I’m currently watching a show called Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. I really wanted to watch it because I saw the trailer for it and was super pumped after seeing seasons 1 and 2 of Bridgerton. It is a really good series so far. It really gives good backstory about the Queen and her marriage to King George. In one of the seasons of Bridgerton, it gives a brief glimpse of Charlotte’s marriage to George but we don’t really see a lot of him after that. Queen Charlotte lets Charlotte tell her story.
The show also grapples with mental illness and how people treated it at the time (spoiler: they didn’t treat it very well.) At first I was confused as to why George couldn’t stay in Buckingham Palace with Charlotte. Was he with another woman? Did he have a health condition that prevented him from staying with her? Was he impotent? I really didn’t know. But as the show progressed, seeing George’s pain and suffering as he dealt with mental illness and the tortuous treatments his doctors gave him at the time, I began to really see George’s humanity and understood much more why he couldn’t be with Charlotte. Because there wasn’t as expansive an understanding of mental illness as there is now. At first I trusted this doctor that the Princess ordered for George, I thought he was a great guy because he used talking to get George to calm down. But then as the episode progressed, it is clear that this doctor was torturing George. He forced George to take ice baths, eat gruel and gave him shocks in an electric chair, and also put leeches on him. The reasoning he gave was that George was living this very pampered life, and it was not good for him, so he needed to have his body subjected to torture and pain because somehow that would cure his “madness.” I think as the series progresses though it is clear that these methods of torture did way more harm than good. In fact, these torture methods didn’t do him any good at all really. I was glad when Charlotte finally fires this doctor after finally seeing what the doctor was putting her husband through.
To be honest, it’s been a while since I studied American history and learned about George’s mental health. The last thing I heard was the movie The Madness of King George, and after seeing this episode I think watching the movie might give me more context about King George’s struggle with his mental health. Queen Charlotte isn’t informed at first about George’s declining mental health but then she later hears noises and then finds him scrawling a lot of drawings and sketches on the walls of the palace, and then when he sees her he doesn’t recognize who she is and runs away from her. He strips naked in the garden and thinks he sees Venus in the sky, but then Charlotte has to put a blanket over him and bring him back home and pretend that she is Venus because that is the only way she can convince him to come home.
There is one particular scene that stuck with me. Queen Charlotte summons Violet Bridgerton to meet with her and Lady Danbury for tea. It’s not just idle chatter, but Queen Charlotte wants to know how she managed to encourage her kids to have children. Charlotte’s children don’t want to settle down even though they are grown adults, and that is stressful for Charlotte because she needs an heir, and the child who was supposed to be the heir died with its mother when she was giving birth. Violet says that it helps if the children are in love with the other person in their relationships, and that is a ridiculous concept to Charlotte because she didn’t marry for love, she married so she could consummate and sire an heir because that was the obligation and expectation put on her as the Queen of England. Lady Danbury also didn’t have a happy loving marriage and hated every minute of having sex with her husband, Lord Danbury, so much so that when he died while they were having sex, she relished it and gleefully told her lady-in-waiting, Coral.
I really love the representation of queer characters, though. Brimsley and Reynolds are the queen and king’s right hand men respectively, and they fall in love with each other. Of course, during the time you couldn’t be an out gay person so they had to keep their relationship hidden, but I just appreciate that they put their story in. They have an interesting relationship because Brimsley wants to know certain details about the King’s life and especially when George is being tortured, Brimsley asks Reynolds about it, but Reynolds cannot share this information with him even when Charlotte demands for Brimsley to find out what is going on. Reynolds hears George’s screams as he is being tortured and tries to save George’s life after he is kicked out of the torture chamber, but he is forced out of the room. Honestly the torture scenes were pretty tough to watch. It showed though how doctors didn’t really have good methods at the time for addressing illnesses and diagnoses.
There is one scene where Violet and Lady Danbury are sitting in the balcony seeing an opera and Violet asks Lady Danbury if Queen Charlotte ever gets lonely. Even though her husband George is alive, Charlotte doesn’t get to spend much time with him and spends a lot of her time alone. This is how it was from the beginning of their marriage; Charlotte could not spend time with her husband because he was ashamed of his struggles with mental illness and thought that showing his true self to her would hurt her. However, there is a scene when she finally barges into his astrology lab and demands that he let her know if he loves her or not. It is a very moving scene because it shows how Charlotte loves George for who he is and is willing to maintain their marriage even though George thinks that having this illness makes him unlovable in the eyes of Charlotte. George carries a lot of pressure to maintain his title as king and his battles with epilepsy and mental health make it hard for him to project this perfect image in society. It kind of reminded me of The Crown because Prince Charles struggled with his self-worth because he always carried this pressure to be perfect since so much of his self-worth depended on his social standing and his title. So he couldn’t just say what he wanted or do what he wanted because he was representing all of England. So when he supports Wales’ self-determination, his mother, Queen Elizabeth, is furious because she thinks he went against what he was supposed to do. After taking classes in Welsh with the teacher, though, and learning more about the history of Wales, he understands that the Welsh people are still oppressed under the rule of England and that it isn’t right and so he wants to speak up. I think especially after he is pulled out of acting school at Cambridge he wants to do something that will give him purpose because acting gave him a purpose in life and also a voice, so making this speech advocating for the people of Wales was that one thing where he felt he had a voice and a purpose. But his mother tells him that no one cares what he thinks, and I think this really crushes his self-esteem. But in Queen Charlotte, later in the series, George’s mother reveals her own scars and trauma to Lady Danbury after Lady Danbury breaks down and cries. She reveals that George’s father abused her and George, but she was forced to take it and not cry because she had this expectation and standard to uphold to not show vulnerability or appear weak. I’m thankful nowadays that we can show up as our authentic selves and have these conversations about vulnerability and healing because I’m sure that back then, there wasn’t the vocabulary or resources to talk about this painful stuff in our lives.
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