The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fifth Queen, by Ford Madox Ford

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Title: The Fifth Queen

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Release Date: October 7, 2009 [EBook #30188]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note.

This is the First book of the trilogy, The Fifth Queen, by
Ford Madox Ford. The other books are The Privy Seal and
The Fifth Queen Crowned.

THE

FIFTH QUEEN

_and how she came to court_

* * * * *

CONTENTS

PART ONE

The Coming, 11

PART TWO

The House of Eyes, 71

PART THREE

The King Moves, 179

* * * * *

PART ONE

THE COMING

I

Magister Nicholas Udal, the Lady Mary's pedagogue, was very hungry and
very cold. He stood undecided in the mud of a lane in the Austin
Friars. The quickset hedges on either side were only waist high and
did not shelter him. The little houses all round him of white daub
with grey corner beams had been part of the old friars' stables and
offices. All that neighbourhood was a maze of dwellings and gardens,
with the hedges dry, the orchard trees bare with frost, the arbours
wintry and deserted. This congregation of small cottages was like a
patch of common that squatters had taken; the great house of the Lord
Privy Seal, who had pulled down the monastery to make room for it, was
a central mass. Its gilded vanes were in the shape of men at arms, and
tore the ragged clouds with the banners on their lances. Nicholas Udal
looked at the roof and cursed the porter of it.

'He could have given me a cup of hypocras,' he said, and muttered, as
a man to whom Latin is more familiar than the vulgar tongue, a
hexameter about 'pocula plena.'

He had reached London before nine in one of the King's barges that
came from Greenwich to tak