The Fifth Queen

By Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford’s novel about the doomed Katharine Howard, fifth queen of Henry VIII, is a neglected masterpiece.

Kat Howard—intelligent, beautiful, naively outspoken, and passionately idealistic—catches the eye of Henry VIII and improbably becomes his fifth wife. A teenager who has grown up far from court, she is wholly unused to the corruption and intrigue that now surround her. It is a time of great upheaval, as unscrupulous courtiers maneuver for power while religious fanatics—both Protestant and Catholic—fight bitterly for their competing beliefs. Soon Katharine is drawn into a perilous showdown with Thomas Cromwell, the much-feared Lord Privy Seal, as her growing influence over the King begins to threaten too many powerful interests. Originally published in three parts (The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, and The Fifth Queen Crowned), Ford’s novel serves up both a breathtakingly visual evocation of the Tudor world and a timeless portrayal of the insidious operations of power and fear in any era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307744920

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

Reviews for The Fifth Queen

[bjace_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Historical novels are stories first and factual renderings last. Most historians regard Katherine Howard, the fifth of Henry VIII's wives as a barely-educated flibbertigibbet who may have been a good-time girl. Ford Madox Ford sees her as a ponderous woman of prodigious education whose greatest interest was restoring England to the Catholic faith. He does, however, never answer the question of Katherine's possible sexual misconduct (and thereby leaves himself an out.) More interesting are the depictions of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Privy Seal (i.e., chief henchman) and his gang of intelligent rogues. Interesting story; fanciful history.

[booksinthebelfry · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel, aptly described by William Gass as "slow, intense, pictorial, and operatic," is a seriously literary historical novel of a sort not much seen anymore (indeed Joseph Conrad, writing of it in 1908, called it "the swan song of Historical Romance"). In it Ford gives us an intriguingly idiosyncratic portrait of Katharine Howard, the ill-fated fifth wife Of Henry VIII (and I use the word "portrait" deliberately, as Ford's prose style is very painterly). Certainly this is not the woman we may think we know from BBC costume dramas or "The Tudors!" It may not be the woman known to historians or her contemporaries either, as Ford I think is less interested in historically accurate depictions of his characters than in fleshing out philosophical and moral arguments about the nature of history itself. Nevertheless, the narrative is dense with period detail, the Tudor language and Latin references are authentically daunting, and the whole enterprise is carried off with masterly skill.The other novels this most puts me in mind of are Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy and Jane Smiley's Greenlanders .... if you enjoyed those, you might well find The Fifth Queen a rewarding reading experience.