S. Byatt

THE FIFTH QUEEN

Dedication

PART ONE
The Coming

PART TWO
The House of Eyes

PART THREE
The King Moves

PRIVY SEAL

Dedication

PART ONE
The Rising Sun

PART TWO
The Distant Cloud

PART THREE
The Sunburst

THE FIFTH QUEEN CROWNED

Dedication

PART ONE
The Major Chord

PART TWO
The Threatened Rift

PART THREE
The Dwindling Melody

PART FOUR
The End of the Song

Introduction

A. S. Byatt

‘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 Ford’s Tudor novels have often been discussed as a nostalgic exercise in an already outdated form.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.