The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford

During the time that had ensued between January and that month of March, it had been proved to Katharine Howard how well Throckmorton, the spy, voiced the men folk of their day. He had left her alone, but she seemed to feel his presence in all the air. He passed her in corridors, and she knew from his very silence that he was carrying on a fumbling game with her uncle Norfolk, and with Gardiner of Winchester. He had not induced her to play his game--but he seemed to have made her see that every man else in the world was playing a game like his. It was not, precisely, any more a world of black and white that she saw, but a world of men who did one thing in order that something very different might happen a long time afterwards.

Ford Madox Ford is always good for a misleading title, so it may surprise no one that in The Fifth Queen Kataerine Howard, who will succeed Anne of Cleves as the wife of Henry VIII, never quite makes it to the throne in this, the first in Ford's trilogy. Instead it depicts something not unlike the beginning of the historical Katharine's relationship with Henry. It is true that she was first a lady-in-waiting in the King's court, but in the service of Queen Anne, not the King's daughter, Mary, and it isn't likely to be true that Henry chanced upon her on the palace grounds riding a mule and, dazzled by her beauty and wit, impressed her into that service. Nor was the historical Katharine a virulent Catholic bitterly opposed to Thomas Cromwell, the Protestant standard-bearer and Lord of the Privy Seal:

The face of a queen looked down just above his head with her eyes wide open as if she were amazed, thrusting her head from a cloud.

'Why, I have outlived three queens,' he said to himself, and his round face resignedly despised his world and his times. He had forgotten what anxiety felt like because the world was so people with blunderers and timid fools full of hatred.

Cromwell sees in Katharine an opportunity to plant a spy in the Catholic Mary's service. Katharine refuses, but quickly finds herself embroiled in the shadowy sectarian conflict that rages beyond the King's notice. She withstands the threats and manipulations not only of Cromwell and his spies but Bishop Gardiner, the country's leading Catholic, who she had idolized. She struggles to maintain her honor and honesty against the moralizing of men like Throckmorton, who may or may not be double dealing against Cromwell:

'How shall you decide what is vileness, or where will you find a virtuous man?' he asked. 'Maybe you will find some among the bones of your old Romans. Yet your Seneca, in his day, did play the villain. Or maybe some at the Court of Mahound, I know not, for I was never there. But here is a goodly world, with prizes for them that can take them...'

Katharine soon learns that everyone is after these "prizes"--that is, except the King, who seeks only the prize of her company. Henry is the most intriguing and magnetic character here: impulsive and irascible, yet truly interested in the pursuit of "right doctrine," a notion lost on men like Cromwell and Gardiner, whose beliefs seem to serve only their ambitions. Perhaps his position as king affords him that right, but it is also a position he uses to lift Katharine out of harm's way at the book's finale, realizing keenly that she is a kindred soul.

But The Fifth Queen seems ultimately like a chronicle of lost opportunities. One wonders why Ford saw the need to transmogrify the historical Katharine into a Catholic stalwart if the religious issues were going to be glossed over. The idea of a Renaissance spy novel sounds great, but the intrigue is a muddle. Everything is a muddle, actually; as an early attempt by Ford to achieve an "impressionist" style, which reproduces the world as it is experienced and seen, The Fifth Queen succeeds mostly in making the particulars of action and location very unclear. Its greatest successes are in its population of minor characters, like the womanizing teacher Magister Udal, or the aged but infamous knight Sir Rochford.

On the other hand, as the first book in a trilogy, this can only amount to a half-finished opinion. I have faith in the abilities of Ford, who is capable of sneaking up on you unawares in a way that few authors are, so I hope for more from The Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting--or no, not acting--sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square house never presented itself to my minds as a menace to its security? It doesn't so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I don't know...


The Good Soldier is about two couples: John and Florence Dowell and Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. John, who narrates the story, and his wife are an American couple who meet the British Ashburnhams at a German resort for those with ailing hearts. Edward is the "good soldier" of the title, idolized by Dowell to the point of fawning, but he also conducts a years-long affair with Dowell's wife.

As it turns out, neither Florence nor Edward truly has a heart condition--not a physical one, at least. Edward is a serial philanderer, incapable of avoiding petty, sentimental affairs with beautiful young women, and comes to the resort in pursuit of a girl with a real "heart." Florence is a fake and an opportunist with designs on Branshaw Teleragh, Edward's estate and the ancestral home of Florence's family. Leonora seeks to endear herself to Edward by managing his love affairs, but throughout all of it Dowell is either painfully, idiotically unawares or represses his understanding, perhaps out of a powerful homosexual attraction for Edward. When, as above, Dowell says "I don't know..." it is a universal expression, as the full realization of the situation--which has caused the suicide both of Florence and Edward--causes him not only to doubt the genuineness of his friendships but his ability to understand any human being.

Dowell begins his tale by saying, "This is the saddest story I've ever heard." The Saddest Story was Ford's original title (and seems still to be Dowell's), but he changed it due to the outbreak of a story arguably sadder--World War I. As such, The Good Soldier is decidedly pre-modernist, as WWI is generally considered the origin of modernity, yet it prefigures so well the modernist model: Dowell's unreliability, the immense gap between the author and his narrator, the disjointed, out-of-sequence narrative. Yet, Graham Greene, an acquaintance and admirer of Ford, thought that he could see underneath it all a great amount of pain and anguish suffered by Ford himself.

I think that this is probably one of the greatest books of the twentieth century--I absolutely love it. It is peopled by generally loathsome characters, who nevertheless manage to make themselves exquisite in pity. Edward is a monster of sympathy, brimming over with such love for the sad young maidens of the world that he cannot help but give himself to them, compelled to be an eternal Christ figure. Leonora is a devout Catholic determined to salvage the wreckage of her marriage. Dowell is an utter fool, ravaged by a misery he does not understand, pursuing an unspoken love through a method that can only be described as self-deletion. Florence is unmistakably the cruelest of the lot, yet she is also the one who keeps with her a vial of prussic acid that she might kill herself should her malignancy be discovered. It is hard not to think of these people as Dowell himself thinks of the Ashburnhams:

But what were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I think that the pair of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible....

Poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath. I think perhaps much of the novel's power has to do with the fact that we are meant to wonder if we are not a little bit like the narrator, unable to see the things in ourselves that an audience, reading the story of our lives, may intuit immediately and pity us for them, and that, as Dowell says, "the record of humanity is a record of sorrows."