Unravelling the mixed race ancestry of British royals

According to Dr. Priya Atwal, a researcher at the University of Oxford and the author of the book Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, Queen Victoria adopted multiple children from the colonies in the 19th century as a “way to learn about her new territories and project a benevolent image of her family.” Queen Charlotte (1744-1818), for example, the wife of King George III, was believed to have been of Black ancestry several generations before her, although the claim is disputed. Indeed, in a 1999 article, the historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom has argued that Charlotte, the daughter of the German Duke Charles Louis Frederick of Mecklenburg and his wife, Princess Elisabeth Albertine of Saxe-Hildburghausen, “was directly descended from Margaritade Castro y Sousa, a Black branch of the Portuguese royal house.”

“That was picked up in the popular Netflix series Bridgerton, which cast a mixed-race lady to play the queen’s character,” Atwal said, adding that the claim is disputed and not all historians agree with it.

Atwal looked into the colonial wards and the colonial godchildren of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), “and they were a group of several young figures from chiefly houses from across colonised territories that were taken over by Britain.” These young people included Prince Duleep Singh and Princess Gouramma from India, but also Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an African orphan from modern-day Nigeria, whom Queen Victoria took under her wing.

“It was fascinating for me to see that there are photographs for example of Princess Gouramma, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Maharaja Duleep Singh and his children included in family photo albums that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert put together. What we have to bear in mind is that photography ... became more widespread in the 1840s,” Atwal said, adding that this was probably the first concept of a family album and, interestingly, all these characters appeared in it. For Atwal, this showed how Victoria and Albert saw their family members. Does that mean the British royals were less racist in the past? Indeed, mixed-race marriages were common between Englishmen and Indians in the mid-18th century, according to the British author William Dalrymple, who discusses his own mixed-race ancestry in the book White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India.

Atwal said the concept of race was not restricted or even determined by skin colour. “It’s interesting that Queen Victoria didn’t see things in those terms. She saw someone like Gouramma, someone like Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Duleep Singh ... somewhat as equals, somewhat as kin, but not because of their skin colour. She understood the ultimate marker of society to be if you had royal blood or not,” she added. So, have the British royals changed at all in these 150-odd years? “It’s complicated, we’re just starting to do more of this research,” Atwal said, adding that despite Queen Victoria bringing these non-white children into her family fold, she was ready to brush away her ward, Duleep Singh, when he wanted to marry an English lady. Like in Meghan Markle’s case, the question was, “What will the children look like?”

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle