The Fifth Queen

ALSO BY FORD MADOX FORD
AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CLASSICS

The Good Soldier

‘Ford’s last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception—the swan song of Historical Romance—and frankly I am glad to have heard it.’ So, somewhat ambiguously, wrote Joseph Conrad (to whom
The Fifth Queen
is dedicated) to John Galsworthy in 1908. Ford’s Tudor novels have often been discussed as a nostalgic exercise in an already outdated form. I think that their ideas, and their techniques, are much more interesting than that. For Ford, the past—the English past, the European past, his own past—was an integral part of present experience and understanding. This is not to say, either, that he uses the Tudor Court as an allegorical portrait of Edwardian England or of Ford Madox Ford. He was more subtle than that.

Ford published eighty-one books between 1891 and 1939, when he died. His father, Francis Hueffer, was German; his English grandfather was the painter, Ford Madox Brown. Ford grew up in Brown’s house amongst artists and artistic debate; Graham Greene sees the imposing figure of Ford Madox Brown with his irascibility, fear of plots, enthusiasm, and melancholy behind the looming figure of Henry VIII in these novels. Ford’s early books include a life of Brown, a study of Rossetti, and a book on the Pre-Raphaelites; in 1905 he published a monograph on Holbein. Some of the great set-piece descriptions in
The Fifth Queen
are reminiscent of the composition—and lighting—of Madox Brown’s historical paintings of Chaucer at the court of Edward III, or Oliver Cromwell—talking to Milton and Marvell or brooding on a white horse amidst farmyard muddle. (Compare Thomas Cromwell on his barge, the carefully composed interior portrait of Anne of Cleves, the farmyard muddle surrounding Mary Hall or Lascelles.) Katharine Howard herself is often described stretching out, or dropping her arms, in hope or despair, like a posed figure ‘caught’ by the painter at a historical crisis. Ford preferred Brown’s historical paintings to his ‘decorative’ work. ‘As a Teuton, I like to think—and I feel certain—that whatever of Madox Brown’s art was most individual was inspired by the Basle Holbeins.’ The virtue of Brown’s best work derived from ‘the study of absolute realism and of almost absolute minuteness of rendering’.

This word, ‘rendering’, is a central word in Ford’s many and varied discussions of the art of the novel. During the period of his collaboration with Conrad, the two of them discussed the techniques of narrative, the importance of ‘accurate letters’, and developed a set of ideas which Ford referred to, on the whole, as Impressionism. ‘We saw’, he wrote in his memoir of Conrad, ‘that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render … impressions.’ Their masters were Stendhal, Maupassant, and above all Flaubert, with his insistence on
le mot juste
—a crafted, exact, descriptive language from which the author, both as rhetorical stylist and as moral commentator, should be absent. In English, both novelists turned to Henry James, who in his essay on ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) spoke of ‘the air of reality (solidity of specification)’ as ‘the supreme virtue of a novel’ and used the word ‘render’ and the analogy with painting to illustrate his meaning. ‘It is here that the novelist competes with his brother the painter in
his
attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meanings, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.’ ‘Rendering’ tends to be concerned with evoking surfaces, especially visual surfaces. In Ford’s work it usually carries moral connotations of authorial reticence, non-interference, impersonality. Here his ideas can be related to Eliot’s idea of the impersonal poet, Joyce’s retired artist-God, paring his fingernails. While he admired their desire for accurate recording of natural objects, Ford mistrusted the moral fervour and nostalgic medievalizing of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. All this helped to shape his highly visual ‘historical Romance’.

His book on Holbein, unlike his book on Rossetti or his life of Brown, is written with moral and aesthetic passion. He opposes Holbein to Dürer on its first page in a way that directly prefigures the opposition of the two forces that battle for the soul of Henry VIII (and England) in the
Fifth Queen
novels. The painters are ‘the boundary stones between the old world and the modern, between the old faith and the new learning, between empirical, charming conceptions of an irrational world and the modern theoretic way of looking at life’. Dürer ‘could not refrain from commenting upon life, Holbein’s comments were of little importance’. It seems that Dürer is greater. ‘Dürer had imagination, where Holbein had only vision and invention—an invention of a rough-shod and everyday kind.’ But it is Holbein whose accuracy Ford is praising. Praising Samuel Richardson’s ‘craftsmanlike’ approach to the novel, Ford said he was ‘sound, quiet, without fuss, going about his work as a carpenter goes about making a chair and in the end turning out an article of supreme symmetry and consistence’. He compared Richardson to ‘the two supreme artists of the world—Holbein and Bach’. He had already compared Holbein to Bach in the Holbein book itself, after praising Holbein’s depiction of Henry VIII as ‘an unconcerned rendering of an appallingly gross and miserable man’. ‘Holbein was in fact a great Renderer. If I wanted to find a figure really akin to his I think I should go to music and speak of Bach.’

Ford, it seems, was interested in Holbein’s art and in Henry VIII’s court and the politics of Thomas Cromwell because of their ‘realism’—and the word ‘realism’ draws together here both moral attitudes and aesthetic priorities. In the
Fifth Queen
novels Katharine Howard is presented as a virtuous, highly intelligent woman who wishes to reverse the political and religious changes worked by Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal—to reintroduce the old faith, feudal values, monastic virtues. This figure bears little relation to what evidence we have about the real Katharine, although Ford teases the reader delicately and inconclusively about the truth of his Katharine’s early relations with her alarming cousin, T. Culpepper. Ford himself was a Roman Catholic, of a kind (with more or less fervour at different times of his life), and liked to refer to himself as a ‘radical Tory’. He argued for the independent smallholder, old continuities, aristocracy, against the depersonalizing effects of modern machinery and democracy. This has led critics of
The Fifth Queen
, almost universally, to see Katharine as its heroine. Arthur Mizener’s comment, in his biograpy of Ford,
The Saddest Story
, is typical. ‘In the end Ford’s romantic need to turn her into an impossibly ideal figure makes her unconvincing.’ Robert Green, who wrote a good and thoughtful book on Ford’s ‘prose and politics’, noticed that Ford, in his non-fictional writings, praised Cromwell as a ‘genius’ and ‘the founder of modern England’, but says that he is portrayed in the novels with ‘near-total disfavour’. Ford ‘attempts to vilify’ Cromwell, and idealizes Katharine’s idealism. I think this view, both of what Ford intended to do, and of what he achieved, arises from a kind of stock response to the ‘historical Romance’ as a genre, and from a failure to appreciate Ford’s scrupulous ‘rendering’ of his world and his characters’ consciousness.

It is very illuminating to look at the books, collected as
England and the English
, that Ford was publishing during the same years as the Tudor trilogy.
The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind
appeared in 1907 in the same year as
Privy Seal
, and a year before
The Fifth Queen Crowned
.