if the british royal family is actually really woke like what if they've been like
01:19:36.920don't worry about it like they've been the whole thing that came out recently but like oh Kate
01:19:40.720Milton's ancestor was an abolitionist and stuff where it's like what if yeah what if the this
01:19:46.280family is like they're so not racist that they've been like back even before it was cool they had
01:19:52.200you know so it's kind of revamping the royal family's reputation as well exactly yeah and I
01:19:57.400and as someone who works on the royal family I'm opposed to to that I mean I don't think this is
01:20:03.900something that they deserve. I think we should be really, you know, reasonable and restrained when
01:20:09.940we think about the royal family. And when we think about the fact that this is a thousand-year-old
01:20:13.340institution that is based on hereditary privilege, definitely on whiteness, hereditary wealth,0.62
01:20:20.520and hereditary status. Everything about the royal family is based on an accident of birth.
01:20:26.240And I've been asked recently by, you know, a number of journalists in the wake of King Charles
01:20:31.980saying, you know, oh, I support research into the connections between the royal family and
01:20:35.980the slave trade because of the evidence that I gave to the guardian and they shared it with the
01:20:40.620palace, you know, which is exciting that he responded to this. And it is a big deal. But
01:20:45.920at the same time, it doesn't really mean much because, you know, this is evidence that's been
01:20:52.060around for a while. These people have been in the archives working on the history of slavery for
01:20:57.000decades now, you know, the company that was founded in the 7th century was called the Royal
01:21:02.260African Company. It's not like a huge surprise. So to take this family and this institution
01:21:09.360that gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade, that invested in it, that profited from it,
01:21:15.200that expanded it dramatically, and then defended it all the way through the abolition movement
01:21:20.480into the 19th century, and then claim, oh, and by the way, secretly, George III's wife was
01:21:26.860actually of African descent and was like a closet abolitionist and all this other stuff,
01:21:31.180it's giving them too much credit. And it's allowing them in some ways to turn that narrative
01:21:37.220around and create yet again, an alternate reality where they were on the right side of history.
01:21:43.540And, you know, we might do that with Bridgerton, but we need to understand that that is not real.
01:21:48.220That is fantasy. And that's great. And it's fun to watch, but it is not real. And Meghan Markle,
01:21:54.040I'm sure, would be the first person to point out that that was absolutely not her experience
01:21:59.600marrying into this family. She was not protected by this institution. And they didn't really
01:22:05.180understand what she was going through as a woman of mixed ancestry. That is one of the claims,
01:22:11.640because obviously, I've read about all of this and what she went through. I've heard,
01:22:16.160you know, it's always hard to confirm this, but I've heard that William said to her and to Harry,
01:22:20.840You know, we've all had to deal with the press. We've all had to deal with, you know, Kate was attacked for her weight and, you know, her alleged weight problems and various things. And then Meghan's response was, yes, but this is racial and it is a different level of attack.
01:22:38.760It's a different level of hatred and hostility and violence essentially inflicted against her1.00
01:22:44.260in the press. And the palace didn't protect her, didn't respond in a way that made her feel safe.
01:22:50.940And they just didn't get it. And I don't think they do even now. I don't think after all this
01:22:56.320time has passed that the royal family or even the tabloids really understand what Meghan went through
01:23:02.980and what anyone would go through who is not white and is in the royal family. I mean,
01:23:09.060the racism and the extreme hostility that Meghan faced, the fact that she actually felt suicidal.
01:23:17.540I mean, I think that is a really important story. And it's in some ways, the real story,
01:23:23.000right? It's not this fantasy reality of, oh, maybe they were actually a lot nicer than we
01:23:28.120like to imagine. Well, no. And even when I've been sort of describing the situation to like,
01:23:32.980um friends in my friends who are not involved in history and stuff like that i said yeah or they
01:23:40.100saw the statement that charles was like oh yeah i'm gonna look into the connection between the
01:23:43.020british royal family and the slave trade like people who have no who've not been in the archives
01:23:46.400are just like like obviously there's a connection it's like you think you think that this had said
01:23:53.820like like of course how could they have not have had like that's anyway it's right and that and
01:24:01.640actually he you know he they're not looking into anything i mean and they're not really doing
01:24:07.520anything because all that was was the palace saying at this point we recognize that the
01:24:14.980connections are irrefutable there is a historical paper trail that we have to acknowledge which it
01:24:20.420is good that they at least acknowledge it because elizabeth ii would not have even responded so i
01:24:25.940do think we have to give charles some credit for that but that's it in terms of how far i'm willing
01:24:31.280to go. Because beyond that, we are talking about someone who is the head of what is essentially a
01:24:37.960multi-billion dollar corporation, the royal family. They have immense wealth, immense resources,
01:24:45.600the ability to assemble a team of people, to create an independent commission to look into
01:24:51.000the links between the monarchy and slavery, to hold a summit. He's also head of the Commonwealth.
01:24:55.460He could reach out to CARICOM, to people in African countries, to people in Britain, and really investigate and acknowledge and address these links in an important and historically significant way.
01:25:11.100That has not happened. I would be shocked if it does happen.
01:25:14.420I do have to say, though, I'm trying to be moderately optimistic, in that I think I'm
01:25:20.320hoping there'll be some changes in the future. But at the same time, I've seen, you know,
01:25:24.860what's happened since 2018, what's happened in the wake of 2020. And that generally speaking,
01:25:31.620the monarchy is very good at releasing statements that sound really great, but don't really mean
01:25:38.380anything. And then kicking it down the line a few more years into the future and saying,
01:25:43.340well, we'll just wait a few more years and see what we discover. Or, you know, we won't refute
01:25:47.860possible claims that one of our ancestors might have been of African descent. Because why, you0.54
01:25:53.340know, at this point, why would they? It's not going to make them look good either way. And so
01:25:56.980they're better off remaining silent on that issue. And I guess this sort of like as a final question,
01:26:02.560I wanted to ask you, what do you think the significance is? Well, first of all, like
01:26:05.940yourself as an American working at an American university, the fact that Bridgerton, this is not
01:26:10.280like a bbc show like this is a netflix series produced by shonda rhimes it's american based
01:26:15.440on and i don't i believe julia quinn herself is american so it's very much like england reimagined
01:26:21.920through an american lens and you were seeing a lot of the stuff with charlotte kind of started
01:26:25.360in charlotte the city in america like what so it's weird because now we're in more of a i don't
01:26:30.780know i don't know just talk about that like the america versus uk and how she's seen as a black
01:26:36.740person? Like, do the people in the UK think about this? Or is this entirely an America,
01:26:41.560America's thing? I can't speak entirely to what they think in the UK. But I will say I do think
01:26:47.720it is more of a focused issue in the United States. And that is partially because we rejected
01:26:54.980the monarchy, you know, with the American Revolution. But at the same time, Americans now
01:27:00.320are fascinated with the royal family. There are so many Americans who love British history,
01:27:06.740who love the Tudor period, who love the Regency period, the Austen novels, all of the historical
01:27:14.200recreations of these time periods, mostly based on novels, not on history. And because of that,
01:27:21.840we've romanticized British history, the British royal family, to an extent that we've even
01:27:27.420imagined entirely new worlds that they operate in, in the 18th and 19th centuries. And I think
01:27:34.760that there is this romanticization of british history and an attempt to in some ways project
01:27:41.200on to britain the fantasies that americans have and even you know african americans too of you
01:27:48.260know being royal being part of the royal family and someone like megan who was she left she actually
01:27:56.800walked away from that and rejected it and so well maybe you know that fantasy is over and so let's
01:28:03.180turn back to Queen Charlotte, because that is pure fantasy. And we can just indulge that fantasy and
01:28:08.700not have to actually deal with the racism, the sexism, the death threats, you know, the suicidal
01:28:15.420thoughts and all of that that Meghan Markle actually experienced. And so there is a sanitization
01:28:20.100of the historical record in this fantasy world. But I also think Americans, we really love fantasy.
01:28:27.000And it really appeals to our sensibilities and our desire to escape, you know, just the
01:28:32.280constant negative news and our own political issues over here. We can all just fixate on
01:28:40.720the royal family. And imagine having swatting around in a castle or on an estate or having
01:28:47.440all these beautiful men that are also wealthy who are desirable. And we can go and dance with
01:28:54.700them at balls. I mean, that is definitely a trope. It goes all the way back to the Disney princesses
01:29:00.620stuff which is also incredibly popular and still is and not just among children adults too so i do
01:29:08.180think there's a connection between how we romanticize the royal family and also just our
01:29:13.800you know the way we digest film you know stories that are fantasy i think well i'm just when you
01:29:21.580were talking talking with british and there's a fantasy and people in the ballroom and stuff i'm
01:29:24.980just like yeah this really just brings me back to the the cinderella with brandy from the 90s
01:29:29.860which was my first experience like as a young person watching colorblind casting and i was like
01:29:34.200oh this is cool this is great like this is like imagine a world where just kind of like everyone
01:29:37.900is just whatever it's like you know here are two sisters and one is black and one is white whatever
01:29:41.560it's like that's i don't know so watching thinking of bridgerton in that way it's just kind of like
01:29:47.200oh look imagine a world where everyone it's kind of like regency england but it's also
01:29:51.220like more diverse and there's like right yeah so you can imagine yourself and i love that about
01:29:56.880bridgerton like getting back to like nothing against bridgerton like i love that they're
01:30:01.300giving you know cosplayers of color like opportunities of people you can dress up as
01:30:06.020i love to think of people you can see yourself like the hate the heroes and the heroines like
01:30:10.020shonda rhimes does in her contemporary shows too like such a good job of having a cast that
01:30:16.420represents the full viewing audience and i think that's really great for bridgerton
01:30:20.020and we can see it as a fantasy situation right yeah and the world of fantasy shouldn't just be
01:30:28.780white and that is also something that i've seen in there's been a backlash to science fiction
01:30:34.800novels and science fiction and fantasy stories if you know there's a diverse cast or if oh my god
01:30:42.480there's a white elf or something it's like i didn't know you knew that all elves were white
01:30:47.020I didn't realize that was a thing. I guess somebody dug around the archives and they discovered a hidden treasure trove of elf letters. And they all said, we're all white and we always have been since time immemorial. But I mean, like all of that always makes me so frustrated.
01:31:01.400You know, imagining that here is this, you know, in the actual world where we should be able to be whoever we want and people should be able to see themselves represented in shows, in, you know, films, and to have that be attacked by essentially white supremacists is horrific.
01:31:17.900And I think that that's also why this issue of Queen Charlotte's ancestry is so contentious, because if you question it, there's a sense that you are basically acting like those white supremacist people who are critiquing, you know, oh, and you know, you you watched or read something in Tolkien, and it wasn't all white characters. So that's not right.
01:31:40.240But that never was supposed to be real. That was always fake. That was always a fantasy. Why can't it be diverse and more interesting? And Bridgerton is also a fantasy, and it should be diverse and interesting. But the actual Queen Charlotte, you know, I mean, I'm not saying she wasn't interesting, but she's definitely not as interesting as people want her to be.
01:32:01.860And actually, she herself, if she was here, would probably tell you that her life was not that interesting.0.66
01:32:07.360She complained bitterly about how bored she was, how her life was tedious.
01:32:12.880You know, she was into botany and she loved music.
01:32:16.020But she also was under the thumb of George III most of her life.
01:32:20.400And she did not like to go against him because the number one reason he married her was that she had a reputation for being compliant.
01:32:31.100not philosophical not not anyone who might be radical not someone who was a free independent
01:32:36.920thinker she was someone who did what she was told and did what george iii wanted and so when george
01:32:43.720iii was not supportive of the abolition of the slave trade behind the scenes neither was charlotte
01:32:49.900this is where like i feel like bridgerton as much as bridgerton the og series is a fantasy i think
01:32:55.880this new queen charlotte series it's like everything you just described it's like that
01:32:58.960is not the character in the trailer that i have seen not at all no and so this is where i appreciate
01:33:04.780is like a sliding glass doors moment of like the okay let's do bridgerton and like what if charlotte
01:33:10.480was a black woman okay and then they create this fantasy world around that and now queen charlotte
01:33:15.080is like taking it even one step further like that wasn't even a book julie quinn has since written a
01:33:19.300book about queen charlotte but that was a breakout character people want to see and i love i love the
01:33:24.980imagery of her with her like afro and everything i'm like this looks like a cool fantasy show
01:33:30.760that's the prequel of bridgerton which is also a fantasy show yeah it's not based on the actual
01:33:37.860charlotte's personality on her character imagine a show where the main character is just pregnant
01:33:43.980for two decades and is constantly writing letters talking about how she's so sick of0.93
01:33:50.200she called it my you know my campaign which was just being pregnant being pregnant1.00
01:33:54.000and that was her job was to ensure the succession but then she did it and then some to where they0.88
01:34:00.580had so many children they didn't even know what to do with all these children and 13 of them
01:34:05.360survived into adulthood which was pretty amazing for i mean amazing for that then and now to think
01:34:11.900that she survived her children survived but i don't think that she had a life that she truly
01:34:18.420enjoyed. I think she was pretty unhappy based on the letters that I found. I think she tried to put
01:34:24.140on a good face and to be cheerful, but she also was someone who was very much about exhibiting
01:34:30.680complete self-control as much as possible. And that's what George III valued. And that's also
01:34:36.640what he wanted the rest of his family to be like. And they were constantly disappointing him. And
01:34:42.500so the real story of the royal family in the 18th century, in some ways, is a story of a
01:34:47.120dysfunctional, toxic family with all kinds of weird, you know, daddy, son issues and other
01:34:53.240things, daughters that were never allowed to go off and marry for years and years, because they
01:34:57.460didn't want them to be independent and to, you know, be free of them. But it's not a story about
01:35:03.440diverse people, diverse ideas, diverse worldviews. This is a conservative, extremely wealthy,
01:35:10.120privileged family. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting to see. And I'm curious, because
01:35:14.680there's a book that just came out um it's called like the real queen charlotte and i'm just in the
01:35:19.100midst i'm going to be reading this and i think people who watch queen charlotte the series or
01:35:23.120bridgerton who are like let's read about this real life person are going to be disappointed it's not
01:35:26.600like oh here's this badass woman from history that you know no one's told you about it's like1.00
01:35:31.240no here's this like quite typical queen who was like the reason we don't know a lot about her is1.00
01:35:37.440because the stuff that she did was not scandalous was not like she did her job right she married1.00
01:35:42.700the king. She had children like that, like that was like top tier. That was what was asked of her
01:35:47.340and she did it. But that's not, that's not the Anne Boleyn story. You know, that's not the
01:35:51.760Elizabeth the first story. It's not some sort of person sort of like stepping out of line with
01:35:56.580expectations. No, she's not like some proto feminist or a rebel or anything like that.
01:36:03.500She's a conservative queen who was constantly pregnant and did what her husband told her to do1.00
01:36:09.440in the majority of cases and took care of him when he was ill and then was his guardian later
01:36:15.240in life. And I just wanted to mention one thing because I think it's significant. So one of the
01:36:20.060quotes that's used to, you know, back up this claim that she was actually of African descent
01:36:25.880was a quote from a physician made about her on when she was basically on her deathbed.
01:36:32.520And he said that she had, quote, a mulatto complexion. But what he meant by that was yellow, because she was dying. And at the time, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, mulatto was a term, it was a racial term, so it was a racial comment, but it could mean many things.
01:36:52.580And one of the things that it meant in terms of complexion was yellow.
01:36:56.080And I think a lot of people now don't realize that.
01:36:59.080And so when we look at historical evidence, even, you know, letters and quotes and books
01:37:05.680that were published at the time, we have to not read into them our 21st century understandings
01:37:12.060of even terminology, because it's often not the case that what we think something means
01:37:18.020is exactly what it meant at that time.
01:37:19.940It might be similar, but there's often variations.
01:37:23.960And so I think this is another reason why, I mean, at least as a historian, I'd like
01:37:27.560to make a push to say this is why history education is so significant, because people
01:37:31.800have to not only understand the history itself and read and understand the context, but they
01:37:36.220also need to understand what terms people used.
01:37:39.920And so if you find certain random pieces of evidence and you just point to go, aha, this
01:37:48.740We never make claims based off of just one piece of evidence because we need more than that. We need to corroborate the claim. And sometimes there's contradictory evidence. And I think all of those things are really important. And it's not always easy for people who are amateur historians to get into the complexity of studying history, that it's time consuming and that it requires a lot of knowledge to understand what something means and maybe how different ways you can read it.
01:38:18.240And I think that's so important to point out as well.
01:38:46.560and here are these two images. And then Wikipedia then takes it and makes a little story. And then
01:38:51.760journalists start to take that and turn it into story. And then it gets replicated over and over
01:38:55.360again. It ends up on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs, in news stories. Well, no wonder people
01:39:01.580are confused. I mean, I'm not at all surprised that people believe that this is true. I mean,
01:39:06.740the New York Times contacted me, and they said, you know, we can you help us legitimize these
01:39:11.580claims? And I said, well, unfortunately, I can't help you legitimize them because they're not true.
01:39:16.160And I think they were surprised because they had heard, oh, well, we thought this was true.
01:39:21.020And so, I mean, even at the highest levels of investigative journalism, they're not really sure.
01:39:26.320And it's because it is that easy for claims to multiply and take on a life of their own on the internet in a way that in, you know, the 20th century, when Charlotte, North Carolina had the statue and there's some letters to the editor, most people probably didn't know anything about Queen Charlotte or anything about her ancestry.
01:39:44.660It's really only since the birth of the Internet and social media that we now even have this rumor going around that has become so contentious.
01:39:54.200Well, and I think it all comes not it doesn't all come down to one of the things it comes down to is just people wanting to see themselves like people who are like, say, an African-American person in the United States is a fan of British history to find someone that you can see yourself in.
01:40:08.640like I can see how that would that would be appealing to find like to find yourself in a
01:40:13.560story. So like myself, we're talking on video chat. Like one of the reasons why I got interested
01:40:18.240in Tudor England was I visited England as a child. And I was like, Oh, who's that pale red haired
01:40:22.300person with a long nose that kind of looks like me? That's Elizabeth the first great. So like,
01:40:26.820that's my like, privileged white person take on it. But it's like, yeah, to see someone who looks
01:40:31.740like you is powerful. And so we still want to see that. No, I totally agree. And I and I think
01:40:38.500i can sympathize with that and i also think that's why there are all these new shows and
01:40:44.740obviously we need that but i also think there are historical actual historical figures that
01:40:51.140are real and that did far more for the greater good than someone like charlotte but if people
01:40:57.980want to continue to imagine who she could have been in an alternate reality and in like a
01:41:04.340fictitious world, then, you know, I can totally embrace that. And I do. But I do think we have
01:41:10.800to stop, you know, at some point and say, Okay, what is this based on? And why are we so keen
01:41:18.020to have her not be, you know, this, this white Germanic woman that she was in her time period,
01:41:24.500and as she was seen and treated by the people around her and the extreme life of privilege
01:41:29.980that she led. So if people want to keep up with you and your your work, can you just share? Do you
01:41:36.440have social media or a website where people can kind of read more of what you've written or see
01:41:40.560what you're talking about? Yeah, I'm on Twitter at Dr. Brooke Newman. And I'm working on a book
01:41:46.660called The Queen's Silence, which is on the links between the monarchy and slavery, which will be
01:41:51.420out in 2025. And I'm currently working on my website with an amazing designer, website designer,
01:42:26.520And I thought, well, I don't know if this is going to go anywhere. And I was a little nervous. Like, what if I can't find anything? And, you know, is this a dead end? But I never thought it would, you know, this is prior to Meghan Markle becoming a huge, since it was really, honestly, really was Meghan Markle marrying the royal family.
01:42:43.960Everything happened to her, the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, and then just the push across the Caribbean in particular for not only reparations, but to potentially separate from the monarchy and remove the monarchist head of state and the royal tour, which was a complete disaster.
01:43:02.800All of that snowballed into my book going from being this kind of esoteric, interesting topic to being relevant politically, socially and historically.
01:43:13.380And so it's been really exciting, but it's also really stressful because of the fact that this is a book that it's going to be poured over and take part and funneled through the culture wars because people are so anxious about, you know, in their minds, rehashing the past and, you know, bringing all the stuff up about slavery and all the rest of it.
01:43:33.540And so I'm, you know, excited about it, but I'm also, it's making me like, you know, need to really buckle down and get it done and also just be really careful with it.
01:43:42.060God, I didn't even think about that. Because usually, usually, and I've interviewed a lot
01:43:45.760of people in my podcast, like an academic writing a book about, they're writing a book,
01:43:49.760and it's going to get a nice audience, you know, of other academics and just like people who like
01:43:53.260reading history, but you're just because of the profile you have and the topic, like, yeah,
01:43:58.040so you're writing this knowing it's not going to be like, oh, other historians will read this,
01:44:01.480but like, we're going to look at this in a really different way.
01:44:06.860Right. And you spend, I mean, writing these kinds of books, years just sitting in a corner by
01:44:10.540yourself, you know, digging around in the archives, transcribing things, writing up your
01:44:14.500findings. I mean, it's a pretty lonely, tedious job, very time consuming, and then just suddenly
01:44:20.900realize, wow, you know, the king of Britain has actually heard about my research, and people are
01:44:25.840talking about it. And the Daily Mail is attacking me. And it's like, Oh, my God, you know, it really
01:44:31.140puts a lot of pressure on you. I think the only way to deal with it is to is to try to just tune
01:44:36.600it out and just tell the story. But I also have to say that this has been the most fun project
01:44:44.080ever. I went to a conference years ago around like 2019 or so. And somebody said, who's excited
01:44:51.320about their second book project? And my arms shot up and I was the only person who was excited.
01:44:56.040And I think that shows because I was excited about my topic. I thought it was interesting.
01:45:01.040I thought, why isn't anybody writing on this? And why doesn't the book already exist? And now I
01:45:04.920realize that other people feel the same way. And as a writer, there is nothing better than
01:45:09.460knowing that there's an audience out there that actually wants to read your work and engage with
01:45:14.180it. Whether or not that engagement might be toxic to some extent, you can't control all of that,
01:45:20.840but it is really motivating and exciting. Yeah, exactly. For any writer, to know that
01:45:27.520there's a bunch of people who are waiting with bated breath for your book to exist.