Star-crossed lovers come and go on Bridgerton—recall the uproar around Regé-Jean Page’s departure in 2021—but Golda Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte is a constant in Shonda Rhimes’s Netflix hit. Now the German princess turned British queen is getting her own spin-off, with newcomer India Amarteifio set to play the royal during her teenage years in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.
In honor of the show, now streaming on Netflix, let’s revisit the most remarkable details about the late monarch’s life and character, from her obsession with snuff to her passion for Pomeranians.
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She has been called Britain’s “first Black queen.”
Born Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in northeastern Germany, there’s been a wealth of (frequently problematic) debate about the racial origins of Queen Victoria’s grandmother and Queen Elizabeth II’s great-great-great-great grandmother. Specifically, historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom believes her to be descended from a 13th-century Portuguese monarch and his North African lover, Madragana. While other academics have questioned the validity of this genealogy, it’s the speculation around Charlotte’s heritage that inspired Bridgerton showrunner Chris Van Dusen’s powerfully diverse casting in the original series. (Notably, Queen Charlotte never appears in author Julie Quinn’s Bridgerton novels.)
Her hobbies included music and marsupial maintenance.
Charlotte adored music, even hiring Johann Christian Bach, the son of the legendary Johann Sebastian Bach, as her music teacher. She also invited Mozart to perform for her as a child, a fact referenced in the Bridgerton episode “Shock and Delight,” and often performed musical duets with her husband on the flute and harpsichord. Meanwhile, at the fledgling Kew Gardens, she became deeply interested in naturalism, both cataloguing plants and founding a menagerie that sheltered the first kangaroos on British soil. Most impressively, she aligned herself with the feminist bluestockings movement—with novelist Fanny Burney, writer Elizabeth Harcourt, and philosopher Margaret Cavendish among her inner circle.
She married her husband at first sight.
Queen Charlotte arrived in London to become the future queen at just 17 years old, speaking virtually no English. The sea journey from her native German duchy had been so tempestuous, and the princess so ill, that her wedding dress—heavily studded with diamonds—no longer fit her, with her purple velvet cape falling off her shoulders so that the “spectators knew as much of her upper half as the king himself,” noted Horace Walpole wryly. Nevertheless, she married King George III just six hours after meeting him for the first time on September 8, 1761, in a ceremony at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace.
She’s the original lap dog fanatic.
Centuries before The Simple Life, Queen Charlotte had a penchant for Pomeranians, bringing two of them with her when she moved to England. (Named Phoebe and Mercury, this original pair were later captured by Thomas Gainsborough in a royal portrait.) In later years, she frequently gifted dogs to her courtiers, keeping her own Pomeranians around her in her state rooms. Her son, King George IV, and his daughter, Queen Victoria, both inherited her love for the species—with the latter even starting a dedicated breeding program.
