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?
That leap gave me room to create Tom’s investigation and the final deal the queen makes with Howard – but the background is all based on fact.* I did allow myself one small piece of guesswork. Henrietta was deaf in one ear. Courtiers joked that this helped her to endure the king’s infamously dull conversation – she simply turned her deaf ear towards him. But there is no record as to why she had become deaf in this one ear. Given the testimony from her neighbours and her own accounts of Howard’s regular, brutal beatings, I have suggested that it was caused by a particularly severe blow to the head. I have no evidence for this, but it seems a possible explanation.
This was a time when it was perfectly acceptable for a husband to beat his wife. In fact Daniel Defoe (one of the few who spoke out against it) argued that beatings had become more common in his lifetime. Even so, Howard was recognised as an extreme case: ‘wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, brutal’, according to Lord Hervey. Shortly after the events described in the novel, Henrietta finally won a legal separation from Howard – almost unheard of at the time.