The Spanish Princess on DVD. It plays an interesting twist with young-love narrative. It's got the usual rom-com, or rom-tragedy, ingredients: two attractive young persons find each other, circumstances and parents try to interfere, and you know how it ends. And a viewer has a reflex, conditioned by experience with this sort of story, to be pulling for the young couple. Only, when it's Catherine of Aragon and the future Henry VIII, you know it can't end well, and in truth, neither one of them is really so attractive. And the thing about this kind of story is that it ends with a wedding. Which in real life is usually more of a beginning than an ending. Although in this sort of story, as in Jane Austen, it has a certain resemblance to the afterlife--a place undescribed and from which there is no return.

The actually sympathetic couple consists not of Catherine and Henry but of Lina and Oviedo, the black "Moors" from Spain who came over as part of Catherine's entourage.

The way royal parents use their marriageable daughters as political pawns to forge alliances, with no thought for their wishes or happiness--appalling. I don't doubt that it was a normal thing. (It's been rumored that all the European royal families are inbred; I don't doubt that either.) Wondering now if anything similar still goes on. Maybe among organized-crime families; it was not unknown in U.S. Mafia circles.

I mistook Henry VII's "An ocean of grief " for "A notion of grief." I'm pretty sure there is a difference.