The Fifth Queen Crowned

With Thomas Cromwell fallen and her rival’s schemes in ruins, Katharine Howard stands at the summit of Tudor power as Henry VIII’s crowned queen. Yet the court she now presides over is no less treacherous for the removal of its greatest schemer. Around her, Protestant and Catholic factions maneuver ceaselessly for mastery of the king’s conscience, and the very virtues that won Katharine Henry’s devotion—her candor, her learning, her uncompromising piety—make her enemies as readily as they make her friends. Ford Madox Ford’s concluding volume of The Fifth Queen trilogy traces the arc of Katharine’s brief reign with the impressionistic intensity that distinguishes the previous books. Henry himself is rendered with remarkable ambivalence: a man of genuine intelligence and feeling whose will is at the mercy of his moods and of the whispers that reach him through layers of courtly deception. Katharine, idealistic to the last, believes she can restore the old faith and reform the king’s court by the force of moral example alone, a conviction that her adversaries, from Archbishop Cranmer to the spy Lascelles, find easier to exploit than to refute. Praised by Joseph Conrad as “a noble conception,” the trilogy concludes here with an inevitability that feels both tragic and dignified.