The Constant Princess

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beautiful palace of the Alhambra, to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. With victory over the last of the expelled Moors, NOTE: I'm no historian, so if you want to see how historically accurate this book is, you might want to seek another review. Culture Clash: The Spanish retinue insist on following their customs, for instance with Catherine taking a siesta in the afternoon, to the annoyance of the English. The romance was saccharine; a brief fight, then a nuclear bomb couldn't drive Arthur and Catalina apart. As for whether or not they consummated their relationship, I don't know. I think you could make a case for either side. But I certainly don't buy that they had sex basically every night, and SOMEHOW Catalina didn't get pregnant.

It was interesting to see how a Spanish princess adopts to the court in England. During her early childhood and teenage years, Katherine's belief that her mother's (Queen of Spain) will is God's will was naive and a laughable matter but at a later stage she realized all that was just brainwashing. And so to my second point: vocabulary. Apparently the average person has a vocabulary of approximately 30,000 words. Journalists can claim between 50 and 70,000, and Shakespeare’s limit supposedly ran up to six figures (although admittedly he made most of them up himself). Gregory would have trouble bypassing 1,000. The monotony of her descriptions astounded me, especially with such passionate claims on the cover that she is able to “bring the sights, sounds and smells of 16th century England to life”. I wonder whether the critic and I were reading the same book – or if her publisher cannily chopped off the start of the sentence, which began “certainly does not”. She frequently uses the same adjective in one sentence, which is beyond lazy, and into the realm of questionable literary sanity. Shift+F7 will conjure up a list of basic Microsoft Word alternatives for the most inactive of authors, and one would hope that a writer as prolific as Gregory might have a real-life thesaurus to hand. Apparently, however, she does not. Repetition and inane lexicon aside, her descriptions are vapid and uninspiring, as is the fictional love story upon which the entire novel is based. The novel begins in 1491 Grenada as the Moors raid the military camp of Queen Isabella of Castile. The young Infanta Catalina watches with adoration as her warrior mother gathers her army and puts out the flames caused by the night raid. Upon her mother’s return, Catalina assures her mother thatSubverted: Princess Margaret doesn't want to marry James IV of Scotland, and manages to convince her grandmother that England is too poor to pay her dowry to Scotland if they haven't received Catherine's dowry from Spain. Other political circumstances eventually push the match ahead, however. Well-Intentioned Extremist: Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain are arguably this. Thomas More could count as this as well.

Age Lift: Catherine of Aragon, Prince Arthur, and Prince Henry have all been aged up at least a decade for the show here, probably because teenagers in an arranged marriage isn't going to go over well with modern audiences. Driven to Villainy: Princess Mary Tudor is portrayed this way. She is also more sympathetically portrayed in The Spanish Princess than she usually is. The Tudors also portrayed her as a tragic anti-villain. Like Father, Like Son: Or, rather Like Mother Like Daughter. In both The White Princess and the one occasion she's seen on a horse in this series, Elizabeth of York does not ride side saddle, as would be custom for a woman. When she leaves for Scotland Margaret is not riding side saddle, just like her mother. Her faith is tested when her prospective father-in-law greets her arrival in her new country with a great insult; Arthur seems little better than a boy; the food is strange and the customs coarse. Slowly she adapts to the first Tudor court, and life as Arthur’s wife grows ever more bearable.One-Steve Limit: Averted. There is more of a variety of names than its predecessors due to the focus on foreign royals with different naming conventions, but many characters still have the same names. Gregory makes the broad sweep of history vibrant and intimate—and hinges it all on a bit of romance. Illegal Religion: Oviedo is a crypto-Muslim, because all Muslims and Jews were forced to convert or leave Spain. He, like those who remained, is officially Catholic. Thus, if this were discovered, the Spanish Inquisition would try him as a heretic, carrying the death sentence if Oviedo didn't repent. Catherine speaks in English even when talking to her mother in Spain, and among her Spanish ladies-in-waiting. Justified in that Catherine is training to be the future Queen of England and integrate into the English court. The Constant Princess is the story of a young girl who was raised to be a queen, the lengths to which she goes to fulfill a deathbed promise, and the crucial lie that changed the course of history.

In Real Life, Anne Boleyn was a fierce and outspoken critic of the abuses going on in the Catholic Church and the excessive and sometimes violent policies of the Catholic Counter-Reformation at the time, but she was not a hardline Protestant as she is usually potrayed as. It is highly unlikely that she wanted to kill the Catholics at the Tudor royal court just because they disagreed with her. She was protecting Protestants who did not have freedom of religion in Catholic majority countries, but it is unlikely she wanted to take away freedom of religion for Catholics the way the Puritans and more fanatical Protestant fundamentalist/evangelical types did. Margaret Pole and Lina are portrayed as being more tolerant Catholics than Thomas More and Catherine of Aragon. They disagree on how to defend Catholicism from the Protestants. Margaret Pole and Lina believe that Protestants should be properly instructed, educated and listened to, while Thomas More and Catherine of Aragon take a Church Police path. fine her for every time she said the words "constant", "princess", "queen", "infanta", "child", "beloved", "lover", and "born to"Happily Married: The White Princess may have featured both their mothers trying to tear them apart, not to mention Burgundy and half of England, but Elizabeth of York and Henry VII are, finally, at last, happily married, so happily married that Elizabeth begs her husband not to leave her in childbirth - normally, men were not allowed to be present. Daughter of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, Katherine has been fated her whole life to marry Prince Arthur of England. When they meet and are married, the match becomes as passionate as it is politically expedient. The young lovers revel in each other’s company and plan the England they will make together. But tragically, aged only fifteen, Arthur falls ill and extracts from his sixteen-year-old bride a deathbed promise to marry his brother, Henry; become Queen; and fulfill their dreams and her destiny. The second season have this as well. Henry will dump Catherine for Anne Boleyn, and while they won't have any sons, their only daughter will be one of England's most powerful monarchs. But consequently, Spain will become one of England's rivals.