Privy Seal

Katharine Howard has come to the court of Henry VIII, and she is rising. By her goodness and her plain truth-telling — not, Ford insists, by the scheming that swirls around her — she has won the King's favour and become the living emblem of the old Catholic cause. That makes her the deadly enemy of one man: Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, who broke England from Rome and made the marriage to Anne of Cleves that the King can no longer stomach.

Privy Seal, the second novel of Ford Madox Ford's Fifth Queen trilogy, belongs to Cromwell. Sensing that Henry is looking for someone to punish, and that his own grip on power is loosening, he sets his spies and pensioners around Katharine to derail her before her cause becomes his ruin. Through the eyes of the frightened, learned schoolmaster Magister Udal, and amid the double-dealing of the subtle spy Throckmorton, the novel carries the court intrigue forward — step by perilous step — toward the moment when the great minister's power will tip, and the woman he sought to destroy will be drawn ever closer to the throne.

First published in 1907, the trilogy was the early triumph in which Ford first brought to full life the impressionist method he was forging with Joseph Conrad. The Tudor court here is no costume pageant but a bewildering present moment — a place of faction and fear, rendered in heavy archaic prose, where every kindness may be a trap and no one can be sure who is truly serving whom. Beneath the plotting it is a study of the precariousness of favour and the cost of conscience: of what it means to keep one's soul intact inside a machine built to turn human beings into instruments.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1907 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword on the trilogy and Ford's method, a biographical note on Ford Madox Ford, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.