Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

• 1. Introduction

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  Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen consort of King George III, left behind belongings that Christie's sold at auction between May and August 1819. Her clothes, her furniture and even her snuff went under the hammer.

  She came from Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a small duchy in northern Germany, and spent most of her life at the heart of the British monarchy. Her husband's mind failed, her eldest son turned against her, and public affection for her faded. Places far from Britain still carry her name.

  Three questions run through her story. How did a young princess with no appetite for politics come to sit beside a king? What did that position cost her? And why does a rumour about her ancestry still return to the news?

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• 2. From Mirow to London

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  The Unteres Schloss, or Lower Castle, in the town of Mirow was the birthplace of every child of Duke Charles Louis Frederick, and Charlotte arrived there on the 19th of May 1744. She was the youngest daughter of the duke, who held the title Prince of Mirow, and his wife, Princess Elisabeth Albertine of Saxe-Hildburghausen. Their small territory belonged to the Holy Roman Empire.

  Diplomatic reports written in 1761, when her engagement to George III was settled, described "a very mediocre education". Britons such as Elizabeth Montagu worried aloud about the supposed provinciality of her upbringing.

  Her parents hired tutors including Gottlob Burchard Genzmer and Friderike Elisabeth von Grabow, and the lessons were broader than those reports implied. Charlotte studied literature, botany, natural history, French, Italian and Latin. She also learned embroidery, dancing, singing and household management, with religion taught by a priest. The composer Johann Georg Linike taught her the harpsichord. The family lived modestly until 1752, when her brother Adolphus Frederick succeeded to the ducal throne. Only then did Charlotte gain any taste of princely duties and court life.

  In 1760 George II died, and his grandson George III inherited the British crown at the age of 22, still unmarried. His mother, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and his advisors were eager to see him settled. Charlotte was not at first on the list of candidates. Baron Philip Adolphus von Münchausen, the Hanoverian Minister in London, put her name forward, probably because relations between Hanover and Mecklenburg-Strelitz were warm.

  At 17, Charlotte appealed partly because an insignificant duchy was unlikely to have taught her anything about power politics or party intrigue. That proved true. Soon after the wedding, George instructed her "not to meddle", and she dutifully obeyed.

  In July 1761 the King announced his intention to wed, following the usual form, to his Council. A party of escorts led by the Earl Harcourt then left for Germany. They reached Strelitz on the 14th of August 1761. The next day Charlotte's brother, Duke Adolphus Frederick IV, signed the marriage contract with Lord Harcourt. Their mother had died on the 29th of June, after encouraging the match in letters exchanged with Princess Augusta.

  Three days of public celebrations followed. On the 17th of August, Charlotte set out with her brother and the British escort, which included her new Lady of the Bedchamber, Elizabeth Hamilton, 1st Baroness Hamilton of Hameldon. By the 22nd they had reached Cuxhaven, where a small fleet waited. The crossing was extremely difficult. The party met three storms and landed at Harwich only on the 7th of September.

  They spent that night at Witham, in the home of Lord Abercorn, and reached St. James's Palace in London at 3:30 pm the next day. The King and his family received the bride at the garden gate. That was the first time the couple had met. At 9:00 pm the same evening, within six hours of her arrival, they married at the Chapel Royal. The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker, performed the ceremony before the royal family, the German travellers and a handful of guests. After a brief honeymoon at Richmond Lodge, the coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on the 22nd of September.

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• 3. Life at Court

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  On her wedding day Charlotte spoke little English. She learned it quickly, though she kept a strong German accent. One observer remarked, "She is timid at first but talks a lot, when she is among people she knows."

  On the 12th of August 1762, less than a year after the wedding, she gave birth to George, Prince of Wales. The couple went on to have 15 children. All but two, Octavius and Alfred, survived into adulthood.

  Buckingham House stood at the western end of St James's Park, and the King had recently bought it as a private retreat. Around 1762 the couple moved in, even though St James's Palace remained the official residence. Charlotte favoured the house so strongly that it became known as The Queen's House. In 1775 an Act of Parliament settled it on her, in exchange for her rights to Somerset House. Most of her children were born there.

  Her first years were lonely. Her mother-in-law, Augusta, insisted on rigid etiquette and interfered with Charlotte's efforts to make social contacts. Augusta also chose many of the Queen's staff, and several were expected to report on her behaviour. Charlotte turned to German companions, above all her confidante Juliane von Schwellenberg. Letters to her brother Charles II, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, reveal the depth of her loneliness and her frustration with royal rules.

  The King preferred riding and country pursuits, and he kept the family as often as possible in the rural towns of Kew and Richmond. His informal domestic life dismayed courtiers who expected grandeur. In July 1769 Lady Mary Coke was indignant to hear that the King, the Queen, her visiting brother Prince Ernest and Lady Effingham had walked through Richmond without servants. She wrote, "I am not satisfied in my mind about the propriety of a Queen walking in town unattended."

  From 1778 the family spent much of its time at the newly built Queen's Lodge at Windsor, across from Windsor Castle, where the King hunted deer. Charlotte oversaw the interior decoration. The diarist Mary Delany, a friend of the family, said of the first room, "The entrance into the first room was dazzling," and praised its Indian paper and brightly embroidered chairs.

  Charlotte also showed warmth to those who served her children. She once wrote to Mary Hamilton, her daughters' assistant governess, about a poem they had read together, saying, "Oh! What a blessing to keep good company!"

  Charlotte held influence through the King, but she used it discreetly. Her letters to her brother Charles show that she kept herself informed and recommended people for offices. In 1779 she asked him to burn one of those letters, because the King suspected that a person she had recommended was the client of a woman who sold offices.

  German affairs interested her most. She followed the War of the Bavarian Succession of 1778-1779 closely. Her efforts may explain why, in 1785, the King backed British intervention in the dispute between Joseph II and Charles Theodore of Bavaria.

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• 4. The King's Illness

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  Charlotte Papendiek, one of the Queen's attendants, believed that George III first suffered mental illness in 1765. The royal governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, who was in the household that July, recorded only a fever. Mrs Papendiek was absent at the time. She claimed in her memoirs that Princess Augusta kept Charlotte in the dark in order to make herself regent. The Regency Bill of 1765 named Charlotte as regent until the Prince of Wales came of age, should the King become permanently unable to rule.

  The true collapse began in October 1788 and lasted until March 1789. The writer Frances Burney, then one of the Queen's attendants, overheard her moaning in a "desponding sound", "What will become of me? What will become of me?" When the King collapsed one night, Charlotte refused to remain alone with him and insisted on her own bedroom. The doctor, Richard Warren, was summoned without her knowledge, and she had no chance to question him.

  When the Prince of Wales announced that the King would go to Kew while his mother should go to Queen's House or Windsor, Charlotte pushed back. She told her son, "Where the king is, there I shall be." Yet she and her daughters were taken to Kew separately and lived secluded from the King. They visited him regularly, but the meetings were uncomfortable, because he tended to embrace them and refuse to let go.

  Suspicion soon poisoned the family. Charlotte believed her son planned, with Doctor Warren's help, to have the King declared insane and take over the regency. The Prince's followers, notably Sir Gilbert Ellis, suspected the opposite. In their telling, she meant to have the King declared sane with the help of Doctor Francis Willis and Prime Minister William Pitt, so that she could be appointed regent. Doctor Warren said that Doctor Willis had pressed him to declare the King sane on the Queen's orders.

  The Regency Bill of 1789 named the Prince of Wales regent if the King were permanently insane. It also placed the King, his court and his minor children under the Queen's guardianship. In one argument, the Prince accused his mother of siding with his enemies, and she called him the enemy of the King. The quarrel became a scandal when she refused to invite him to the concert celebrating the King's recovery.

  Satirical prints depicted her as an unnatural mother and a creature of the Prime Minister. In January 1789 The Times accused the Opposition of beginning "a most scurrilous attack on the queen, not only by private conversation, but through the medium of the prints in their interest". Mother and son finally reconciled in March 1791, on her initiative.

  The ordeal changed her. She developed a terrible temper and no longer enjoyed appearing in public, even at the concerts she loved. Her relationships with her adult children grew strained. Portraits had long shown her young and contented in maternal poses. Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait from this period marks a break, after which she looks much older. Charlotte Papendiek wrote that the Queen was "much changed, her hair quite grey". The King's illness is now thought to have been porphyria, though bipolar disorder has also been named.

  In 1792 Charlotte found some relief in planning the gardens and decoration of Frogmore House, a new residence in Windsor Home Park. When the King's health declined again in 1804, the marriage suffered a serious rupture. Despite pleas from her daughters and his physicians, she slept in a separate bedroom, took her meals apart from him and avoided time alone with him.

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• 5. Revolution and Regency

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  Queen Marie Antoinette of France was 11 years younger than Charlotte, and the two women never met face to face. They shared a love of music and the arts, and they kept their friendship alive on paper. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Marie Antoinette confided in Charlotte. Charlotte had apartments prepared for the refugee French royal family. News that the King and Queen of France had been executed left her greatly distraught. The Napoleonic Wars that followed threatened the safety and sovereignty of her German homeland.

  In 1811, the King's madness became permanent. Under the Regency Bill of 1789, he passed into the guardianship of his wife. She found it hard to visit him because of his erratic behaviour and occasional violent reactions. It is believed she did not see him again after June 1812. Yet she remained his legal guardian from 1811 until her death in 1818. He was incapable of understanding anything about her later life.

  On the 12th of October 1814, Charlotte became Queen of Hanover. That same year she stood beside her son, the Prince Regent, at the festivities in London marking the defeat of Emperor Napoleon. Because the Prince Regent and his wife were estranged, Charlotte served as the first lady of royal occasions and hosted official receptions. She also supervised the upbringing of her granddaughter, Princess Charlotte of Wales.

  Popularity slipped away in her final years, and she sometimes met demonstrations. After a reception in London on the 29th of April 1817, a crowd jeered her. She answered that it was upsetting to be treated this way after so long a period of service.

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• 6. Patron and Botanist

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  In April 1764 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then aged eight, arrived in Britain with his family on a grand tour of Europe, and he stayed until July 1765. The royal couple admired German artists and composers, and they loved the music of George Frideric Handel. The Mozarts were summoned to court on the 19th of May and played before a small circle from six to ten o'clock.

  Johann Christian Bach, the eleventh son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was the Queen's music-master. He set difficult works by Handel, J. S. Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel before the boy, who played them all at sight. Mozart also accompanied the Queen in an aria she sang and played a solo work on the flute. On the 29th of October the family returned to court for the fourth anniversary of the King's accession. Leopold Mozart then published six sonatas by his son, known as Opus 3, dedicated to the Queen on the 18th of January 1765. She rewarded the dedication with a present of 50 guineas.

  Charlotte was an amateur botanist with a strong interest in Kew Gardens. Explorers such as Captain James Cook and Sir Joseph Banks kept bringing home new plants, and she helped to enrich and expand the collections. The South African bird of paradise flower was named Strelitzia reginae in her honour.

  In December 1800 Charlotte set up the first known English Christmas tree at Queen's Lodge, Windsor. She had earlier decorated a single yew branch, a custom from her native Mecklenburg-Strelitz, with the help of her ladies-in-waiting. The court gathered round it to sing carols and exchange gifts. For the 1800 party, held for the children of all the families of Windsor, she placed a whole tree in the drawing-room and hung it with tinsel, glass, baubles and fruits. John Watkins, who attended, recorded that it was illuminated by small wax candles. He wrote that each child received a portion of the sweets and a toy, and "all returned home quite delighted". The custom spread among the British nobility and gentry, and later to the colonies.

  The cabinetmaker William Vile, the silversmith Thomas Heming and the landscape designer Capability Brown numbered among the craftsmen the couple favoured. The German painter Johann Zoffany often painted the family in informal scenes, including one of Charlotte at her dressing table with her children. In 1788 the couple visited the Worcester Porcelain Factory, founded in 1751, and she ordered a service later renamed "Royal Lily" in her honour. A second service, the "Queen Charlotte" pattern, also bears her name.

  She founded orphanages as well. In 1809 she became patron of the General Lying-in Hospital for expectant mothers, providing new funding that kept it from closing. Today it is the Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital.

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• 7. Death, Jewels and Legacy

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  Charlotte died on the 17th of November 1818, at the age of 74, seated in an armchair at the Dutch House in Surrey, now called Kew Palace. Her eldest son, the Prince Regent, held her hand. She was buried on the 2nd of December in the Royal Vault at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. From her marriage on the 8th of September 1761 to her death, she served 57 years and 70 days. That makes her Britain's longest-serving female consort, and the second-longest consort of any kind after Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

  The day before she died, she dictated her will to Sir Herbert Taylor, her husband's secretary, and named him and Lord Arden as executors. Her personal estate was valued at under £140,000, and her jewels made up most of it. She left her husband the jewels he had given her, unless he remained insane, in which case they would be a Hanoverian heirloom. Jewels from the Nawab of Arcot and others were to be shared among her surviving daughters. Her daughter Augusta Sophia inherited Frogmore, and her daughter Sophia received the Royal Lodge. The will was proven at Doctor's Commons on the 8th of January 1819.

  The jewels then caused a protracted dispute. The Prince Regent claimed them, and so, in turn, did his heir, William IV. After William's death, Queen Victoria claimed them for the Crown. Charlotte's son Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, claimed them as the senior male of the House of Hanover. The quarrel outlasted Ernest. In 1858 it was settled for his son George, and Victoria had the jewels delivered to the Hanoverian ambassador. Her husband, blind, deaf, lame and insane, had died 14 months after her.

  Her name travelled widely. The Queen Charlotte Islands, now Haida Gwaii, lie off British Columbia, and Queen Charlotte Sound is in New Zealand. Charlotte, North Carolina, and Mecklenburg County in the same state are named for her. So are Charlottesville, Virginia, and Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island. The proposed colonies of Vandalia and Charlotina also honoured her. In Tonga, the royal family adopted the name Sālote, and it was borne by Sālote Tupou III.

  Rutgers University was chartered in 1766 as Queen's College, in reference to Charlotte, and renamed in 1825 for Henry Rutgers. Its oldest extant building, Old Queen's, was built between 1809 and 1823. The Queen Charlotte's Ball, an annual debutante ball, originally funded her hospital, and a large copy of Allan Ramsay's portrait of her hangs in its lobby. A lead statue that is probably of her, from around 1775, stands on Queen Square in Bloomsbury. Charlotte, North Carolina, has two more, at its airport and its International Trade Center.

  On screen she has been played by Frances White in the 1979 series Prince Regent and by Helen Mirren in the 1994 film The Madness of King George. Heike Makatsch took the role in the 2000 miniseries Longitude. Golda Rosheuvel played her in the Netflix series Bridgerton in 2020. In Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, India Amarteifio played her younger self opposite Rosheuvel.

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• 8. The Ancestry Claim

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  In 1929 the German historian Brunold Springer published Racial Mixture as the Basic Principle of Life, in which he challenged Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Charlotte as inaccurate. Preferring Allan Ramsay's portrait and contemporary descriptions of her appearance, he concluded that her features pointed to African heritage. The Jamaican-American amateur historian J. A. Rogers agreed in his 1940 book Sex and Race, calling her biracial or black.

  Supporters of the claim also rely on a literal reading of the diary of Baron Stockmar. He was personal physician to Leopold I of Belgium and arrived at court in 1816, two years before Charlotte died. His diary describes her face in unflattering terms, and his descriptions of her children are equally harsh.

  In 1997 a genealogist and self-described independent researcher, Mario de Valdes y Cocom, popularized the argument in an article for PBS Frontline. Many later articles cite it as their main source. He pointed to Charlotte's 1762 Ramsay portrait and traced the supposed inheritance to Madragana, born around 1230, a mistress of King Afonso III of Portugal. Historical sources call Madragana either Moorish or Mozarab, which Valdes took to mean she was black.

  Most scholars reject the claim, even though it is popular with the general public. Apart from Stockmar's jab shortly before her death, no one in her lifetime referred to Charlotte as having African features or ancestry. Her portraiture was not unusual for its time, and painted portraits are poor evidence of how a sitter looked. The historian Andrew Roberts calls the claims "utter rubbish". He attributes their popularity to historians' reluctance to address them, because of their "cultural cringe factor".

  The term "Moor" in the Middle Ages marked religious affiliation rather than race, so it proves little about Madragana. She was more likely an Iberian Mozarab. A contribution from an ancestor fifteen generations back would be too diluted to have affected Charlotte's appearance.

  In 2017, after the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was announced, a number of news articles promoted the claims. A Buckingham Palace spokesperson, David Buck, was quoted by the Boston Globe: "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."

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