Her father was the heir of his brother the art connoisseur Payne Knight (d.1824), MP,[3] who rebuilt Downton Castle in Shropshire.

Her father, himself a noted botanist, had written in 1816 that the new variety "sprang from a seed of the Ambrée of Du Hamel and the pollen of the May-Duke".

The writer and gardener Christopher Stocks notes in his book Forgotten Fruits (2008) that Charlotte Knight "deserves posthumous recognition" given how rare it was for women to generate new cultivars: "of all the hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables in this book, Waterloo is the only one not to have been created by a man".

[1] In 1824, Knight married Sir William Edward Rouse-Boughton, 2nd and 10th Baronet (1788–1856), a member of parliament for Evesham in Worcestershire, by whom she had three sons and five daughters, including:[6] Knight was buried in the parish church of Rous Lench, Worcestershire.

[1] A portrait of Lady Rouse-Boughton, painted by Henry Collen and engraved by John Cochran, was published in the Court Magazine in July 1834.