Now she must convince everyone at court, and especially the Vatican, that she and wan Prince Arthur (Angus Imrie) never actually consummated their brief marriage, a lie that could undo her potential union with dopey redhead Prince Harry (Ruairi O’Connor).

Luckily for her, her departed husband’s passionate and impetuous young brother, the future Henry VIII, is hot - and easily manipulable.

(In reality, Catherine technically had a better legitimate claim to the English throne than her father-in-law, thanks to ancient bloodlines.) However, her gentle husband soon succumbs to illness and she’s left to be brokered once again by the monarchs, diplomats and sycophants laboring to maintain their own agendas. Starz Orders 'The White Queen' Follow-Up 'The Spanish Princess'Ĭharlotte Hope, best known for playing Ramsay Bolton’s sadistic lover Myranda on Game of Thrones, stars as young Catherine, sent by her warrior queen mother to ally sunlit, affluent Spain with dreary, destitute England by marrying the delicate teenage son of King Henry VII. (Catherine’s only child, whom Henry tried to name his bastard, still became England’s first ruling queen - the Catholic zealot commonly known as Bloody Mary.) Eventually, the interloping Anne Boleyn lost her head and Henry moved on to four other wives, but Catherine’s pop cultural legacy remains shrouded in shame: a woman so drab, barren and intolerable that a tyrant king had to create an entirely new religion just so he could defy the Pope and divorce her. Catherine of Aragon is best remembered as the pious intellectual wife Henry VIII humped-and-dumped for a younger, livelier wit who promised to bear him the future king.

Princessbet tv