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The Spanish Princess ended its first season with a doozy of an emotional cliffhanger: Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope) and Henry VIII (Ruairi O’Connor) are free to marry, but they are entering their union with at least one whopper of a lie.
Before they’re wed, Catherine confronts Harry with the report that he slept with her sister, Juana (Alba Galocha). Harry says this is preposterous (even though the show strongly suggested Juana seduced him), and then he turns the tables on Catherine. He asks if she slept with his brother Arthur (Angus Imrie). We know that she did, and she does a less-than-stellar job lying to her beloved. The look on both Catherine and Henry’s faces are heartbreaking because this once madly in love couple now distrust one another.
The Spanish Princess‘s executive producer Emma Frost told Decider they had a lot of conversations about how they wanted to leave Catherine and Harry’s story.
“I think what we felt was that it would be insulting to twenty-first century women and to a twenty-first century audience. Knowing what we all know about what will come later, if we were to suggest that by the end of the first day we should all just go, ‘Hooray, she’s married. It’s all wonderful. They’re going to walk off into the sunset together and it’s all going to be perfect.’ We all know this is Henry VIII. There is a lot we bring to this story already,” Frost said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate and it wouldn’t be sophisticated to do that. This is not a fairytale.”
“What we’ve been exploring is the story of a lie and the story of a woman who did consummate her first marriage and chose to pretend that she didn’t because she was so intent on marrying Harry and becoming Queen of England whether that was because she believed that’s what God wanted or whether that was about her personal ambition,” Frost said, explaining why it was important to bring the focus of the story back on Catherine’s own lie.
Frost said that she thinks it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves if they think Harry hooked up with Juana on that, uh, hook, but that she and co-showrunner Matthew Graham wanted to remind the audience that Catherine did sleep with Arthur and has lied to Harry about it.
“So we very particularly constructed the ending because we sort of wanted to say, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ She wanted him. She wanted to be queen. She’s got both those things. But at what cost?” Frost said.
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Frost and Graham shared that Season 2 of The Spanish Princess will delve into that cost, but not without celebrating the “rock star” years of Henry and Catherine’s reign, when they were both “adored by the public.”
As Graham said, “They ran a court that was vibrant and young and full of sexy people – well relatively Tudor sexy.”
Nevertheless, Season 1 of The Spanish Princess had to end with that shadow looming over Harry and Catherine’s love. (After all, Anne Boleyn showed up in Episode 7!)
Frost said, “This is, in the end, two ambitious, intelligent, but dangerous people who are looking at each other and realizing they’ve met their match. And they are about to be married and be King and Queen. And they’ve got each other now for better or for worse.” As history teaches us, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.
