The Fifth Queen Crowned by Ford Madox Ford

Description

Ford Madox Ford’s trilogy began with the accomplishment of a clever queen’s marriage, and its crown piece begins where coronations end: with the question of whether a fifth queen can sing a new song in a king’s house. Catherine Howard accepts the crown as she accepts the man, with an odd, hard integrity that the court, the Reformation and the roaring machinery of royal favor are all determined to dissolve.

The novel’s four movements are frankly musical. The major cord strikes Catherine’s brief triumph; the threatened rift gathers the religious and factional storms; the dwindling melody confesses the inevitable; and the end of the song arrives with all the force Ford can command from the Tudor world he rebuilt from the inside. No costume drama, this is prose history writing of a high order, and the twentieth century’s finest portrait of Henry’s court viewed through the eyes of a queen who kept her truth past the point where truth was safe.

Why the trilogy endures

• An emotionally modern Catherine, no ornament but an agent of her own doom.
• Ford’s hallucinatory conviction in the physical texture of Tudor life.
• A tragedy conducted almost entirely in the music of what people leave unsaid.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The complete 22 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.