I just finished watching The White Queen miniseries. It’s based on the three novels Philippa Gregory wrote centered on the war of the roses from the perspective of several key women.
I was struck by several things, the first being that the wildly popular series Game of Thrones is obviously heavily influenced by this history. Take the names of the historical houses verses the fantasy series: Lancaster and York vs. Lannister and Stark. Take the premise; a trio of brothers overthrow the king, who has lost his mind. The eldest brother disrupts the greater plan by taking for his queen a woman who is widely hated by the nation at large. She’s beautiful but her detractors are convinced she’s a witch. Her large, beautiful, golden haired family is suspected of stealing power for themselves. The King’s two brothers plot against him, turn on each other and constantly throw the kingdom into war. Everyone is a liar, a traitor and a breaker of sacred vows.
That’s the short description of both the historical story and the popular fantasy novel. The only real difference is one also has dragons and zombies. (That would be Game of Thrones.)
I enjoyed the miniseries far more than I like Game of Thrones. I love the dragons and zombies but the producers of GofT constantly go for the grossest option, whether in dialogue, violence or sex. I can easily imagine the director yelling “Grosser! No, grosser! That’s good but it needs to be more disgusting! And could we please get a couple of ugly people having gratuitous sex in the background? Please?”
There’s plenty of gratuitous sex in The White Queen but most of it moves the plot along. I only recall one scene where a random couple was going at it as the main characters walked by. Personally, I find sex scenes boring. It’s not a spectator sport. They were unnecessary; how many teenage boys are going to watch a miniseries based on Philippa Gregory novels?
All the performances in The White Queen were good. The characters were all layered and interesting, like real people. They loved to speak as though what they did was for the greatness of England and that God was on their side but every last one of them really acted out of self-interest. Men, women and children, they lied, cheated, turned coats and stabbed every back they could find yet every one of them was shocked, SHOCKED! When their ‘supporters’ turned on them.
The script does a great job of letting you see how events unfolded from the perspectives of different factions; how Elizabeth (the white queen) tried to win her husband’s supporters but failed, gave up and became defensive and suspicious; how Anne (the kingmaker’s daughter) at first admired Elizabeth and worshipped her own sister Izzy but events turned her hard, cold and defensive; how Margaret plotted, schemed and never gave up working for the advancement of her own son, even to the point of contracting the deaths of two little boys in service to her ends, all the while establishing her image as the most pious woman in Christendom!
I think Margaret was my favorite character. In her youth, all she wanted was to join a convent and become a saint. Her ambitious mother married her off to the heir to the Lancastrian crown instead. With sisterhood off the table, Margaret decides to become Mother of the King and no force on earth will stand between her and her goals. Every third episode features a scene of her on her knees in some chapel demanding that God give her a sign to prove that whatever it is she wants to do is His will. Naturally, she always gets the go ahead. In today’s world she’s be classified as a narcissist, a megalomaniac and a sociopath. Whatever the diagnosis, she’s stark raving bonkers and a joy to watch.
The only decent person in the whole epic was Margaret’s second husband, Stafford. He clearly loves her although she makes no bones about the fact that he wasn’t her choice. He admires her and totally falls for her holier than though schtick. He’s a Lancastrian but wants nothing more than to be left to live his life in peace and that’s what he argues for as his wife plots to overthrow King Edward and place her son on the throne. She urges her husband to raise his men and fight on her son’s behalf. When war becomes inevitable, he musters his troops and tells his wife “I’m fighting for Edward. He’s been a good King and brought peace, just like he said he would. Sorry.”
In short, he’s the only guy in the whole epic story who has any principles and he’s got the backbone to stand by them even in the face of his wife’s wishes and his family’s traditional allegiance. Naturally, he dies; we can’t’ have his sort cluttering up the landscape.
He suffers a mortal belly wound in the battle. It takes him weeks to die. It occurred to me that what would have actually killed him was sepsis; an infection caused by his perforated bowels leaking into his abdominal cavity. It’s a slow, painful, horrific way to die. They didn’t even have aspirin in those days!
In the hands of the directors of Game of Thrones, we would have been treated to views of his putrefied belly, probably crawling with maggots even as he lived, along with scenes of him losing control of his bowels all over his bed. I’m telling you; that show doesn’t believe there's such a thing as ‘too gross’. In the White Queen, the sight of his sweat slicked, red eyed face tells the whole story. The scenes between him and his wife as he lay dying were some of my favorites because it was such a stark depiction of the difference between perception and reality in terms of the political world. Margaret is known as holy and pious yet we know she’s a scheming, lying, hypocritical wretch while her husband is known as a small, weak willed nonentity who has been revealed as the only one in the land with the strength of character to recognize right from wrong and act on it. As he dies, we realize that he loved his ambitious wife (against all reason) and that she had grown to admire him as well (against her will).
Then there are the York brothers. Edward is actually portrayed as a pretty good king; he did bring peace for about ten years. He married Elizabeth because he loved her and he clearly adored his brood of kids. His brother George gets bored and betrays him several different times. Edward continues to trust him right up until he commits treason in front of the entire court. Years later on his death bed, Edward asks his youngest brother, Richard, to be Lord Protector of the two crown princes, who are still just boys.
You’d think that was a good choice, since Richard had been true to Edward through thick and thin. “Hey bro; take care of my sons until the elder is old enough to rein, will ya?” That seems like a reasonable request.
Instead, Richard kills them both (or does he??) and takes the crown himself.
At this point, I’m thinking ‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’
And the funniest part of all this bloodshed for power is that not even the King himself is fighting for a lifestyle that holds a candle to my own lowly station as a middle class, 21st century American. Indoor plumbing, central heat and electricity are all hundreds of years in the future. They live in cold, dark, damp piles of rock, the dungeons of which, to my modern eyes looked no less comfortable than the throne rooms, they wear the same stinky clothes for years on end, they feast on food I wouldn’t touch with a stick, they’ve never heard of chocolate, few of them can read, there is no place in any of their lives for imagination and they die of fevers that we can treat with a pill that costs less than a penny.
No wonder their favorite leisure activity is war.
On the whole, quite a lesson about the character of humanity. As a species, we’re a violent, crazy bunch. We delude ourselves if we think anything has changed.