- Season 2 of The Spanish Princess premieres on Sunday, October 11 on Starz.
- The season focuses on Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope) and Henry VIII's (Ruari O'Connor) marriage and struggle to have children.
- Speaking to OprahMag.com, Hope reflects on the true story that brought her to a very dark place.
Charlotte Hope struggled to get through season 2 of The Spanish Princess, even though she plays the Starz period drama's titular character, Catherine of Aragon. The English actress broke down while watching the series alongside her co-star, Ruari O'Connor, who puts a charming glint on the notorious King Henry VIII.
"Ruari was like, 'Charlotte, are you crying at your own performance?' I said, 'No, I'm not crying at my performance. She really goes through it and I just really feel it," Hope tells OprahMag.com.
The second season of The Spanish Princess, which premieres October 11, gets very dark, very fast. The Spanish Princess began with two young monarchs fantasizing about ruling England as equals. Their fantasy is tested, and quite brutally, in season 2.
"At the beginning of season 2, Catherine and Henry are a bunch of cocky teenagers. They've taken over the castle. They're having a party at the center of the world. What could possibly go wrong?" creator Emma Frost tells OprahMag.com. "They learn the hard way that a hell of a lot can go wrong—and rapidly."
As a king's wife, 23-year-old Catherine has one primary duty, and spoiler: It's not planning battlefield strategy, as is her wont. Per the royal rulebook of the era, Catherine has to have a child—a male child—to be heir to the throne.
As any Tudor fanatic can tell you, Catherine struggles to fulfill her so-called duty. Historians believe that Catherine of Aragon gave birth six times. Her first child, a daughter, was stillborn. In 1510, Catherine gave birth to a healthy son named Henry, who tragically died 52 days after he was born. Two more infants were stillborn, and another, a girl, died within a few weeks of birth.
Historians have been unable to determine why, exactly, the couple suffered so many losses—but it probably wasn't the "curse" that Henry VIII so fears in the show, divine retribution for him marrying his brother's wife. "We can only conclude that the losses Katherine suffered were just tragic examples of what could happen in an age that did not perfectly understand childbirth," Alison Weir, the author of Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen, wrote for History Extra.
Only one child survived to adulthood: A daughter, named Mary, born in 1516. History would later nickname her Bloody Mary for the number of people she executed for heresy while ruling as Britain's first female monarch.
Often, Catherine's pregnancy woes are situated only in terms of the massive historical upheaval they caused. In a desperate quest for a male heir, Henry VIII divorced Catherine, broke with the Catholic Church, and married five more women (and beheaded two). His third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to his long-awaited male heir, Edward, in 1537. His daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, became Britain's first female monarchs, and some of its most legendary.
The Spanish Princess offers a more narrow, intimate perspective on the pain Catherine must have felt throughout her traumatic pregnancies, leaving viewers to research their far-reaching repercussions on their own.
"The tragedy for Catherine is her inability to deliver on what they expect of her as a woman. It's what rips her power away," Frost says. "If she could only have a son, then Henry would have loved his strong, political wife. The more she's unable to deliver on that, the more panicked Henry gets, and the more Catherine is relegated to a much more conventional, docile role."
The Spanish Princess doesn't shy away from depicting Catherine's drawn-out, gruesome births, and the toll that losing child after child takes on her. The series equates childbirth with war, and understandably so: The maternal and infant mortality rates were high in the Middle Ages. "In those days, it was as dangerous to have a child as it was to go to war," co-creator Matthew Graham says.
"Whenever people think period drama women are passive and quiet, I'm always like, Are you f***ing joking? It was so difficult to survive, particularly as a woman. Any of them that did must've been made of steel," Hope adds.
In a poignant moment, Catherine tries to create a new role for herself—one that is not warrior or mother, but both. She dons armor while pregnant, and heads into the battlefield at Flodden as Catherine of Aragon did in real life, custom-made maternity armor and all.
"She thinks she can be whoever she wants to be as a woman. She will not be defined by her biology. It's what Henry loves about her, and what she feels he has to curb and control, because he fears that the very fact that she's doing these things is what's preventing her from delivering him an heir," Frost says.
While Catherine survived all six births, she became emotionally wrecked—or at least, she does in The Spanish Princess. So did Hope, while playing her. "I wanted to make sure that the darkness felt really honest. It's quite hard for me to watch, because it's not really acting. I really was in a pretty dark place, in those scenes," Hope says. "You can only lie to your body so much before it starts to think it's real."
Hope says it took her time to shake off the residue of Catherine, whose journey reaches a lonely conclusion at the end of the two-part miniseries. Before Catherine died in 1536 at the age of 50, she wrote a letter to her husband, whom she still professed to love. "I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things," she wrote, in the final sentence of her letter. At the time, she was living in exile at Kimbolton Castle—the proverbial first wife in the attic—and had not seen her daughter, Mary, in years. Henry allegedly celebrated her death.
"It's quite hard for me to watch, because it's not really acting."
"Lockdown was a bit of a blessing at the beginning, because I had chance to wash her through me. I've never been one of those actresses that can just like click in and click out. She got under my skin," Hope says.
Still, while she's recovered, she hopes watching The Spanish Princess proves to be as visceral an experience for viewers as it was for her. Catherine's trek from Spanish Princess to English Queen is tough—but so is she.
"When I watched some of those scenes, I remember how awful I felt on those days. It's uncomfortable to watch for me. And hopefully, it will be uncomfortable to watch for lots of people," Hope says.
For while Catherine's struggle is specific to her place in history, Hope sees a universality there, too. "I'm a woman, and I want to get married, have kids, and have a career. To be able to juggle all of them successfully seems like a kind of impossible task, but that's the same task that Catherine was handling. It's just that she also happened to be the Queen."
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Elena Nicolaou
Elena Nicolaou is the former culture editor at Oprah Daily.
