The Fifth Queen Crowned

Thomas Cromwell has fallen, and Katharine Howard stands at the summit of England — crowned queen, wife to Henry VIII, and bent on a single perilous hope: to turn the King and the kingdom back toward the old faith, and to govern by truth and justice rather than by the lie and the bribe that are the court’s native tongue.

It is exactly her honesty that will destroy her. Ford’s Katharine is a girl too upright and too deeply religious for the world she now commands; her candour makes enemies as fast as friends, and her refusal to deal in faction leaves her without the cynical alliances that keep the powerful safe. The Archbishop Cranmer and his fox-like spy Lascelles work patiently at her undoing, and the secrets of her own past lie waiting to be turned against her, as a king who loves her grows wary of a wife too good to be managed.

First published in 1908, The Fifth Queen Crowned is the third and final novel of Ford Madox Ford’s celebrated Fifth Queen trilogy — the sequence Joseph Conrad called “the swan song of historical romance.” It is historical fiction at its most ambitious: Ford’s impressionist method carried into Tudor dress, conjuring the glittering, treacherous atmosphere of Henry’s court out of concrete, sensuous detail and a deliberately archaic prose. Beneath the pageantry it is a tragedy of integrity destroyed by a corrupt world — a study of what it costs to be honest in a place where honesty is a kind of nakedness.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1908 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the trilogy and its close, a biographical note on Ford Madox Ford, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.