“Lady Danbury finally finds some joy that’s not connected to marrying anybody,” Shonda Rhimes says of the decision.
On Bridgerton, Lady Danbury needs love like a hole in the head — but it turns out she’s got some romantic secrets up her brocade sleeve.
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story introduces us to a young Agatha Danbury (Arsema Thomas), who endures marriage to a man she doesn’t love and then is thrust into widowhood where she must also contend with the possible loss of her title and estate. What’s a newly minted member of the ton to do? In Agatha’s case, it’s take refuge in the arms of Lord Ledger (Keir Charles).
That’s right — the dear papa of Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) is Lady Danbury’s secret lover. Things begin quietly, shared moments and glances while taking walks on their adjoining estates. But eventually, they graduated to a stolen night in the bedroom where for the first time, Lady Danbury experiences physical pleasure.
Shonda Rhimes, who created and wrote most of Queen Charlotte, came to this liaison in a roundabout way. “To me, anyone who turned out the way Violet did had an excellent father. I wanted to give her this excellent, amazing father, but I also wanted him to be human and to have this flaw,” she tells EW.
“It was in the writing that I came to it,” she continued. “It hadn’t been my first plan, but as I continued writing the story, it became clear to me that that would provide a nice underlay of tension for Violet and Lady Danbury moving forward. But also what I needed was for you to see Lady Danbury finally finds some joy that’s not connected to marrying anybody, that’s not connected to love. It’s just physical joy.
Sorry, Danbury and Ledger lovers, that means that this is not some great lost love, so much as a moment of sexual awakening for Lady Danbury. “He is not really the love of her life,” Thomas says. “I don’t think Agatha thinks in that way because then she would’ve fought for him. If she had been denied this love all of her life, and now here he is, she would’ve been distraught. It’s less that he’s the love of her life and he’s maybe her first love where everything is so joyful and devoid of complications and then, you drift apart. But it’s still a very formative relationship.”
What is it that draws Agatha to Lord Ledger in the first place? She’s already enduring a marriage (and marital relations) with the much older Herman (Cyril Nri), and Ledger is a middle-aged man with a child and a wife.
“No one has ever taken her seriously before,” Thomas says. “No one talks to her like an intellectual or about things other than men and embroidery. This is somebody who wants to engage with her mind. He wants to play games and bring her back to a childlike state because she’s not really ever had that childhood . She’s been an adult for a really long time, and he represents what could have been and also what is not possible anymore.”
Lord Ledger is the one to break things off, bring young Violet with him on a walk and make it clear that their dalliance cannot continue. At first, Danbury seems wistful — especially when, in the Bridgerton timeline, she retrieves the birthday hat Ledger made her and dances with it once more. But Thomas says the potential for scandal is also a reason why Agatha doesn’t long for Ledger as a lost love.
“He is married,” she said. “That’s why she takes the active step of ‘I need to compartmentalize this.’ She doesn’t look at that hat ever again really, unless she’s in need of solitude and warmth. She realizes that if it were to ever come out, it would distract from everything that she’s trying to do So, she’s like, ‘This is not an important part of my story.'”
Still, we can’t deny that after this brief interlude, Lady Danbury seems to come more into her self, empowered to be the fierce woman we know and love on Bridgerton. Thomas would agree. “He’s the person that allows her to recognize how much she loves herself,” she reflects. “How she actually has this space to ask for her own pleasure and that she doesn’t need a relationship to get what she wants.”
