THE FIFTH QUEEN, REVISIONARY HISTORY AND THE STAGING OF NOSTALGIA

Abstract

Around the turn of the last century Ford Madox Ford had planned to write a work of history on Henry VIII after a governmental release of many documents related to his reign.1 But A. F. Pollard got to it first with his Henry VIII (1902) and as Ford did not want his hours in the British Museum to go to waste, he turned his material into his most successful historical fiction, The Fifth Queen, a trilogy of novels comprised of The Fifth Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907), and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908). They center around Katharine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, who desires to see the restoration of the Catholic church but is in the end beheaded for her supposed sexual infidelities to the king. The Fifth Queen hearkens back to Shakespeare's histories, draws upon Walter Scott's historical romances, and anticipates works such as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2010) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).Although considered mostly a nineteenth-century and/or postmodern genre, Max Saunders notes that ?the historical novel was enjoying an Edwardian vogue in the works of Baroness d'Orczy and Maurice Hewlett'.2 Jason Harding writes that ?[i]n 1902 over 2,000 historical novels were published in England alone, making the form a natural choice for any writer as ambitious (and impoverished) as Ford'.3 If Ford's novels continue to stand out from this vast crowd it is due to style, that term most dear to the devoted disciple of Flaubert. Here is a representative passage, from The Fifth Queen Crowned.In the shadow of the high walls, and some in the moonlight, the serving-men held their parliament. They discoursed of these things, and some said that it was a great pity that T. Culpepper was come to Court. For he was an idle braggart, and where he was disorder grew, and that was a pity, since the Queen had made the Court orderly, and servants were little beaten. But some said that like sire was like child, and that great disorders there were in the Court, but quiet ones, and the Queen the centre. But these were mostly the cleaners of dishes and the women that swept rooms and spread new rushes.4The vocabulary and syntax are chosen to evoke the Tudor Era, and, while the trilogy was a critical success and was back in print through the second half of the century, some of Ford's contemporaries bemoaned this choice of language. An Academy reviewer of the first volume deplored the use of ?Wardour Street English, from that wellknown Soho thoroughfare where antiques and, more especially, sham antiques were to be found in such abundance'.5If all Ford had to offer was ?sham' history, however stylized, then we might safely pass over such an experiment. However, The Fifth Queen remains pressing because of how it stages so many of the issues still central to the writing of history, both fictional and nonfictional. With these novels, Ford offered a formal model for a revisionary mode of history, in the strict sense of that word: The Fifth Queen re-represents images of the Tudor court via striking series of tableaux that eschew the predominant realist tropes and narrative techniques of the Edwardian period. Ford also leaves behind a mode of the historical novel that avoids the pitfalls of what Frederic Jameson sees as so problematic in E. L Doctorow's Ragtime, where the ?historical novel can no longer set out to the historical past; it can only represent our ideas and stereotypes about the past' {Postmodernism 25). The danger in any historical novel is lapsing into pure nostalgia and the regurgitation of received ideas, as the empirical checks that orthodox history employs are not present in the mode of historical fiction. Ford's solution, as I will argue, is to cast his main character as a nostalgic figure, not to bemoan the condition of modernity, but to stage the very processes of nostalgia that the historical novel must constantly confront.Re-visionary HistoryFictional history is often called upon to depict a world in crisis or transformation. …