‘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.

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:

And indeed a sort of peasant-cunning did … distinguish the international dealings of the whole world at that date. Roughly speaking, the ideals of the chivalric age were altruistic; roughly speaking, the ideals of the age that succeeded it were individual-opportunist. It was not, of course, England that was first in the field, since Italy produced Machiavelli. But Italy, which produced Machiavelli, failed utterly to profit by him … England did produce from its depths, from amidst his bewildering cross currents of mingled races, the great man of its age; and along with him it produced a number of men similar in type and strong enough to found a tradition. The man, of course, was Thomas Cromwell, who welded England into one formidable whole, and his followers in that tradition were the tenacious, pettifogging, cunning, utterly unscrupulous and very wonderful statesmen who supported the devious policy of Queen Elizabeth—the Cecils, the Woottons, the Bacons and all the others of England’s golden age.

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.

For in essentials the Stuarts’ cause was picturesque; the Cromwellian cause a matter of principle. Now a picturesque cause may make a very strong and poetic appeal but it is, after all, a principle that sweeps people away. For poetry is the sublime of common-sense; principle is wrong-headedness wrought up to the sublime pitch—and that, in essentials, is romance.

Consider this opposition: ‘the sublime of common-sense’/ ‘wrong-headedness wrought up to the sublime pitch’.