54 thoughts on “The Spanish Princess Recap: Episode 8

  1. I facepalmed so hard when I saw them hanging Oviedo. Like… did no one stop and say, hey, maybe we shouldn’t show a black man being HANGED in 2019.
    Anyway, yeah, the Dudley executed was Robert Dudley’s grandfather Edmund, which did actually happen. But I refuse to give them credit when their main premise (Catherine sleeping with Arthur) means Henry was RIGHT during The Great Matter, and yet they still claim this to be a feminist show!

    1. Yes, the whole thing with Dudley is historically accurate… Except for that thing where Margaret Beaufort got him executed, ASAP (in the real world, he was executed like a year after being imprisoned), and without trial at that. They are really looking for every excuse to demonize that poor woman, aren’t they?!

      1. I mean, they make this entire series seem like it happened over the course of a year, it’s kind of ridiculous. And she’s also the last character who’s been there from the beginning, unless you count “Maggie” who was a baby in The White Queen. What will we do without a Margaret Beaufort to chew scenery? It’d be like having Reign without Megan Follows!

      2. IKR? They always wreak horrible revenge on Margaret Beaufort at some point. Wonder who is going to be the horrible “feminist” next season now she’s dead? :P

        1. I suspect it might be Anne Boleyn, assuming she isn’t reduced to awful-incest-having-witchy-alpha-bitch.
          …..
          I just jinxed it, didn’t I?

          1. I don’t know if the writer wants to get into The Other Boleyn Girl years or not. I guess we’ll see. Starz may renewe the damn thing for another season just to get in Anne Boleyn.

            1. Nah. It’ll be Maggie Pole – the title screen DOES say that it is taken from “The Constant Princess” and “The King’s Curse” in which Maggie plays a big role. Evidently, judging from the series, they have gone with the whole Anne Boleyn being born in 1501 for the series, so she won’t play a role until the last few episodes…

        2. Next season the big bad will be Bessie Blount, The Man Eater who will try and come between true love.

            1. My guess is season 2 ends up covering a huge amount of time, in the same vein as The White Queen. They could progressively age up Anne over a handful of episodes. Alternately, the groundwork is laid for them to give us Philandering Harry, so I’d look for an aged-up Mary Boleyn before they go to Anne.

              1. They have said they want to “conclude” Catherine’s story, which would mean going to 1536… so year, presumably season 2 is going to cover a 27 year gap and they’ll just use make-up to age the characters.

            2. It depends on what sources you go for with Bessie. Sources differ between Bessie’s birth; some sources say 1498 and that she was 21 at the time of Henry Fitzroy’s birth and that she was 16 when the affair began in 1514. Other sources say she was born in 1500 or 1502 and was between 14 and 12 when the affair began. So for Bessie, it depends on which age they go with, really…

              1. I’m guessing she was older. Henry in general seemed to go for more mature girls; Katherine Howard being the exception.

      3. Yes not sure why Margaret Beaufort is being portrayed so demonically and she would have never been allowed to run around wreaking havoc. She certainly was not present at Dudley’s execution nor would she have passed sentence. Why are we devoting so much time to fictional character Lina? I appall the Phillippa Gregory novels. They are so historically inaccurate yet I keep watching! The real history is so fascinating. Why butcher it so mercilessly!

    2. Eh? Why should they not show a black man being hanged in 2019, just as much as a white man? It’s not as though he’s hanged for being black; he’s hanged for being a lousy Spaniard who has p**ed off the Queen enough for her to want to trump up a charge against him. In the Tudor period making your self an inconvenience to the monarch was enough to get *anyone topped in short order.

        1. Ah, now I get you, but that’s – I think – mainly an American reaction. Lynching never having been part of Black history in Britain, it honestly just didn’t occur to me, and I don’t think it would to most Brits.

    3. I think she & Arthur did have sex though…Catherine had great reasons to stick to that declaration and probably viewed it as a valid fib since she was “meant” to be Q of E per God, so…whatever it takes. Also she never said a word during the pregnancy watch in real life either…only used the virgin line when threatened to be expelled etc…

  2. Like CoA would risk her immortal soul by lying. More PFG wrongness.

    A Catholic would never, never marry in a partial Islamic ceremony at this time. CoA parents drove the Moslem population out of Spain. PFG cannot get basic Spanish History 101 right. She is an equal historical fuckup.

    I hope you have a great reward for reviewing this shit.

    Your screencaps were drole.

    BTW. I’m reading I Know My Own Heart. It’s great. Anne Lister is so CURIOUS. She’s interested in everything.

    Have fun at Costume Con.

    1. For the record, PFG didn’t include Oviedo, Lina or a partial Islamic marriage between the two of them. That was nowhere in the book. 😉

    2. As usual, modern political commentary can’t be left on the table. Starz would have considered it blasphemy to miss a chance for a totally inaccurate interfaith marriage ceremony – as if this isn’t the same England that’s going to burn heretics at the stake in a very short time.

    3. Actually, COA could lie; if it’s for her daughter’s sake – i.e lying to stay Queen so Mary stays a Princess – then it’s for a “noble” cause and her immortal soul is not harmed. So she could lie.

        1. Except if she’s lying for “God’s plan”; God’s plan was for her to be Queen… and, to do that, she has to lie. So, she COULD lie to fulfil god’s plan…

  3. I can’t help but wonder if the wedding dress isn’t made of damask, but devoré. It looks like the darker portion has a bit of pile to it. But, considering the amount of polyester utilized in this piece, what is a technique invented a few centuries in the future between friends?

  4. From the way you’re describing it, Catherine’s confrontation of Henry over his alleged affair with her sister must’ve been hilarious.
    “Did you shag my sister while she was there?!”
    “Uhm… No?”
    “Okay!”
    “And did you sleep with my brother while you were married?!” looks into the camera like a character on The Office
    “No!” also looks into the camera
    “Okay! Let’s get married! God, that was so close! We almost had a conflict there!”

  5. I still can’t believe this crap gets a season 2.

    Also, the executioner… wouldn’t he just… keep hacking? I mean, the guy had one job, kill the dude. And he lets him bleed out long enough to spill the beans?

  6. What happened to the dispensation that Isabella & Ferdinand got from the pope when Arthur died, which allowed Catherine to marry Henry ‘even if’ the marriage with Arthur had been consummated??? Margaret Beauford cackling on about ‘you don’t have a dispensation’, when Catherine already had one?!?! Give me one good reason why Margaret Beaufort loathed Catherine with such a white-hot hatred? And finally – 2 tax collectors, Empson & Dudley were executed BY HENRY VIII after his ascension to the throne. But we can’t let our red-haired hero look bad, can we? No, we must pin more dirt on Margaret Beaufort. LOL on the windmill dress – it is really hideous!

    1. By the way Margaret Beaufort was dead when Edmund Dudley was executed. She died in June 1509. Dudley was executed in August 1510.

  7. The problem with the windmill dress is that it is being used incorrectly. Catherine should yell, “WINDMILL, ACTIVATE!” And the door to the Tower of London will blow open, freeing Margaret Pole, Oviedo’s executioners are blown out to sea, and the letter with the Pope’s dispensation is lifted from Margaret Beaufort’s papers to fly directly into Catherine’s hands. After all, Isabella of Castile defeated the Moors with the power of the windmill dress. Cervantes referenced this in his first draft of ‘Don Quixote,’ which is where we get the well-known saying ’tilting at windmills dresses.”

  8. Oh My God.
    I don’t recall the exact details of Henry VII’s death but it was in his own bed and young Henry was right there in the room having been kept right at his father’s side for the seven or eight years he was heir apparent.
    Margaret Beaufort was technically regent for a few months until Henry turned eighteen but she doesn’t seem to have done much. Her only son’s death took her hard. Once she saw her grandson crowned and married she had little more to live for and didn’t long survive.
    Margaret Pole was still posing as a poor widow and boarding with the Bridgetine Nuns. She was definitely not in the Tower and there was no de la Pole plot for her to be implicated in.
    Henry VIII had Dudley and Empson tried and executed in a cold blooded play for popularity. It is doubtful that either man had done anything illegal but they were symbols of Henry VII’s unpopular fiscal policy..

      1. Oh, yes! Ever so hard. And it’s just–boring, you know, and has to be simplified and tarted up and made relevant to our little dumbed-down, 21st-century brains.

  9. How much booze do you need to get through Season 2? Will your livers be safe?

  10. This was such a weird, wild ride. It was like I had no idea what to expect just from one sentence to the next because nothing makes any sense – not even on a historical level, but just from pure storytelling! If all this mishmash of history came together into something that was a good story I would be maybe a little more forgiving but I don’t know what this is lol

  11. “Catherine knows Henry has been summoned, and apparently there’s only one road into London from the north of the city, so she goes and waits for Henry to ride along.”

    Actually that’s not far off the truth. There was only one main road leading north to Lincoln and York, and that entered the city at Aldersgate. There was only one leading northwest to St Albans, the Midlands and the mid-Welsh Marches, and only one westward to Bath, Bristol and the west country, and they both entered the city at Newgate. Et cetera. So if you knew where someone was coming from, you only had to wait at the appropriate gate and you would indeed meet them, unless they were deliberately trying to avoid you and took a long hike around the walls to come in by a different gate.

  12. It was special, there’s no doubt there. I’ve been watching mainly to try and anticipate the quality snark y’all put out :-)

    But yeah, all three series have made me wonder what the heck PFG has against Margaret Beaufort. I got a decent sense in The White Queen that she was nuts, but for a reason. After that it just spiraled into undiluted crazy (and by this series, they left her devout Catholicism at the gate – can we talk about how the Margaret Beaufort they set up would never have given anything the Pope had touched to a heretic, much less what the real MB might have done in that situation?? Not that “devout” means anything in these shows beyond occasional kneeling before crucifixes and constantly having a Rosary at one’s hip).

    The loose dress thing that Catherine wears for a good chunk of this episode is just….all I can say is I liked it better than the windmill dress, which isn’t saying much, as I like sackcloth better than the windmill dress.

    I wonder, now that Henry VII is dead, can we stop calling Henry VIII “Harry”??? Also, what are the chances that the Meghan Markle conspiracy theories find themselves attached to Catherine’s future storylines….

  13. I’ve been watching along with more and more shock at the devolution of Margaret Beaufort. For a show that touts itself as feminist and a way of showing the women’s side of history, they sure did go out of their way to make a woman who was not a devil into one.

    Catherine apparently forgetting her devotion to the Catholic Church is another one that’s been grating at me. I mean having her sleep with Arthur when she never would have lied to risk her soul was bad enough but just in general it’s like they only remembered how devout she was on occasion. Just like they peppered in reminders that Margaret B was a child bride to?? Garner sympathy after they destroyed her character?? I can’t even figure that one out, especially the random flashback to child her giving birth to Henry.

    TWQ and TWP were still very “history? I don’t know ha” but they didn’t enrage me the way this one has. And yet you know I’ll be watching season 2, especially to see how Anne Boleyn is demonized (because apparently showing the women’s side of a history in which they were used as literal pawns, fuck them kids, right? The Henry’s were pure beans surrounded by crazy power hungry harlots!)

    1. (That was supposed to say “literal pawns MEANS fuck them kids”, apparently I can’t edit that last bit to actually make sense)

  14. Henry’s wedding outfit is definitely one of the better costumes in the show, along with whenever Margaret actually wears a gable hood.

  15. I can’t decide which was more annoying – the Catholic & Muslim-officiated wedding of a condemned Muslim thief about to be hanged to his Catholic bride (annoying because I doubt that it would have been allowed even if they could have found a Muslim cleric to co-officiate), or the fact that after sitting through all those episodes of Catherine’s angst, they didn’t show her actual wedding to Henry (or if they did, it went by so quickly that my eyes didn’t register the ceremony).

  16. Why did Margaret just suddenly realize that the taxes SHE instituted could get her in trouble? I thought she was supposed to be smart. Or are they trying to imply she has dementia?

    1. I think the implication, Lillian, is that she assumed Henry VII would live for another 10 years or so and she’d be dead of old age anyway, so it wouldn’t matter.

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