Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
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Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (May 19, 1744 - November 17, 1818) was the queen consort of King George III.
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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.
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 Johan 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
In recent years, Charlotte's distant ancestry has become of interest to some scholars of the African diaspora. 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 African blood in his opinion. In support of this comment, some researchers have noted that Queen Charlotte was a descendant, through as few as three and 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 12th-century Portuguese monarch Alfonso III and his mistress, Mourana Gil -- who has various been described as African, Moorish or Berber -- and eventually became an ancestor 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 a 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.
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 (http://www.genealogics.org/getperson.php?personID=I00000318&tree=LEO)
- PBS's Frontline Article (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/royalfamily.html)
- Royal Genealogies (http://ftp.cac.psu.edu/~saw/royal/r05.html#I131)
- King George III: Mad or Misunderstood? (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3889903.stm)
- Hedley, Olwen Queen Charlotte J Murray, January 1975, ISBN 0719531047
- Scobie, Edward. African Women in Early Europe. African Presence in Early Europe. Edited by Ivan Van Sertima. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1985: 202-22.de:Sophie Charlotte von Mecklenburg-Strelitz