How Did a White Queen Become a Minority?

In last month’s blog, I reviewed the Netflix series “Bridgerton.” I found it entertaining, though anyone who hoped it to be at Jane Austen’s level was going to be disappointed. It has appealing leads, the necessary amount of romantic drama, and a racy take on sex. Steamy fun for pandemic days.

I commented on the casting of many people of color, including the lead male, Rege-Jean Page as Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, for a series that normally would have been almost entirely white. This was not “colorblind” casting but part of a political point. Queen Charlotte, shown as mixed race herself, has promoted blacks socially and economically in the series.

The idea of the queen’s African ancestry came long ago by a Jamaican-American writer, based on a portrait in which he says she had African features. Another writer followed to later claim Charlotte had African heritage through an obscure line leading back through Portugal to the Moors, who ruled the Iberian Peninsula, what is now Portugal and Spain, for hundreds of years. I called the idea far-fetched.

At least one major historian, however, finds merit in the idea of a Black queen. In a recent Zoom talk on Blacks in England during Austen’s time, expert Gretchen Gerzina says she believes it is “probable” that the queen has African ancestry. She adds that she saw a portrait of Charlotte in Nova Scotia years ago that displays distinctly African features. She said a museum official told her that Princess Anne of today’s royal family had told that person on a visit that “everybody knows” of the queen’s heritage.

Gerzina has written a book on Blacks in England, “Black London: Life before Emancipation,” which provides an overview of life for ordinary Black citizens and profiles of the best-known Black persons. She also has edited two books on Black history in Great Britain and has hosted a BBC series on Black topics. She is a highly capable historian.

Perhaps Gerzina’s comment was a throw-away line designed to entice people to learn more about Black history in an English society that often omits their contribution. Online comments show enthusiasm for the idea, as Black people look for direct, personal connections with the white dynasty that has served as head of state for hundreds of years. The result is that many others have jumped on the Charlotte-as-minority bandwagon.

Yet this disinterested observer—as opposed to an uninterested observer—must demur. The most exciting idea is not necessarily the correct one. The math simply does not work. Charlotte’s Black ancestry goes back to Madragana, a Moorish woman and mistress of the Portuguese king Aphonso III, in the mid-1200s. Queen Charlotte was born in 500 years later. The genealogies show a 15-generation remove.

What does this mean? In each generation, her Moorish ancestry would be cut in two. Two is a small number until you multiply it many times. Mathematically, Charlotte was only 1 part Moor out of 32,768 parts total. You might get more or less DNA from one parent in any generation, which is why one child of a mixed-race couple might have more European looks and coloring, while another child of the couple might have more African looks and coloring. But those differences average out over time. After 15 generations, there would be an infinitesimal amount of that DNA left.

Put another way, each human being has at most 30,000 genes (they’re still counting). Charlotte’s Moorish heritage would, statistically, account for perhaps one gene out of all the rest.

There’s also the question of whether Madragana was even Moorish. She might well have been only a European living in an area ruled by the Moors in Iberia.

But let’s assume she was a Moor. Shakespeare and others used the word to mean a Black African as is commonly meant today. English family names such as “Moore” and “Morehead” probably relate to moor, the word for open English lands also called a heath. There’s a chance, though, that some of the names may speak to an original Black progenitor in the country going back hundreds of years. “Morris” seems to directly relate to Moors in the form of “morris dancers,” troupes that came over from Europe, often featuring Black performers.

But a Moor, then and now, is not the same as a Black African as normally meant.

“Moor” is a general name for different groups living along the North African coast, a loose collection of tribes and clans rather than a defined ethnic group. They were also part of the Islamic empire, and at least some of the leaders and occupiers of Iberia were of Arabian descent.

Thousands of years earlier, North Africa was colonized by the Phoenicians, people from what is now Lebanon, who spread along both sides of the Mediterranean. Hannibal and the other Carthaginians who battled Rome for supremacy descended from the Phoenicians. Their empire covered roughly what is now Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco (“Moro” = “Moor”).

Undoubtedly, trade and conquest brought in ethnic groups from the sub-Sahara—Blacks who live south of the great desert. These are the people who comprise the predominant ancestry of African Americans.

But their contribution to the Moorish DNA would have been relatively modest, which means Charlotte’s inheritance would have been even less than computed above.

A look at today’s Iberian DNA provides an insight to the Moorish contribution. General European ancestry makes up roughly 50 percent of Spanish DNA and 60 percent of Portuguese DNA. The rest includes different combinations of Middle Eastern descent (12 pct.), North African (2-5 pct.), Germanic (4 pct.), and Roman (1 pct.). The Middle East component includes Phoenicians, other Arabs, Jews, and others living in the general Red Sea area.

Another survey shows that North Africans (“Moors”) comprise 10.6% of Iberian DNA, while Sephardic Jews, those of Middle Eastern rather than eastern European descent, constitute 19.8% of Iberian DNA. Sephardic Jews spread across the Mediterranean in the great diaspora when the Romans destroyed Israel in 70 C.E.

Even Neolithic hunters from thousands of years ago contribute a smidge to Iberian blood. Yet, in terms of identifiable genomes, Sub-Saharan Africans do not seem to register uniquely.

The images used to “show” that Queen Charlotte was African go back to a 1761 portrait by Allan Ramsey, shown above with the headline. The painting displays a pale white woman with reddish-brown hair. Other original portraits show her even “whiter.”

Some images on the internet have been adjusted to darken the coloration of her skin and to more heavily outline her nose and mouth. In one Photoshop, even her hair has been altered to an African texture. The result is an African face for those who want her to be African.

(Note: I have not seen the original paintings, as Gerzina has. If anyone can comment on their direct observation of any Queen Charlotte portrait, please do.)

Ironically, the European royal families have been so intertwined for so many dozens of generations that if Queen Charlotte is an African, so is her husband King George, and so is every other European monarch for the last five hundred years.

I am one of those who would delight in tweaking the noses of biographers and historians who want to find something special in the “white” blood of “royal” families—families who more often displayed incompetence than brilliance. However, the mathematics of biology works against us. Until somebody analyzes her DNA and concludes otherwise, the princess from a northern white country in the 1700s was—surprise—a white woman.

If we are going to stretch inheritance to the limit to identify a non-European minority in Charlotte’s background, let’s use the DNA we can actually find. Let’s proclaim her not as a Black woman but as a Phoenician or Judean princess who married an English king.