It was intriguing to watch this miniseries with The White Princess fresh in my mind, as it also takes place in Henry VII's reign, but a couple of years later, when his eldest son Arthur is old enough (only just) to marry. What also added context was that I've actually read The Constant Princess, although it was a few years ago now. I haven't read The King's Curse, but I've encountered its protagonist, Margaret Pole, making trouble in her old age in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy. It's interesting to see how it all started and to get an idea of why the Poles kept plotting so tenaciously during Henry VIII's reign. The main character of the series, though, remains the titular Spanish Princess, Catherine of Aragon.
From what I can remember, there are quite a few changes compared to The Constant Princess. In the novel, Gregory wrote up the marriage between Catherine and Arthur as an unexpected romance: Arthur was Catherine's great love, not his younger brother Henry. In the series, by contrast, Catherine and Arthur manage to reach warmth and understanding in their relationship before he dies after only a few months of marriage, but they're not head over heels, and once Arthur is gone Catherine falls for Henry pretty badly. This seems to make a little more sense than her cool appraisal of him in the novel, as Catherine and Henry went on to be happily married - until they weren't. (Though some time must have passed before she started setting her sights on Henry in real life - he was just a kid when his brother died.) It also makes Gregory's take on the consummation of Catherine's first marriage more plausible. According to Gregory, Arthur and Catherine did consummate their marriage, but Catherine chose to stubbornly deny it. Only if she hadn't actually slept with Henry's brother could she hope to get a dispensation from the Pope to marry Henry, and because she saw it as her destiny to become Queen of England, she decided to lie.
Besides the shift of romantic focus, another change from the book is that a lot more is made of the hostility of Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother and Princes Arthur's and Henry's grandma, towards Catherine. Once again, the "formidable old boot" role is played by Harriet Walter, and brilliantly too. What is really strange is that this time, for once in my life, I actually found myself rooting for Margaret. What I never quite realised when reading the novel was how insulting to Arthur Catherine's (here false) claim of being a virgin was. Previously, I've always thought: "well, he was just a boy and under a lot of pressure, surely it was no great shame if the short-lived marriage remained white". Arthur had just turned fifteen when he married Catherine. In Tudor times, though, royals were expected to be ready for all aspects of marriage at that age. Margaret herself, married off at twelve (which was obscenely early even for the times), would certainly not have bought the "oh, but he was far too young" argument.
Walter's Margaret is depicted as the villain of the piece for wanting to keep Catherine and Henry apart, but I couldn't help thinking that she had a very good point. Leaving ecclesiastical law aside, a girl prepared to besmirch her dead husband's name in order to marry his brother does not feel like such a great addition to the family. There's nothing particularly commendable in Catherine's wish to become Queen, and though the romantic motive added in the series made her case a bit more appealing - well, we all know how it ended, don't we? She would probably have been better off going back to Spain while there was still time, and knowing this, it's hard to cheer when she finally gets her man.
Added subplots about Catherine's (I'm pretty sure fictitious) lady's maids feel mostly like padding, though as a way of getting a Moor element into the plot (Catherine being the daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain), it's way better than the Princess talking now and again to a Wise Moor Medic, which I believe was what happened in the novel. Here, Catherine's senior lady's maid, Lina, is from a Moor family (converted), and in love with one of the escorting soldiers, Oviedo, who is also a Moor (not converted). I did like Oviedo's realisation that his and his lady's interests don't necessarily align with Princess Catherine's, which finally leads him to start working for Margaret. Regrettably, she double-crosses him, which means in the end we have the goodies vs the baddies again with no interesting mix-up between the camps.
All in all, the series is entertaining enough. Charlotte Hope (who played Myranda - the chit who's even more villain-loving than me - in Game of Thrones) in the title role is convincing as a waif-like beauty with nerves and determination of steel. It was fun to see how uxorious Henry VII comes across here: in the novel, he quite fancied the notion of marrying Catherine himself once he became a widower, while in the series he only countenances the idea as it's a dying request from his beloved wife Lizzie (who for complicated reasons really doesn't want Catherine to get hitched to her second son). He claims that his dead wife was the love of his life, though in The White Princess the novel, he was smitten with the Scottish wife of a pretender to his throne a good fair while. It makes me curious how they manage this plot thread in the adaptation, which I'm nevertheless not quite ready to watch yet. Even I can get enough Tudor drama in one go.
