This post was expanded and updated on January 3, 2025.

The White Princess, the Starz adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s novel, promises a lush continuation of The White Queen, full of intrigue, romance, and Tudor power struggles. But for viewers searching “how accurate is The White Princess?”, the answer is… not very. While the series stars Jodie Comer, Jacob Collins-Levy, and Michelle Fairley and leans heavily into modern feminist drama, it repeatedly sacrifices historical truth for shock value. From inventing incestuous romances to flattening politically savvy women into caricatures, this analysis takes a hard look at where The White Princess strays from real Tudor history, and why those inaccuracies matter.

Heinous Histories: A Warning Rant

I like the Tudors. I can understand Henry VII’s decisions when on the throne, even if I disagree with some of them. I appreciate the real Elizabeth of York and her gentle, quiet spirit (which you will not see on-screen). I respect Margaret Beaufort. She was a strong woman in a time when men ruled. I read the novel on which this is based years ago, but this is mostly a historical analysis. I’m not trying to pick on story beats that work to further the plot, but I take issue with character assassination.

It pains me to write this analysis, because I loathe this series to the depths of my Tudor-loving soul. I can’t even hate-watch it like I do The Tudors. It’s just bad, clunky, poorly written, and full of insulting “girl bosses” and ludicrous plots. But, I also get a thousand hits a month from people searching for “how accurate is it?” so without further ado, let’s rip it to shreds!

NOTE: I call Elizabeth of York “Lizzie” throughout this series to distinguish her from her mother, Elizabeth Woodville (the Dowager Queen).

Episode 1: In Bed With the Enemy

In this episode, Princess Elizabeth of York is forced to marry the new Tudor King, Henry VII, to unite England after the War of the Roses, despite her hatred for him and lingering love for the slain Richard III. She plots with her mother to resist the marriage from within while navigating her reluctant role as queen.

No, Lizzie Wasn’t In Love With Her Uncle

The episode opens with this: 1485. It’s two days since Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth. Princess Elizabeth was in love with him, but is promised in marriage to the new Tudor King Henry VII.

The series does not elaborate on who Richard was, or how she is related to him, and persists in referencing him as “her lover” all season, with even her mother being okay with it, but…

Richard was her uncle. Let’s sit with the yuck for a minute. The man she talks proudly about loving, whom she taunts Henry with in her “he satisfied me forever” speech, who we see in flashbacks having sex with her, whom her mother calls her lover, WAS HER UNCLE, and she is defending an incestuous relationship. Nobody calls this gross, nobody shames her with incest; it’s just “you’re a whore, because you’re not chaste.” The screenwriters know how gross it is, which is why they’re hoping the audience doesn’t know Richard was her father’s younger brother.

No serious historian sees these rumors from the time as credible. (Alison Weir takes it as fact and says there was a romance between them, but she has no sources.) Richard was negotiating Lizzie’s marriage to the King of Portugal. Since it was difficult to get a dispensation to marry a cousin, there is no way he could have gotten a papal dispensation to marry his niece, and such an alliance would never have crossed his mind. Nor would anyone at the time have seen their union as anything other than repugnant / immoral. And that includes Elizabeth Woodville.

These rumors were probably spread by Tudor supporters to paint the York / Plantagenet families as evil and amoral, and to undermine Richard’s reign.

So, no, she never slept with him before the battle, she was never in love with him, and she never used him as a taunt to offend Henry Tudor.

Richard III, Perkin Warbeck, and the Princes in the Tower

We will get into this more later, but this series claims that Elizabeth Woodville feared for her sons’ lives and sent only one of them, along with a servant pretending to be the second, to the Tower when Richard summoned them. She held back her son Richard. Ahead of Henry’s arrival, she tells her son to hide and then make his way to a boatman in Tournai named Yan Warbeck abroad, and pretend to be his son. All of them are distraught when no one knows what happened to Richard, and they hear Margaret Beaufort “ordered any boys found at their estate to be killed.”

The Princes in the Tower is a mystery that will never be solved unless the monarchy allows the tombs of the children to be opened and compared with the DNA of their supposed parents. All we know is they fell under their uncle’s care, were seen for a couple of months, and disappeared forever, while Richard established himself as King of England and made all of his nieces and nephews illegitimate to strengthen his claim. Most historians think they were poisoned or strangled and buried in the grounds (they “found” two sets of bones several hundred years later while doing renovations), and that Richard was responsible because he benefitted most from their disappearance as their Regent. Because no one knew what happened to them, rumors that one or both escaped and returned later ran rampant.

This series blames Margaret Beaufort for their deaths, and it has become popular to blame her, even though there is no evidence, she had no access to the boys in the Tower, and very little influence at court. It’s likely both boys were killed.

A Court of Girl Bosses (Who Would Have Been Executed For This Behavior)

I dislike how this series turns all the women into unlikable idiots for the sake of drama because it’s inaccurate to their actual political savvy and their understanding of how the world works, and  because it also devolves into character assassinations. They were living in a dangerous time, so storming around, insulting the king to his face and in front of his nobles, actively plotting against him, etc., would have been dangerous. None of them were stupid. Most of them had seen the throne change hands many times and knew how these things worked.

Fictional Lizzie is a fiery girl who sasses people, defies her mother and Margaret Beaufort, insults Henry’s sexual prowess, flaunts her power, disobeys orders, defends her lack of virginity, and winds up in a power struggle with him over a stupid plot point, which we’ll address later. She gets the motto “Humble and Penitent” forced on her by Margaret Beaufort to change her behavior.

Real Lizzie chose her own motto, “Humble and Reverent,” to reflect her Christian faith. She focused on being pious and loyal. She was modest, gentle, mild-mannered, and chaste, and she filled her court with poets and philosophers. She rarely disagreed with her strong-willed mother-in-law and seemed content to let Margaret Beaufort arrange things for her. Far from being a contentious brat, when she met Henry, he was smitten with her beauty and manners.

Fictional Margaret Beaufort is a cold-hearted bitch who wants to kill Elizabeth Woodville as a traitor and actively plots against her by framing her for treasonous actions. She constantly has to tell her son how to rule England, which robs him of his intelligence and his agency (unlike the real Henry VII, who was a shrewd politician and strategist and ruled just fine on his own).

The real Margaret Beaufort was well-liked at court and had a reputation as a philanthropist. She dedicated much of her time to funding colleges and providing educations for the lower classes, including her insistence that women be taught the same as boys. She opened up her house to vagrants and found them positions as servants or paid to educate them in a trade to get them off the street.

Fictional Elizabeth Woodville plots against Henry, tries to convince her sister-in-law in Burgundy to invade and kill him, and urges her daughter to support his being deposed after her marriage. She is kept imprisoned in the castle, then moved to an abbey, where she continues to conspire against him.

In reality, Richard III undermined her reputation and changed the law to make her children illegitimate. After her sons vanished and Elizabeth suspected they were killed by their uncle, she and Margaret Beaufort conspired for Henry to invade England and marry Lizzie, to unite the rival Lancaster and York houses and end the Wars of the Roses. She actively worked to secure support for him, and after his victory, was released from the imprisonment she suffered under Richard and restored to the position of Dowager Queen. Henry returned all the properties Richard confiscated to her. So no, she did not hate his guts or work against him.

Fictional Duchess Cecily of York (Richard’s mother) is defiant against Henry and plots against him with her daughter in Burgundy. She says, “You are not the king in God’s eyes and never will be; you are the son of a servant who has stolen a crown. I bow only to God!” He threatens to throw her into the Tower in retaliation.

Historical Cecily would not insult the king in front of his court. She had a good living under his reign and took great pride in being the Queen’s grandmother.

Henry VII: Careful King, Not Cartoon Villain

Henry thinks Lizzie is a “whore, who lay with my enemy the night before the battle.” (HER UNCLE! At least call her an “incestuous whore!”) He argues with his counselors over picking another princess who is chaste, and is told he must marry her if he wants York support. He is reminded that he is a Welshman who lived his life in France and knows nothing about England. (A clunky info dump!) Margaret likens his suffering in having to marry this whore to Jesus in the desert and on the cross. Ugh.

Lizzie never slept with her uncle, so none of this happened. Their marrying was part of the plan between their mothers and a huge selling point for getting him support from within England from the nobles who opposed Richard.

The Rape Plot That Never Should Have Been Written

This is the scene that pisses me off the most, and it’s derived from the awful book, but let’s get it over with.

The king demands to see Lizzie alone tonight in his rooms, then points out that her mother should be present for it to be proper, but “chaperones are pointless in your case; it’s foolish to close the stable door when the filly has bolted” (you are not a virgin and I know it).

Lizzie shoots back that she loved her freedom, and “spent myself so fully on that gallop [sex] its memory will sustain me until I die.”

Infuriated, Henry drags her into his bedroom and says before he marries her, they must know she is “fertile,” so she has to sleep with him. Lizzie fights him a little, then gets indignant and defiant and says let’s get it over with, and taunts him after he finishes too quickly.

The entire thing is character assassination against Henry VII (he was not a rapist), but it’s also STUPID for multiple reasons.

Fertility, Illegitimacy, and The Writers Didn’t Do Their Homework

Fertility in Ye Olden Times was determined by the number of siblings you had. The assumption was that if your mom had ten kids, and nine of them lived, and your sisters had eight kids, and most of them were fine, that you were “fertile.”

Lizzie’s mother had 12 children, and her grandmother had 14 children. She would have automatically been assumed to be “fertile.”

Illegitimacy Wouldn’t Have Benefitted Henry

Henry had a tenuous claim to the throne and had to do everything right. His delay in marrying Elizabeth of York was not because he wanted to knock her up first, but because he had to secure a papal dispensation and establish peace first. As he proved throughout his scrupulous reign, Henry was a cautious man who wanted to protect his children. Any claim of them being illegitimate would give their rivals a way to insist their claim to the throne was stronger than a “bastard.” He needed all of them to be born in wedlock. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Henry never took a mistress even when his wife was pregnant, because he knew illegitimate heirs would weaken his own family’s stability.

This is a case where, to create fictional drama, the writers are dumber about the period and how it worked than the actual people they are writing about.

Morals Actually Mattered in the 1400s

Catholicism shaped every aspect of these people’s lives, and the Pope could make or break their reign. Morals were the actions of “good” and “pure” people, and a lack of morals were evidence of “evil” people. Hence discrediting Richard with lies about him seducing his niece (he’s immoral, and should not be king), and Richard making his nieces and nephews illegitimate, so they had no claim to the throne. If there were rumors about Henry being immoral, or his future bride being sexually active outside of wedlock, both would have been discredited in the eyes of the Church and of the populace. Even if Elizabeth had been immoral, Henry would not have drawn attention to it or called her a “whore” in front of other people.

This plot was invented to explain how Arthur arrived eight months after the wedding rather than nine, but it makes more sense to assume he was premature and that contributed to his later health problems. (A better fictional narrative would be that Henry and Lizzie were so hot for each other, they couldn’t wait, despite their own awareness of the scandal it would impose on them if she fell pregnant too soon.)

Where is Lizzie’s Catholic Faith?

This Lizzie doesn’t want to marry Henry or have his son and tries to abort him with mandrake roots, but her mother talks her out of it. Everyone is glad about the baby conceived out of wedlock and excited to welcome it.

The real Elizabeth welcomed the pregnancy and saw it as a blessing and a sign of God’s favor for their union. She looked forward to being the mother of the future King of England. Abortion was a terrible, damning sin in Catholic England and would never have crossed her mind. These people have no faith or Catholic beliefs, because they are inconvenient to the “modern” plot.

Children conceived out of wedlock were shameful and the parents would marry in haste to conceal the truth, or if the man refused to “do his duty,” the girl would be sent off to give birth in the countryside and never heard from again in polite society (nor would she easily find someone to marry her).

The Red Dress: Symbolism Over Sense

Lizzie wears a red dress and says, “I am a whore and a martyr, because that is what Henry has made me.” She goes to her wedding defiant and tells her mother she will fight him from inside their marriage. She will find and bring back her brother to kill Henry.

Stupid, again. If Henry dies, their son or daughter is a threat to whoever sits on the throne. You would think Lizzie would know it would be a death sentence for the child, given that her own brothers were killed for the same reason! But no.

What The Series Does Right:

True: Henry VII backdated his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, which legally declared anyone who fought for Richard III as traitors. This was a smart move; it allowed Henry to confiscate the estates of anyone who supported Richard, filling his treasury and weakening anyone who might challenge him a second time.

Teddy Plantagenet is depicted as disabled. Historians differ on this point, but most agree that rather than being handicapped, Teddy was intellectually stunted because of being imprisoned in the Tower from a young age.

Info Dumps: Margaret Beaufort says, “I am called my lady the king’s mother now, I receive a royal bow and am called Your Grace.” Yeah, everyone she is talking to would know that already, but thanks, Bob.

A Flash of Truth: For about twenty seconds, we get an accurate look at Margaret Beaufort when she says, “I knew [my son] would be king of England and I would put him on the throne. When I met you [Lizzie], I knew you had a destiny to bear his son. […] You will be mother to the King of England. A boy who is the red rose and the white combined. You will be the peace that ends the Cousins’ War. And God himself will call you blessed.” This is accurate to who she was, a woman of foresight and faith, but the show ruins the moment by telling her to go to her son’s rooms and conceive an illegitimate son (the real Margaret was pious and cared about morals).

This article is part of my Historical Accuracy in Historical TV Shows & Movies series, where I break down the real history behind popular historical dramas.

About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.