The 'madder, badder' Plantagenets are the latest targets of the author behind the television drama 'The White Queen’
Women at war: Philippa Gregory
believes it is the competing females who will get us hooked on the
Plantagenets Photo: Ed
Miller
To those enthralled by the Tudors, Philippa Gregory is issuing a challenge:
why not try out the Plantagenets, their immediate predecessors on the English
throne? “They are,” she promises enticingly, “madder, badder and more exciting.”
We began to glimpse this last night in the first incident-stuffed instalment of
BBC One’s adaptation of Gregory’s historical novel, The White Queen.
Promoting the Plantagenets over the Tudors is quite a sales pitch, given our
national obsession with Henry VIII, his wives, daughters and ministers, but one
that the bestselling author has road-tested. After spells as a journalist and
academic, she explored the Tudors in the fiction she started publishing in 1987.
She made her name internationally in 2001 with the award-winning The Other
Boleyn Girl, based on Mary, sister of Henry VIII’s second wife. It went on to
become a TV drama and then a film, starring Scarlett Johansson.
However, more recently the 59-year-old, who lives with her third husband on a
100-acre farm on the North Yorkshire moors, has switched her literary allegiance
to the Plantagenets.
“My journey in my own work has been backwards,” she says. “I did almost all
of the Tudor wives. When I was writing about Catherine of Aragon, that led me to
her father-in-law, Henry VII, and then to his queen consort, Elizabeth of York,
and then back to her mother Elizabeth Woodville, wife of the Plantagenet king
Edward IV.”
And it is the beguiling Elizabeth Woodville (played by Rebecca Ferguson) who
is set to be the star of The White Queen. The series extends over 10 parts and
brings in two other Plantagenet women featured in the Gregory novels: Margaret
Beaufort, the ambitious mother of the future Henry VII; and Anne Neville,
consort to Richard III, the last Plantagenet monarch, believed by some to have
murdered his nephews, “the Princes in the Tower”, in order to seize the throne.
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