#queencharlotte — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #queencharlotte, aggregated by home.social.
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✰✰✰✰✰ Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Overview: Created by Shonda Rhimes, this 2023 Netflix limited series is a prequel spin-off to Bridgerton. It features two alternating timelines: young Queen Charlotte's origin story and love affair in the late 18th century, paired with a framing plot from the main Bridgerton series. The Plot & "The Great Experiment": The story follows seventeen-year-old German princess Charlotte, who is betrothed against her will to King George III of England. To justify a Black queen, the British royal […] -
✰✰✰✰✰ Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Overview: Created by Shonda Rhimes, this 2023 Netflix limited series is a prequel spin-off to Bridgerton. It features two alternating timelines: young Queen Charlotte's origin story and love affair in the late 18th century, paired with a framing plot from the main Bridgerton series. The Plot & "The Great Experiment": The story follows seventeen-year-old German princess Charlotte, who is betrothed against her will to King George III of England. To justify a Black queen, the British royal […] -
✰✰✰✰✰ Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Overview: Created by Shonda Rhimes, this 2023 Netflix limited series is a prequel spin-off to Bridgerton. It features two alternating timelines: young Queen Charlotte's origin story and love affair in the late 18th century, paired with a framing plot from the main Bridgerton series. The Plot & "The Great Experiment": The story follows seventeen-year-old German princess Charlotte, who is betrothed against her will to King George III of England. To justify a Black queen, the British royal […] -
✰✰✰✰✰ Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Overview: Created by Shonda Rhimes, this 2023 Netflix limited series is a prequel spin-off to Bridgerton. It features two alternating timelines: young Queen Charlotte's origin story and love affair in the late 18th century, paired with a framing plot from the main Bridgerton series. The Plot & "The Great Experiment": The story follows seventeen-year-old German princess Charlotte, who is betrothed against her will to King George III of England. To justify a Black queen, the British royal […] -
“Queen Charlotte Died in Her Bedroom,” by Kate LaDew
Queen Charlotte died in her bedroom,
sitting in a black horsehair armchair. She was saying something to her daughters, and then her head tilted forward, and they knew. Later, they tried to remember the words, tried to remember the last sounds their mother ever made, but it couldn’t have been very extraordinary, very meaningful, except that it was their mother and they loved her. It would’ve meant something to them.
Charlotte’s body was fitted into a coffin, sat under a canopy in the Kew Palace dining room, six candles in six silver candlesticks burning around it. Why six? the daughters wondered, but did not ask. They’d never had a coffin in the dining room, so maybe this was just how it was done. They couldn’t ask their father, who might know. He was in his bedroom, busy being mad, and they didn’t trouble him with anything anymore. They knew a lot of the servants were afraid of King George, but he was their father, so they could only love him. And, knowing how troubled he was by sounds, familiar and unfamiliar, such as the bark of a dog, the closing of a door, or footsteps. The daughters asked their brother if something could be arranged to prevent their father from hearing the funeral procession as their mother was carried to Windsor Castle.
Nearly a month later, as they walked six feet behind, the daughters’ black chamois leather shoes moved soundlessly over the now straw-covered cobbled courtyards. As they passed under their father’s window, they hesitated, looked up, and, seeing no movement, walked on. At twenty-five past nine, in the new royal vault in St. George’s Chapel, the daughters watched as the platform bearing the coffin containing their mother’s body was gradually lowered by imperceptible machinery into the dark.
At the same moment, they both remembered her hushed, happy voice as she told of the long voyage to England to meet their father. How it had given her such a bout of sea sickness that her diamond dripped wedding dress nearly fell off, and her new husband spent the ceremony gripping her shoulder, a small worried smile on his face, stealing glances and whispering, Steady, my dear, steady. It made her love him forever.
When the daughters returned to Kew, their father was in bed, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling. Neither spoke to him, walking back to the dining room. The space their mother occupied those last weeks was huge and bottomless, as if she’d sunk into the floor right there and was hanging somewhere underneath them, waiting.
A few days later, the daughters opened their mother’s bedroom door, stifling, at the last moment, the urge to knock. There, beside the bed, was the black horsehair armchair, a ribbon tied round it, pinned with a note, “Queen Charlotte died in this chair.” What had their mother said? She’d been speaking, they could still hear the warm vibrato, that thick German accent she never tried to shake.
What had she said? At the first meeting with her future husband, she could only manage, God save the King, over and over, until he smiled that small worried smile, Ruhig, meine liebe, ruhig. They looked at each other. Was that it? Couldn’t be, but could it? Should it be?
The air in the room was stale. They sat on either side of the bed, held hands across it, both tapping their feet and then stopping. Everything sounded louder now.
“Do you think,” one daughter said, “maybe we could ask for straw everywhere?”
“No,” her sister laughed. “They’d think us mad as –” and they squeezed each other’s hands.
Steady, my dear, steady.
Ruhig, meine liebe, ruhig.
And they both knew, years from now, if anybody asked, those would be her final words, and they wouldn’t explain, and they’d mean nothing to anyone, but she was their mother. It meant something to them. Every little breath, it meant something.
Copyright © 2026 Kate LaDew
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