Episode 122: Christine Morgan on The Spanish Princess - Renaissance English History Podcast

Episode 122 features Tudor historian Christine Morgan’s first episode of The Real Spanish Princess Podcast. It’s a radio show over on the Tudor Radio Network where she breaks down the history behind the Starz series, The Spanish Princess.

You can check out her complete Tudor show review episodes below.
The Real Spanish Princess Podcast with Christine Morgan

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Transcript of Christine Morgan on The Spanish Princess:

Heather:

Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, having a better understanding of our place in the universe and more deeply connecting to our own humanity.

This is Episode 121. And this is actually a guest episode. This is the first of a new series that the wonderful Christine Morgan is doing over on the Tudor Radio network. So if you don’t already listen to the Tutor Radio Network, you definitely should. It is all Tudor all the time, music and talk shows and podcasts. All of your favorite Tudor podcasts and shows in one place.

Christine is doing a new series over there on The Spanish Princess. And so to kind of get you excited about that, I am doing this first episode. I’m putting it out here on the podcast feed so you can take a listen. But then if you want to hear future episodes, you’re gonna have to listen to the Tutor Radio Network. So TudorRadioNetwork.com to listen, you can listen easily in the US, in Canada, and also Europe. If you’re in Australia or New Zealand, you have to use one of those radio aggregator apps like MyTuner and I’ve got links to those on the website at tudorradionetwork.com. So check out tutorradionetwork.com for more info on that.

So I hope you enjoy this first episode of Christine talking about the Spanish Princess. She’s absolutely awesome. I love Christine and she’s going to be talking at Tudorcon so plug for Tudorcon. Cool.

Christine:

Hello and welcome. You are listening to the Tudor review show. I’m Christine Morgan. And I’m talking all about the new Starz series The Spanish Princess. This is the first in a series of episodes where we will talk about each show as they air, talk about the things that we love, and maybe some of the stories that need a little bit of a fact check. But let’s get to know our newest Tudor Queen, Catherine of Aragon.

And a huge shout out to Ben Sound music for that incredible piece of composition. Also, just for those of you who do find production, and kind of behind the scenes things really, really interesting, I think you’re going to really enjoy the composition, the orchestration of The Spanish Princess. There are a few moments that make me really think of The Tudors if you’ve ever watched The Tudors, which I know is on Netflix for sure. But for me personally, I think that a lot of times, these kind of costume history dramas or historical fiction dramas, for me, the standard is usually The Tudors.

I think that The Tudors is special because they gave themselves enough time to get through all the stories without it feeling really rushed. And so you get to know a lot of the characters. But in addition to talking about relationships, that particular series also did a great job of getting into kind of politics, fashion, religion. So I’m really glad that we’re getting into The Spanish Princess, because this is a really rich period of history.

And we’re coming off of other series like The White Queen, and The White Princess. And so I’m excited to get into this period, not only because we know a lot of interesting things are coming up, but this show is going to address some big historical questions that honestly we can’t know the answer to.

So there’s going to be a lot of guessing and creative license here in there. But that’s what makes it fun. If the theories weren’t possible, they wouldn’t exist. And so we will get to watch how this show chooses to develop their characters. And you know, there are a couple of places that we’ll fact check, but certainly not because of any other reason other than it’s fun to watch how writers interpret or how screenwriters take a book and adapt it for the screen. But there’s always got to be an element of extra drama.

So for me, one of the big questions I always like to ask is, is the drama better than the reality? Is fiction better than reality?

Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes I’m going to be very adamant that I would have preferred them to stick more closely to the actual history. But you know, we have to, we have to keep an open mind. And I can tell you already, as we move into Catherine of Aragon, something that’s really special that we haven’t had a chance, really to see that with series like The White Queen and The White Princess, we’re not seeing a whole lot of diversity in the cast, diversity of backgrounds, diversity of religion, diversity of gender roles, and I think we’re going to really get quite a bit of that with The Spanish princess. And for me, as a historian, that’s always really exciting. It’s the juicy part, it’s the bits that we all want to really know about.

Anyway, the whole reason these shows are being made, or the whole reason that someone like Philippa Gregory would write a book like this, is because there’s an effort to get inside the minds of really, really interesting people, and address some of the theories and rumors and gossip. But it certainly makes for a really interesting show adaptation 500 years after these people have lived.

So what I would like to do is kind of very, very simply talk about where we’ve left off with the series like The White Princess, that series followed Henry Tudor, who becomes Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. It’s all about their marriage, the uniting of Lancaster and York into one house that would supposedly bring England together and unify them after the Wars of the Roses, the civil disputes that are really quite destructive. And then on top of it, they’re going to start a family. So by the end of The White Princess, Arthur is born. And Henry and Elizabeth are getting their family started.

I think, too, they don’t really address it as much in The Spanish Princess, but a pretty consistent threat to Henry VII is going to be Scotland. France is a problem as well. That’s pretty typical. But keep that in mind as we move into some of the ways that the Spanish Princess dresses, the way that Henry might negotiate marriage contracts, or the way that Henry might be talking about his finances, things like that, knowing that his early reign had a lot of war. And a lot of people trying to invade from other places, or imposters, the classic Perkin Warbeck story. Also, other people that he may have been related to or that maybe Elizabeth of York had been related to, who might have a claim to the throne. So we have to be really aware that England is not really in a peacetime.

Henry VII wins his crown at the Battle of Bosworth but he doesn’t go back on to any sort of battlefield following that.

It would be important to say though, that just because he chose not to lead other groups into battle, does not make him necessarily a person who should be described or portrayed as someone who is especially weak. I don’t know that the line of masculinity is really correctly drawn by whether or not a man rode off into battle as many times as possible. What I do like about this particular Spanish Princess Series is that they’ve aged Henry. He’s now a father. He’s in a happy marriage with Elizabeth of York. He’s got some kind of like, nice grandfather vibes coming. He’s gray.

And he’s really impatient for Catherine to get to England. The treaty of marriage between Catherine and Arthur was drawn in 1489. So for them to have not been married until 1501, these are two kids who grew up knowing exactly what the future held for them. Some of the really important things to add here.

I think Margaret Beaufort, the king’s mother, she gets painted a lot as sort of this really cold and heartless character. But I’d like to point out that part of the reason why Catherine and Arthur weren’t married earlier, was because I’m sure she voiced her own concerns over the fact that she gave birth at a very young age, and it almost killed her.

So the idea that we need to let the children grow up, we need to let them get to puberty and we need to make sure that they are physically and emotionally mature enough to handle the responsibility that we’re going to put on their shoulders and for Catherine especially, that includes childbearing.

We can talk about how powerful Catherine of Aragon is, all day. But when it boils down to what her biggest role was, her biggest expectation was to give birth to children and heirs. So we have to remember that the treaty of marriage, the Medina del Campo, is 1489. So Catherine is about three and Arthur is maybe two, early three? They’re very, very young. They’re babies. So for Henry and Elizabeth to be in an alliance with Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain is really great, too.

And I think a lot of people, the word that gets used a lot for Henry VII is “miser”. But I was recently speaking with a friend of mine. And he pointed out that, in his research, what he’s actually seeing is what he would identify as “avarice”.

So the difference between someone who’s really greedy, avarice, and someone who’s a miser, which is someone who doesn’t like to spend money, those are kind of different things. And I mean, we know Henry VII knew how to throw a good party. It is in his court, when we first see acting companies being held on retainer. They’re coming in, they’re putting on these great shows. We know that Henry VII liked to be covered in jewels and fine fabrics to show his wealth and power. And we know that he gave Catherine some of her own. Just majestic sets of jewels. It was sort of an effort to make sure she didn’t feel too homesick or something like that.

So I think when we talk about Henry VII, we need to make sure that we’re not painting him as weak just because he doesn’t go into battle. And we need to make sure that we’re really identifying what the root of the money concerns is. He is very greedy, but he’s very good at getting money as well. So he’s finding ways to fund England that are really creative.

So in the way that it kind of works for Arthur and Catherine. Obviously, Catherine is going to bring a dowry, a massive dowry, and that’s always good for England. And that’s going to definitely be helpful in trying to secure marriages for his other children, things like that is always good.

And then Spain is coming from a place where they’ve had quite a few years of excellent exploration. Definitely Columbus in 1492. And then, they’re taking over Granada, which is the southern tip of Spain, it was primarily Muslim, did a lot of trade in that area with places like Morocco or Tripoli. So they’re doing a lot of trade with these Muslim countries out of Granada.

And so Isabella and Ferdinand are going to declare Spain in favor of Catholicism in favor of the Pope. They’re going to take over Granada and expel all the Moors which would be the African Muslims who are living there. They’re going to expel the Moors or forced them to convert to Catholicism. And then later, the same is done to the Jewish population.

So Spain is really, really well, it’s not really Spain. It’s Castile and Aragon, we’ll call it Spain for simplicity. They are really not tolerant of religions other than Catholicism. And that really works for England. England has already done its own expulsion of the Jews. And we’re definitely in a Catholic family when we talk about the Tudors at this point. Margaret Beaufort especially is very religious. So for them, this makes a lot of sense. And for Spain, they’ve done a lot of this exploration, they found The New World, they’re colonizing a bit. They’ve gotten into Africa. This is the Age of Exploration. They found gold and Africa, really, really wealthy ports, along the western coast, especially of Africa, so they have a lot of gold specifically, and that makes them very, very wealthy.

And because of their wealth, they’re not only going to be able to marry Catherine to Arthur, which is obviously a mutually beneficial agreement, but Isabella and Ferdinand have other children that they have married into very powerful families, including the Habsburg Empire, and we will eventually see their offspring giveaway to a Holy Roman Emperor and things like that. So Spain is a really big deal.

For Isabella and Ferdinand, Catherine is their youngest. And even though the marriage treaty said that the prince and the princess shouldn’t be married until they were 14, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York get just a little bit impatient. They do need some finances. They are trying to get their oldest daughter married off into another royal family. They need money for her jewelry, things like that. They do try to kind of push Isabella and Ferdinand into an earlier marriage than what the agreement said. But Isabella and Ferdinand are dealing with some issues of their own in Spain, especially with the expulsion of the Moors and these little uprisings that keep happening. And additionally, it’s their last daughter, it’s their baby.

So by the time Catherine actually leaves the castle at Alhambra, which the show depicts, just beautifully. They said that they filmed on location, and they did all those opening scenes with just a couple of hours before the palace opened up. And it’s just gorgeous. Emma Frost live tweets. So if you want to follow her on Twitter, you can get some of the insider tips and tricks of the trade from her.

But we see Catherine leave the Alhambra. And honestly, I think Catherine of Aragon is a bit of a party queen. She takes six months or so to get to the port from the palace to the port where she’s supposed to get on a ship and then sail for England. She takes six months because she’s visiting all these royal families and all these cities are throwing her parties and sending her off in style, which of course would be very fun. And then they finally ended up at the bay of … And the trip from that particular bay to England is really, really treacherous.

So the show itself is definitely giving you an accurate depiction of the fact that you had all these people on this ship and they’re all sick, and they’re all scared.

And by the time they reached land, they’ve been blown really far off course and they actually land, I believe it’s in Plymouth, they were supposed to land in Southampton, they ended up in Plymouth and about five days later than what they were supposed to. Some of the documents, if you look at them, make it seem as though maybe Henry VII was concerned that after all these years, after all this time, after trying to move the wedding date up, he’s worried that Catherine’s ship may have sunk. But then she lands in Plymouth and everything’s okay from there.

But something that we should also address, in the show, you see a scene where Margaret Beaufort is talking all about how she’s going to meet Catherine, and how Catherine is going to address her and they’ve set up this really great welcoming platform, so that Margaret Beaufort looks really important. And she has a line where she says something about how Catherine will have learned the ways of England, by the time she gets to her final destination or by the time she gets to her wedding. And this is a really big deal. Because it’s not just about learning how things are done, how things are, you know, how do they eat, what kinds of utensils are different. There’s no good water in England. So Catherine is going to have to learn how to drink wine. These are really big things.

But we should also address, remember, Spain is incredibly conservative. And the court that she’s coming from is pretty segregated in terms of gender. A lot of times the women and men wouldn’t eat together. The only time Catherine would have really socialized with men would be for some sort of ambassador visit, state diplomatic visits when Isabella and Ferdinand would host parties.

And I think generally speaking, Isabella had her daughter share her bedroom with her. So there’s not really a whole lot of knowledge from Catherine’s point of view of men are, how to interact with them on a nondiplomatic level. And here she is in England, being escorted by men, being waited on by all kinds of different people. And in a language she doesn’t understand. Even though her marriage treaty happened in 1489, no one ever took the time or bothered to teach Catherine how to speak English.

So in the show, she’s very, very obstinate and she’s very clear that she speaks English. She doesn’t need to speak Latin with Margaret Beaufort, you know she’s educated. And that’s true. She was very well educated, but she didn’t know English. She was taught French and she knew Latin. The letters that exist between her and Arthur are mostly in I believe, Latin. But even when they began to communicate in person, it was kind of odd because they had different pronunciations for Latin. And that’s kind of what happens with a dead language. You know, people kind of take it and run with it.

So I think that when we watch the show, and we see them trying to portray Catherine upon her arrival in England as being really, really strong and forceful, and almost combative, in some cases, you know it’s just not reality. There’s just no way.

But it does make it fun to watch. You kind of root for her, we know that Catherine grows up and she becomes very, very confident. But I think 15-year-old Catherine would have probably been pretty terrified. Not to mention she’s coming off of this really, really rough sea travel. And of course, once she lands in Plymouth, you her destination is Dogmersfield House which is now a hotel, you can actually go and stay there. I think it’s some sort of like four star hotel. But of course, it looks very, very different. What was there is no longer there. But she will eventually arrive at this house. But again, it takes her a month to get there.

I did a little Google Map searching, which is always fun. And I found that from the Plymouth port to Dogmersfield House, it’s only about a two-hour drive. Well, when you’re Catherine of Aragon, and you’re a party queen, it might take you a month. And that’s exactly what she did. She took about a month to get from the port to that house. It’s because she’s meeting different lords and ladies, she’s visiting different noble families along the way. She’s being hosted in all these grand homes. Of course, she’s doing all of this without having any knowledge of English. She hasn’t yet met her in-laws, she hasn’t yet met her fiancé. She’s just surrounded by her entourage, and then the English Court, which of course, is a huge culture shock for her, they do things very differently in England.

So once she finally gets to Dogmersfield House, we have the scene in the show, which is really, really dramatic. I thought it was kind of stressful. I’m sure she did, too. But the scene where Henry VII gets too excited. He wants to meet her right away, and he runs to the house and he’s got to meet her. And he wakes her up, he demands that she wake up and meet him. This interaction definitely did happen. This is an accurate interaction. What didn’t happen, though, is in the show, Catherine kind of tells him off, she says things like, well, you need our money, you need me more than I need you. And, you know, I have on this veil, and it’s my culture.

And it’s true, it would have been her culture to be far more conservative. But the reality of their first meeting is that they needed a translator, Henry tried to speak in French. And she stuck primarily to Spanish. And then in terms of the things that they sent to each other. It was very amiable. They were very pleased to meet each other. Catherine had actually exchanged letters with Henry and Elizabeth prior to her arrival. And it was a very warm reception. It was perhaps a little urgent and improper. But the combative scene that we see in the show, simply didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. Henry and Elizabeth were thrilled that Catherine was finally in England and that the wedding plans could move forward.

She of course, then meets Arthur later. And then we get this really great scene. She’s walking with Arthur on the grounds of this house, and they’re talking about the rain and she’s cold, and she’s complaining. And he’s trying to be polite, and she’s just really unhappy. I can’t really blame her. You go from someplace like the Alhambra and you end up at Dogmersfield and it’s raining all the time and it’s cold, and you’ve just come off this terrible, long traumatic journey, and you’re expected to put on a show and be ready to meet your future husband. I think Catherine probably would have been incredibly overwhelmed.

What I do really love about this series, at least so far, I hope they don’t get into it like too, too much. But in terms of visuals, the costumes of the Spanish ladies are really beautiful. You get the colors. Spain had a lot of Islamic world influences. So a lot of the designs, the colors, the shapes, of the clothing is all in keeping with these Islamic world influences. Really, really beautiful costuming hair done by Phoebe De Gaye. And then on top of it, they are doing these sort of nods to cultural norms where Catherine is really insistent upon bathing everyday something the English, they really just didn’t do. But for Catherine, who’s coming from a place with really beautiful bathhouses and hot springs and putting herbs in the water, olive oil, orange mint, things like that, it would have been completely normal for her. So I really liked that they’re doing a nod to that cultural difference there.

And then again with her ladies. We’re getting a really lovely introduction to a diverse cast. And we have Lena, and Rosa. And Lina is based on a real woman, Catalina who was a Moorish woman who had been assigned to accompany Catherine to England and Catalina would have been with Catherine for quite a few years. She was not there for the whole time. But she certainly would have been there for the big question of what happened between Arthur and Catherine. If anyone would have been able to make a testimony about that it would have been Catalina, but by the time we get to that question in a court of Tudor Law, Catalina has returned to her home with a husband. So Catalina is certainly there. She is certainly influential, and she is serving her Queen with a lot of integrity. And so far, I see all of those characteristics depicted in the show as well.

Rosa, I’m not so sure about as far as I can tell. There were two sisters that accompanied Catherine from Spain to England, and their last name was Vargas or de Vargas. And so what I’m thinking is Rosa de Vargas is probably some sort of combo of those two ladies.

I don’t know what her story is going to be though. I don’t know what that precedent is right now. She seems a little a little boy crazy. Maybe a little preoccupied with finding a man. And if I could go back in time, I’ll definitely tell her stay away from the Duke of Buckingham. But what can you do? But, watch out girl. That’s a mess. Don’t do that.

So Catherine has been met by this massive entourage. She’s got her own ladies. She’s probably very overwhelmed. And now we’re preparing for a wedding. This massive wedding. And we talked about how Henry VII in particular is really good about finding money in different places. Well, he has convinced the City of London to pay for this royal wedding. So it’s not really coming out of the Royal Treasury or at least not in its entirety. And the City of London puts on the most spectacular celebration, parade, music, and pageants all along the path up to the church. And gosh, it would have been so exciting. We don’t see that in the show.

We definitely see Catherine having a very human moment where she’s really nervous about her wedding. And then Catalina, she comes in and she says, you’ve been prepared for this, this is your role, this is what you’ve been waiting for. And we’re going to do it. And if they keep making Lina kind of the voice of reason here, I’m going to really dig it, because that’s really exciting. She has a couple of really nice lines actually all throughout this particular episode. So I think they’re setting her up to kind of be almost a mother figure.

In reality, of course, all of these girls, all the ladies-in-waiting, would have been between maybe like 10 and 17. But obviously, the show aged them up a bit which gives them just a little bit more autonomy and a little bit better conversational opportunities.

So we see Lina kind of talking Catherine off of a ledge there. And then Catherine, we see her kind of processing into the church, of course, like I said, the City of London threw this ridiculous opulent party for them and there are pageants all along the path to the cathedral. Some of these pageants are kind of funny. They’re drawing a lot of parallels between King Arthur and Prince Arthur, lots of Camelot influences on the way to the wedding, some religious influences as well. And then also some kind like cosmological-themed pageants, things like astrology were kind of a big deal.

Henry VII and Elizabeth of York actually really kind of liked astrology. And then of course later when we get into series like The Tudors, you see people like Henry VIII, Mary I, Elizabeth I, they get really into it as well. So the pageants would have been just absolutely incredible.

And then they arrive at the church and the church has been remade to have these massive platforms and the king and queen were kind of hidden so that they didn’t steal focus. And Arthur and Catherine are in white satin, both of them it’s very, very, it’s, gosh, I can’t even imagine what would have been like. It would have been completely overwhelming.

What we do know is that Prince Henry does in fact, meet Catherine and escort her down the aisle. So that is accurate. The one thing that we have to fact-check is Prince Henry at this time would have only been about 10 years old. But the show aged him up. He looks like he’s probably like 17, is very handsome, and swoon-worthy and all the things you would want in a television series. But it is important to know that Catherine and Arthur exchanged love letters with each other. That is true. And Prince Henry wouldn’t really have been a part of that love triangle yet, but they’re setting us up for what we obviously know is coming. So they’ve aged him up probably so that they can have like a smooth transition into that particular relationship down the line. And I just can’t blame them for that.

Some other people that we get introduced to in this episode would be, well we see Margaret Beaufort. I really liked that they’re portraying her as a grandmother in this particular series. She’s a little softer here. I like that a lot. Maggie Pole, Margaret Pole, she’s still around. We’ve seen her on previous series, most recently in The White Princess. And she’s now married to Richard and they are working together and they are part of the royal household. Essentially, Maggie Pole will eventually become, hopefully we’ll see it in the show, but she will eventually become something of a confidant for Arthur and Catherine after their wedding. So she’s gonna play a big role here and making everyone really comfortable.

Elizabeth of York, like I said before, Elizabeth and Henry, we’re really excited to meet Catherine. There’s again, this really weird combative scene between Elizabeth and Catherine. And it’s a bit unusual, because Catherine being the party princess definitely spent at least one evening with Elizabeth of York, where they just drank and danced all night long. And it was very, very pleasant. And that’s the reality of their relationship.

So the show is giving us some seeds of discord, which makes me a little bit nervous. This is where I think reality would probably be better than dramatized scripts. Because I really think Catherine would have loved having in-laws that were so excited and warm and welcoming in these moments where she’s really alone. I really wanted that for her in this series. But alas, I don’t think we’re going to get it. So I’m going to have to get over it.

And then we do see Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor, of course, they call Margaret Tudor Meg in the series, and we get a little glimpse of them. So I’m really excited about Margaret Tudor, because she’s kind of fierce. And she’s gonna eventually have a really big role as well. So you know, maybe there’s a spin-off of this, where we get a Margaret Tudor show, and I would absolutely watch that.

But anyway, so these are some of the characters that we’ve been introduced to. Catherine comes with some soldiers, some army people who are also Moorish. So I’m really excited to see characters like Oviedo. As we walk into the chapel, we see a black trumpeter and his name would have been John Blanke. And we can talk a little bit about John Blanke, maybe next episode if we see him again. But someone like that absolutely was employed by the crown, and had a very prestigious role in these really big ceremonies.

So I’m so, so excited to see these representations on screen next week. Hopefully, we get post-wedding. And we’re going to see how the show kind of addresses what happens between Catherine and Arthur, I’ll tell you what I think and then we’ll talk about whatever it is that the show comes up with, but what I’m just really enjoying it so far.

The showrunners and the actors they have been live-tweeting during the East Coast and the West Coast premiere of the show, at least if you’re in the US, and so if you feel inclined to go on Twitter, you can usually interact with them or ask them questions and I would absolutely encourage you to do so because they’re telling some great stories.

There’s a lot of love put into this show. Visually in terms of the script, the actors are doing a great job and I’m just excited to see where this goes.

I hope you’ll tune in with me next time. And we can talk about Episode 2, do a little fact-checking and then appreciate all the hard work that’s going into this series. I’ll try to have a few more names for you next time to so that you can kind of track some of these actors and production crew people down and let them know what you think about the show too.

But for now, I’m gonna sign off. My name is Christine Morgan. Thank you so much for watching a Tudor review show.