"She was famously ugly," says Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen's pictures. Even her physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, reportedly described the elderly queen as "small and crooked, with a true mulatto face". In the opening of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities she is dismissed in the second paragraph: "There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England." Historian John H Plumb described her as "plain and undesirable". Here, Charlotte is a woman who hasn't so much intrigued as been regularly damned. We have forgotten or perhaps never knew that she founded Kew Gardens, that she bore 15 children (13 of whom survived to adulthood), and that she was a patron of the arts who may have commissioned Mozart. If she is known at all here, it is from her depiction in Alan Bennett's play as the wife of "mad" King George III. Yet Charlotte (1744-1818) has much less resonance in the land where she was actually queen. "As a woman, an immigrant, a person who may have had African forebears, botanist, a queen who opposed slavery - she speaks to Americans, especially in a city in the south like Charlotte that is trying to redefine itself." "We think your queen speaks to us on lots of levels," says Cheryl Palmer, director of education at the Mint museum.
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