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 Cicely Elliott says, ‘God hath withdrawn himself from this world’, and to Katharine ‘Why, thou art a very infectious fanatic … But you must shed much blood.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.

I worried about his parentage, his diseases, the size of his shoes, the price he gave for kitchen implements, his relation to his wives, his knowledge of music, his proficiency with the bow … But I really know—so delusive are reported facts—nothing whatever. Not one single thing! Should I have found him affable, or terrifying, or seductive, or royal, or courageous? There are so many contradictory facts; there are so many reported interviews, each contradicting the other …

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.

Holbein’s lords no longer ride hunting. They are inmates of palaces, their flesh is rounded, their limbs at rest, their eyes sceptical or contemplative.