The White Queen

I didn’t know a lot about the War of the Roses aside from York vs Lannister…I mean Lancaster…the Battle of Bosworth Field, princes in the tower, “my kingdom for a horse” and that it all somehow results in The Black Adder. So it was a pleasant surprise to watch this two-part documentary, The Real White Queen and Her Rivals, presented by Philippa Gregory, author of The White Queen and The Kingmaker’s Daughter and many other books about the women involved in the War of the Roses.

I’m much more familiar with the English Civil War (Roundheads, Cavaliers, the king who lost his head, etc.). The Civil War seems much less complicated compared to the ups and downs and changing loyalties of the War of the Roses. The documentary did a lot to help me understand a conflict that mercifully does not involve religion but is essentially the Hatfields and McCoys writ large: the Yorkists, represented by King Edward IV with their white rose emblem, against the Lancastrians, represented by King Henry VI and their red rose.

Admittedly I did fall asleep during the second part of the documentary (we‘d done a mountain hike that day), but my husband, who knew all this stuff anyway, filled me in on what I’d missed. And what I’d missed from the documentary, I could, of course, learn from the Starz series The White Queen, based on Gregory’s books. And if you don’t have cable (or premium channels), you can watch the first episode free on Youtube.

I actually enjoyed watching the The White Queen series far more than The Tudors series also from Starz. The court of Henry VIII seemed too much like a doubleted and ruffed version of a Mafia movie for me to enjoy. (I don’t like Mafia movies because there are generally no likable characters.) Somehow viewing the War of the Roses through the viewpoint of three women—Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian widow who marries the York King; Anne Neville, the daughter of the kingmaker Warwick, who marries Yorkist King Richard III; and Margaret Beaufort, a Lancastrian whose son becomes Henry VII and the first Tudor king—makes sense of it all for me. I can understand the motivations of these women and I can sympathize with them. I can even admire them, even though they are as ruthless as any of the great men with which history is usually concerned.