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'The Spanish Princess' Season 2 Episode 8 Preview: Why should Catherine fear for her life in finale Part 2?

In her final hours, Catherine had penned a letter to the Tudor king, forgiving him for all the tribulations

For an episode titled 'Peace', there's going to be anything but in the upcoming part 2 of 'The Spanish Princess' series finale. The previous episode was titled 'Faith' and we saw just how much of that king Henry VIII's (Ruairi O'Connor) subjects and family had left in him after he went more and more berserk with each passing second. From trying to secretly work with Wolsey (Phillip Cumbus) to get his marriage to Catherine (Charlotte Hope) annulled, to imprisoning his close friend Lord Stafford for no good reason other than hearsay conspiracy — Henry's rapid downfall from a man of rational thought to a frantic maniac has been essayed with detail. But in all of this, the person who should be the most afraid is, of course, his once-beloved wife Catherine.

According to the official synopsis of Season 2, Episode 8, aka the final episode of the series, "As Henry descends into madness, the stakes have never been higher for Catherine; her husband has become a threat to her life." Ominous and foreboding in equal parts, one can't help but hope that since the show is fictional and dramatized, maybe they will end up granting Catherine a fate not as tragic as the real-life Catherine of Aragon had been cursed with.

In real life, after Henry met Anne Boleyn and campaigned his hardest to get their marriage legalized, Catherine was reduced to the Dowager, Princess of Wales, on the accounts of her being Henry's brother Arthur's widow before she tied the knot with the other Tudor brother. Her and Henry's marriage too was disbanded, and soon she would be banished from the kingdom, to be transferred from castle to castle, where she was kept confined, wth occasional visitors allowed. Catherine was, however, not allowed to see her and Henry's only living child, their daughter Mary, neither communicate in writing, although historians have documented the two often did so discreetly.

In her final hours, Catherine had penned a letter to the Tudor king, forgiving him for all the tribulations, and asking him to take care of their daughter, who would grow up to become Bloody Mary. Catherine is believed to have died from poisoning and while a lot of people believe it was either Henry or Anne who did that, some historians also believe it could have been the yet to be understood cancer.

Whether the Starz drama will be able to encapsulate all of that in an hour-long episode still remains a mystery, but the trailer for the same doesn't raise hopes for Catherine coming out of this alive. Snippets from the series finale show Oviedo speculating there's a disease with Henry — thus hinting at his murderous tyranny, threatening to behead Catherine. The end of the clip also sees Henry drag her across a landscape where only the two of them seem to be present. It's a brilliant setup for the show to end with Henry murdering Catherine in isolation and thus saving her trial in confinement, but knowing how true to the real-life queen's tragedies the series has been, looks like nothing can save her from the cruel destiny.

'The Spanish Princess' Season 2 finale will air on Sunday, November 29, at 8 PM only on Starz.