On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 4:22:44 PM UTC-5, Wayne Boatwright wrote:
>
> Meghan Parkle was not the first bi-racial to mary into the British
> roral family. Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was of
> mixed race and became Queen Charlotte after her marriage to King George
> III. She was purportedly directly descended from a black branch of the
> Portuguese royal family: Alfonso III and his concubine, Ouruana, a
> black Moor. She spoke no English, only German, when she arrived in the
> UK.
>
Charlotte may have had African ancestry, via descent from Margarita de Castro e Souza, a 15th-century Portuguese noblewoman, who traced her ancestry to King Afonso III of Portugal (1210€“1279) and one of his mistresses, Madragana (c. 1230€“?).[36]

In a 2009 episode of the PBS TV series, Frontline, Valdes speculated that Scottish painter Allan Ramsay emphasized the Queen's alleged "mulatto" appearance in his portrait of her to support the anti-slave trade movement,
and noted that Baron Stockmar had described the Queen as having a "mulatto face" in his autobiography and that other contemporary sources made similar observations.

Critics of Valdes's theory point out that Margarita's and Madragana's distant perch in the queen's family tree €“ nine and 15 generations removed, respectively €“ makes any African ancestry that they bequeathed to Charlotte negligible and even doubt whether Madragana was black. In addition, Charlotte shared descent from Alfonso and Madragana with a large proportion of Europe's royalty and nobility.