Does ‘Becoming Elizabeth’ Episode 2 Have a ‘Spanish Princess’ Easter Egg?

About halfway through the second episode of Starz‘s Becoming Elizabeth, Princess Mary Tudor (Romola Garai) name-drops a character who might sound familiar to fans of the network’s last Tudor drama, The Spanish Princess. While meeting the Catholic knight Sir Pedro (Ekow Quartey), Mary attempts to connect with the Black Spaniard by sharing that she’s tight with a certain lady-in-waiting with a similar background.

“You are, I believe, from Spain, Sir Pedro,” Princess Mary says. “If so, my lady Catalina who waits on me at home would not forgive me if she heard I met a Spanish negro at the English court and did not ask his family. I know if she saw you, she would wonder if she and you were in some way kin. She served in Spain’s court before coming to England with my mother.”

Sir Pedro, not knowing that she is Princess Mary or the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, is rude about all this. Mary, all too used to the false fawning of court, finds his attitude refreshing. Sir Pedro, for what it’s worth, is horrified when he does discover she is Princess Mary, as that makes her the granddaughter of two of his country’s most legendary monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. He pulls out a Catholic cross and tells the Princess he keeps her in his prayers, thus bonding the two outsiders at the English Protestant court.

Mary’s Catalina, however, sounds an awful lot like a character who was front and center in the last Starz medieval history series, The Spanish Princess. That series, based on the books by Philippa Gregory, followed young Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope) as she left her homeland to fulfill her mission to be the (Catholic) Queen of England. Offering her strength through the joy and heartbreak was best friend Lina (Stephanie Levi-John), a Black Christian Spaniard.

Lina was based on a real life member of Catherine of Aragon’s court. Spanish Princess EP and writer Emma Frost told Decider back when that show debuted that Black Spaniards like Lina were “there to be found for anybody who actually bothers to read the accounts of the time. It is incredibly glaring that Catherine of Aragon has a very diverse entourage, that one of her main ladies was a woman of color.”

So is Mary’s Catalina the same person as Catherine’s Lina? After all, Becoming Elizabeth is the first Starz historic drama about the British royals in over a decade that isn’t a Philippa Gregory adaptation. Is it possible that Becoming Elizabeth made this reference to link the shows?

It turns out that Catalina is Lina, but that line wasn’t meant to be an Easter egg connecting the two Starz shows as much as it was just another clever TV writer mining Tudor history.

“[Catalina] was a real life person. So it’s that,” Becoming Elizabeth creator and showrunner Anya Reiss told Decider. “I didn’t actually think of The Spanish Princess. I knew there was a girl called Lina in it. It was only later that I realized, ‘Oh fuck, it’s the same person!’ So it’s gonna look like a nod. It wasn’t deliberate.”

It may not have been a deliberate Easter Egg connecting the two series, but it is once again proof that Lina was a real person in the Tudor court.