To read more about the presence of Black people in Europe, check out Black and British by David Olusoga, Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann, and African Europeans by Olivette Otele. Other known Londoners of the time included writers and abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cuguano, as well as composer Ignatius Sancho.
Her cousin was a British aristocrat, but Dido herself was not out in society. During George III’s reign, Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a rear admiral in the British navy and an enslaved African woman, came to live in London. When the British did not want to deal with Black refugees from the American Revolution, they sent many of them to Sierra Leone, despite a large number having been born in America.īridgerton’s alternate reality has danced around the existence of the British transatlantic slave trade - which wasn’t abolished until 1807, and colonial enslavement wasn’t banned until 1833 - but it’s worth noting that England and Europe have always had Black residents of varying social status. In the 18th century, more than 400,000 people were abducted from Sierra Leone and sold by enslavers, many of them to British colonists. While Lady Danbury and the Great Experiment are fictional, England did have a relationship with Lord and Lady Danbury’s home country - it’s just an extremely bad one. What history tells us: There is no real evidence that Charlotte or her family were Black or had any even semi-recent ancestors who were (although if you’d like to read about the shaky theory behind this, here you are).
What we see: Charlotte’s “very brown” skin comes as a surprise to George’s mother despite being told the queen-to-be has “Moor blood.” (Charlotte and her brother, the ruler of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in Northern Germany, are played by actors who identify as Scottish Nigerian and mixed-race.) So Princess Augusta scrambles to bring some other Black people to court, kicking off the series’ “Great Experiment” and introducing us to our beloved Lady Danbury and her husband, originally from Sierra Leone.
Here’s what history tells us about the points in the series where fact and fiction meet. The facts of their relationship may not include a societal shift regarding race (unfortunately), but 18th-century England was a gossipy, funny, inventive place, and the more you read about it, the more Queen Charlotte’s world will feel familiar. While the reality of King George III and Queen Charlotte does not exactly match the show, recorded history does tell us that they were two people who loved each other very much, had 15 children together, and even slept in the same bed when that was quite outside the norm for their class. It is fiction inspired by fact,” a fair warning for history purists, who are encouraged to think of this Bridgerton spinoff as history adjacent. Queen Charlotteopens by telling us, “It is not a history lesson.
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