The Fifth Queen
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Product Description
Product Description
Ford Madox Ford's trilogy about Henry VIII, his fifth wife Katherine Howard and Thomas Cromwell.
About the Author
Ford Madox Ford (1873 - 1939) grew up in pre-Raphaelite circles, was friendly with Joseph Conrad and as founder and editor of the 'English Review' and the 'Transatlantic Review' did much to shape Twentieth Century Writing. His other two great novels THE FOOD SOLDIER and PARADE'S END are also published by Penguin.
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MAGISTER NICHOLAS UDAL, the Lady Mary's pedagogue, was very hungry and very cold. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
MAGISTER NICHOLAS UDAL, the Lady Mary's pedagogue, was very hungry and very cold. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ford’s The Fifth Queen trilogy deals with, as may be conjectured, Katherine Howard – after all, how many other monarchs have had five or more queens? If you are at all familiar with your Tudor history then I’m afraid you’re not going to find the Katherine Howard you are familiar with here. Ford’s Katherine is tall, witty and an expert in Latin. The real Katherine we know was petite and barely literate. Here she is Ford’s Catholic martyr and romantic heroine.
Many of the other characters, or historical figures, are pretty well drawn, although the Lady Mary comes across as a thoroughly unpleasant woman, sneering and snickering her way through the book.
Usually blatant historical inaccuracies in novels like these really get my goat. I shudder at the very name of Phillipa Gregory. Nevertheless I did enjoy the Fifth Queen trilogy and got through it reasonably quickly, being nearly 600 pages in all. The writing was good, the settings realistic and characters behaved consistently, even where they weren’t as they were supposed to be! This is another example of why you should not judge a book by its first chapter as I did think it would be a struggle to finish, but afterwards I got drawn in to the story.
All in all an enjoyable read, although not a great book. I think sometimes it says more about its author and the Edwardian period than Katherine Howard and the Tudors!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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6 reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful
A Parable
15 Jun 2000
Format:Paperback
Ford Madox Ford's "The Fifth Queen" - actually a collection of three separate novels - is a fictionalized account of the fifth wife of England's Henry VIII, Katharine Howard. As A.S. Byatt explains in her Introduction, "This figure bears little relation to what we have about the real Katharine . . ." and thus the reader should be conscious that Ford's Katharine - a young, pretty, pious woman who yearns for a return to Catholicism after Henry's split with Rome - is strictly fictional. That said, the only real failure of this work is that Katharine is the least appealing, least interesting character; we first meet her as a dispossessed ingenue seeking entrance to Henry's court around the time of his disasterous fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves, and it is this description which will follow her throughout the book. Even as she becomes Queen, it is almost by accident, surviving the machinations of Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and the recklessness of her devoted cousin Culpepper. She is Queen by default. She constantly protests that all she seeks is a Catholic England - the "old ways" - and yet throughout she resigns herself to letting events happen to her, as if she cannot control the consequences of her own life. Indeed, her final speech to Henry where she confesses to an adultery which did not occur, becomes her last fatal act of passivity, for which she pays with her life. She cannot see that there are those who wish to help her and that her naive, narcissistic piety does not have to be her ruin. What holds these novels together is the rich supporting cast: the aforementioned Cromwell, who has his own sovereign Protestant image of England, free from the entanglements of Rome. There is the brooding Princess Mary, Henry's daughter by his first wife, who knows how to carry a grudge for her mother's divorce, the super-spy Throckmorton, the lecherous Magister Udal and more. Ford uses Katharine to show that the blind commitment to an ideal - any ideal - will only result in failure, that this world is more than ideas and faiths, but of people who are imperfect, people who will fail. It is a world five hundred years in the past, but it is also our own.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Intrigue and romance in the court of Henry VIII
23 July 2002
Format:Paperback
Intrigue and romance in the court of Henry VIII
Katherine Howard, armed only with education, wit and honesty, becomes the Fifth Queen, Henry VIII's fifth wife in this amazing historical trilogy. The plot-ridden court comes to vivid life as everyone high and low maneuvers for advantage. Everyone except Katherine Howard, whose unwillingness to scheme will make her queen and defenseless at the same moment. Even knowing the general story this is a fascinating and occasionally shocking novel, with a stunning ending...
Katherine Howard, armed only with education, wit and honesty, becomes the Fifth Queen, Henry VIII's fifth wife in this amazing historical trilogy. The plot-ridden court comes to vivid life as everyone high and low maneuvers for advantage. Everyone except Katherine Howard, whose unwillingness to scheme will make her queen and defenseless at the same moment. Even knowing the general story this is a fascinating and occasionally shocking novel, with a stunning ending...
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Remarkable
9 Dec 2010
Format:Paperback
I read this book about ten years ago. I bought it at a sale out of idle curiosity, having once read that it was one of Ford's three best works, though much less well known than "The Good Soldier" and even than "Parade's End." Until I had it in hand I had no idea that it was about Tudor England, a subject about which I had no prior interest. It took about five pages for me to get into the narrative, and after that it was spellbinding. Every character in the novel is interesting, and most of them are deeply engaging, most particularly Katherine and Henry. The sense of fear in and around Henry's court is palpable, and this is a great suspense novel, though certainly a curious example of the genre. The novel opened my eyes to the deep ambivalence felt in England about the Reformation and the loss of the Catholic church--something which must be understood to make any sense at all of the era and of the life of Elizabeth I. I can't praise this novel highly enough, and I am bewildered that it remains so far under the radar. While not an easy read, this isn't challenging modernist prose. What makes it hard is the strangeness of the milieu and of the preoccupations of the characters--and this is exactly what makes it great historical fiction, far superior to "Wolf Hall," which despite its merits has a set of characters who think like our contemporaries. How true can the novel possibly be to the life of the historical Katherine Howard? It hardly matters. Ford has invented a new fifth queen, and given her a gripping and convincing story.
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