The Fifth Queen (2 page)

In this book, Ford claims that England’s greatness ‘begins with the birth of the modern world. And the modern world was born with the discovery of the political theory of the Balance of the Powers in Europe’.
The Fifth Queen
is concerned with sex, love, marriage, fear, lying, death, and confusion—it is also concerned with the idea of the balance of power as a real force in men’s lives. The Ford of
The Spirit of the People
leaves us in no doubt about his admiration for the Cromwell who was ‘the founder of modern England’. He describes Henry VIII’s ministers as ‘Holbein’s type’, the ‘heavy, dark, bearded bull-necked animal, sagacious, smiling, but with devious and twinkling eyes’. He goes on:

The Tudor age, Ford said, was ‘a projection of realism between two widely differing but romantic movements’. That is, the feudal-Catholic times were romantic because of the altruism, heroism, and chivalry of their ideals. In Ford’s view, the post-Stuart times, the days after William III and the glorious Revolution, were paradoxically ‘romantic’ in a deeper sense than the ‘picturesque’ romanticism of the Stuart cause.

Consider this opposition: ‘the sublime of common-sense’/ ‘wrong-headedness wrought up to the sublime pitch’. It has much in common with the opposition, in these novels, between Cromwell and Katharine—the realistic Machiavellian with his belief in England, the King, the health of the country, and the in many ways ‘wrong-headed’ Katharine, unprepared to come to terms with the greed of the nobles who have acquired the lands of the dispossessed monasteries, the venal nature of servants, or the distress of Margaret Poins who cannot be married in Katharine’s restored Roman Catholic dispensation. There is a further twist to this opposition. Later in
The Spirit of the People
Ford blames Protestantism for ‘that divorce of principle from life which, carried as far as it had been carried in England, has earned for the English the title of a nation of hypocrites’. Katharine’s Catholicism is like the ‘female’ Catholicism which Ford says these islands have discarded: the female saints, the Mother of God, ‘an evolution almost entirely of the sentiments and of the weaknesses of humanity’. Katharine calls on the saints and on the Virgin throughout this book. But she also calls on the great classical moralists for what Ford would have called ‘principles’, and Throckmorton sums her up, in this context, shrewdly, as a Romantic puritan as well as a romantic Catholic woman: ‘in all save doctrine this Kat Howard and her learning are nearer Lutheran than of the old faith.’ (We remember that Ford, in his Holbein book, describes Holbein’s portrait of Katharine’s ‘bitter, soured and disappointed’ uncle, Norfolk, as ‘rigid and unbending in a new world that seemed to him a sea of errors’ and pointed out that it was Norfolk who said, ‘It was merry in England before the new Learning came in.’) Katharine’s appeal to Henry is essentially romantic: they speak of the Fortunate Isles and bringing back a golden age. And her morals have the absolute quality of Ford’s ‘principle’, against which the despairing cynicism of Cicely Elliott is set. Cicely Elliott says, ‘God hath withdrawn himself from this world’, and to Katharine ‘Why, thou art a very infectious fanatic … But you must shed much blood. You must widow many men’s wives. Body of God! I believe thou wouldst.’ And Katharine does not demur. She will kill out of her righteous principle as Cromwell will out of his expediency. In
The Spirit of the People
Ford remarks in parenthesis, contrasting his versions of Catholicism and Puritanism, ‘I am far from wishing to adumbrate to which religion I give my preference; for I think it will remain to the end a matter for dispute whether a practicable or an ideal code be the more beneficial to humanity.’

A novel, Ford wrote, was ‘a rendering of an Affair: of one embroilment, one set of embarrassments, one human coil, one psychological progression’. That the world of this novel is seen through Katharine’s eyes more than any other has tended to make her appear to be a ‘heroine’; but this, as I suggested earlier, is partly the result of Ford’s attempt at what he called authorial ‘Aloofness’. I believe she is morally judged, but she is judged by juxtaposition (another favourite term of Ford’s, who admired Stendhal and Jane Austen for their gifts of dramatic juxtaposition of incidents which changed the reader’s view of what had gone before). The moral work is done by the reader. We do not see so much of Cromwell, or Throckmorton, as we do of Katharine, and the King, passionate, bewildered, cunning, desiring virtue, dangerous, generous, cruel, is seen almost—not entirely—from the outside, a looming body at the end of dark corridors, behind doors. We guess at their motives, with Katharine, but not through her view of them. In his later masterpieces,
The Good Soldier
and
Parade’s End
, Ford used bewildered innocent minds to depict the muddle, the horror, the endless unsatisfactory and painful partiality of knowledge of human motive, of what has ‘really’ happened, or why. This novel is not so subtle, but it is recognizably by the same man. Ford as a writer was always preoccupied with the effect of lies, and the nature of worry and anxiety—they are his great themes, public and private.
The Good Soldier
and
Parade’s End
are inhabited by grand, terrible liars. In
The Fifth Queen
, Udal’s little lies run into Throckmorton’s politic and murderous ones, as the sexual lies of Tietjens’ wife in 1914–18 run into the public lies behind the Great War. In
The Spirit of the People
Ford wrote that the English are ‘a nation of hypocrites’
because
Protestant virtue divorced principle from life. In
The Fifth Queen
he displays the workings of the divorce.

The ‘solidity of specification’ of the world of this novel is its great virtue. Ford claimed to have spent ten years before these novels were written working on a book on Henry VIII, whose private papers had just been published.

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.

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.

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 Lord Privy Seal, who had pulled down the monastery to make room for it, was a central mass. Its gilded vanes were in the shape of men at arms, and tore the ragged clouds with the banners on their lances. Nicholas Udal looked at the roof and cursed the porter of it.

‘He could have given me a cup of hypocras,’ he said, and muttered, as a man to whom Latin is more familiar than the vulgar tongue, a hexameter about ‘pocula plena.’

He had reached London before nine in one of the King’s barges that came from Greenwich to take musicians back that night at four. He had breakfasted with the Lady Mary’s women at six off warm small beer and fresh meat, but it was eleven already, and he had spent all his money upon good letters.

He muttered:
‘Pauper sum, pateor, fateor, quod Di dant fero,’
but it did not warm him.

The magister had been put in the Lady Mary’s household by the Lord Privy Seal, and he had a piece of news as to the Lady’s means of treasonable correspondence with the Emperor her uncle. He had imagined that the news—which would hurt no one because it was imaginary—might be worth some crowns to him. But the Lord Privy Seal and all his secretaries had gone to Greenwich before it was light, and there was nothing there for the magister.

‘You might have known as much, a learned man,’ the porter had snarled at him. ‘Isn’t the new Queen at Rochester? Would our lord bide here? Didn’t your magistership pass his barge on the river?’

‘Nay, it was still dark,’ the magister answered. The porter sniffed and slammed to the grating in the wicket. Being of the Old Faith he hated those Lutherans—or those men of the New Learning—that it pleased his master to employ.

Udal hesitated before the closed door; he hesitated in the lane beyond the corner of the house. Perhaps there would be no barges at the steps—no King’s barges. The men of the Earl Marshal’s service, being Papists, would pelt him with mud if he asked for a passage; even the Protestant lords’ men would jeer at him if he had no pence for them—and he had none. He would do best to wait for the musicians’ barge at four.

Then he must eat and shelter—and find a wench. He stood in the mud: long, thin, brown in his doctor’s gown of fur, with his black flapped cap that buttoned well under his chin and let out his brown, lean, shaven and humorous face like a woodpecker’s peering out of a hole in a tree.

The volumes beneath his arms were heavy: they poked out his gown on each side, and the bitter cold pinched his finger ends as if they had been caught in a door. The weight of the books pleased him for there was much good letters there—a book of Tully’s epistles for himself and two volumes of
Plautus’ comedies for the Lady Mary. But what among his day’s purchases pleased him most was a medallion in silver he had bought in Cheapside. It showed on the one side Cupid in his sleep and on the other Venus fondling a peacock. It was a heart-compelling gift to any wench or lady of degree.