Neither Queen Charlotte was black, nor George III was crazy: the half-truths of the Netflix series

On the cold morning of January 29, 1820, at the age of 81, King George III of the United Kingdom breathed his last at Windsor Castle.

The monarch thus ended one of the longest reigns of the British monarchy with the permission of his descendants: Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and the recently deceased Elizabeth II (1926-2022).

George was the son of Frederick Louis of Wales and his wife Augusta of Saxe-Gotha.

He belonged to the house of Hanover, the German dynasty that reigned in Great Britain since 1714 (United Kingdom since 1801), after Queen Anne I Stuart died without issue and Queen Victoria of Hanover and her cousin passed on to inherit the British throne, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

In the middle of World War I, and due to the deep anti-German sentiment that was beginning to awaken in the United Kingdom, the Hanovers decided to adopt the surname Windsor.

George III was, curiously, the first of this dynasty to be born in British territory, and also the first whose mother tongue was not German, but English.

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The life of George III is fascinating from the point of view of history and, especially, from the history of medicine, due to the disease he suffered, porphyria, the origin of which is believed to be the hemophilia that he inherited and that through consanguinity came to him. even to the Spanish Royal Family in the figure of several of the children of Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia, popularly known as

Ena

.

This was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England, also known as the grandmother of Europe, since, by virtue of the numerous descendants she had, today it is rare to find a member of a European dynasty who is not descended from her.

Almost nothing in his life happened as it seemed it would.

George III was born prematurely and for this reason he was immediately baptized due to the conviction that he would die within hours.

He was the second son, although the first male, therefore, a future heir at the time his father ascended the throne.

His father, Frederick Louis, was a wayward Prince of Wales who, due to the bad relationship with his father, the monarch George II, was exiled in 1837. The reasons for these terrible relations are probably explained by the fact that father and son separated when The little boy was only seven years old, leaving him in the care of the court in Germany, when the parents went to live in England when they became heirs to the throne on the occasion of the accession to the throne of George I. Frederick did not see his parents again. parents until he was an adult and finally ended up in England, upon arrival being a true stranger to his own family.

Despite having been a womanizer and spendthrift, he finally found wonderful stability with his wife Augusta of Saxony, with whom he had nine children, the future George III being the second to be born, but the first male, therefore, heir to the throne. .

At the age of 44, he died before his own father, so he never reigned and directly passed the principality of Wales to his son, the future George III, who became king on the same day of the death of his grandfather, George II. , October 25, 1870.

A newly minted king who is single and, therefore, without descendants, at least legitimate.

A situation that was not comfortable in a reigning royal house and that was resolved a year later after an exhaustive search for marriageable European princesses.

The

chosen one was Queen Charlotte, protagonist of the

Bridgerton prequel

on the Netflix platform and where she is presented as a black woman, the first of the licenses that fiction allows itself and which does not correspond at all to what was the true queen consort.

Both the portraits of her that are preserved and what was written about her in her time, deny that she was black.

The historian John Watikings described her as “fine figure and pleasant step;

Her hands and neck were extremely well shaped, her hair was brown, her face was round and white, her eyes were sky blue.

Although at the time marriages were arranged, it was customary to send portraits of future wives so that the groom could, among the possible candidates, get an idea and choose.

George received two portraits of Charlotte that are kept in the Royal Collection of the British crown and in which she is described as having blue eyes.

There is no historically compelling reason that her race was black at all.

The only thing that could explain certain traits and very remotely is that the queen's ancestors, specifically María Afonso, born five centuries before her, could have been Moorish instead of Jewish.

Something that lacks, in any case, any basis, since in the Middle Ages the word Moorish referred to a religion and not to an ethnicity, which could be from anywhere, including, of course, Europe.

Portrait of Queen Charlotte, a work by Georg David Matthieu.

Heritage Images (Getty Images)

Whether they were happy in their marriage cannot be said with certainty, but what is known is that they had 15 children, two of whom died, a low figure considering the high infant mortality of the time.

The Netflix series focuses exclusively on the couple's marital side and the king's illness, which is absolutely true, but George III was much more than that.

Such a long reign necessarily brings many events to a country.

So it was.

“The reign of George III of Great Britain meant the arrival of a certain stability to the crown,” explains Rocío García-Bourrelier, PhD in Modern History from the University of Navarra.

“His predecessors, prince-electors of Hanover, had prioritized the direction of this German territory over their obligations as British monarchs, which led to the detachment of the people and part of the nobility.

George III was the first Hanoverian born and raised in the United Kingdom, his mother tongue was English, and he was endowed with a folksiness pleasing to the population, who nicknamed him

George the Farmer

.

In politics, however, he is considered a king with absolutist tendencies, who minimized the weight of Parliament in strategic decisions for the State, such as the signing of the treaty of Paris (end of the Seven Years' War), ”he recalls.

The doctor adds one more note: “he is also blamed for the loss of the 13 American colonies.

He later had the insight to turn to William Pitt the Younger as a trusted minister despite his personal differences, which led to better economic results for the country.

Suffering from porphyria, his last years were spent between medical treatments and periods of lucidity.

Due to his illness, an important debate arose about who should hold power in the event of royal incapacity: Parliament, the Prince of Wales or the Prime Minister.

Indeed, the three points that the historian García-Bourrelier points out are fundamental in her reign and none of them are even mentioned in the Netflix series.

The loss of the 13 colonies represented a great change in the international policy of Great Britain and, of course, it was a radical change in the relations between both countries.

George III began to reign in 1760 and these territories had already begun to organize, declaring their independence on July 4, 1766, the colonies disappearing forever and the United States was born after the military victory of the American troops in the Battle of Yorktown. , Virginia, 1781. On September 3, 1783, the armistice was signed with the Treaty of Paris that put an end to the War of Independence and in which the American side had among its representatives, among others, Benjamin Franklin, considered today as one of the fathers of the American country.

The king's illness is accurately narrated in the series and is something that really happened, although the medicine of the time, unfortunately, treated it as a sign of madness, with the treatments applied to the unfortunate monarch being as unpleasant as they were ineffective.

Porphyria is a defect in the metabolism of the red blood cell molecule responsible for transporting oxygen.

One of his symptoms is suffering from hallucinations and mental confusion, among many other things, hence the belief at the time that the king was crazy.

Today it is a disease controllable with medication.

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Another historical reality, and one that the series does not even touch upon in its narrative, is the total control of the monarch in his reign, something unusual in a monarchy like the British, characterized in almost all reigns by strong control of Parliament.

As the British philosopher and MP Edmund Burke wrote: “England was in danger of a revival of monarchical absolutism, with an unstable government because George III insisted on unconstitutionally interfering in politics using the king's friends and a secret cabinet to influence Parliament.”

Be that as it may, the series is a product designed to entertain and not to transmit the true story, so the viewer can relax and eat popcorn, knowing that much of what is told there never really happened, starting because Queen Charlotte was not black.