HISTORY & FILM Women Doing What They Must: Female Strategizing in The White Princess
Much of Philippa Gregory’s royal fiction explores the ways women survive challenges and claim power. In the TV mini-series The White Queen (2013), based on Gregory’s books set during the Wars of the Roses in 15th-century England, the BBC promised “a riveting tale of three different, yet equally relentless women who will scheme, manipulate and seduce their way onto the English throne.”1 (The women are Elizabeth Woodville, queen of Edward IV; Anne Neville, queen of Richard III; and Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII.) What interested me about the series was the arsenal of weapons the women used in waging their war: sexual manipulation, magic, and maternity.2 The Starz sequel The White Princess (2017) follows its predecessor in the same key aspects: it expands the stage to include the scheming of more women than just the titular princess, Elizabeth of York, and it imagines women’s power in the same terms — terms that, curiously, show how much the modern vocabulary for women’s agency inherits from the premodern stereotypes. The fascination with women’s power relies, in the medieval period and now, on their limited access to public channels; forced to operate via subterfuge and manipulation, women are thus all the more dangerous. In the script written by Emma Frost, an executive producer of the Starz series, the plot pivots on secrets to which only the women are privy. One is that the pretender Perkin Warbeck is without question Prince Richard, the second son of Edward IV. Episode 1 shows the young boy, nicknamed Perkin, in hiding with the family at their estate in York. When Henry VII’s soldiers come, fast on the heels of his triumph at Bosworth, the Dowager Queen Elizabeth instructs her son to run away and seek refuge with Jan Warbeque, a boatman in Tournai. The return of Perkin/Richard — called, as he is in Gregory’s novel, “the boy” — provides the dramatic action for the last half of the series.3 The second secret is that Margaret Beaufort, My Lady the King’s Mother, ordered the death of the princes in the Tower in a ploy to bring Henry VII to the throne. When Henry learns what his mother did, it throws his sense of legitimacy into doubt: “I never had the right,” he realizes in episode 8. “She killed the rightful king and put me on the throne. It’s all been lies.” This complicity directs the force of a curse that the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, with the help of Princess Elizabeth (“Lizzie”), put on the killer of Edward V: the murderer’s sons will die, one after another, until the male heirs are extinguished. The Dowager suspects My Lady Mother in episode 1. Lizzie makes the connection around episode 3, after she gives birth to Prince Arthur and realizes that by the logic of
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COLUMNS | Issue 94, November 2020
the curse, as she’s married Henry, her own boy will die. The curse exerts a greater resonance when Perkin shows up at court. Whereas Gregory’s novel shifts the narrative tension to Lizzie brooding over her husband’s fascination with “the boy’s” comely wife, the Starz series keeps the dramatic focus on Lizzie’s dilemma: what will she do when confronted with her lost brother, who means to murder her husband and dethrone her and her sons? As Lizzie denies, then doubts, and then comes to fear that this boy is who he claims to be, she faces a horrifying realization: if Henry kills him as a traitor, the curse will fall like an axe upon their own young princes. That women are the king-makers is illustrated in other compelling ways. In episode 1, My Lady the King’s Mother hands the throne over as Henry approaches it; she’s made him king through the sheer force of her will. That they are both pawns of aggressive mamas is a point over which Henry and Lizzie bond in episode 3. After the the series demonstrates she is just as ruthless as anyone in ensuring her power, a triumphal Lizzie, in episode 8, crowns Henry as they dress together for an audience. “And now we will rule, King Henry,” she tells him. Moreso than Gregory’s book, the Starz series plays on the real historical tension that was the sum of my secondary schooling on the Wars of the Roses: by granting her hand in marriage, Lizzie, as the heir of Edward IV, unites the two warring factions of Lancaster and York into the house of Tudor. From episode 2 onward, Henry relies on Lizzie to legitimize his kingship. She bears the princes who will become his heirs, securing his dynasty. She advises him on how to rule generously and wisely, to the benefit of his people. Lizzie organizes the betrothal between Prince Arthur and the Spanish princess Catalina, ensuring the aid of a mighty ally. In an amusing moment in episode 6, as the English monarchs visit the Spanish court, Lizzie demonstrates, to Henry’s surprise, that she speaks Castilian Spanish (Henry does not). It is the fiery Queen Isabella of Castile who dictates the terms on which England may claim Spain’s daughter, and it’s understood that the charge of living up to these terms rests on Lizzie. Choosing rulers is women’s business. The writers of the TV series make several other changes to Gregory’s novel that serve the story’s focus on “the women waging the battle for power.”4 The most pleasing change, for this viewer, was the improvement in Lizzie’s agency. Gregory models Lizzie’s life on 15th and 16th century reports that Elizabeth of York was a miserable queen, hemmed in by her suspicious husband and ambitious mother-in-law. Gregory’s Lizzie is kept in the shadows by My Lady the King’s Mother, little trusted by her husband, and ignorant of her mother’s rebellions. She can’t even decide if “the boy” is her brother or not, and the theme of the book is how little Lizzie knows about anything. Writer Emma Frost makes her White Princess a far more forceful character. Lizzie resists being forced into marriage with the man who murdered her lover, Richard III (also her uncle, but that’s beside the point, and there’s precedent for premodern avunculate marriages).5 In the scene where she meets Henry for the first time, far from being docile, Lizzie holds back as if considering whether to run. When Henry — at his mother’s prompting — insists that she prove her fertility before he wed her, Lizzie furiously hikes up her hem and challenges him to get it over with. “I hardly felt a thing,” she says after, delivering the insult along with a stinging slap. Later, Lizzie procures a mandrake root to try to “dislodge” the resulting baby. Her mother talks her out of it; to the Dowager Queen, this a York boy, a prince they will put on the throne. As does her counterpart in the novel, Lizzie dislikes the
