The Ton would not be the same without Queen Charlotte, who’s as much a fixture in Bridgerton as the Netflix drama’s titular family. But historically speaking, the fashionable royal consort is poised to die relatively soon.
Season 3 is set around 1815 and the beloved monarch’s real-life death occurs in November 1818 — mere months before the birth of her granddaughter, the future Queen Victoria.
We can’t imagine those fancy ballroom scenes without her commanding presence and elaborate wigs, but is that an unfortunate reality we eventually have to face?
Showrunner Jess Brownell tells TVLine, “I worship Golda Rosheuvel, and I think she’s so fantastic in her role. Shonda [Rhimes] and I, internally, have just decided that we’re in an alternate dimension.”
According to the EP, that alternate history began when the queen and Lady Danbury “worked together to make society more inclusive,” as depicted in the Bridgerton prequel series Queen Charlotte. “That’s where we went into another timeline,” she explained. “There’s potential that in this timeline, Queen Charlotte could live forever.”
That lines up with what Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton EP/director Tom Verica previously said about choosing which elements from Charlotte’s life to draw from. In an interview timed to the prequel show’s finale, he told TVLine that Queen Charlotte’s creative team was “very clear that this is a fictional telling of this story, but we also wanted to honor elements of the real Queen Charlotte and her story.”
Working with historian Polly Putnam, they were strategic about which historical bits were incorporated into the show and what other details were best left out.
“We really delve into the history of Queen Charlotte and extract the elements to ground it in some reality, but we’re very clear when we diverge from that path,” he explained. “So Shonda extracted real elements of the story to be able to give authenticity to the time period, but clearly in the retelling of our story, decided where it leans into our story and how we get to the Queen Charlotte that we know at that time.”
