Race, relationships & the British monarchy
As Meghan Markle gets set to write her name in royal history, Rosa Silverman looks at race, the aristocracy and who came before
‘Meghan Markle won’t be ‘first biracial royal,’” trumpeted a headline in The Charlotte Observer this week. “A queen named Charlotte came first.” The local newspaper serving the North Carolina city of Charlotte was referring to the wife of King George III, from whom the American city took its name and who some have claimed was “Britain’s black queen”.
If the truth of this assertion remains much disputed, what is clearer is that when Markle – whose mother is black and father is white – marries Prince Harry next spring, she certainly won’t be the first biracial member of the British aristocracy.
Those who have gone before her may comprise a tiny minority, but they none the less show Britain’s “blue blood” (the literal translation of the Spanish, sangre azul, an idiom referring to the proud families of Castile who claimed never to have intermarried with Moors, Jews or other “outsiders”) has been mixed for centuries.
Some contend that our first black royal can be traced further back than Charlotte, to the 14th-century Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III. Named on a list of 100 Great Black Britons, a campaign launched in 2004 to ensure the continued legacy of black British historical figures, Philippa was the daughter of William of Hainaut, a lord in what is now Belgium.
The theory is slight, resting upon a contemporary description of her by Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter, as having a broad nose, wide mouth and being “brown of skin all over”. Her first child, also called Edward, may well have been known as the Black Prince, but the sobriquet is believed to refer to the black armour he wore, and doesn’t appear in written records until nearly two centuries after his death.
Charlotte, who also makes it on to the 100 Great Black Britons list, was born some four centuries later, in 1744, the daughter of Duke Charles Louis Frederick of Mecklenburg-strelitz. Most prominent among those making claims for her mixed heritage is Belizean historian Mario de Valdes y
‘Some contend that our first black royal can be traced… to the 14th century’
Cocum, who has traced Charlotte’s ancestry to a black branch of the Portuguese royal family headed by the 13th-century Alfonso III and his concubine Ouruana, a black Moor.
In support of his argument, he draws on the depiction of Queen Charlotte by the artist Sir Allan Ramsay in 1762, described as “the most decidedly African of all her portraits”. He also came upon a contemporary account of Charlotte by a royal physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, as having “a true mulatto face”, while Sir Walter Scott venomously described her family as “a bunch of ill-coloured orangutans”.
Many modern historians are sceptical, or at least believe further proof is needed. Prof Kate Williams says: “It has been argued she was a Moor but other scholars suggest she was a Mozarab – an Iberian Christian. We hope that a scholar will find evidence that will tell us.”
Of course, Britain has long been a nation of immigrants, not least thanks to our colonial history. The wills of East India Company officials show that in the 1780s, one third were leaving their goods to Indian wives and their Anglo-indian children. As Philip Eade, author of a biography of the Duke of Edinburgh, has said: “A lot of aristocratic families have stories of African or Indian ancestors in the family.”
Yet many have remained on the peripheries. A notable exception is that of Dido Belle, the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy English aristocrat in the 18th century. John Lindsay, an officer in the Navy, is thought to have met Belle’s mother, a slave called Maria, on a ship captured from the Spanish in the West Indies.
Who knows how many white men’s children were born to black slave women in the 18th century, but in what was an unusual move for the era, Lindsay brought his illegitimate daughter home to Britain and asked his family to raise her. Thus, Belle grew up in Kenwood House, north London, which belonged to her father’s uncle, the first Earl of Mansfield, who made a number of landmark rulings on slavery that were among Britain’s first steps towards abolition. Her extraordinary story was dramatised in the film Belle by Amma Asante in 2013.
Even so, Belle’s acceptance by British high society was far from
clear-cut. She was not invited to join the family at dinner when they were entertaining guests, for example. Nor was she treated as the equal of a white girl being brought up at Kenwood at the time: Elizabeth Murray, daughter of the Mansfields’ nephew Lord Stormont, whose wife had died when her daughter was six, received an allowance of £100 a year, Belle received just £30.
The degree to which attitudes had moved on by the 20th century is debatable. In 1952, Bapsybanoo Pavry, born in Bahrat, India to a wealthy family, married the twicewidowed 16th Marquess of Winchester, who was already
90 years old. Bapsy, who in 1928 was presented at court to King George V, became the Marchioness of Winchester. But according to Christopher Wilson, the royal author and biographer, she did not feel wholly welcomed into the top echelons of British society. “She felt that society had never really got used to the idea of having an Indian aristocrat,” he said. “But it may not have been the colour of her skin so much as her extremely pushy attitude to being accepted [that prevented this].”
It was not until this decade that Britain gained its second non-white marchioness-in-waiting, and she too has endured a sometimes rough ride. Emma Mcquiston, the mixed-race daughter of a Nigerian oil tycoon, married Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth and heir to the Longleat estate, in 2013. Not only has the former model, food blogger and chef faced a certain amount of society prejudice – “There has been some snobbishness, particularly among the much older generation. There’s class, and then there’s the racial thing,” she told Tatler magazine – but in 2015, the Viscount claimed he had been estranged from his mother since she asked: “Are you sure about what you’re doing to 400 years of bloodline?”
Dr Olivette Otele, a specialist in European colonial and postcolonial history, says the significance of Britain’s involvement in the building of Empire, and historic notions of “tainted blood” and “pure blood”, should not be underplayed. If nonwhite nobility have always been few in number, we can no doubt blame the prejudices of “class, ethnicity, race and religion”. In a mark of how much has changed in a generation, however, it is the idea that such attitudes persist that now seems shocking.
Wilson believes that, for the most part it’s not so much racism that has kept the British aristocracy so white as the importance placed on social status: “It’s more the feeling they should marry someone they can look up in Debrett’s or Burke’s Peerage,” he says. “I don’t think British aristocrats are any more or less racist than any other social group and I think the only reason why they marry who they marry is because they want to keep things in the club.”
Prince Harry’s departure from that tradition, in marrying even further than his brother from this “club” (remember those who questioned Kate Middleton’s suitability as a future queen on the grounds of her middle-class origins?), is sure to set a welcome new trend, he believes.
“I think everyone else will follow suit. Others will realise all the barriers are down and I think everyone must finally accept we live in a multicultural society,” he says. “Harry is leading from the front. It’s a wonderful thing.”