The Fifth Queen Read Free

have found him affable, or terrifying, or seductive, or royal, or courageous? There are so many contradictory facts; there are so many reported interviews, each contradicting the other …
    He used his ‘facts’ supremely well. He is at ease with clothes, food, rooms, roads, hangings. The world of this novel is largely an indoor world, dark, artificially lit, a world of staircases, spyholes, hangings that conceal listeners, alleys where men lurk with knives, walls that close people in. This both mirrors the confusions of Katharine’s ‘affair’ and the new world of Tudor England.
    Holbein’s lords no longer ride hunting. They are inmates of palaces, their flesh is rounded, their limbs at rest, their eyes sceptical or contemplative. They are indoor statesmen; they ideal in intrigues; they have already learnt the meaning of the words ‘The balance of the Powers’ and in consequence they wield the sword no longer; they have become sedentary rulers.
    In the context of this observation, from Ford’s Holbein book, it becomes easier to see why the archaic outdoor scenes are so moving. In the brief days of her happiness with Henry, Katharine is portrayed out of doors, hunting, in the North, amongst farmers and peasants. In the marvellous scene in the stable yard (designed by Holbein) the old knight, survivor of a world of chivalric action, amongst the already outdated armour, drops his lance. Roy Strong, in
The Elizabethan Image
, wrote of the importance to the Tudors of the nostalgia for chivalry. In
When Did You Last See Your Father?
he wrote of the genuine historical and human concerns of Victorian historical painting. Ford understood—and rendered—both.
    A word, finally, about the language. Ford believed—in the interest of excluding the writer from the reader’s experience of the affair rendered—in plain words, current language, common speech. He distinguished three English languages: ‘that of the Edinburgh Review which has no relation to life, that of the streets which is full of slang and daily neologisms and that third one which is fairly fluid and fairly expressive—the dialect of the drawing-room or the study, the really living language.’ Nevertheless, in 1903 he wrote to H. G. Wells, advocating that we should learn from the Elizabethans to use current slang. ‘If you will reconsider the matter you will see that slang is an excellent thing. (Elizabethan writing is mostly slang.) And as soon as practicable we should get into our pages every slang word that doesn’t (in our selective ears) ring too horribly … we must do that or we shall die; we and our language.’
    He uses Tudor language in the
Fifth Queen
novels with
this
kind of vitality—a pleasure in accuracy and sharpness, not a distant strangeness. His heroes and heroines tend to be excellent Latinists—Katharine Howard is related to Valentine Wannop in
Parade’s End
. Ford’s prose has the flexibility and elegance of a good Latinist and the roughness and brilliance of a writer interested in the quiddities of the vernacular. It is proper that his comic character should be Magister Udal, looking back, like Katharine, to the Golden Age of Latin, unaware that he will be remembered as the father of the drama in the ‘vulgar tongue’ he so despises.

THE
FIFTH QUEEN
and how she came to court

To Joseph Conrad

PART ONE
The Coming
I
    M AGISTER N ICHOLAS U DAL , the Lady Mary’s pedagogue, was very hungry and very cold. He stood undecided in the mud of a lane in the Austin Friars. The quickset hedges on either side were only waist high and did not shelter him. The little houses all round him of white daub with grey corner beams had been part of the old friars’ stables and offices. All that neighbourhood was a maze of dwellings and gardens, with the hedges dry, the orchard trees bare with frost, the arbours wintry and deserted. This congregation of small cottages was like a patch of common that squatters had taken; the great house of the