Privy Seal

This unique edition of Privy Seal from Dead Dodo Vintage includes the full original text as well as exclusive features not available in other editions.

The Fifth Queen trilogy is a series of connected historical novels by English novelist Ford Maddox Ford. It consists of three novels, The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908), which present a highly fictionalized account of Katharine Howard's arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king, and her death.

The main strengths of this trilogy are considered by many writer admirers and critics—notably Graham Greene, Alan Judd and William Gass—to be its impressionistic qualities, its creation of a believable approximation of Tudor English and its successful creation of atmosphere.

"The style of this novel cannot be escaped, and readers who prefer their literature to be invisibly literary should shun it."

"The Fifth Queen, then, is like Eisenstein's Ivan: slow, intense, pictorial, and operatic. Plot is both its subject and its method. Execution is its upshot and its art."

"The whole book has the atmosphere and particularity of film. It is set in static scenes and drenched in suggestions of power, fear, sex, longing, guile and fate."