The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins (49 page)

A flash of pain crosses her face. It is gone as fast. ‘I had a son. For ten years,
I had a son.
That much alone I can say.’

‘But you are free now. You may leave your rooms, visit your friends. Walk in the park without fear.’

‘Yes, sir.’ She folds her hands together. ‘These are comforts indeed. I am most grateful.’

‘And here you are, Mr Hawkins. Risen from the dead.’

I present a low bow.

‘Are you angry with me, sir?’

I look up, still bent in my bow. ‘Furious, Your Majesty.’

She laughs, great hiccuping gulps that make her long strands of pearls slide across her vast bosom. ‘Princess Amelia is in deep mourning for you. Such a heroic death. She will be most disappointed when she hears you are alive.
Debout, monsieur.
’

I stand. It is many weeks since our last meeting. Since then I have been arrested, put on trial, sentenced to death, hanged, and revived. The queen, meanwhile, does not appear to have moved. Her dress is new – a heavy, dark-blue sack gown – and there is a fresh plate of confectionery at her side. Other than that, the room is precisely as I remember it, and unbearably hot. She holds up a fan embroidered with garden scenes. Fans herself.

‘All in black,’ she muses. ‘How very sober you look. I suppose you wish to know why I chose not to pardon you?’

Chose?
And with that word she reveals the truth – that my death was indeed part of her agreement with Howard. The truth is, she had enjoyed very little choice in the matter – and she would rather die than admit it. ‘I am sure Your Majesty had a very good reason.’

‘Oh, he is sure. What, am I your servant, to solve all your petty troubles? Fold them up
comme ça
?’ She snaps the fan closed. ‘What a conceited notion. Perhaps the Queen of England had no reason at all. Perhaps she was busy playing cards or embroidering a handkerchief. Budge, pour the boy a glass of claret.’

I sip the wine. It is even better than I remember. The queen decides to rise. This takes some effort and she appears to regret it, wincing as she walks to the fire. A touch of gout, I think. When she first arrived in England she would walk for at least an hour every day and wore out all her ladies-in-waiting.

‘Have you ever visited Yorkshire, Mr Hawkins?’

I am too tired to wonder at such an unexpected question. ‘No, ma’am.’

‘I’m told it has a rugged charm.’ She lets her gaze wander over me for a moment, but leaves the jest unspoken. ‘We have a friend, in need of assistance. You will set off at once. You may take your little
trull
along, if you wish. You had best marry her somewhere along the way. Your city manners will not be appreciated in the North.’

‘Your Majesty . . .’ I stop. Why waste breath refusing? This is not an offer, it is a command. I throw back the last of the wine. Bow my obedience.

Budge leads me back down the stairs. When we reach the final landing he hands me a sheaf of papers, bound with a black ribbon. ‘For Yorkshire.’

I tuck it beneath my arm. There are many things I wish to say to him. That I feel betrayed. Ill-treated. That I have no desire to travel all the way to Yorkshire, or perform any service for his mistress. But there seems no purpose in arguing, and so I say nothing. I find that I am saying less these days.

Budge is not used to my new, sombre ways. He peers at me, worried. ‘You hoped for an apology.’

‘No.’ I am not so foolish.

‘The queen never explains,’ Budge says. ‘And
never
apologises.’

I nod. In truth, I do not really care.

He glances up the staircase. Leans in. ‘Howard refused to agree terms unless you hanged. Twelve hundred pounds a year, control of his son, and no pardon for Thomas Hawkins. I do think she was
passing
sorry, sir.’

‘And Betty? Was
she
sorry?’

Budge frowns. ‘What choice was she given, do you think?’

The carriage rolls along the Strand. Kitty is so angry not to have met the queen that she cannot disguise it. She looks so furious and beautiful that I begin to laugh, for the first time in weeks.

‘We were going to Italy,’ Kitty grumbles. ‘I have seen Yorkshire on a map. I believe it is
some distance
from Italy.’

Sedan chairs weave around us, chairmen trudging through the rain, water pouring from their hats. A merchant skirts past a stream of brown filth spewing from a broken gutter. I have not left London in three years. I cannot decide if I will miss it. ‘The queen wants us to marry.’

Kitty looks down at her boots.

‘Kitty. Are you afraid I will gamble away all your money?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you afraid I will grow bored and leave you?’

Her boots are still of enormous interest to her. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you truly think that, my love?’

She looks up at last and stares deep into my eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

I smile at her. ‘Well. That is progress.’

The carriage rolls over a hole in the road and she is flung forward. I grab her and pull her to safety, holding her close. She laughs, a little, and her shoulders soften as she settles against my chest.

The carriage moves on through the rain, the driver urging the horses forward with light taps of his whip. He is keen to travel as far north as possible today before the rain turns the roads to a sticking mud. He doesn’t see the small, dark figure slip down from a sodden rooftop. The boy in the clean, patched clothes sprints after the carriage and climbs on the back. He tucks himself into a gap between the luggage until he is quite invisible. He’s good at that.

the history behind
_{The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins}

The
‘
imprisonment
’
of Henrietta Howard

In the winter of 1727–8 the king’s mistress, Henrietta Howard, was kept a virtual prisoner in her rooms at the palace of St James. Her husband, Charles Howard, had sent her stark messages, demanding that she return to live with him. When Henrietta refused to comply, Howard applied to the Lord Chief Justice for a warrant that allowed him to seize his wife ‘wherever he found her’.

This was all play-acting on Howard’s part, though no doubt he would have followed through if need be. The couple had lived separate lives for years and clearly loathed each other. But following George II’s coronation in October 1727, Howard saw an opportunity to humiliate his wife and gain a fortune: irresistible for a man of his nature. While in public he continued to press – violently – for his wife’s return, in private he made it clear that he would relinquish all claims to her for the enormous sum of £1,200 per annum. Although he applied to Henrietta for this ‘fee’, it was clear that – as she couldn’t possibly afford it – his demands were really made to the king.

The implicit threat was clear. The more Howard insisted upon Henrietta’s return, the more attention he would bring upon her intimate relationship with the king. It was generally accepted at the time that kings took mistresses, but they were expected to be discreet. This was messy and embarrassing. If the situation wasn’t resolved swiftly, it could make everyone involved look weak and a little ridiculous.

However, Howard’s plan had one flaw. He’d waited years for George to become king in order to ensure the maximum embarrassment and thus the best pay-off. But by this time, George had grown tired of his mistress. When he became king it turned out – much to everyone’s astonishment – that Henrietta had no influence upon him whatsoever. People who had paid court to her for years in the hope of gaining a decent position under the new regime were left bitterly disappointed.

George refused to pay Howard’s bribe. Perhaps it’s not all that surprising: he was notoriously tight with money. He was also proud, stubborn and prone to terrible bouts of temper. (When very angry, he would snatch off his wig and kick it around the room, ranting and raging like a toddler.)

This left Henrietta in an intolerable situation. The early years of her marriage had been shockingly bad, even in the context of the time. Howard had married her for her large fortune and then gambled it away, leaving them with nothing. Far worse, he had abused and tormented her throughout their life together. Neighbours later testified that she had been beaten often and savagely, and that Howard would then abandon her and their young son Henry for months at a time, leaving them destitute and desperate. Henrietta even contemplated selling her hair, but could not agree a decent price. Howard taunted her about this when he learned the truth.

Henrietta’s last hope, as a member of the nobility, had been to find a position at court. And so – ironically – it was Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales, who had saved her, by making her a Woman of the Bedchamber. Howard meanwhile found a position with George I. Later, when the two courts split, Henrietta was at last given the perfect chance to escape her husband’s control. But it meant leaving her son Henry in the hands of his father.

Now, ten years later, Charles had returned, swearing that he would seize his wife by force if he caught her. He even threatened to drag her from the queen’s carriage if need be. And so Henrietta – terrified and powerless – was forced to remain within the sanctuary of the palace walls.

One of the fascinating things about studying the past is discovering how much has changed – and how much has stayed the same. Sometimes, this can be reassuring. Other times, it’s heartbreaking. Henrietta’s abuse at the hands of her husband is horribly familiar. Howard was clearly taking a sadistic glee in terrorising her. Even Lord Hervey, who disliked Henrietta, felt some pity for her ‘extraordinary, difficult, and disagreeable’ predicament, writing in his memoirs: ‘She was to persuade a man who had power to torment her not to exert it, though it was his greatest pleasure; and to prevail with another
[i.e. the king]
who loved money and cared but little for her to part with what he did like in order to keep what he did not.’

Meanwhile Howard – frustrated by the lack of progress – arranged a meeting with the queen, alone. Her description of the
tête-à-tête
(as she termed it) in the novel is very close to the one she gave to Lord Hervey. He has a liking for camp drama, but the words ring true in this account:

When Mr Howard came to Her Majesty, and said he would take his wife out of Her Majesty’s coach if he met her in it, she had bid him ‘do it if he dare; though,’ said she, ‘I was horribly afraid of him . . . What added to my fear upon this occasion,’ said the Queen, ‘was that, as I knew him to be so brutal, as well as a little mad, and seldom quite sober, so I did not think it impossible that he might throw me out of that window (for it was in this very room our interview was, and that sash then open just as it is now); but as soon as I got near the door . . . [I said] I would be glad to see who should dare to open my coach-door and take out one of my servants . . . Then I told him that my resolution was positively neither to force his wife to go to him if she had no mind to it, nor keep her if she had.’

In the end the king was persuaded to pay the £1,200 per annum after many weeks of stalemate. (The queen had drawn the line at paying the money herself, despite being asked by Lord Trevor on Henrietta’s behalf. She pleaded poverty, but in fact she was insulted. It was one thing, she said, to allow her husband’s ‘
guinepes
’
*
under her roof, but another to pay for them.)

It was in Caroline’s interest to keep Henrietta at court – better the mistress you know. The queen had been the clear winner in the battle for influence over the king in the early months of his reign, and it suited her to have a mistress she could manipulate. Who was now, in fact, even more in her debt.

But before this resolution, Henrietta endured those long, dreadful winter months at St James’s palace, trapped, humiliated and terrified as her husband made his demands and her lover ignored them. Within that gap, I imagined a situation where Howard’s initial demands had been much higher and that perhaps there had been some form of compromise. I imagined the king growing more and more impatient about the situation, and increasingly bored with Henrietta. And the queen having to put up with this every night, and realising she might lose her tame mistress. Caroline was a politician and a pragmatist. Perhaps she might put out secret enquiries to find something she might use against Howard?