Spoilers for Season 4 of Bridgerton are ahead! You can watch it in full with a Netflix subscription.
Dearest gentle reader, a new era of Bridgerton is upon us. Half the Bridgerton siblings have found love, Penelope is no longer Lady Whistledown, and there’s a new gossip columnist in town. So, with Season 4 wrapped on Netflix’s 2026 TV schedule and Seasons 5 and 6 confirmed, let’s discuss my two guesses about who the new Lady Whistledown could be.
For Context, There Is No New Lady Whistledown In The Books. We Are In Uncharted Territory.
When I spoke to Bridgerton’s showrunner, Jess Brownell, about Season 4’s ending and the Lady Whistledown reveal, she told me that what’s coming next is a true mystery. n the books, Penelope is the only one who runs the column; however, now we’re diverging off that road, as the show’s boss explained:
Ultimately, we didn't want to squander the voice of Julie Andrews. And I think, Whistledown is such a useful device, narratively, thematically, and in terms of the conflict in the show. So now we have a genuine mystery about who Whistledown is, because it's not from the books.
Even the people who have read the novels this book-to-screen adaptation is based on don’t know what’s coming. Therefore, it’s time to start guessing.
Hyacinth Bridgerton
I think there are two points to make in an argument for Hyacinth Bridgerton.
One is that in Season 4, we see how badly she wants to be in society and the way in which she idolizes it. However, we also see her get humbled and hardened by it, so much so that she tells Eloise she wants to be a spinster. That makes for an interesting storm within the youngest Bridgerton, and it tells me that she has the connections and the potential motivation to gossip about the people around her.
Plus, as Season 4 proved, the youngest Bridgerton is fully capable of going to a ball or event unnoticed, and I have a feeling she could fly under the radar and be the new Lady Whistledown. Before you tell me she's too young to do this, Penelope was a teenager when she started writing the column.
The fact that she’s the youngest Bridgerton is the second part of this argument for two reasons. One is that since she’s the youngest, the attention is on her seven other siblings first, for the most part. Secondly, while Hyacinth’s book is second to last in Julia Quinn’s series, the show has abandoned book order before, and it’d be pretty epic to end the entire series with her season and a reveal that she’s Lady Whistledown.
Alice Mondrich
Now, on to our newest lady in waiting. Throughout Season 4, Alice is working really hard to find her place within Queen Charlotte’s court. Through that, she learns how much the queen loves to gossip. While Alice helped the Bridgertons through all this this season, I could also see her using this position to be the new Whistledown.
Think about it, she knows the ins and outs of society, she’s lived at many different levels of it, and now she has a place right next to the queen. She has connections, but can go unnoticed as she walks in the royal’s shadow. Plus, we all know how much the queen loves to gossip. Therefore, it’d make a whole lot of sense if her new lady in waiting became Whistledown.
It’s possible that the new Lady Whistledown is a different character, too; however, I do think these two women make the most sense. So, as we venture into Francesca and Eloise’s seasons (we still don’t know in which order we’ll get them), make sure to take notes of the clues that are dropped so we can continue to speculate about who the ton’s queen of gossip is.
