Fifth Queen

Katharine Howard is a devout Roman Catholic, impoverished, young noblewoman escorted by her fiery cousin Thomas Culpeper. By accident, she comes to the attention of the King, in a minor way at first, is helped to a position as a lady in waiting for the then bastard Lady Mary, Henry's eldest daughter, by her old Latin tutor Nicholas Udal. Udal is a spy for Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal. As Katharine becomes involved with the many calculating, competing, and spying members of Henry VIII's Court, she gradually rises, almost against her will, in Court. She is brought more to the attention of the King, becomes involved with him, is used by Cromwell, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer as well as the less powerful though more personally attached Nicholas Throckmorton.

This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1906 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family – Hueffer's grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times – and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the young Hueffer began to write. Although Hueffer never attended university, during his early twenties he moved through many intellectual circles, and would later talk of the influence that the "Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great" – men such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle – exerted on him. In 1908, Hueffer founded the English Review, and over the next 15 months published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, and gave débuts to many authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Hueffer's editorship consolidated the classic canon of early modernist literature, and saw him earn a reputation as of one of the century's greatest literary editors. Ford's most famous work was his Parade's End tetralogy, which he completed in the 1920's and have now been adapted into a BBC television drama. Ford continued to write through the thirties, producing fiction, non-fiction, and two volumes of autobiography: Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933). In his last years, he taught literature at the Olivet College in Michigan. Ford died on 26th June 1939 in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

"The Fifth Queen" is a fictionalized account of the fifth wife of England's Henry VIII, Katharine Howard. Katherine is depicted as armed only with education, wit and honesty. The plot-ridden court comes to dramatic life as everyone high and low maneuvers for advantage. Everyone except Katherine, whose unwillingness to scheme will make her the queen and defenseless at the same time.

The Magister Udal sat in the room of his inn in Paris, where customarily the King of France lodged such envoys as came at his expense. He had been sent there to Latinise the letters that passed between Sir Thomas Wyatt and the King's Ministers of France, for he was esteemed the most learned man in these islands. He had groaned much at being sent there, for he must leave in England so many loves-the great, blonde Margot Poins, that was maid to Katharine Howard; the tall, swaying Katharine Howard herself; Judge Cantre's wife that had fed him well; and two other women, with all of whom he had succeeded easily or succeeded in no wise at all.

Privy Seal was the second novel of "The Fifth Queen" trilogy. The historical series presents a highly fictionalized account of Katharine Howard's arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king, and her death.

The Lady Mary, the Lady Mary of England' the King said weightily and these last two words of his had a weight all their own, so that he added, 'of England' again, and then, 'will have little longer need of thee. She shall wed with a puissant Prince.'

The Fifth Queen Crowned is the final book in a trilogy of historical romances based on the courtship, marriage, and eventual dissolution of the relationship between England's notorious King Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, a beautiful young woman who was a cousin of another of Henry's wives, Anne Boleyn.

"The Fifth Queen Crowned" is the third book in the series. The historical sequence presents a highly fictionalized account of Katherine Howard's arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king and her death.