‘The Spanish Princess’ Showrunners Break Down the Intense Season Finale

The Spanish Princess gave us a bittersweet Season 1 ending last night, as an old foe perished, Henry VIII (Ruiari O’Connor) ascended the throne, and Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope) got exactly what she wished for. After a whole season of fighting to be her Harry’s queen, Catherine saw her beloved take his crown and pledge his troth to her. With Henry VII and Margaret Beaufort (Harriet Walter) gone, Henry and Catherine will finally get their happy ending. Except we know from history that they don’t.

“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,'” Emma Frost, The Spanish Princess‘s showrunner and executive producer told Decider. “We all know this is Henry VIII.”

Because we know handsome Prince Harry is doomed to become one of the most infamous tyrants in history, The Spanish Princess‘s first season ends with him and Catherine lying to one another about sleeping with the other’s sibling. It’s awkward and upsetting and confirms that their love is doomed.

Decider spoke with Emma Frost and her co-showrunner and executive producer about The Spanish Princess Season 1 finale and what fans can expect in Season 2.

DECIDER: I noticed on Twitter you guys retweeted someone mentioning that Anne Boleyn makes an appearance in last week’s episode (“All is Lost”). Is that confirmed that the little girl is supposed to be Anne Boleyn and that’s her sister Mary with her? 

Emma Frost: Well, if you look it up that the character who was the father of that little Anne and Mary is called Thomas the Earl of Wiltshire and if you look it up you will find your answer. I’m basically in a very long winded way saying yes it’s absolutely them. And we had the character with their father in the show right the way through. And in an early episode he refers to his little baby daughter. Yes, so they make a guest appearance.

I also wanted to ask about the Oviedo scene where he’s almost hung. I know that historically the punishment for theft would be hanging, but as an American viewer the imagery of a black man wrongfully being hung, or just being hung period, by white people can be very evocative of racist history. I was curious if it came up in conversation at all.

Matthew Graham: Yeah, it did absolutely. In fact, he isn’t hung by white men. He’s hung by white men and a black man actually as well, a black soldier who is there as well. We did that deliberately to make the point visually that this was a military punishment done in a military context, and not anything to do obviously with race and purely to do with martial law. And yes, I don’t think there’s really any getting away from the fact that it is evocative of a later period in U.S. history.

But we also felt that it was really important to create a real sense of jeopardy and fear and terror for Oviedo’s and Lina’s future, and that the machinations of Margaret Beaufort and what she wanted from that episode put them in great danger and put Oviedo in great danger. But what we did think was very, if you will, progressive of us, shall we say, was that we conducted a wedding ceremony that was both Christian and Muslim. And that was something that we also wanted to instill. We felt that that was a nice way of unifying two cultures and something that throughout the show has been this kind of slight yin and yang in the cultural sort of pull of religions, you know, Spain’s relationship obviously with Islam. Isabella’s relationship with Muslims in Spain is a very contentious one as well. And so we felt like that was a nice way of kind of bringing that together a little bit.

Speaking of Margaret Beaufort and her machinations, her final scenes really sort of brought the story back to what began The White Queen for me. A lot of the imagery, and going back to the boys in the tower. I even noticed there was a reference that Henry made to a silver thread. How much did you want to go back to the first series with this finale?

Frost: I think Margaret has been such a huge character throughout all three iterations of the show, and the biggest and most heinous deed that she has done is being responsible for the murder of the princes in the tower in our iteration. 

So it felt to us, it was just the natural thing that on her deathbed she would be remembering and regretting or at least certainly reclaiming these things that she’s done that actually are weighing on her conscience.

It’s very present in the fans’ minds what her history has been and the tragedy for Margaret I think in The Spanish Princess is that she’s right. She says Catherine is lying and for once Margaret is correct. And nobody listens. So I think there’s something quite tragic about the idea that she finally got everything she wanted. Her son and her grandson on the throne, but nobody is listening to her. And then she dies and remembers the worst things she’s done on her deathbed. I think she wouldn’t be going out with enough of a bang if we hadn’t done that.

I know that you’ve mentioned that you’ve already broken down the next eight episodes. How far in history will those eight episodes go?

Graham: Well, we’d rather not give too much away at this stage. But we will say that obviously we go deep into the marriage between Henry and Catherine and we see a little bit more of the emergence of the Henry VIII that we know and love so well. I guess really what we see is in much more detail — emotional detail and dramatic detail — is basically the fallout from that lie that Catherine told. This is about their struggle to give birth to an heir, and so on, but there’s also a wider political story which is going to be so much fun for the audience. It’s been fun for us.

We’re going to follow Meg Tudor in Scotland with her husband James IV. There’s a point that Scotland goes to war with England that Meg and Catherine will be right in the heart of that. We follow young Princess Mary who gets married off to fat King Louis down in France and we follow some of that. So we’re really following the fortunes of all these women in the course of the next eight [episodes] as well. So it’s opening the show up in a way, taking it out off just the machinations of Westminster and into the machinations of Scotland and in France.

You’re absolutely certainly going to see, the heart of a very robust and a very very macho Scottish court. I mean the Scottish court we’ve had a lot of fun with because it’s going to have a different vibe to the Tudor court. It will be a more aggressive, more machismo, more testosterone, and Meg has to really hold her own up there. She was rather unfortunate with the men in her love life and we will be exploring some of that as well. But she really always gave as good as she got. So expect to see a lot more of that.

You mentioned that we’re also following Mary Tudor. She’s quite young in the first season. Is she going to be possibly recast? I know that the leads are staying, but is anyone else going to be replaced with a new kind of generation of performer?

Frost: You’re quite right. Mary will be recast as an adult, a young adult. There are no plans to recast anybody else. I say that really cautiously because I’m not sure yet if everybody will come back. Certainly there were no plans to recast anybody else. 

Then there are some fantastic new characters who will be coming in such as Thomas More, King James IV of Scotland, a new lady in waiting who has replaced Rosa. We’ve got some great new blood as well. Beyond that, we will absolutely be with the original cast.

Does that mean that we’re not going to see Rosa again? Because she was fantastic.

Frost: You may be hopeful of seeing her. I can’t answer that definitively. But we certainly have a plan that she isn’t gone forever.

And how much will Lina and Oviedo factor into the next season? I know that obviously Catherine and Henry are the rockstars. How will that other romance be kind of balanced?

Frost: Lina and Oviedo are in right the way through. And there will be a new resonant cause of conflict and friendship between Catherine and Lina in their different situations.

Do you have a favorite fan response or question so far from the first season?

Graham: Oh, I do! I do! I have a wonderful one. I love it when people have found things out research wise. Sometimes, you know, we get corrected about things and were told that they’re not historically correct about this or about that and we say we used dramatic license.

Then every now and again somebody gives you some lovely nugget of information. And this lovely lady explained to us that in one of the episodes, Catherine watches the swallows migrating back to Spain, and she’s watching them and she goes, “The swallows are heading back to Spain for winter.” And this lady tweeted and said that nobody in that period understood the migratory habits of birds. So she wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t going to be for another hundred years before people started to actually talk about birds flying south for the winter or north for the summer. And I really liked that! I thought that was something I didn’t know. I thought it was smart.

Frost: My favorite response has been the unbelievable number of people of color who have tweeted and said, “I’m in tears. I never thought I would see someone who looks like me in a show from this period.” That’s been such a huge ambition for us to do that and to bring those stories to the screen and to try to start, to help a little bit in undoing the white-washing of history. That’s been very important to us. Having people respond in such a personal way has just made every bit of struggle in making the show worth it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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