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Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (May 19, 1744 - November 17, 1818) was the queen consort of King George III.

Birth, youth, and marriage

Charlotte was the youngest daughter of Charles Louis Frederick, Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz-Mirow (23 February, 1707 - 5 June, 1752) and his wife, Elizabeth Albertine, Princess of Saxe-Hildburghausen and Duchess of Saxony (4 August, 1713 - 29 June, 1761).

She was a granddaughter of Adolf Friedrich II of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (October 19, 1658 - May 12, 1708) by his third wife, Christiane Emilie Antonie, Princess of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen (March, 1681 - November 1, 1751). Her father's elder half brother reigned from 1708 to 1753 as Adolf Friedrich III.

For an "equal" person to marry the reigning king of one of the then most remarkable countries on the planet, she had only a surprisingly distant ancestry from kings herself. All her ancestors up to the level of great-great-great-grandparents were solidly princes, dukes and counts (or equivalent), and there was no reigning king. All her 62 closest ancestors were not higher than reigning princes. One could observe that she was rather an aristocrat than a royal. Only two of her great-great-great-great-grandfathers were kings: Gustav I of Sweden and Frederick I of Denmark and Norway. However, earlier in her ancestry, there are some more kings and queens.

Charlotte's brother Adolf Friedrich IV of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (reigned 1752 - 1794) and her widowed mother actively negotiated for a prominent marriage for the young princess. At the age of 17, Charlotte was selected as the bride of the young King George, though she was not his first choice. He had already flirted with several young women considered unsuitable by his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and by his political advisors. He also was rumored to have married a young Quaker woman named Hannah Lightfoot, though all later claims to prove this marriage were deemed unfounded and the purported supporting documents discovered to be forgeries.

Princess Charlotte arrived in Britain in 1761, and the couple were married at the Chapel Royal in St. James's Palace, London, on September 8 of that year.

Despite not having been her husband's first choice of bride, and having been treated with a general lack of sympathy by his mother, Charlotte's marriage was a happy one, and the king was apparently never unfaithful to her. In the course of their marriage, they had fifteen children, all but two — Octavius and Alfred — of whom survived into adulthood.

Issue

Interests and patronage

Queen Charlotte was keenly interested in the fine arts and supported Johann Sebastian Bach, who was her music teacher. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then aged eight, dedicated his Opus 3 to her, at her request. The queen also founded orphanages and a hospital for expectant mothers.

In 2004, the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace staged an exhibition illustrating George and Charlotte's enthusiastic arts patronage, which was particularly enlightened when compared to previous Hanover monarchs and compared favorably to the adventuresome tastes of the king's father, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Among the royal couple's favored craftsmen and artists were the cabinetmaker William Vile, silversmith Thomas Heming, the landscape designer Capability Brown, and the German painter Johann Zoffany, who frequently painted the king and queen and their children in charmingly informal scenes, such as a portrait of Queen Charlotte and her children as she sat at her dressing table.

The queen also was a well-educated amateur botanist and helped establish what is today Kew Gardens.

The education of women was a great importance to the queen, and she saw to it that her daughters were better educated that the usual young women of the day.

Husband's illness

After the onset of his illness, then misunderstood as madness, George III was placed in the care of his wife, who could not bring herself to visit him very often, due to his erratic behavior and occasional violent reactions. However, Charlotte remained supportive of her husband as his mental illness, now believed to be porphyria, worsened in old age.

Death

The queen died in the presence of her eldest son, the Prince Regent, who was holding her hand as she sat in an armchair at the family's country retreat, Dutch House in Surrey (now known as Kew Palace). She was buried at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Her husband died two years later.

Modern ancestral studies postulating Negro features

In recent years, Charlotte's distant ancestry has become of interest to some scholars of the African diaspora, though on flimsy genealogical grounds. The queen's biographer Olwen Hedley stated that Queen Charlotte's personal physician, Christian Friedrich, Baron von Stockmar, described his patient as having "true mulatto features" ("ein wahres Mulattengesicht"), presumably meaning that she appeared to have some Negro blood in his opinion.

In support of this comment, some researchers have noted that Queen Charlotte was a descendant, through at least three and possibly through as many as six lines, of Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a Portuguese noblewoman who lived in the 15th century. Castro was a descendant of the 13th-century Portuguese monarch Alfonso (Afonso) III and his mistress, Mourana Gil -- who has variously been described as African, Moorish or Berber (though this in all probability meant North African descent and not a remarkable Subsaharan descent). Castro eventually became an ancestress of most northern European royals, including George III. Critics of this research, however, argue that Castro's distant perch in the queen's family tree makes any presumed African, Moorish, or Berber ancestry highly negligible, and no different from that held by any other member of any German princely house at that time. However, Charlotte, to date, is the most prominent of Castro's descendants to have been described by contemporaries as having what they believed were negroid features, features that were much commented on during her youth and caricaturized by contemporary cartoonists.

The idea of her alleged Subsaharan features being inherited is apparently based on the possibilities of genetical material from several sides of one's ancestry combining and in random concentrating in that one individual. Such usually requires closer ancestors with similar features, and those genes coming from the both sides of one's parentage. We know (e.g from knowledge about most recent common ancestor) that each person has some ancestry in all parts of the planet. As Charlotte's both parents undoubtedly were descended also from an insignificant number of Subsaharan ancestors, her alleged features could be explained better even by such combination than claiming that a foremother in 15th century had left a hidden gene pool that did not emerge in any of the intervening generations but suddenly were visibly present in Charlotte. However, much more probable explanation to anyone's Subsaharan features would be a parent being of visible Negro blood.

Another story (myth or like) of a black child born to European royals is that of a black daughter of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain.

Named in her honor

• Charlotte, North Carolina
• Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada
• The Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia
• Queen's College, New Brunswick, New Jersey (now Rutgers University)
• Queens College, Charlotte, North Carolina
• Port Charlotte, Florida

External links and references

• Page at Genealogics.org
• PBS's Frontline Article
• Royal Genealogies
• King George III: Mad or Misunderstood?
• Hedley, Olwen Queen Charlotte J Murray, January 1975, ISBN 0719531047

• 1744 births
• 1818 deaths
• British queen consorts
• Charlotte, North Carolina
• English & British princesses
• House of Hanover