Starz May Have Found One Princess-Themed Drama to Rule Them All
The Crown might live on Netflix, but Starz is constructing another kind of royal family all its own...
The Crown might live on Netflix, but Starz is constructing another kind of royal family all its own. On Thursday, the premium cabler green-lit a limited series titled The Spanish Princess—which will take its cues from the Philippa Gregory novels The Constant Princess and The King’s Curse.
Starz already has two royal-themed dramas, The White Queen and The White Princess—both of which, Variety notes, are also based on Gregory’s novels. The White Queen premiered first in 2013, followed by The White Princess four years later—at just the perfect time to capture the attention of Game of Thrones fans awaiting Season 7’s summer premiere. Now, there’s a new royal in town: The Spanish Princess, all about Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII.
Unlike the first two Gregory properties Starz adapted, The Spanish Princess unfolds within a historical context that viewers probably know a thing or two about already. The White Queen is set during the Wars of the Roses; The White Princess is about Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. The Henry VIII era, however, has been far more widely explored in TV and film than either of the others. This show will also have a particularly compelling figure at its center: as Variety notes, Catherine was promised the English throne from childhood. In the series, “she arrives in England with her court, including her lady-in-waiting Lina, an African Moor. She is princess of Wales now, but when her husband Prince Arthur dies suddenly, the throne seems lost to Catherine. Until she claims her marriage was never consummated and that as a virgin she may set her sights on the new heir, the charismatic and headstrong Prince Harry, who will one day rule as King Henry VIII.”
This series, then, has potential to break out in a way that its predecessors have not. Who doesn’t love any story adjacent to the Tudors? (It’s an arena Gregory knows well, as the author of The Other Boleyn Girl, which is all about Mary Boleyn—sister of Henry VIII’s infamous second wife, Anne Boleyn.) Starz is clearly pleased with how its other Gregory series are doing, but this one could well be the princess show to rule all princess shows.
Sadly, Catherine of Aragon’s marriage did not end well—although, in terms of Henry VIII’s breakups, it could have gone worse. Henry VIII, frustrated that their union had not produced any male heirs, eventually broke away from the Catholic Church so that he could annul their marriage and marry Anne Boleyn—who, to be fair, got an even worse deal than Catherine. Catherine’s response to Henry VIII, however, was a TV-worthy lesson in pettiness: she simply declined to recognize Henry’s newfound religious authority and continued to consider herself his rightful wife and queen, even as she lived out the rest of her life banished from the court. Cersei Lannister would be proud.
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Laura BradleyLaura Bradley is a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com. She was formerly an editorial assistant at Slate and lives in Brooklyn.