The Queen's College Record 2023

The professorship will move into new territory with the appointment for 2025-2026.
The centenary of Queen’s association with the chair will see the post being filled not
by invitation but by formal application.
Articles
‘Blessings as endless as her line’: Queen Charlotte
as Patroness
Dr Amy Ebrey, Assistant Archivist
For many years remembered as the forbearing wife of
‘mad’ King George III, Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) has
recently re-entered the public consciousness as a more
complex and multifaceted figure. In Bridgerton, that staple
of lockdown viewing, Charlotte plays a leading role as both powerful matriarch
and determined young bride, and the series also explores some of the more
intriguing theories about her racial identity. She has also featured in several cultural
retrospectives, most notably a 2017 exhibition at the Yale Centre for British Art, which
presented Charlotte as one of three ‘Enlightened Princesses’ who influenced the art
and science of the nascent modern era. In a similar spirit of reinvestigation, we might
also revisit Charlotte in another of her roles: as Patroness of Queen’s.
Most contemporaries typecast Charlotte in the role of royal wife and mother. In
the Epithalamia Oxoniensia, an anthology produced by the University of Oxford
to commemorate Charlotte’s marriage to George in 1761, a Taberdar at Queen’s
makes plain this expectation when he describes the new Queen as ‘Destin’d to
share a nobler fate…And deal out blessings endless as her line’. Yet he and other
Queensmen had reason to hope for additional blessings from Charlotte, for the
College periodically invited Queens Consort to become Patronesses. This role has
never been formally defined beyond conferring a ‘special dignity’ on the incumbent, in
exchange for granting the College’s requests
for special favour or financial assistance.
Such invitations have been extended to only
around half of Queens Consort since 1341
and Charlotte’s immediate predecessor,
Queen Caroline, made good her status as
Patroness by donating £1,000 towards the
College’s latest project, the construction of
the grand neoclassical façade of Front Quad;
and her statue under the cupola still greets
visitors to Queen’s.
Queen Charlotte
Although Charlotte has no comparable statue,
her full-length portrait in Hall has watched
92 The Queen’s College | College Record 2023