Star of the Morning
The Extraordinary Life of
LADY HESTER STANHOPE

KIRSTEN ELLIS

Dedication

For Michael and Nathanielandthe Stephan sisters, Rania and Wafà

Epigraph

Dayr, the Lion of the Desert, to Hester, the Star of the Morning, sends greeting, with love and service. Those who obey the sabre of Dayr, hold the Great Desert in the hollow of their hand, even as the ring encircles the finger. Warriors without number, horses, camels, powder and shot, what is required … all is ready. You need only to send your orders.

Your true friend, Dayr

DAYR AL FADIL, Bedouin Sheikh of the Anazeh, To Lady Hester Stanhope

If you were a man, Hester, I would send you on the Continent with 60,000 men, and give you carte blanche and I am sure that not one of my plans would fail.

WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER, Prime Minister of England

The Arabs have never looked upon me in the light either of man or woman, but un être à part.

HESTER LUCY STANHOPE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Tree

Maps

Prologue

1 Beginnings

2 The Minority of One

3 The Company of Men

4 A Summoning of Strength

5 Love and Escape

6 A Bolt-hole on the Bosphorus

7 Indecision

8 Friendships

9 Under the Minaret

10 The Desert Queen

11 Separation and Despair

12 ‘The Queen Orders Her Minister’

13 A Chained-up Tigress

14 ‘I Will Be No Man’s Agent’

15 The Broken Statue

16 Revenge

17 ‘I Am Done With All Respectability’

18 Mr Kocub’s Spy

19 The Sun At Midnight

20 Djoun

21 The Mahdi’s Bride

22 The Last Dance

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Notes

Copyright

About the Publisher

Lady Hester Stanhope’s Family Tree

Maps

Prologue

It was four o’clock on Sunday, 23 June 1839, the second year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Far away from England, on a hill in the shadow of Mount Lebanon, only the hum of cicadas stirred in the suffocating afternoon. The white stone walls and roofs of a house – as high and formidable as a small fortress – seemed to hover in the heat-distorted haze, above a handsome grove of olive trees. Round about there were other hills and ridges, crisscrossed with terraced fields, and gashes of that same chalky, porous stone. In the distance, bells pealed from the tower of a monastery; perhaps the only hint of what a European might recognize as kindred civilization. These hills were renowned as ancient cemeteries for the Greeks, Romans and Phoenicians, their warrens of tombs crammed with sarcophagi and hidden treasures invisible to the eye; superstition had allowed them to remain undisturbed for centuries.

Amid clouds of dust, half a dozen household servants scurried along the dirt path leading down to the village of Djoun, bringing with them a skittish collection of mares, donkeys and goats, the sturdiest saddled with hastily-packed bags and whatever furniture could be lashed into place, such things of value they hoped would compensate for unpaid wages. A boy clutched a red leather-bound book filled with strange divinatory symbols he did not understand.

In her bedroom with its stone-cut windows, the woman they called Syt Mylady was dead. Her open eyes stared straight ahead. A white turban was bound tightly around her skull-cropped grey hair. Incense smouldered in an earthenware saucer and candles had burnt to waxy stubs. She had died in the house which she had first glimpsed more than a quarter of a century earlier, not realizing then that it would become the one true object of her ambitions. How the light had glittered and danced about her then! Light, which she craved as a young woman, light that was exhilarating and alive under a cobalt-blue sky.

For the last seven years she had remained within her fortress walls, leaving her private quarters only to walk in her garden whenever it pleased her, at any hour of night or day. She would visit her mares, rest her hand on their warm flanks as they slept, or lie under her bitter orange trees, scrutinizing the constellations.

Now her body lay on coarse Barbary blankets, on a low-slung bed that was nothing but five planks nailed together, tilted slightly to incline her head. She was dressed in her customary night-dress – a chemise of cotton and silk, a white, quilted abaya and with a striped pale red and yellow keffiyeh tied under her chin, the way she had learned from the Bedouin. Her fingers still gripped a crooked staff with a naïve carving at the top shaped to resemble a ram’s head.

In death, her features – which were those of an old woman, for she died in her sixty-third year – seemed to soften. Her face was very pale and gaunt, making what some had affectionately called her famous Chatham nose look even more pronounced. This was the same unmistakable nose that had perched defiantly on the faces of four generations of Pitts before her, including not only two of England’s most outstanding and powerful Prime Ministers, father and son – both wartime leaders – but also ‘Diamond’ Pitt, her great-great-grandfather, curmudgeon of the first order and maker of the family fortune. It was his ability to thrive in an alien country, and by a combination of boldness and tenacity to rise from the rank of humble merchant, firstly, by founding a trading concern which grew formidable enough to rival even the East India Company, and later, to be Governor of Madras. She often used to say it was the blood of this Pitt that ‘flowed like lava’ through her veins.

Yet of all her relatives, aside from her mother, it was her grandfather, Pitt the Elder, she resembled most as she grew older. Indeed, by the age of fifty, she could have been his female incarnation: the same large, almond-shaped blue-grey eyes, with their direct, contemplative gaze; the refined oval face and high forehead.

These last few nights she had dreamed such living dreams. Herself, strong again, with all of her youth and boldness restored. Visions, half-dreams, half-memories from a time long distant, came to her. Footsteps echoed down familiar passageways, but this time she recognized them as the impatient, joyful steps of her younger self. Voices called to her, chided her in the old, loving ways. In sing-song French and Arabic: ‘Ne verse pas des larmes, ma chère et belle marquise …’ and in English.

There she was again at Walmer, standing on the drawbridge in the sunlight near the shore, laughing after her straw hat as it blew away, her long dark chestnut hair like an aureole, and her blue dress billowing, a vision so unrestrained that the red-coated soldiers turned to stare. She had the ears and the heart of the Prime Minister. ‘Oh, Hester,’ he would say, with the tender exasperation he reserved especially for her. Not the love between father and daughter, or brother and sister, but something possessive all the same. Their secret language when in company, much of it conveyed implicitly by the eyebrows and in sideways glances, gave no clue to the paroxysms of laughter they shared later in private. What could she not have achieved, had she set her mind to it? Before, when every expectation and anticipation she held of life had not been disappointed.

On Friday, she wavered from her appointment with death, and sent one of her men down the hill with orders to bring back the first European doctor he could find. She seethed, knowing that an Italian doctor – ‘that useless Lunardi’ – was at that very moment hurrying on his way to return to her service, no doubt hopeful that the fee for this voyage, as well as the large sum owing on his earlier ministrations, would be reimbursed upon his arrival. Unable to eat, and barely sipping water, her coughing became worse, and with each attack, blood poured from her mouth. She acknowledged defeat, too weak even to pull at the hemp rope within her reach, attached by an apparatus of pulleys to a large brass bell. She ordered only that the candles be kept constantly lit in the whitewashed alcove at her bedside, so she could watch the flames. That night the moon and stars were clear, and she could smell the breath of jackals as they prowled beneath her window. Did she fear death then? Many believed her fearless. She believed in the divine, in the transmigration of souls – that she herself was marked for greatness. She had looked death in the face many times, and fancied she could see it written in the faces of men, and so could judge their fate.

Now Lady Hester Stanhope lay dead, and all that she had been was gone. Her garden would be left to run wild – the arbours of yellow jasmine, fountain pavilions and her favourite archways of periwinkle with its bright blue flowers – and her splendid house would be left to rot and crumble, the bricks themselves to melt back into the earth. Her hill would become no more than a place you might climb for a better view of the sea, as it was when she came.

It was not until ten o’clock the next night that two strangers could be seen making their way up the hillside to the house, their torches bobbing like fireflies, their horses stumbling at the steep incline. A guide from the village walked alongside, fearful in the darkness of snakes, wild boar, jackals, wolves and even panthers. The journey had taken the two men more than ten hours of hard riding. It had fallen to the British consul in Beirut, Niven Moore, to investigate the death of Lady Stanhope. She was, after all, granddaughter of the Great Commoner himself and the niece of William Pitt, even if she had placed herself beyond the reach of reasonable society in such curious and remote circumstances. He had asked an American missionary, the Reverend William McClure Thomson, a man well liked by the British community in Beirut, to accompany him and conduct whatever funeral service they could manage.¹

Moore was already well acquainted with the affairs of ‘Her Ladyship’. He was in glum possession of a dispatch box of documents bristling with notarized seals thrust upon him by her numerous creditors. It was said that not only had Lady Hester Stanhope descended from bankruptcy to penury – patronizing moneylenders all the way up the coast from Sidon to Tripoli, with escalating debts in half a dozen currencies – but was now quite mad. Gossip about her was as commonplace in the Beirut souk as in a Bath tearoom. Of all the young Victoria’s subjects in this part of the world, he mused, she was surely one of the most problematic. Or at the very least, notorious.

Nothing had deterred her, not travelling at sea during the Napoleonic wars, not riding through deserts of warring Bedouin, nor the threat of assassination during civil war in Syria, a semi-barbarous country at the best of times. Who could resist speculating about the lovers she had entertained in her fairytale fortress, about the way she presided like a chieftain over her raggle-taggle band of servants, about what fate befell those whose throats she had threatened to have cut, in her make-believe kingdom, with its dungeons and secret passages. Many times she had sheltered refugees: Arabs, Jews, Armenians and Albanians who fled to her after the siege of Acre, and scores of panicked Europeans after the Battle of Navarino. It was true that for a time she was more like a warlord than a woman, and she had hired her own army of Albanian soldiers. Had not the wily Mehemet Ali, ruler of Egypt and her erstwhile friend, grumbled: ‘The Englishwoman has caused me more trouble than all the insurgent people of Syria or Palestine.’

It was said she was like Scheherazade and could transport her listeners to other worlds. To all those of a certain age who heard her talk, it was impossible not to think of her grandfather, the greatest orator that England had ever produced. Was she so notoriously vain that she met her guests only at dusk and by candlelight, and in some cases, let them see only her hands in the gloom?

When Moore first arrived in Beirut, he had anticipated a cordial summons to the Chouf mountains. He was even disposed to do what he could to assist her with the horrible state of her financial affairs. Indeed, he opened the first letter from her with something approaching elation. Instead, he was stung by her reply, for she treated him like a peon. Her pension – granted by the King himself for her services to the country – was to be confiscated in order to pay her debts, a move that would render her worse than penniless.

Her defiant letters – one to Lord Palmerston, another to the Duke of Wellington, and the last to Queen Victoria herself – were published in The Times. The latter was generally held to be, as one wag observed, ‘the letter to a Queen from a Queen’.

But the Queen had other matters on her mind, including her own coronation. War appeared inevitable, with campaigns in both Afghanistan and China, and then there was the looming Eastern Question. She had no wish to indulge an old relic who had been a favourite of her grandfather’s and certainly not one who had made the mistake of addressing her with such familiarity.

Many in England were sympathetic, especially those who had come to think rather fondly of Lady Hester as something of an institution, but mostly because her well-publicized exploits and grandiose foibles had never failed to provide amusement over the decades. Mothers would warn their daughters they must not be too headstrong or they too might end up as unfortunate a creature as Lady Hester Stanhope. She hardly set a proper example, even for young women wishing to broaden their horizons through travel. She was altogether an exotic from the Romantic era, which to current taste was overblown, dissolute and even vulgar. Simply put, for the Victorians, she was out of fashion.

As they approached, Moore and Thomson were taken aback by the imposing appearance of the house. Two gateways with heavy wooden doors were flanked by high walls which encircled a residence of seemingly indeterminate size. There seemed no way to make their presence known, aside from hammering their fists first against one door, then the other. ‘No one met them: a profound silence was all over the place; they lighted their own lamps in the outer court.’² It seemed to the men that passages branched off in all directions. They had the sense of becoming trapped in a maze. As they went on there were glimpses of other inner courts and pavilions linked by vaulted arcades, as well as those along the route they took. One seemed particularly grand, sheltering a liwan, a hall open to the sky, lofty and gracious with rows of cushioned divans and a trellis of climbing roses and jasmine. Although this house was not as grand as the grandest Damascus mansion, it was something else entirely: whoever had created it had the soul of a magician. They also began to be aware of large numbers of restless cats beneath their feet, curling around their ankles and clinging to their boots. A young African woman appeared in the passageway, and made a gesture towards a thick red door.

In a room with green walls, stripped of all furnishings, they found the body of Lady Hester.

Moore was slight and handsome with a moustache and sidewhiskers which he kept neatly clipped, but which nonetheless he worried at constantly with his fingers when under strain, as he did now. For this event, he had been careful to wear a black armband and dress in sombre colours with a high stiff collar. ‘It was an intensely hot Sabbath,’ Thomson would record. The idea of a woman’s corpse lying here for over a day in such unbearable warmth made him nauseous. Sweat dripped from his temples and soaked his jacket. He did not wish to investigate further.

Behind the men, a small tribe of servants had assembled. Decisive action was required. There had been thirty-seven servants in the fortress in the morning. They had watched ‘every motion of her eye’ until she died. Most had taken what they could and fled. Now, some ten or so remained. Moore noticed that many of the servants seemed to be wearing what he surmised to be cast-off robes and hats from the wardrobe of their mistress. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that their ragged clothes were incongruously matched with brilliant velvet and brocade cloaks, red turbans, silk stockings and carpet slippers.

By midnight the men had ascertained several facts. Although she had left no written instructions, it was clear that Lady Hester had managed to convey how she wished to be buried. At least five of her servants professed to be expert on the subject, and one in particular had apparently been entrusted with duties he had sworn on his life to carry out. This was her most trusted servant, Almaz – her dragoman – who combined the roles of translator, secretary, gardener and general factotum.

They decided to do as she had apparently asked. Lady Hester was to be buried in a grave at a specified place in her garden, which already contained a vault, along with the bones of a Frenchman by the name of Loustaunau, who had been buried there before. ‘The vault in the garden was hastily opened and the bones of General Loustaneau [sic], or of his son, I forget which – a Frenchman who died here … were taken out’ and readied for burial.³ How he had died and why Her Ladyship commanded this posthumous mingling, which Moore regarded as immoral, it was difficult to say. Such an indelicate request on the part of this spinster might be best left out of his report.⁴ He would have to decide whether or not it would be necessary to mention this detail when he informed the ladyship’s younger brother. A more chaste companion had been intended for the burial ceremony: the jaunty square of the Union Jack flag which he had brought for the purpose, folded away in his saddlebag. A roll of white muslin would do as a shroud. The vault would be opened and its contents were to be arranged according to Lady Hester’s instructions. Reverend Thomson would perform the Church of England service.⁵

Despite the heat and disrepair, the garden impressed the men. Thomson would later describe it as ‘a wilderness of shady avenues, and a paradise of sweet flowers … I have rarely seen a more beautiful place’. They left the dragoman to open the vault and arrange its contents according to the instructions Lady Hester had given him and returned to supervise the removal of the body into its waiting shroud, and its placement into the plain wooden coffin they had brought with them from Djoun. The carved staff was clasped between her hands. After draping the Union Jack over the open coffin, they followed the procession of her servants bearing her aloft, threading their way through the passageways and out to the garden. Thomson wrote of the macabre sight awaiting them: ‘When at length I enterered the arbour, the first thing I saw were the bones of the general, in a ghastly heap, with the head on top, having a lighted taper stuck in either eye-socket – a hideous, grinning spectacle.’⁶ The servants were clearly no less taken aback. They stood aside, respectfully, as though this arrangement had a dignity of its own. Moore stared in shock at the open vault for some moments. There was nothing to be done except to conduct the funeral as rapidly as possible.

The next morning, after a rough night, overhearing shouting between the squabbling servants, who were anxious about their unpaid wages, the men went around the premises to make an inventory of Lady Hester’s assets. They had not been the first to inspect her Djoun fortress, for as soon as news of her death had reached Sidon, the British consul there, a wealthy Maltese Jew by the name of Joseph Abela, had immediately hurried up in order to prevent her house from being ransacked. Abela had ordered the more valuable-looking furniture and possessions to be piled up together in rooms which he had sealed up.

They counted thirty-five rooms, not including the cellars or the stables. Thick curtains were draped across the windows, but the light was just bright enough to see tables, chairs and chests, all inlaid with mother of pearl; cushions in Aleppo silk and bright woven carpets; bolts of calico, brocade and linen; large brass lanterns, damascene glass and brassware; and carved, painted wooden doors off their hinges, rich in geometric star patterns. There were stained-glass windows, blue and white Mameluke jars, and large circular pewter trays. One room contained countless letters, some filed, some heaped at random, and papers of esoterica scrawled with strange diagrams and notes in a language Moore surmised to be Hebraic, as well as boxes of books. Another was filled with more than forty oil jars, but they were all empty, and spiders nested between them; in still another, there were enough Arab saddles for a small army. Two more were crammed with medicines – a madwoman’s pharmacopoeia of phials, pills and powders, with medical almanacs and instruments of all descriptions. A store-room contained shelves of stacked boxes, some of whose contents were emptied out: cases of Promethean matches, silver snuff boxes, a few prized canisters of tea and jam from Jermyn Street, candles, Epsom salts, watercolours of English soldiers on horseback, a portrait of the Duke of York, green umbrellas and English gunpowder. There were a great many narguileh and tchiboque pipes. They speculated as to how many of the ladyship’s most valuable possessions had been stolen the previous day.

When Moore opened the closet in what he assumed to be Lady Hester’s dressing room, out spilled models cut in paper of rooms with arches, vaults and pavilions and buildings, and fountains, all scrawled with her comments in the margins. Gradients, plans for borders and paths and notes for unusual trees and shrubs. He found himself admiring the determination of this singular woman, cutting out shapes with her scissors, studying books – designing, building and furnishing her mansion of dreams – so far from home.

1 Beginnings

She came into the world with a shock of chestnut hair and bright, greyish-blue eyes, blinking at the watery sunshine that came slanting in through frosted windowpanes. It was Tuesday, 12 March 1776, a clear, chill day in London. That morning, Handel’s Messiah was being rehearsed at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden; a short distance away in Hanover Square, J. C. Bach was preparing for his performance the following evening.

It had been one of the coldest winters on record; the Thames had frozen over, and the city was blanketed by great drifts of snow. At the first hint of the child’s arrival, Lord Mahon, Charles Stanhope (the future third Earl Stanhope), sent urgently for a trusted doctor. By the standards of the day it was considered an easy delivery.

Instructed to remain completely supine for at least a week before attempting to sit up and not to leave their Marylebone townhouse on Queen Anne Street for another month (a ruling she would soon ignore) the new mother contemplated her daughter, now bathed and dressed in a flannel gown and cap. She was a healthy size, with an equally healthy pair of lungs. She was to be called Hester, after her mother.

Hester Pitt, the new Lady Mahon, was twenty and had been married for just over a year. She herself had been named after her mother, the redoubtable Lady Chatham, formerly Lady Hester Grenville. The Pitts were fond of the name, thinking it unusual and unconventional. The choice of her daughter’s middle name – Lucy – for her great-grandmother, also leaned towards her mother’s side of the family.

Within hours, news of Hester’s arrival was sent to Lord Mahon’s parents at Chevening, as well as to the Chathams and the Pitts. Charles’s mother, Lady Grizel Stanhope, immediately left for London so she could make herself useful, no doubt leaving her husband, Philip, the second Earl Stanhope, buried in his library. If ever a woman could be described as a dominant matriarch, it was shrewd Scottish-born Grizel, who supervised the day-to-day running of the family estate with a precision and fortitude that marked her out as an exceptionally well-organized woman. She would have been a comforting presence for the anxious new mother.¹

Grizel was delighted to note the tenderness evident in her son. She thought his comment, on seeing his naked daughter being dressed, that he hoped ‘no other gentleman will ever see her in’ such ‘attitudes’, amusing enough to pass on.²

Hester Pitt, then nineteen, optimistic, pretty and popular by all accounts, had married her cousin, Charles, two years her senior, tall, lanky and angular-featured, at the end of 1774. The family connection was dismissed as relatively unimportant, a commonplace amongst aristocratic families. Their grandparents, Lucy Pitt and James, first Earl Stanhope, had married in 1713, producing six children, including Charles’s father, Philip. Therefore, when both sides of the family were peering into the crib to look upon the newly-born Hester, it was entirely debatable whether the Pitt and the Stanhope noses were merely variations of the same.

Had it not been for a stone found on the northern banks of the Krishna river near the medieval city of Hyderabad three-quarters of a century before, Hester Stanhope’s parents might never have met. It was no ordinary stone, but a diamond that weighed 410 carats, the largest of all Indian diamonds in its rough form. It was this discovery, and the tremendous fortune it bestowed upon its owner, Hester’s great-great-grandfather – the supremely wilful and enterprising Thomas Pitt – that made the family fortune. Without it, perhaps the histories of the Pitts and the Stanhopes would not have collided the way that they did, setting the seal on the earlier marriage between the two families and bringing Hester Pitt and Charles Stanhope into each other’s orbits.

Thomas Pitt, then Governor of Madras, acquired the stone that would be known as the Pitt diamond from an Indian trader for 48,000 Indian pagodas which was some £20,400 at the time. Pitt was already a shrewd investor in substantial quantities of gems and gold as a means of easily transporting his accumulated wealth back to England. He knew this stone had been smuggled out from the arid, boulder-strewn Deccan plateau, from one of a cluster of the Golconda mines, but he could not have foreseen that the stone would make his name; that ever after he would always be known as ‘Diamond Pitt’.

By the time it sat like a bulbous paperweight on his teak desk at Fort St George in the East India Company’s garrisoned White Town, the diamond had a whiff of scandal attached to it. The story went that it had been smuggled out of the Mughal Emperor’s lands by a slave who had slashed open his thigh and concealed it in the wound. At least one man had been murdered for it. The slanderous chatter about how Pitt came by his impressive rock would follow him to the grave, and even find its way into his funeral oration.³

When Thomas Pitt finally saw his stone after it had been cut with great skill over two years by Messrs. R.H. Long & Steele in London at a cost of £6,000, he was ecstatic. It was a 136-and-a-half-carat cushion brilliant, reflecting the light in lozenge-shaped and triangular facets, with only one very small imperfection. By any estimation it was the most beautiful blue-tinged stone, the colour of a dawn sky and the size of a large cherry. Valued at £125,000, it was acknowledged as the finest and largest of all Indian brilliants.

Sold to Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, Prince Regent of France, for the sum of £135,000, it became known as the Regent diamond, and was placed as the centrepiece of the crown worn for the coronation of King Louis XV in 1723. Two generations later, Marie Antoinette adored it at first sight, and wore it frequently, sewn into her large black velvet hat. Once it was in Napoleon’s possession, he had it placed in his sword, which he wore for his coronation in December 1804. When his second wife, the Austrian Archduchess Marie-Louise, was forced to leave Paris with her family as fugitives in 1813, she took the diamond with her; it was later returned to France by her father, the Austrian Emperor Francis I. It was placed back into the French crown for the coronation of Charles X in 1825, and was taken out again so that the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, could wear it as a diadem in her hair.

During World War II, as the Nazis reached the outskirts of Paris, it was smuggled to the Château du Chambord in the Loire, where it was hidden behind a stone panel for the duration of war. Today, Pitt’s priceless diamond – sometimes called the Millionaire Diamond – can be seen in the Apollon Gallery at the Louvre.

In many ways, the diamond that had shaped the fortunes of Hester’s family, and its trajectory through the changing fortunes of France’s rulers, would become a potent symbol of the power and glory – abroad – that she herself would spend her entire life seeking.

There can be no mistaking the fact that Hester Stanhope came from a family of passionate egotists. She lived with the perpetual awareness that not only was she descended from a line of exceptional achievers, but also that the traits they had in common represented her best characteristics: the ability to think and act for themselves, often in a highly unconventional way, and sometimes in the face of considerable public scorn. Added to this was a family propensity towards imperiousness, extravagant behaviour and quixotic ambition, which sometimes tilted towards an unbalanced and volatile temperament. At least one Pitt had been shut away in a mental asylum. It had been observed that there was ‘a great degree of madness in the family’.

Yet nothing out of the ordinary seemed to distinguish the earlier Pitt clan. They knew themselves to be descended from the Pitts in Hampshire and Dorset, mostly gentry, with several eminent local magnates among them. It was the family fortune-maker, Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt, who set the trend for greatness. In 1673, when Thomas Pitt had just turned twenty, much to the disquiet of his mother he announced he was taking off for India, joining the East India Company as a lowly clerk. His beginnings were humble: a trading practice on the salty banks of Balasore, a fetid but profitable British cantonment in Orissa. But not content with slaving for the Company, he absconded and began to buy goods from Indian merchants, shipping them back to England on his own account. He also made the first of many trips to Persia, primarily on the lookout for well-bred horses. There was nothing that so riled the East India Company as a turncoat agent like Pitt. But he showed himself to be a skilled negotiator, capable of passionate, even brutal fits of ranting, but expressed with such force and persuasion that he quickly established a kind of rogue authority. Even his rivals admired his energy, his belief that the future of England’s success in the world depended on opportunistic profit-seekers like him. In the end the East India Company decided they had better have him on their side. Pitt was able to buy respectability along with the medieval borough of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, for which he later successfully ran as Member of Parliament.⁴ In 1698, following a parliamentary ruling that relaxed restrictions on trade in India, allowing interlopers to follow Pitt’s example and deal freely, the Company decided to appoint none other than their notorious old adversary as Governor of Madras. For eleven years, the Madras Residency echoed with his blustering rages. Family legends about Diamond Pitt’s bombastic personality were picked over for generations.

It was Thomas Pitt’s second daughter, Lucy, a great beauty of her day, who first brought together the Pitts and the Stanhopes. Lucy Pitt could have had her pick of any number of suitors, but it was the dashing, hard-drinking and impetuous James Stanhope, a man twice her age, a hero in the War of the Spanish Succession, who took her fancy. The Stanhopes were a clan of diplomats and warriors. James was the son of Alexander Stanhope, the grandson of Philip Stanhope, whom Charles I had in 1628 created Earl of Chesterfield. Despite his inherent dislike of foreigners, Alexander himself had been distinguished as a diplomat in the time of Oliver Cromwell and was William III’s ambassador at Madrid and afterwards at The Hague. In 1708, as commander of the British forces in Spain, James led his men in the capture of Minorca and the nearby naval base of Fort Mahon.

Shortly after the couple’s marriage, George I made James Stanhope successively Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons. From their house in Whitehall, they became a formidable, glamorous political couple. By 1717, James had become one of George I’s most trusted confidants, and he was rewarded with the sinecure of Chief Minister, and raised to the peerage as Viscount Mahon, thus earning the Stanhope title. It soon became necessary to find a family mansion. Because of its relative proximity to London, Chevening, tucked away in the chalky hills of the North Downs in Kent, surrounded by enchanting countryside, was thought suitable.⁵

Lucy Pitt put her own strong mark on Chevening, the family estate where her great-granddaughter would grow up. The original house, built in 1620 and attributed to Inigo Jones, and the 3,500-acre estate were bought in 1717 for £28,000, some £10,000 of which was paid with Lucy’s dowry. While her husband was continuously busy in high office, Lucy preoccupied herself between her frequent pregnancies with supervising extensive alterations to their new house. A thermometer-shaped canal was created in front of the house – where black swans, geese and wild birds still flock – and extensive gardens were laid out in a formal pattern of box hedges, yew trees and intersecting pathways fashionable at the time; meanwhile the original doll’s-house design of the house was extended with pavilions and the forecourt enclosed with elegant wrought-iron gates, with the Stanhope crest triumphantly on top.

A new road was created to make a stately loop along the high ridge on Star Hill, where pheasants still whir through woods of silver beech on the one side, allowing the contemplation of far-reaching vistas across Chevening and the surrounding countryside on the other. Anyone passing would marvel at one particular spot along the road – a sudden and unexpected vista through a towering arcade of trees in which the prospect of Chevening is perfectly framed. This view especially pleased Lucy, who designed it, planting the row of trees and coaxing them to form an arch, nicknamed the Keyhole.

It was this landscape that the young Hester Stanhope would grow up to love, more than the house itself. It was on these wide undulating hills that she would first learn to ride. The view through the Keyhole took on a magical significance for her. It was the portal through which four generations of her family had passed, and an unchanging link to the women of her family, her namesakes.

Diamond Pitt’s grandson, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, came to be regarded as the greatest politician of his time. Known to a generation as ‘the Great Commoner’, he was revered as the man who had led the country through the Seven Years War, presiding over a series of victories, wresting the provinces of Quebec and Montreal from French settlers, thereby bringing much of the eastern seaboard of North America under British control, and reinforcing British supremacy in India. His granddaughter would be raised on accounts of his thunderous orations and grandiloquent gestures in the House of Commons.

Chatham’s firstborn child, Hester Pitt, now Lady Mahon, always had every expectation that her lot in life should include both the grand lifestyle and intellectual stimulation that had always surrounded her. Yet her father, despite his brilliance, had also been profligate, almost maniacally so, and was too debt-ridden to offer any suitor she might have an enticing dowry. Much of the family money had been plunged into renovating and beautifying Chatham’s house and garden at Hayes, near the village of Bromley in Kent. It was left to her mother’s relatives, the Grenvilles, one of the most powerful Whig aristocratic families, to provide the bare minimum that might be expected for a ‘polite’ marriage: jewellery and the endowment of a thousand pounds to the young couple.

There were five in the Pitt brood – John, Harriot, William and James as well as Hester – all born within five years of one another. Unlike most girls at the time, Hester Pitt benefited from a careful education, being tutored at home along with her brothers, one of whom, William, would follow in the family political tradition and earn the distinction of becoming Britain’s youngest Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four. By the time William left to study at Cambridge university, where he would be admitted as an undergraduate to Pembroke Hall at the age of fourteen – an achievement which was as exceptional then as today – brother and sister were proficient in the classical languages, able to translate ancient Greek at sight with impressive fluency, and apt to quote long passages from Thucydides and Polybius.⁶

In all ways, as she entered the first year of her marriage, Lady Mahon – a slender, self-possessed girl with wide, expressive dark eyes – was an advanced young woman at the height of her powers. She was described by a family friend as ‘one of the most accomplished persons of the age’.⁷ It would have been impossible for her not to have a political consciousness: not only her father, but her great-grandfather, grandfather and uncle had all been Members of Parliament.

Shortly before he married Hester Pitt, Charles had returned to England after more than ten years away in Europe. His family had moved to Geneva in 1763 when Charles was ten, in the hope that the better climate would improve the health of their ailing elder son Philip, who nonetheless died of consumption six months later at the age of seventeen. Philip was the son on whom all hopes were pinned, while Charles had been so obstinate as a child his parents called him ‘the little Devil’. The Stanhopes had stayed on so that Charles might continue his education. Geneva was then the centre of extreme radical thought, where the theories of the city’s famous residents Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire were respected. At a young age, Charles was fired with enthusiasm for social reform, and his intense idealism was infectious.

Charles Stanhope was not obviously handsome at first glance; he was lithe and gaunt, and bore a strong resemblance to his mother with his smooth high forehead, aquiline, almost beaky nose and clear dark-blue eyes. But his face was that of a thinker and he had a proud, confident manner. Hester Pitt was used to successful, clever men, mostly politicians, many of them dissident Whigs as well as leaders of the Opposition in her father’s circle, and was also accustomed to her father’s adept command over them. The fact that her father warmed to Charles and clearly enjoyed talking to him, when he was hopeless at disguising his impatience with intellectual inferiors, would not have been missed by her.

Considered a genius by his tutors, Charles had created a stir with his original thinking and aptitude for taking unfamiliar, difficult theoretical problems in his stride. His first love was science, and he was perpetually at work on idiosyncratic experiments and inventions. At seventeen he had invented a mathematical device, an early prototype of the calculator, the ingenuity of which amazed those who saw it. He also won a prize offered by the Swedish Academy for the best essay on the construction of the pendulum; drawings and doodles of clocks and pendulums cover his school-books from the time. The Royal Society invited him to be their youngest Fellow. Just as his mind seemed constantly to be ticking, he was always in motion – with an erratic, hurrying gait that made him frequently clumsy, although his hands were extraordinarily nimble. He and his daughter were to resemble each other more than she would later care to admit.

It was not surprising that Charles’s intended plan was to go into politics. His closest male friendship was with his cousin, Hester Pitt’s brother, William. Although Charles was six years older than William, they marvelled at how alike they were. At that time, both young men held similar idealistic views, reading Adam Smith and Thomas Paine, brooding critically about society, the rights of the common man, and the need for parliamentary reform. Yet where Charles was frequently impetuous, even zealous, William tended towards caution and reserve.

In October 1774, several months after his return from Geneva, and just weeks before his marriage, Charles, as Lord Mahon, unsuccessfully contested the seat for the City of Westminster. His candidature as a radical had been warmly endorsed by the Lord Mayor elect, John Wilkes, the popularist radical. But his defeat did not appear to put any damper on the couple’s wedding on 19 December that same year. The Reverend Francis Fawke presided, a great friend to both Dr Johnson and Lord Chatham, and he read aloud a little composition of his own:

When gentle hearts in faithful union join

And mix the Hero with the Patriot’s line

With every charm uniting every grace

And all the virtues of the Temple race

The happy omen we with joy admit

And bless the match of Stanhope and of Pitt.

Hester, or Hetty as she was often called, was handed over to the servants in her first month of life. Chevening was Hester’s first playground, set amid a swathe of parkland and carefully cultivated pleasure grounds, requiring a small army of servants, farmers, foresters and seasonal hop-pickers. It would been difficult for an impressionable young mind not to be struck by the sweeping entrance hall with its great wooden staircase, which was a hymn to weaponry, bristling with rifles, bayonets and daggers, crosshatched into geometric decorations across the walls, the pièce de résistance a whorl of tightly packed rifles from which a giant lantern hung suspended from the ceiling.

Hester grew accustomed to the excitement of frequent guests and the constant presence of servants. It was obvious to her, even when she was very small, that her family name was something to be proud of. In the kitchen, linen-capped servants scurried about under a giant iron-worked ‘S’ – for Stanhope – set in a coronet in a pentagram on the wall, under a ceiling as high as a church.

Although they did not realize it, Hester’s parents would never be happier. Since his marriage, Lord Mahon had been content to let his charming, pretty wife take charge of their social life. From their new Harley Street house, which they moved to shortly after Hester’s birth (then a smart residential address before the doctors invaded around the turn of the nineteenth century), the young couple enjoyed an enviable town life, with their own carriage and a household staff. As a member of the Royal Society, Mahon frequently haunted the Society’s club, and held regular meetings and scientific demonstrations. He was well known to the Society’s members, eminent scientists and philosophers such as William Watson, Joseph Priestley, and Dr Richard Price. The brilliant naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, shortly to be elected the Royal Society’s president, became his particularly close friend.*

Hester was raised in a household busy with scientific discussions and political debate, talk of playhouses and the season, fashionable masquerades and dinner parties. The Mahons thrived on concert-going: Mozart, J. C. Bach and Haydn were all then working in London. The house at Harley Street was often a second home for the Pitts; Harriot came to live with them there, and William visited when he could from Cambridge.

Throughout Lady Mahon’s second pregnancy, the young family spent more time at Chevening, where Charles was engrossed in his latest experiments. One quest was to strike upon the best method of fire-proofing, and he hit upon a technique that involved the suctioning-out of air, based on the principle that when a quantity of oxygen is removed, there can be no fire. A grand demonstration took place in the grounds at Chevening, attended by some of London’s greats, including the Royal Society president Sir John Pringle. With his parents looking on, Charles invited his guests to sit on a row of chairs he had placed on the second floor of the small wooden building he had constructed in the estate grounds. With a show of theatrical display he set torches to the lower room, the floors of which he had strewn with a highly combustible mixture of wood shavings and dried faggots mixed with chips of coal. As he described it himself, when the fire took hold, ‘the heat was so intense that the glass of the windows was melted like so much common sealing wax and ran down in drops; yet the flooring boards of that very room were not burnt through; nor was one of the side-timbers, flooring-joints or ceiling-joists damaged in the smallest degree’. It was deemed a brilliant success.

When she was not shuttling back and forth to London, Lady Mahon was hard at work assisting her husband. William Pitt gossiped to his mother that he hoped to see his sister ‘as soon as she can find a leisure moment. Her great business is that of secretary to Lord Mahon, whose “Electricity” is nearly ready for the press and will rank him, I suppose, with Dr Franklin.’ Charles had by now thrown himself into one of the most dominating preoccupations of the second half of the late eighteenth century, and with his new friend Benjamin Franklin’s encouragement, was writing an ambitious treatise, Principles of Electricity. He embarked on a series of perilous experiments devoted to explaining the phenomenon with a great deal of his research based on the close observation of lightning strikes. At the slightest hint of a thunderstorm, he would stride up to Star Hill where he would try and induce lightning strikes using all sorts of imaginative devices, attaching lightning conductors to an ever-changing variety of connective materials, including in one instance a cow.

Chatham’s health had been declining to the point where he now spent most of his time in seclusion, suffering not only from the physical ailment that tormented him – described by his own doctors as ‘diffused gout’ – but also from terrible fits of depression. Lady Chatham shielded his friends and to a large extent his family from the truth of how ill he really was, and how much she worried about their finances.*

In the spring of 1778, Hester’s dying grandfather provided one of the great dramatic moments in the history of the House of Lords. Chatham’s conscience had been once more roused by what he considered to be the greatest of all threats against Britain: a French invasion. That February, the conflict in America escalated when France announced it would fight for the American cause, so that now, once again, the two countries were at war. On 7 April, to the horror of his doctor, a cadaverous Chatham appeared before the assembled members to make what would prove to be his final speech. Stumbling on his wooden sticks, pale and emaciated, he had dressed grandly for the occasion in black velvet, with a large wig wobbling on his domed forehead, his head shrunk with illness. His legs were an unsightly mess of bedsores; blood seeped through his flannel bandages. As he staggered, raising his hand in a wispy salute to his old friends and foes, he reminded his onlookers of a ghostly seer. The real enemy, he warned them, was not America but France.

Shall a people that fifteen years ago were the terror of the world now stoop, so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy … You cannot conquer the Americans. You talk of your powerful forces to disperse their army, but I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch.

With these words he faltered, falling back as though in a death trance, and as his son William and Charles rushed to catch him, he managed one last prayer: ‘Let us at least make an effort; and if we must fall, fall like men.’ Gasping for breath, he was borne back to the Prince’s Chamber and the debate was adjourned.*

Chatham died on 11 May 1778 in his seventieth year and was buried in Westminster Abbey on 9 June. ‘The concourse of people assembled’, it was reported the next day, ‘was beyond belief; the windows of all the houses, and even the tops of some were crowded; as were the streets, though the spectators had been not only exposed to the rain for several hours, but to stand in dirt and wet nearly to the ankles.’ The previous day, around a hundred thousand people had filed past his body in the black-draped Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace. The Commons had agreed to pay off Chatham’s debts, which amounted to some £20,000, the equivalent to some £2 million today.

Hester grew into a sturdy child with dark hair and long limbs; she was an early and voluble talker, who struck her family as having definite opinions. When she was two and a half, her mother gave birth to her sister, Griselda. To the Mahons’ anguish, an earlier pregnancy had resulted in the birth of a son who died shortly afterwards. After being invited to inspect Griselda, William Pitt wrote to his mother, clearly showing his preference. ‘I am told my little niece is a perfect beauty, though I own I am hardly persuaded of it, and have extremely offended the nurse by not preferring her to Hester.’⁸

No matter what sweetness little Griselda exhibited, her grandmother could not help showing favouritism. Writing to her friend Lady Chatham, betraying a grim pride at their wilful granddaughter, Grizel wrote: ‘Hester is quite wild. I am forced to send assistance from here to keep her within bounds’.⁹ In an earlier letter, Lady Chatham too had noted with delight that ‘My namesake is so merry, she not only laughs all day, but also all night, to the no small disturbance of those who during the latter would choose to sleep’.¹⁰ The following year, while her daughter-in-law, pregnant for a third time, was in London, Grizel wrote: ‘I am grown quite a fool about Hester. What a wonderful and amiable child … I have hopes her sister will be such another. Hester said – the next must be a boy, for two girls are enough for anybody. If like her, a dozen would be welcome to me, so I am quite calm and feel no impatience on that score.’

In February 1780, a month before Hester’s fourth birthday, Lady Mahon gave birth in London to a third daughter, Lucy, a frail and pretty newborn, but her recovery was complicated by the onset of puerperal fever. At twenty-five, Lady Mahon was exhausted by her succession of pregnancies. She seemed at first to improve, and rallied slightly in spring. Her sister Harriot wrote from Harley Street that she is looking after the ‘Invalid’ in April, telling her mother hopefully that ‘she gains strength visibly every day’.¹¹ By May she reported that her sister ‘bore a drive in the hottest day imaginable without suffering from it in the least’, and how they went shopping for lute strings and chintzes.¹² The ‘Invalid’ was apparently well enough to attend a ball at Gloucestershire House, and Charles was so convinced of her good progress that he went on a tour of Buckinghamshire, where he planned to run for Parliament.

Before the summer was out, however, Lady Mahon’s condition suddenly worsened, possibly due to a weakened heart. She died at Chevening on 18 July 1780 and was buried in the family chapel. Three weeks later Grizel wrote to her friend Lady Chatham, deep in mourning for her daughter’s death. ‘Poor Charles has passed a melancholy day. I keep him amused as much as I can, and nothing but hindering him to think is service. Alas! when he does – but I will not dwell upon a subject that must be heartbreaking to us all. The sweet children are perfectly well and thrive amazingly in the good air. I see poor Charles grow thoughtful when they are present, though he takes great notice of them when they are present, more I think, than he used to. Time alone can do good to us all.’ In reality, she despaired. Her eldest grandchild asked her constant, confused questions about death to which she had no answer, while her son retreated into silence, barely eating, his skin suddenly ashen, his eyes red-rimmed. When Charles returned to London to throw himself into politics, the girls stayed behind at Chevening.

Within months of becoming a widower, Charles’s eye fell on Louisa Grenville, his late wife’s cousin. It was another politically advantageous marriage: Louisa’s father Henry Grenville had already served as Governor of Barbados and ambassador at Constantinople. Writing from Bath, Charles’s former sister-in-law, Harriot, described a day she spent with his bride-to-be over the summer of 1780: ‘Poor Louisa is a little of a Coward, and has not rode often enough to be a very good Horsewoman, but her Figure is remarkably pretty in a riding dress, and she looks vastly well upon her Horse.’ Louisa, apparently susceptible to Charles’s forceful personality, believed he was marked for a brilliant future.

Charles could see Louisa lacked the intellect and the wit of his first wife, but he craved the reassurance and the routine of marriage. At twenty-three, with her ash-blonde hair and blue eyes, Louisa was in all ways a contrast to the former Lady Mahon. Her background of privilege and carefully managed wealth was a different cut from the brilliant, volatile and impulsively spendthrift Pitts. Within months of being widowed, Charles remarried; within the year, the new Lady Mahon gave birth to their first son, Philip Henry, the future heir.

For both Charles and his former brother-in-law William Pitt, this was a time of rapid political advancement. Charles was elected for Chipping Wycombe (later known as High Wycombe) in Buckinghamshire, not as a radical, as he had first wished. Instead, his candidature had been endorsed by the Earl of Shelburne, most prominent among a small group of Whig parliamentarians still loyal to the ideals of Chatham. Like William Pitt, Charles passionately favoured the American rebels and parliamentary reform. Shortly afterwards, Pitt followed Charles into the House of Commons as an MP, aged just twenty-one. The two young men shared a common purpose, each determined that his voice would soon provide a rationale for a vision of a better England. At the time, it was greatly in vogue, especially among the Whigs, to appear to flirt with reform, but both Charles Stanhope and Pitt went further than most. It soon became obvious that of the two, it was Pitt who was born for a career in politics. Not only was he the more effective speaker and a naturally charismatic politician, he was unshakeably ambitious and ultimately a pragmatist. He always knew when to draw back. Charles, on the other hand, refused to climb down on any issue once he had taken a stand; he would prove both mercurial and unpopular.

Pitt’s ascent was spectacular. By the age of twenty-three, he found himself in the new Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shelburne, who preferred to stay in his comfortable house on Berkeley Square, offered Pitt the Downing Street house that had been given by King George II in the 1730s as official residence for the First Lord of the Treasury. (It was one of a row of townhouses; when Pitt moved in, it had only recently been renamed as No. 10.) Around this time Pitt wrote to Charles saying he hoped to visit him at Chevening. ‘I trust you will be in town in a very few days, for there are several things in which I am quite at a loss without you.’¹³ Whatever Pitt might have wanted to discuss, he evidently relied on Charles’s judgement.

On 19 December 1783, the twenty-four-year-old Pitt kissed the King’s hand as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the youngest Prime Minister in history. Hester, who was then seven, was well aware of the significance of this achievement and the importance of her uncle’s position. Pitt moved back to Downing Street, and saw a good deal of the Mahons, who often stayed with him. It was from the Prime Minister’s residence, at half past three in the morning on 3 June 1785, that a thrilled Charles wrote to his friend Joseph Banks, informing him that Louisa had just given birth to another boy, and that he would be ‘extremely flattered’ if he would be the child’s godfather.¹⁴ This was Hester’s second half-brother, Charles.¹⁵

To their doting Uncle William, Hester was the tomboy he called ‘the Jockey Girl’, Griselda was ‘the little Book-devourer’, Lucy, ‘the Beauty’.

It seems that early on, Hester had acquired both her rebellious streak and her ability to present a stalwart face to the world. When she was eight, on a family outing to the beach at Hastings on the Kentish coast, she slipped away unnoticed, clambered aboard a boat and rowed herself out to sea, utterly confident that she would be able to navigate her way to France. The fast current swept her away from the pebbly shore, but she later claimed she had not been frightened, merely amused by the look of pure terror on her governess’s face. In her memory, she was always that precocious, self-aware girl, only happy when acting of her own volition.

On his father’s death in 1786 Charles became the third Earl Stanhope. As the new Earl his presence in Parliament took on an immediate edge when he disagreed publicly with Pitt over the latter’s establishment of a Consolidated Fund to reduce the national debt, arguing with him vociferously and publishing a pamphlet against the scheme, much to the Prime Minister’s embarrassment.¹⁶ To his family, it seemed as though almost overnight they were dealing with a different man, one prepared to be openly hostile to his former close friend and ally. There were other changes. He began to criticize his wife’s taste in clothes, in the theatre, in friends. He was a hard man to live with, often going into what his family called one of his ‘republican fits’. Chastised for the things that gave her pleasure, Louisa quickly lost her bloom, although James, the third and last son, was born in 1788.

Hester recalled once going to find her father at the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, former Governor of Bengal and Governor-General of India, after he took it upon himself to become an independent observer of the judicial system. (He attended every session religiously; and since proceedings began in February 1788 and lasted until Hastings’ acquittal in 1795, this was no small undertaking.) She would recall:

I can recollect, when I was ten or twelve years old, going off to Hastings’ trial. My garter somehow came off, and was picked up by Lord Grey, then a young man. At this hour, as if it were before me in a picture, I can see before me his handsome, but very pale face, his broad forehead; his corbeau coat, with cut-steel buttons; his white satin waistcoat and breeches; and the buckles in his shoes. He saw from whom the garter fell; but in observing my confusion, did not wish to increase it, and with infinite delicacy gave the garter to the person who sat there to serve tea and coffee.¹⁷

Hester was on the brink of adolescence already; aware of the power of simply being a young woman. Her father took measures to repress his daughter’s budding sexuality, such that Louisa feared that in society the girls would get a reputation as drabs. ‘My father,’ remembered Hester years later, ‘always checked any propensity to finery in dress. If any of us happened to look better than usual in a particular hat or frock, he was sure to have it put away the next day, and to have something coarse substituted in its place.’

Even so, by the time she was twelve, Hester was used to a rather sophisticated life, split between London and the country, along with young Philip, who was known by all now simply as ‘Mahon’, a name which stuck. She appears to have been her father’s favourite ‘when he bothered to notice any of them’. Earl Stanhope imposed upon his children a type of education that from today’s perspective seems almost guaranteed to create intellectual frustration for an intelligent child. He was determined that his children should, as Rousseau propounded in Émile, ‘learn nothing from books that experience can teach them’, a regime he prescribed until each child was about twelve. He restricted their exposure to books of all sorts, including the Bible and any prayer books, until such time when he judged that ‘nature’s lessons’ had been thoroughly learned. Considering the fact that he was a voracious reader himself, and the possessor of an impressive, highly eclectic library, this was extraordinary.

Any impression that Stanhope ignored his children’s education altogether would be false. He made sure they mastered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as French, and developed complicated games of logic for them, frequently setting them philosophical problems. Hester seems to be the only one amongst them who responded to this regime; her name for her father was tellingly sarcastic: ‘The Logician’. She was painfully aware that not all fathers apprenticed their sons to the local blacksmith in order to teach them humility and the fundamentals of mechanics. Unlike her own mother, who read and wrote Greek, Latin and French by the time she was twelve, Hester – whose intelligence was never in question – unconsciously absorbed the Rousseauian ethos. Hester recalled the rare occasions when she was summoned to her father’s study.

He would turn to me and say, ‘Now we must talk a little philosophy,’ and then with his two legs stuck up on the sides of the grate, he would begin. ‘Well, well,’ he would say, after I had talked a little, ‘that is not bad reasoning but the basis is bad’. My father, with all his mathematical knowledge, said I was the best logician he ever saw – I could split a hair. ‘Talk to the point’ was his cry; and I could bring truth to a point as sharp as a needle. The last time he saw me he repeated the same words, and said I had but one fault, which was being too fond of royalty.

From a very early age, she nourished the sense that she was quicker and cleverer than others; physically she was impatient, confident and advanced beyond her years. She did not respond well to petty punishments. She recalled one governess ‘had our backs pinched in by boards, that were drawn tight with all the force the maid could use; and as for me, they would have squeezed me to the size of a puny miss – a thing impossible!’ Another attempted to reshape her feet, trying to flatten her high instep.

She spent much time bolting about the countryside on horseback and dominating her siblings in a quasi-maternal role. She played pranks on staid Griselda, the most conventional of the girls; taunting her into violent fights, knocking over furniture and leaving them both scratched and bruised. Guitar and voice lessons were acceptable to the young Hester. ‘The first amuses her and the latter I hope will be of use to me in softening her voice,’ Grizel commented. Perhaps because of her father’s restrictions, Hester rebelled by being ever alert to the latest fashions.* ‘She has a very good taste for dress; but one of her jokes is to overdo the fashion in something or other when she comes to me, to amuse me or make me laugh,’ Grizel wrote to Lady Chatham.¹⁸ As she entered adolescence, it seems Hester liked to charm and shock in equal measure.

When the Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789, Earl Stanhope was jubilant. Many admired the way in which the French people had revolted in the name of liberty. Stanhope’s idealistic fervour for the principles of the Revolution intensified; he was instrumental in forming the Revolution Society, and was a natural choice as chairman. He determined to divest himself of his peerage and signed all his correspondence as ‘Citizen Stanhope’. He ordered that the armorial bearings be taken down from Chevening’s gates, much to the disgust of the servants. His speeches in support of the revolutionaries, and his Letter to Burke, his refutation to the man the French regarded as the Englishman most antagonistic to their Revolution, quickly translated and distributed, carried his name into the remotest corners of France. The teenage Hester must have been aware that for many French people, her renegade aristocratic father’s name meant more even than Pitt’s or Chatham’s.

Fear that London mobs might follow the example from across the Channel began to grow. At first, Pitt’s attitude was measured; although he evinced some sympathy for its early reforms, events swiftly moved to harden his heart: the mounting radicalism of the Jacobins, and news of the grisly butchering of priests and prisoners in France, caused him and many others who had previously been supportive to feel revulsion for the sans-culottes. Despite this, Earl Stanhope believed France would remain true to the virtues of liberty and equality. From that autumn, he and his former brother-in-law would regard one another as little better than enemies.

* There was a family connection to the Banks through Lady Mahon, for one of her uncles, Henry Grenville, had married Banks’s aunt, Eleanor Margaret. Their young daughter, Louisa, one of Banks’s cousins, was also cousin to the Pitt sisters, and was a great friend of Lady Mahon’s sister Harriot, who was then nineteen.

* Perhaps it was her extreme discretion and tact that led the banker, Thomas Coutts, to declare Lady Chatham ‘the cleverest man of her time, in politics or business’. The Pitt women, especially in their maturity, seem to have been altogether formidable.

* The heroic image of the dying statesman collapsing in Parliament, surrounded by more than fifty noblemen, would be committed to legend by an expatriate Bostonian, painter John Singleton Copley, in his painting The Death of Chatham. It took Copley two years to complete, painstakingly recording each detail of dress and interior, with most of the portraits made from life, and was regarded by many as the greatest historical painting ever done in England.

* Writing in 1793 of what he termed ‘the era of Jacobinism’, Sir Nathaniel Wraxall noted ‘it was then that pantaloons, cropt hair, and shoestrings as well as the total abolition of buckles and ruffles, together with the disuse of hair powder, characterised men, while the ladies, having cut off those tresses which had done so much execution, exhibited heads rounded à la victime et à la guillotine, as if ready for the stroke of the axe’.

2 The Minority of One

As the French Revolution raged, everyone in London knew about ‘Citizen Stanhope’. He was mercilessly lampooned in satirizing cartoons by Gillray, who enjoyed depicting him as an emaciated, wine-drinking sozzle-head rallying cockade-wearing mobs, usually with an equally emaciated, vexed-looking Pitt lurking about in the background.

As far as the Stanhope children were concerned, their father the freedom-lover was a domestic tyrant. Hester began to mimic him; demanding that her siblings never enter a room unless they first sent a servant to ask whether they could be admitted. She disapproved of her father’s many ‘republican’ measures, such as doing away with the carriage and horses his wife had relied upon to ferry her about. Louisa reacted with predictable exasperation. By then the relationship between them was becoming irretrievable. Hester went to elaborate lengths to keep the peace. In her own words:

Poor Lady Stanhope was quite unhappy about it: but when the whole family was looking glum and sulky, I thought of a way to set it all right again. I got myself a pair of stilts, and out I stumped along a dirty lane, where my father, who was always spying about through his glass, could see me.

So when I came home he said to me:

‘Why little girl, what have you been about? Where was it I saw you going upon a pair of – the devil knows what? – eh, girl?’

‘Oh! Papa, I thought, as you had laid down your horses, I would take a walk through the mud on stilts, for you know Papa, I don’t mind mud or anything – ’tis poor Lady Stanhope who minds these things, for she has always been very accustomed to her carriage, and her health is not very good.’

‘What’s that you say, little girl,’ said my father, turning his eyes away from me, and after a pause, ‘Well little girl, what say you if I brought a carriage again for Lady Stanhope?’

‘Why papa, I would say it was very kind of you.’

‘Well, well,’ he observed, ‘we will see; but damm it! No armorial bearings.’

So, some time afterwards, down came a new carriage and new horses from London, and thus by a little innocent frolic I made all parties happy again.¹

Hester makes her father sound quite acceptably human, not at all a monster, and goodhearted beneath his somewhat autocratic exterior. Despite her claim, her ruse did not alter the growing coolness between her father and Louisa, whom all the children called ‘Mama’. Hester was old enough to observe cracks in the marriage and noted that ‘we children saw neither one nor the other’. It was usually Grizel who watched over the girls as they dressed for local balls and dances. ‘The Three Graces’, as she called them, were often up ‘all night, at least until five … dancing their hearts out’. But Grizel noted that Stanhope regularly took his daughters ‘some sixteen miles over the heavy Kent roads, waits patiently … and return[s] at seven in the morning’.² He did this several times a week over the winter ‘season’, for at least three years. It is hardly the picture of an unloving father.

Acutely aware of her father’s embarrassing behaviour, Hester’s letters are primarily concerned with finding creative ways around his restrictions on her movements. Unlike most daughters of her generation, Stanhope was doing his best to discourage her from having anything to do with families he thought too ‘aristocratical’ or ‘too bourgeois society’. To her closest friend from this time, Evelyn St Clare, Hester complained about his guests. He spent much of his time with Varley, his great ally and friend, and the blacksmith to whom he apprenticed his sons. ‘Oh defend me from Citizens and Philosophers if this is the life they lead.’ But she was also proud of her father’s brilliance.

Hester came of age in the 1790s, a time of revolutionary enthusiasm and political agitation that created a generation of thinkers, poets and artists. But it also ushered in a new wave of repression in Britain, for which her uncle Pitt was directly responsible. He feared civil strife, whether it stemmed from revolutionaries, anarchists or reactionary ‘Church and King’ mobs. Pitt regarded societies like the Revolution Society, and the Corresponding Societies, which by now had acquired hundreds of members, especially in the industrial centres of the north and in Scotland, as a particular threat.

Unconcerned, Earl Stanhope forged strong ties with many of the Revolution’s loftier theorists, notably the Marquis de Condorcet, the mathematician and Revolutionary martyr, whom Stanhope felt to be his true brother-in-arms, and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.* Stanhope’s pacifist views were well known to these Frenchmen, as was his desire to see France and England ‘united by indissoluble bonds’.†

Hester was almost seventeen when Louis XVI was guillotined. Although reluctantly drawn into war, Pitt was of the widely-held opinion that this could only be a limited conflict. In fact, the conflict between the traditional foes would ultimately last, short intervals aside, for twenty-two years. Even Pitt’s great rival Charles James Fox, who had condemned the ‘madness’ of the war, conceded that the French regime had taken on a criminal nature. Under Robespierre and the Jacobins, political prisoners of all backgrounds – out-of-favour Girondins and generals as well as Marie Antoinette – had been sent to the ever-clattering guillotine. Walpole wrote that its ‘horrors make one abhor Lord Stanhope and his priestly firebrands’ and derided his pronouncements as the ‘ravings of a lunatic, imagining he could set the world on fire with phosphorus’.

Over the next few years, the ‘White Terror’ unleashed by Pitt would suspend constitutional freedoms, such as habeas corpus, and introduce the Treason and Sedition Act, the Unlawful Oaths Act and the Corresponding Societies Act. Determined to prevent any incitement to revolution, he instituted gagging measures such as the banning of public meetings, and employed indeterminate numbers of spies and informers. Hundreds of those deemed seditious would be arrested; many houses of Dissenters and Unitarians attacked and burnt.³ Stanhope was among those whose letters and communiqués were routinely intercepted and read. Although Pitt’s popularity sank – he was despised and pilloried in the radical press – he succeeded in consolidating power among the splintered Whigs. Indeed, his grip on Parliament during those repressive times would never be stronger.

By 1794 it would have been impossible for Hester to ignore the fact that her father was rapidly becoming a political pariah. Many on both sides in the House shunned his zealous views. But he was not merely a contrarian. A fierce champion of democracy, a pacifist and a republican, he saw himself as one of the few men in Parliament motivated by his conscience alone. For that reason, he adopted with particular pride the title ‘The Minority of One’, and even had a medal struck in his own honour.* Around this time, Coleridge wrote a poem, To Earl Stanhope.

But where Stanhope saw encroaching darkness, many of his fellow peers looked at him and saw precisely what Pitt warned them against, one of an emerging breed, a viperous ‘British Jacobin’. Stanhope’s exhortations not to interfere in the internal affairs of France appeared distinctly unpatriotic.

Pitt decided that his tolerance had been stretched far enough. He made a string of arrests. One of them was the Reverend Jeremiah Joyce, employed by Stanhope as his secretary and tutor for his two elder boys. Joyce was seized at Chevening, in front of the gawping Stanhope children.* That same night Stanhope was woken by a large crowd outside his house at 20 Mansfield Street, who at first shouted insults, then began breaking windows and throwing torches. Hester remembered her father telling them how he was forced to make his escape over the roof while the mob jeered. Stanhope was convinced the crowd had been paid to incite violence against him – even to cause his death. But this served to increase his radical activities.

Hester was torn between childhood pride in her father, whom she had always more or less sought to please, and the gnawing sense that ominous repercussions were about to fall on all their heads because of him. She enjoyed the notoriety of knowing clever radicals like the clergyman Horne Tooke. ‘I am an aristocrat,’ she told an amused Tooke, ‘and I make a boast of it’. When she told Tooke, ‘I hate a pack of dirty Jacobins that only want to get people out of a good place to get into it themselves,’ he roared with laughter, and had to admit she had a point.

But now Horne Tooke, like Jeremiah Joyce, was imprisoned in the Tower.† Stanhope did his utmost to lobby on behalf of his imprisoned friends – Joyce, Hardy and Tooke among them – all of whom faced certain death if found guilty of high treason. Hester worried that if her father were arrested the same fate would await him.

Disgusted with political life, Stanhope would resign from the House of Lords by the end of the year. Two days before Christmas, to celebrate Joyce’s acquittal, in which he played no small role, Stanhope staged a grand ball at Chevening, inviting more than four hundred guests for dancing and feasting. He hoped to please Hester by making this her unofficial coming-out party. She was, her grandmother commented, ‘looking incomparably well’. How pleased she was to dance with the bumpkinish sons of local squires around a centrepiece display of life-size mannequins meant to depict prisoners being unchained, under a large banner emblazoned with ‘The Rights of Juries’, was not recorded.

Hester would look back upon this as a happy period. She was closer to Louisa now that she was of age, and theoretically in search of a husband, while her stepmother was grateful for any excuse to escape hers. There were visits to Bath and to Louisa’s Grenville relatives in London. ‘Every amusement that riding, visiting &c. can produce, they have had without interruption, and which the uncommon strength of Hester bears most amazingly, for none can keep up with her,’ wrote Grizel, apparently missing the irony that while her son would sooner see the monarchy dispatched, her granddaughter insisted it was her duty to attend a ball celebrating the Prince of Wales’s birthday.

In 1795, Hester heard that another notorious prisoner at Newgate, the self-declared millennial prophet Richard Brothers, had asked to see her. It would have been easy to dismiss Brothers as a raving lunatic; he was, after all, about to be transferred to Bedlam. Although arrested on charges of sedition, he had been found criminally insane. He had declared himself to be a prophet, the ‘nephew of the Almighty, descendant of David and ruler of the world’. Brothers informed her that she was among a select group of people he believed would play a profound role in the ‘future Kingdom’. He himself would be the future King, he told her, and she was a chosen one, destined to be the ‘Queen of the Jews’. One day, he informed her, she would ‘go to Jerusalem and lead back the chosen people; that, on her arrival in the Holy Land, mighty changes would take place in the world and that she would pass seven years in the desert’ before her destiny revealed itself to her.

Hester mentioned her visit to Brothers in somewhat scathing terms to Horne Tooke. He teased her that he and his colleagues intended to establish ‘a new hospital for the diseases of the mind’ and that she was to be placed in charge of it, ‘for nobody knows so well as you how to cure them’. It was true that, at nineteen, Hester had every reason to congratulate herself on being the possessor of a formidably shrewd, even intimidating intellect, able to spar with many of the sharpest wits of the period.

She cannot have failed to be impressed by her father’s unusually fertile mind. He was fascinated more than anything by clever mechanics and by the power that might be harnessed through the invention of ships that could be self-propelled. The design of docks, canals and bridges obsessed him to an equal degree; he saw a future driven by steam.

Throughout Hester’s childhood, Earl Stanhope worked on his great dream, to create a workable steamship; he designed several modest prototypes which he tested out on Chevening’s small lake, and on the Thames. As soon as Watt’s steam engine appeared, Stanhope tried to apply the new technology, experimenting for a decade with various ingenious but cumbersome designs. Soon he had a flotilla of boats, including his pride and joy, the 111-foot Kent, the ‘Stanhope Ambi-Navigator’, which weighed over 200 tons even before it was fitted out with its heavy steam engines and boilers.*

In the end, the Kent would neither win Stanhope his elusive dream, nor bring his family the satisfaction of seeing him publicly honoured. The sailing trials were delayed, first by the Navy Board, and then by the Admiralty itself. John Leard, the Admiralty-appointed commander of the Kent, was the first to alert Stanhope somewhat apologetically that there were those who would prefer that he did not succeed. ‘I have two charges,’ he wrote, ‘to shew their unwillingness to attend to anything belonging to the Kent. But it was all leveled at your Lordship. They are afraid of you.’⁴

Stanhope must have known that conservatism and hostility towards innovations at the Navy Board were hardly new. To many of the Admiralty Lords, new technology, no matter how exciting, could be a potential threat to comfortable financial arrangements and contracts.† Orders were given to remove the ship’s steam engine. Stanhope was incensed.

It was Pitt’s revenge, or so it must have seemed. The Admiralty removed the unused boilers and refitted her as a gun-vessel, but soon the Navy Board had their way, and had her broken up.* To Stanhope, it was as though all his early promise and his scientific genius had been betrayed: it was perhaps the most crushing of all blows.†

Early in January 1796, Hester’s sixteen-year-old sister Lucy eloped; it seems she was already pregnant. The man in question, Tom Taylor, was a pleasant-looking twenty-seven-year-old apothecary who had been living quietly in Sevenoaks, until catching sight of Lucy. Before she fled, Lucy left a note for Hester, the only person she believed she could trust, counting on her not to raise the alarm, and hopefully to delay telling their father. Hester turned to Pitt, who was only too aware of the lasting shame the elopement could bring upon the family, and after his intervention, Lucy returned with her suitor and meekly asked for her father’s permission to marry.

Whatever Stanhope gave Lucy as dowry, it was not enough to stop Taylor from accepting a highly prestigious position offered to him by Pitt, that of Comptroller General in the Customs Service. He had few qualifications for the job but Pitt assessed that he had an excellent brain, and would thrive quickly, which seems to have been the case. This sinecure in a government he loathed greatly angered Stanhope. Lucy, with a measure of her sister’s defiance, refused to bow to his pressure that Taylor should not take the job. An angry estrangement ensued. It was to become a familiar Stanhope pattern.

Later that year, Hester caused her own sensation, appearing alone at Lord Romney’s military review. It was the most spectacular event held in Kent in 1796, staged to celebrate Pitt’s government’s successful raising of volunteers – six thousand in that county alone – who would parade and perform splendid feats dressed in their brand-new regimentals; fencing; charging across the field to swipe the heads off turnips with their swords; and marching before a crowd of landowning families; a grand feast would be held in a tented encampment. As well as Pitt, the King and Queen were there; and their sons, the Duke of York, then commander of the British army, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Clarence and the future Duke of Kent.

To Hester, who adored pomp, horses and dancing, and the sight of soldiers, the lure was obvious. Her father was equally determined that neither she nor the rest of the family should go; one corrupted daughter was quite enough.* The matter of getting there would prove more difficult than Lucy’s elopement; not least because Hester had to borrow both a carriage and something suitably elegant to wear. She found her first taste of freedom glorious. The fact that she was un-chaperoned was held to be highly improper. By the time Pitt arrived, she was something of a celebrity.

According to Hester, the King teased out of her stories of her father’s eccentricities. He took it into his head that she must be rescued, and carried back to Windsor to be made part of the Court.† Hester might have been willing, but Queen Charlotte did not seem enthusiastic. Nonetheless this marked the beginning of Hester’s firm friendship with the princes, of whom she would later say: ‘I loved all the princes, all, except George the Fourth – they were all so lively, so good-natured; people who would laugh at a straw.’

She was certainly ready to be noticed. When she was much older, she had an acute sense of what her beauty had once been:

At twenty, my complexion was like alabaster; and at five paces distance the sharpest eye could not discover my pearl necklace from my skin; my lips were of such a beautiful carnation, that without vanity, I assure you very few women had the like. A dark blue under the eyes, and the blue veins that were observable through the transparent skin, heightened the brilliancy of my features. Nor were the roses wanting in my cheeks; and to all this was added a permanency to my looks that no fatigue could impair.⁵

Until the sudden scandal with Lucy, Pitt had become quite remote from her; now the ice was broken. She made him laugh with a quip about his dog, who had made it into the gossip pages of The Morning Post and Fashionable World.* In contrast to her unorthodox father, he must have seemed the model of decisiveness and stability. ‘I thought it was better to be where I should have Mr Pitt at my side to help me, should he get into great difficulty.’ It would not be long before her uncle would come to be her touchstone for all important matters.

‘She had on a costume, which had nothing feminine about it, but the mask. She seemed very tall, very thin, very decided, very independent.’⁶ This is how the Duchesse de Gontant, a fashionable refugee from Paris, described Hester, meeting her at a masked ball in London around this time. These were rare qualities for a woman of twenty. Hester now made it her mission to get away from Chevening as much as possible. Her father relented under the barrage of her willpower and energy. Her grandmothers were anxious; the matter of whom she might marry was a pressing one. From them, the nod was given to Pitt to see that she was chaperoned when she was in London. This would be a thankless task, as society hostesses Mrs Pole and Lady Clarendon found out. ‘Don’t bother yourself about me; I am quite independent,’ she smiled at them, shocking them with her announcement that she was capable of making her own introductions. The Comtesse de Boigne, who met her en passant, observed she was ‘well-made’ and ‘fond of society, of dancing, and of any public function. She was something of a flirt … with ideas of striking originality’, although she noted dryly, ‘for a Stanhope, she was prudence itself’.⁷

Hester’s risk-taking instinct came to the fore. As far as she could see, in the wealthiest and most privileged circles, it was never enough to have merely good breeding and a title. Wit was what was prized above all, and she did her best to flaunt her own. With Pitt taking her part, Hester felt secure enough to be cleverly irreverent. She thought the Duchess of Rutland’s parties were a ‘heavy, dull business … all high breeding and bon ton’. As for the Duchess of Devonshire’s, ‘there they were, all that set, all yawning and wanting the evening to be spent, that they might be getting to the business they were after’.⁸ But Pitt did not wish Hester to be overly exposed to the ‘business’ she glibly refers to – bed-hopping; heavy drinking, whoring, juggling lines of credit and gambling away vast amounts late into the night. In the end, he took on the role of chaperone himself. He ‘remained with infinite kindness until four or five o’clock in the morning at balls which wearied him to distraction’, wrote the Comtesse de Boigne of Hester’s introduction to London society that year. ‘I have often seen him sitting in a corner, waiting with exemplary patience until Lady Hester should be pleased to end his sufferings.’⁹

By softening to the Stanhope tribe, Pitt may well have wondered what he had taken on. Griselda also turned to him, announcing her intention to marry John Tickell, an army officer from Hampshire. Earl Stanhope likened himself to King Lear; deserted by his daughters. But Hester, still semi-loyal to her father as well as her brothers, continued to return home, and when in London, to stay at Mansfield Street. There was in any case a well-established overlap between Pitt’s world and Stanhope’s, the fashionable world mingling with the radical elite. But Pitt, to a modest extent, had begun to subsidize Hester’s adventures.

By the time she was twenty-three, Hester had danced at ball after ball and dined on champagne and turtle all over town. Toasts were proposed to her beauty, much was made of her ‘magnificent and majestic figure’ and the way ‘roses and lilies were blended in [her] face’, and the way she ‘diffused happiness around [her]’.¹⁰ She had many admirers. Two men in particular, however, stood out.

George Bryan (‘Beau’) Brummell was the most fashionable man in London. Society hostesses sent him fawning invitations; even though he habitually ignored them for the most part, talked only to his friends and refused to dance. Here, finally, was someone Hester could share the latest intrigue with and count on to draw her away from any tedium. Hester laughed at his jokes, discussed horses with him (he named his favourite Stiletto) and adored his outrageous behaviour.* She affected some of his rebellious style, and paid ever greater attention to her dress. It is fairly certain Hester never seriously considered Brummell as a romantic prospect, nor vice versa. Nonetheless, a strong chemistry between them was noticed, and there was speculation she was in love, at least a little. He came up to her at a dinner and coolly took out her earrings in front of everyone, telling her they could not match the beauty of her skin, and spoiled the delicate line of her face. Brummell’s anarchic charm came as a heady relief to a fun-starved Hester.

It was the other man who appeared in Hester’s life who seemed to promise the possibility of a serious attachment. Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, Baron of Boconnoc, was her cousin, a year older than her. When she met him at a family dinner shortly before Christmas 1799, she had not seen him since they were both infants. His looks were fierce and wild; he was six foot two inches tall, powerfully muscled and dark. He was the sole heir to the Camelford fortune, and the owner of vast estates in Cornwall and Dorset, as well as a palatial London mansion, with an income of more than £20,000 a year (roughly £1 million in today’s money).†

From the start, it looked as though history might repeat itself; the Pitts and the Stanhopes destined to find their way to one another once again. She would say she ‘admired Lord C’s character, and in some things, imitated him’. He was, she said, ‘a true Pitt, and like me, his blood fired at a fraud or a bad action’. Camelford was notorious. He was known for having shot a fellow Royal Navy officer, apparently in cold blood, and his life was a tangle of duels and skirmishes. He had a sailor’s taste for prize-fighting, and was often seen at the ring. He was a connoisseur of pistols and swords. If anyone introduced Hester to her later love of weaponry and to the art of the duel, it was him. She certainly took up both passions at this time with an unusual relish. Not many men would have been willing to show a young woman how to fight, but Camelford was.

It was obvious that Camelford was hell-bent on doing something extraordinary. He was already the veteran of remarkable travels, notching up exploits as far away as Chile, Malacca and Ceylon, and having landed at Madras, had sailed to the Red Sea and crossed the desert from Suez to Alexandria. He felt a rivalry with their mutual cousin, Captain Sidney Smith, who months before had defeated Napoleon at Acre. They both knew what the Emperor had famously fumed about Smith: ‘That man made me miss my destiny.’ Smith was a hard act to follow, but Camelford had every expectation that he would find a way to out-do him.

At the beginning of 1799, Camelford had been arrested on a shingle beach in Deal for trying to cross the Channel on a smuggling boat, then a prosecutable offence. He had on him nothing but some money, a pair of pistols, a short, two-edged dagger, and a letter of introduction in French to Paul Barras, considered by the Pitt administration to be the most shrewd and unscrupulous of Napoleon’s advisers. A discreet royal pardon was given, on condition he resign his captaincy in the navy, a terrible humiliation. Speculation remained rife that Camelford, who spoke flawless French, intended to infiltrate himself into France and offer himself as a turncoat intelligence agent, a role that he hoped might bring him close to Barras – or Napoleon himself. The London Chronicle reported that he had ‘been prompted by a too ardent desire to perform some feat of desperation, by which, he thought, the cause of Europe might be served’ – in other words, a political assassination.

Hester appears to have been struck with admiration for her danger-seeking, intrigue-loving cousin. The attraction was mutual. She is widely credited as being the only woman he loved, aside from his beautiful sister, Anne. Soon after meeting her, he moved into a bachelor apartment, first on Baker Street, near Pitt’s house, then to New Bond Street.

Another clue that reveals Camelford’s feelings for Hester was his sudden appearance at the House of Lords, alongside the equally conspicuous Earl Stanhope, returned after a five-year absence. The House was debating Pitt’s and Lord Grenville’s rejection of Napoleon’s Christmas Day offer to negotiate peace. On 28 January 1800, Earl Stanhope, along with a small group in the Opposition, cast his vote to express disapproval, while Lord Grenville reiterated the administration’s position. The vote, 92 to 6, was unsurprising. What baffled everyone there was the fact that Camelford voted with the Opposition, for despite his erratic attendance in the House, Camelford had always voted reliably for Pitt and Grenville. The following day, after Stanhope made a speech to the Lords ‘on his knees’ to reconsider, the House divided once more. This time, Stanhope found only one other peer willing to take sides with him: Camelford. Hester’s father was not pleased to find himself supported: minority of two had no triumph to it. ‘Why!’ he harrumphed to Camelford afterwards, ‘you spoiled that division!’¹¹ If Camelford had wanted some measure of Hester’s father’s approval, he certainly did not get it.

The following month Camelford challenged one of his closest friends to a duel over Hester. Camelford was charged with grievous assault, but before it could go to the courts, which would have meant the explicit revelation of the details of the slight, the matter was quietly disposed of by a cash settlement.¹²

Pitt put his foot down. Hester was ordered back to Chevening. Whatever liberty her father might have allowed her in the past, he now curtailed. They were now all locked in at night. Hester alternately raged and moped, protesting at her own lack of freedom and at her father’s treatment of her brothers. Mahon was then eighteen, his movements far more circumscribed than Hester’s had ever been. He bitterly resented that he had not been sent to school nor prepared for university. As for Hester’s middle brother Charles, she was shocked to see he ‘could hardly write legibly’ and ‘cannot spell three words’.¹³ None of them was remotely equipped to ‘shift for themselves’.

Earl Stanhope was determined to dissolve his hereditary privileges, but this could only be achieved if Mahon agreed to break his entailment once he had reached his majority, in other words to sign away his inheritance. Stanhope, whose expenditure on his various experiments now amounted to many tens of thousands of pounds, was growing short of funds. He wanted eventually to sell Chevening, and was prepared to barter with his eldest son over a suitable lump sum if he complied.

On her return to Chevening early in the spring of 1800, Hester wrote to her older married friend Evelyn. ‘I want to ask advice about an unfortunate woman who was my playfellow and whose faults and misfortunes have given me great concern … I am too inexperienced to know how to act.’¹⁴ Might she possibly have been asking for advice for herself, and needing to conceal her own difficulties? It is not clear.

Hester later claimed that Ann Fry, a young chambermaid at Chevening, came to her in tears. She was pregnant. A house where the girl could spend her confinement was quietly arranged. The fact that her child would be baptized at the village church later that year despite her stubborn silence about who had fathered the child is intriguing, for the church rarely gave charity to unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children; a chaplain’s first task was always to establish the identity of the father, who might contribute to the child’s keep.¹⁵ In light of Hester’s later remarks and her own material support for the girl, the possibility that her father, or one of her brothers, may have been responsible cannot be overlooked.

Whatever the cause, around this time, some kind of violent confrontation occurred between Hester and her father. He lost his temper and pinned her to the wall, threatening her with a dagger. ‘The Logician often has said that from the hour I was born I have been a stranger to fear. I certainly felt no fear when he held a knife to my throat – only pity for the arm that held it; but this was a feeling I should rather not again experience …’¹⁶ She fled as soon as she could, taking little with her, and promising her brothers she would do what she could to help them. Camelford pressed her to stay with their uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Chatham, at their St James’s home; Pitt was drawn into the debate about who should take care of the runaway. His initial reaction is revealing; he worried that Hester might be untameable, and might bring scandal with her. ‘Under no circumstances could I offer her a home in my own house,’ he wrote at the time. Recovering from raw shock, Hester wrote to her grandmother, the Dowager Chatham:

It had hitherto been my fate to lead the strangest, as well as the most unforgettable life … I shall therefore gladly profit by this occasion to improve my mind, terribly neglected, and recover that flow of spirits natural to me but which a constant state of anxiety has rendered very unequal … It would be my wish when brought into society to appear as happy as I naturally might feel from the kindness of my uncles, but the heartfelt gratitude I feel towards them would at this moment rather serve to give me a contrary appearance for I should unavoidably be led to draw comparisons between their conduct and that which I have been used to, painful reflections must of course follow, but this will shortly wear off when the treatment I have been in the habit of receiving is less pressed in my mind.¹⁷

It is not clear whether Hester believed herself to be in love with Camelford, but she certainly saw a good deal of him that year. Despite his brush with the law, Camelford was regarded as a great catch. It was around this time, at a society gathering, that Hester met Lady Henrietta (Harriet) Bessborough, and she noted what the older woman made of her cousin, how he had ‘such delightful manners, such fascinating conversation, how charming, irresistible and well-bred’ he was. Hester and Camelford were sighted openly together a great deal – at plays, the opera, riding in St James’s Park, but more often on long excursions alone together to the countryside in his carriage, apparently making it a particular game to keep everyone in suspense, especially the Chathams. ‘How frightened Lady Chatham was for fear he should marry me!’ Hester recalled. Later, she described her behaviour around this time as ‘wild and reckless’. Their association was intense for at least eight months, and her wanderings with him took her as far as his estate at Boconnoc in Cornwall, where, if they wished it, they might have become lovers.¹⁸

Camelford suddenly transformed himself from being rather scruffy into something of a dandy. He looked like a man who had taken a sweetheart’s comment that he smarten himself up to mean that he should buy himself a new set of clothes from every fashionable tailor on Jermyn Street. But he kept his old brown coat, which he always wore with the collar turned up to his ears, and a slouch hat for one of his habits, apparently known only to Hester and his lawyer: do-gooding around the fleshpots and slums of Seven Dials, Southwark and Wapping. He would sometimes prowl these areas in disguise and press large sums of cash into the hands of those whose stories particularly affected him. He put £5,000 aside each year for his lawyer to distribute among the poor.

Hester appears to have influenced him to do things he would otherwise not have done. At her urging, Camelford approached Horne Tooke, with the suggestion that he put him forward as candidate for Old Sarum, Diamond Pitt’s famous ‘rotten borough’, located on land in Wiltshire he now owned. It was a move calculated to unnerve Earl Stanhope, who would be forced to concede that by bringing Tooke to Westminster, his daughter’s would-be suitor pulled off the coup of drawing attention to the very man whose cause he once championed, while at the same time showing up the scandalous loophole in the unreformed parliamentary system.¹⁹ There were dinners with Sir Francis Burdett, a rich radical politician friend of her father’s, who sympathized with Hester’s determination to ensure that her half-brother Mahon would not be strong-armed into surrendering his inheritance.

It was then that Hester devised a careful escape plan for Mahon, for which she secured Pitt’s approval. With the pledge of money from Burdett and another of her father’s former friends, William Lowther, the second Earl of Lonsdale, and the help of an urbane young diplomat, Francis James Jackson, Hester obtained a passport and letters of credit for Mahon, and recommendations that would ensure his acceptance for study at Erlangen University. She contrived a waiting carriage, and advised the time-honoured trick of using tied-together, twisted sheets to descend from a high bedroom window. Mahon’s successful escape early in 1801 caused a lifelong rift, not just with her father but also her grandmother Grizel, who bitterly blamed Hester for fomenting and publicizing family tensions.

Hester was perturbed only by the thought that her father might take his fury out on the ‘remaining captives’, Charles and James, whom she feared might be ‘flogged to death to make them confess what they are really ignorant [of]’. She would hear that Louisa too had reached breaking point, and would soon demand a separation.

For much of 1801, Hester came and went to London freely, while staying at the Pitt family home at Burton Pynsent in Somerset, where her grandmother left her free to do much as she liked, riding ‘at least twenty miles a day, and often forty’. She would be remembered from this time ‘as the intrepid girl who used to break in her friend’s vicious horses for them’.²⁰

By now Hester was the same age as her mother when she died. Although mindful of the freedom her unmarried state gave her, she was certainly aware that everyone close to her was anxious she make a good match. But she seems to have been reluctant.

She had suitors, including a wealthy landowner’s son, ‘Mr Methuen of Corsham’, with whom she danced repeatedly at the Assembly Rooms during the 1801 season in Bath, but turned them down. Something of her defiance for the institution – any institution – of courtship and marriage is revealed by a remark she made around this time to Jackson. ‘I have been going to be married fifty times in my life; said to have been married half as often, and run away with once. But provided I have my own way, the world may have theirs and welcome.’

On 5 February 1801 Pitt formally resigned over the King’s refusal to grant Catholic emancipation, after a term as Prime Minister that had lasted for seventeen years. Overnight, Pitt was no longer the invulnerable creature Hester had grown accustomed to. He was £45,000 in debt and faced bankruptcy; he was ‘very unwell … gouty and nervous’. He declined the King’s offer to pay his debts, but he would accept a personal loan put up by a circle of his friends, including Wilberforce. Hester’s chance to repay her uncle’s kindness would come later that year.

She appears to have been as astonished as everyone else when Camelford disappeared at the end of October 1801, shortly after the announcement that war with France was at an end, although she suspected where he might have gone. She would soon write to her friend Jackson, now British Minister in Paris, asking if he knew anything. ‘If I may ask a question of you, how is Lord Camelford? I like him better than people do in general, and am anxious about him, after the strange reports I have heard, but do not answer if you do not like it.’²¹

Almost immediately, she began to prepare her own plans for departure, something that was unthinkable without being accompanied. She hoped to meet with Mahon – and perhaps Camelford. Whom she petitioned for funds is not known – she had no money of her own. She chose a stolid, elderly and well-connected couple, the Egertons, who planned to leave, although not until the following spring. ‘You may wonder why I have not fixed upon more dashing persons for companions …’ she wrote to Jackson. ‘I shall have perfect liberty to act in all respects as is most pleasing to myself … they want a companion, and I want a nominal chaperone.’²²

In the meantime, in early 1802, she went to Weymouth to be one of her cousin Sir Sidney Smith’s party. She did not miss the fact that Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales, cast lascivious looks at her thirty-seven-year-old cousin. Indeed, Hester’s presence was requested so often by Princess Caroline as a ruse so that she could also have Smith along that many assumed she was the Princess’s new lady in waiting. Hester enjoyed renewing her friendship with the royal family, and the rapport she formed with the Duke of York allowed her to make him a proposition concerning her brothers, Charles and James, now sixteen and thirteen. She secured a commission for Charles in the 25th Foot, based in Gibraltar; while James was to go into the navy as a midshipman. With this in place, all that was required was for another escape plan to be laid. Once again it was successful, and the boys took up their new lives.

By the end of April 1802 Hester learned exactly what Camelford had been up to. It was splashed over the newspapers. What was not reported was that the French authorities considered him a serious threat as soon as news of his disappearance reached them: Napoleon’s Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, lost no time in putting out an alert that he be apprehended. But Camelford managed to baffle everyone (including a spy sent to Paris at his brother-in-law Lord Grenville’s expense to make discreet enquiries about the peer’s whereabouts). He slipped in and out of France undetected, spending several months lying low in Geneva and Italy. By the end of March 1802 Camelford had entered Paris, having adopted an American alias, with French travel papers issued in the name of ‘John Rushworth’.

Camelford intended to be in Paris on 5 April, the day he knew Napoleon planned to attend a review at the Tuileries, where English visitors might present themselves to him at the Salle des Ambassadeurs, but two days beforehand, Fouché had him arrested after he was sighted at the Palais-Royal. Camelford had with him a small, specially designed magazine pistol, able to fire nine shots in succession without reloading, the perfect weapon for close-range assassination. If any doubted his target was Napoleon, the French police report was unequivocal:

Lord Camelford, first cousin of Mr Pitt, brother-in-law of Lord Grenville and near-relative of Sidney Smith, gives much money to the émigré Chouans living in London, particularly to Limoëlan, whom he sees often. His close relationship with these scoundrels gave him the idea that he himself should assassinate the First Consul.²³

Yet Camelford was able to save himself by his gift of the gab. When interrogated by Fouché, he presented a passionate case for being an admirer of France, citing his close association with Earl Stanhope and Horne Tooke. Aside from the offending weapon, nothing could be found to support Fouché’s suspicions. Camelford was escorted to Boulogne, warned never to return and put on a ship to England.

Undoubtedly Hester must have seen Camelford. One way or another, her travel plans were put on hold. Whatever occurred at this juncture between them remains a mystery. There had undeniably been an infatuation and most likely a physical affair. But if she had toyed with him as a marriage partner she knew that, despite his wealth, he was full of darkness and rough edges. He drank, fought and was used to bedding the women he came across in ports and brothels. Perhaps the truth can be found in a comment she made many years later, that ‘the violence of my character [is] something like Lord Camelford’s’. Together, they were too volatile and headstrong to last.

On her way to join the Egertons at Dover, Hester stopped at Pitt’s residence at Walmer Castle, with the intention of staying no more than a few days before setting sail. The visit proved to be longer than expected. Pitt had been suffering periodic fits of stomach pains, cramps and vomiting, usually exacerbated by overwork, but this relapse was particularly extreme. She stayed long enough to supervise his recovery, and to demonstrate that ‘I have talents as a nurse’. Pitt was reluctant to see her go.

That October, the Egertons and Hester travelled first to Lyon, where they were met by a very grown-up Mahon. There had been so much anticipation on both sides that the meeting was almost anti-climactic. Hester was anxious to see Mahon’s transformation into a cultured gentleman, but her first impression was somewhat critical. He ‘converses not pleasantly, like a Frenchman out of humour’, she noted, although she was impressed at the extent of knowledge he had acquired, and noticed he studied ‘from morning to night’. At Hester’s urging, they crossed Mount Cenis in the French Alps by mule, undoubtedly a tortuous enterprise for the Egertons.

Brother and sister parted angrily in Florence after an explosive argument. It appears that she had trusted him with a confidence and that he took a vehemently moral stance against her; certainly his subsequent treatment of her suggests he viewed her as a ‘fallen woman’. ‘In truth, his conduct disgusted me extremely,’ she wrote. From this moment on, Mahon’s treatment of his sister was very frosty, even vindictive.

A larger drama was now the backdrop to their travels. War was declared against France in May 1803; the Treaty of Amiens had lasted less than fourteen months. After a winter spent in Naples and Venice, Hester’s patience with the Egertons had frayed too. Mrs Egerton, she noted scathingly, was ‘a fidget married to a fool’. In Germany the Egertons dithered about their itinerary, not wanting to budge from the communities of English expatriates, infuriating Hester by deciding in the end not to go to Vienna or Berlin – or Paris, while the chance still remained. By now Camelford had returned to France, only to be apprehended once again, and incarcerated for a time in the infamous Temple prison, before his release was engineered, no doubt through Pitt’s and Grenville’s efforts.

Hester was away for almost nine months. When she returned to England again in July 1803, Pitt gently informed her that his mother – her grandmother – had died that April. Burton Pynsent had passed to the Chathams. She was not, of course, on speaking terms with her remaining grandmother, Grizel. She was homeless.

* Condorcet would go on to inspire one of the most enduring achievements of the Revolutionary period, the founding of the scientific Institut de France, which replaced the Old Regime’s Académie des Sciences and prestigious Académie Française, which would not be revived until 1815. His friendship with Earl Stanhope was indeed close; he asked the Englishman to become a guardian to his child in the event of his arrest and execution.

† When, in February 1792, Talleyrand – who would go on to become Napoleon’s Foreign Minister – came to London seeking support for the cause, he went directly to the famous Earl, hoping he might act as a mediator with Pitt. It was no good: Pitt curtly ignored them both. Despite this, for the duration of his stay, Talleyrand was the toast of London’s leading revolutionary sympathizers and Dissenters. Stanhope made sure Hester accompanied him to a dinner held in Talleyrand’s honour in Hackney. No doubt he thought she could benefit by observing that not all revolutionaries were unwashed rabble.

* In January 1795, Lord Stanhope’s vote was recorded as being ‘in the minority of one’, after the House was divided 61–1 against his second protest at the interference in the internal affairs of France; the one being himself.

* Jeremiah Joyce had been amongst a band of English and American expatriates drawn to Paris in the winter of 1792, hopeful that the tide would soon turn, and that revolution would come to England. He was a member of both the Society for Constitutional Information and the LCS.

† Horne Tooke was one of the most celebrated radicals to be arrested; his memoirs were a best-seller.

* The Admiralty, whom Earl Stanhope had sufficiently intrigued to part-finance the Kent (on which he had already spent £8,000 of his own money), were waiting to see whether the ship could live up to the claims of its inventor, although they had pronounced steam navigation ‘a wild scheme’. Still, the newly-formed Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture was so impressed by the Kent they made Stanhope one of their vice-presidents.

† Scientific shipbuilding in Britain was then practically non-existent. When the Kent finally sailed from Deptford on 22 February 1797, reaching Chatham on 1 March, the crew had been placed under instructions not to use the boilers; only Stanhope’s ‘vibrators’ or oars were tested and they were hand-operated and employed only to ferry the ship downstream from Deptford. The official report on the Kent’s performance seems to have been a thinly-veiled stitch-up; ostensibly praising the ship for its speed and weatherability, but evaluating it as though it were an ordinary vessel. By finding one elaborate reason after another not to witness it performing under steam, they would not be in a position to comment on it. The Kafkaesque farce that ensued lasted until the end of the decade. Nor could Stanhope take his invention elsewhere; the deal he had signed with the Admiralty meant they owned the ship’s bond, while he remained responsible for many of its expenses. Finally he was curtly informed that ‘an invention of this kind could never be applied to any advantageous purpose in His Majesty’s Navy’.

* Stanhope’s next invention was the Stanhope Weatherer, which he believed would be the ‘perfect’ frigate, but the Commissioners were as disparaging as before. Yet in 1816, the year Stanhope died, a Captain Tuckey would sail out on a mission to explore the Congo in a new vessel built for the purpose by the shipbuilder Seppings. Called the Congo, it was acknowledged officially as being almost identical in design to the Weatherer. Not long afterwards, the design for the Congo won the government stamp of approval; and Seppings’s ship became almost universally adopted by the merchant service. And so, the ghost of Stanhope’s Weatherer found its way into countless ports in far-off lands after all.

† Stanhope was perhaps too inventive for his own good. Still, several enduring inventions bear his name. The Stanhope printing press, for which he pioneered a process of stereotyping designed to reduce costs, was later acquired by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, along with his system of logotypes. The Stanhope lens, a small but powerful microscopic lens, was the only invention of his that achieved widespread commercial success during his lifetime. Many of Stanhope’s designs – from his calculating machines (‘The Stanhope Demonstrator, an Instrument for performing Logical Operations’) to his steam-powered vessels, as well as his innovations for canal construction – using a system of inclined planks and improved locks – would ultimately be perfected by others.

* Stanhope’s distaste for the royal family was by then shared by large numbers of British citizens. The previous year, at the height of his unpopularity, on his way to the House of Lords in October 1795, the King’s coach was pelted with stones amid cries of ‘Down with George!’

† King George III habitually appointed women he liked or admired to the Court, a sinecure viewed as a form of social advancement for women of the middle classes. Between 1786 and 1791, the writer Fanny Burney was employed as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte; for which she was given an apartment at Windsor, a maid and footman to attend her and £200 a year. Her only duties were to help the Queen select her outer garments and to make witty conversation, but she found the position socially humiliating and stifling.

* Pitt had, that year, vexed squires across the land by the introduction of his tax on both dogs and hair-powder; although the fashion for the latter waned virtually overnight, the Englishman’s attachment to his dog remained. Hester is said to have joked that Pitt’s great hound at Holwood was so fat it should be taxed twice.

* ‘Brummell would commit … freaks at the house of parvenus, or people who were not exactly of haut ton, where, sometimes at dinner, he would all of a sudden make horrible ludicrous grimaces, as if he had found a hair in his soup, or would abruptly ask for some strange Palmyrene sauce, or any out of the way name that nobody ever heard of, and then pretend he could not eat his soup without it,’ Hester remembered of his outrageous behaviour. Palmyra was evidently a topic of conversation even then.

† Camelford House, fronting Oxford Street, near Park Lane, which had been built for the 1st Baron of Camelford, was demolished in 1913 to make way for a ‘cinematograph palace’.

3 The Company of Men

Pitt offered Hester a life with him, on the condition that she avoid Camelford, ‘whom’, as Hester put it, ‘he liked personally as much as [I] did, but considerations of propriety obliged him to keep him at a distance’. He knew her too well to tell her what she must do, but he certainly knew how to ask her to respect his terms.

Pitt remained Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and had made his home at Walmer Castle. He had already done much to improve the speckled-stone castle with its bulbous bastions, one of a line of coastal forts built by Henry VIII as protection against the invasion the Tudor monarch feared would come from the combined forces of France and Spain. For Pitt, this was where he hoped to recover his health, repair the appalling state of his personal finances and spend more time reading and gardening. Hester was quickly caught up by day-to-day distractions at Walmer. She informed Jackson:

Here, then I am happy to a degree; exactly in the sort of society I most like. There are generally three or four men staying in the house, and we dine eight or ten almost every other day. Military and naval characters are constantly welcome here; women are not, I suppose, because they do not form any part of our society. You may guess, then, what a pretty fuss they make over me.¹

That Hester felt most at ease in the company of men we have already seen; she knew what to expect from them and, as a rule, was far more stimulated by their interests, their talk of war and politics, horses and journeys, and tended to be amused rather than offended by their dirtier jokes. She gave the impression of knowing more about worldly matters than she would have others believe. Something of this quality was sensed by her uncle, who told her he did not know if she were ‘a devil or an angel’.

Many of Pitt’s friends and colleagues were also not sure what to make of Hester in her decidedly public new role. She was a talented mimic; her timing was perfect and often cleverly nasty. She could be sharp and scintillating; she also made flippant off-colour jokes, commenting on the shape of a man’s bottom, for instance, ‘He would not do for a hussar’ and laughing at one of Pitt’s visitors, who made a sweepingly low bow with his hat and a stoop in front of her: ‘One would think he was looking under the bed for the great business.’ Pitt did reprimand her: ‘You are too bad, Hester,’ he would say, adding weakly, ‘You should not be so personal.’ But he seems to have enjoyed her witticisms, and being teased out of his usual intimidating aloofness. Above all, she felt close to him. Hester would remember that ‘He used sometimes to say to me when talking away after my fashion, “You put me so in mind of my Father!”’

An observer of her at the time, the nineteen-year-old William Napier, the future general, wrote: ‘Lady Hester … was very attractive, so rapid and decided was her conversation, so full of humour and keen observation, and withal so friendly and instructive, that it was quite impossible not to fall at once into her direction and become her slave.’²

What became clear was that after the successive deaths of two sisters and his mother, Pitt warmed to having her loving and vivacious presence in his life. She was exuberant and irreverent, a player of innocent pranks. Although he continued to watch over her sisters Lucy and Griselda, it was Hester who became the privileged keeper of many of his past and future confidences, and his châtelaine at Walmer.* She was a sympathetic ear and could be surprisingly non-judgemental. Of his campaigns to eradicate sedition, which so enraged her father, she would later say that ‘[he] used to say that Tom Paine was quite in the right, but then he would add, “What [was] I to do?”’ She found that she had a unique influence; a position that must surely have been gratifying.

One of the first things that strikes a visitor to Walmer today is how – for a castle – altogether intimate and informal it feels. It is easy to imagine Hester feeling content and self-important here. From the dining room, with the doors open, they could watch the spray over the Goodwin Sands and the great panorama of the Channel. She could choose her hours; she was free to stay for after-dinner discussions, and frequently to add her opinion. War stratagems and news from Westminster were constantly mulled over. Although he was courted by the Opposition, Pitt wished to maintain his mandate within the existing government; his return to power was germinating.

Hester’s room was directly beneath Pitt’s chambers, and she often heard his footsteps pacing on the ceiling above her; she could even hear the clink of decanter against glass. From her room she could wander freely up the stone stairs to the bastion to spy on the night patrol or into the garden, no matter what the hour. Her windows overlooked the moat and the garden; a view which encompassed a magnificent magnolia tree. The scent of its opening flowers she would always afterwards associate with heightened expectation, a feeling that something marvellous was yet in wait for her.

Two pursuits she took up at Walmer became lifelong obsessions: stargazing and gardening. She made use of the tomes on astronomy from Pitt’s library, and often looked through the Herschel reflecting telescope, a gift from William Herschel, the Astronomer Royal, to Pitt so he could use it to watch for the invading fleet.

After overhearing Pitt tell a friend that Walmer was not as beautiful as it might be due to a lack of trees, Hester took action. As soon as her uncle was next called away to London, the transformation of the garden in his absence became Hester’s most ambitious project to date. She commissioned samples and seeds of plants from all over the country and managed to convince all the regiments quartered at Dover to help ‘in levelling, fetching turf, transplanting shrubs, flowers …’ for no extra pay, while she kept a close eye on them, commenting that by deploying some of her feminine charm, ‘with a few civil words, and occasionally, a present,’ the work was quickly done. She redesigned the main lawn, planted flower borders along Walmer’s distinctive thick yew hedges, and managed to import and plant some fully-grown horse chestnut trees, adding to the formal groves of yew and lime trees already planted by Pitt. On his return, she was thrilled with his reaction:

When Mr Pitt came down, he dismounted from his horse, and ascending the staircase, saw through a window, which commanded a view of the grounds, the improvements that had been made. ‘Dear me, Hester, why this is a miracle! I declare it is quite admirable; I could not have done it half so well myself.’³

By the autumn of 1803, the entire nation was braced for an invasion across the Channel. Walmer, and the entire south coast between the Cinque Ports, were the frontline. Pitt was disgusted with his successor, Addington, whom he thought devoid of all military vision. In his role as Lord Warden he announced he would step in, taking on a voluntary but highly symbolic military role as Colonel Commandant of the Cinque Port Volunteers, a corps of ‘gentlemen volunteers’. In his two-corned cocked hat, his buttoned red jacket, grey breeches and with his ceremonial sword, Pitt looked almost boyish that autumn, riding out, very often with Hester, to inspect the training of all battalions. War created the perfect climate for a fightback, and Pitt now lived as he meant to go on, mobilizing all his strengths, his health much improved.

The new mood also gave Hester a sense of mission. She felt both needed and useful. There was an exciting tension in her world, and few rules. A great deal about her strength of character is revealed by how she handled a group of would-be rapists one evening in Ramsgate.

Five of the Blues, half-drunk, not knowing who I was, walked after me and pursued me to my door. They had the impertinence to follow me up-stairs and one of them took hold of my gown. The maid came out, frightened out of her senses, but just at the moment, with my arm I gave the foremost of them such a push, that I sent him rolling the others down the stairs, with their swords rattling against the balusters. Next day, he appeared with a black patch as big as a saucer over his face, and when I went out there were the glasses looking at me and the footmen pointing me out – quite a sensation.⁴

It is easy to see why the troops nicknamed her the ‘Amazon’. She wore a jaunty riding habit, styled in bright red wool with military braid, buttoned up against the sea wind like a man’s greatcoat, and knee-high nankin boots. She loved to watch duelling soldiers, following all the moves closely, and rating them. She wrote to Jackson that Pitt ‘promoted’ her as nominal commander of her own ‘army’, ‘the first and last’ of the Berkshire Militia.

Adding to her contentment was the presence of her younger half-brothers. All the Stanhope boys were close by. James had decided to leave the navy to join the Guards, and was living close to Dover Castle. Charles had returned from Gibraltar, and for a time stayed at Walmer. He was soon promoted to the 57th Regiment, at Ashford. ‘Charles is by nature my favourite,’ she had confided to a friend several years earlier, ‘he has the least ability of the three, but a degree of openness and good nature which wins every heart, and an air of nobility his quizzical education can never destroy.’

About Mahon she was even cooler than before, however. The previous autumn, on his return from Europe, Pitt had appointed him Lieutenant-Governor of Dover Castle and made him colonel of one of his battalions. Mahon was about to be married. His choice of wife was Catherine Lucy Smith, one of Lord Robert Carrington’s four daughters. The wedding would be held that November at Deal Castle. Mahon found Hester’s presence very disquieting, for reasons that beg some interpretation. He wrote to his father-in-law:

I hope that Catherine does not see Hester much alone; this intimacy can be productive of no good consequences, but probably of much mischief. I have endeavoured this week to prevent it by painting with truth and sincerity and I trust with candour and impartiality what Hester’s character was and the evils that too great an intimacy might occasion.⁵

Almost certainly, Mahon’s account concerned Hester’s association with Camelford, who now filled newspapers with his brawls and duels, and continued to be tailed by Fouché’s spies.* Whatever the cause, there was something Mahon did not want Catherine to know and did not trust Hester to be discreet about, or he truly believed that his wife would be compromised in some way by associating with her. Either way, his letter shows that as far as he was concerned, his sister’s reputation had already been sacrificed.

By early 1804, the political winds were blowing in Pitt’s favour. Lord Grenville, his cousin and ally, had been repeatedly urging him to lead the Opposition factions against Addington; surely, he reasoned, together, they would form an unbeatable alliance. But Pitt was not prepared to capitulate to the Whigs. Frustrated, Grenville took the hitherto unthinkable course of aligning himself with the one man who had been their mutual arch-rival for two decades: Charles James Fox.

In February the King, now sixty-five, once more had an attack of the symptoms that afflicted him earlier, the second time in three years. His mental health was hotly debated. As soon as his father showed signs that could be construed as lunacy, the Prince of Wales began making plans for a new government, hosting numerous dinner parties for Pitt’s opponents. One of the Prince of Wales’s most valuable assistants in once more galvanizing the Whigs and forming the Fox-Grenville coalition had been the formidable Whig hostess, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. She proved to be a particularly effective go-between in the setting-up of meetings between her close friend Fox and Grenville, and was instrumental in trying to persuade George Canning – regarded as the cleverest of Pitt’s trusted Ministers of Parliament – that he should find a way to convince Pitt that his decision not to join them was political suicide.

In February, in a series of rousing parliamentary speeches, Pitt made a devastating assault on Addington, accusing him of almost criminal negligence in his inability to sufficiently protect the nation from invasion. Few failed to be moved. The writing was on the wall. Addington would have to go.

It was at one of Pitt’s gatherings that February that Hester met Lord Granville Leveson Gower.* Pitt thought highly of him, going so far as to observe, as though he were a connoisseur of male beauty, that he had the looks of ‘Hadrian’s Antinous’. Granville had been elected as Member of Parliament for Staffordshire at twenty-two, and before he was thirty had already served as a middle-ranking diplomat in Paris and Lille. In 1800, Pitt had made him a Lord of the Treasury, a position he was forced to give up when Pitt resigned a year later.

When Hester met him, Granville was thirty, a charmer, groomed for success by his wealthy, well-connected parents. An aristocratic bachelor, he was moneyed and refined, conversational and amusing. In country houses across England, he was being referred to as one of the best-looking men of his generation. His expensive tastes in travel, wine, gambling and women were indulged by his loving parents.

Hester was instantly besotted. Granville was politically ambitious, and clearly destined for success in the world of high diplomacy. Marriage to him would bring her exactly the sort of life she wanted: it would place her in the salons of Paris and St Petersburg, close to the corridors of power. She immediately began a campaign to make him fall in love with her, acquiring his sprightly mother, Lady Stafford, as her ‘leading female acquaintance’. She would have been acutely aware that the Staffords would have preferred their son to marry into a family able to confer the assurance of wealth, and she could offer no such enticement. All the same, she must have felt confident that with Pitt once more in the ascendant, her proximity to power might act in her favour. For the first time, she worried about what might be said about her in society and appears to have been almost relieved when she heard, two days before her twenty-eighth birthday, that Camelford had been fatally shot in a duel. She confided cryptically to her friend the diplomat Jackson: ‘Lord Camelford has been shot in a duel, and there is no chance of him recovering. You know my opinion of him, I believe, therefore can judge if I am not likely to lament his untimely end. He had vices, but also great virtues, but they were not known to the world at large.’*

Hester became a regular guest at Lady Stafford’s house in Whitehall, opposite the Horse Guards, and Granville in turn visited Pitt and saw her frequently at York Place. As intent as she was on her own crusade for his affections, she did not allow any details of Pitt’s battle for power to escape her, some of which likely provided more erotic leverage than she would have wanted her uncle to know. Politically, Hester had become a behind-the-scenes dynamo. That the brilliant and shrewd Canning consistently sought her opinion demonstrates the degree to which it was valued.

At first she was convinced her passion for Granville was returned. He would come to call on her; she was not always there or was delayed; he would wait for her, not wanting to miss the chance of seeing her. Having spent long months away at Walmer, if not in near solitude, then at least deprived of the many temptations of London, Hester was in a mood to be diverted. As part of Pitt’s inner corps of two, she was invited to a dizzying number of events. Her life was a Cruikshank caricature come to life; a never-ending round of dinners, parties and dances at which she came to know all the leading personalities of the day.

When Pitt and Hester returned to Walmer in April, Granville was invited. It seems that shortly after this, Hester and Granville became lovers. Physically, she thought Granville ‘perfection’. She certainly does not appear to have behaved like a shy virgin. Instead, she seems to have launched herself fearlessly into her new affair. If Granville’s record was anything to go by, he preferred sexually experienced – or married – women. He was also an enthusiastic collector of what he called ‘dirty Books’, preferably French, and when ‘infected with a Bibliomanie’ would hunt the bookshops for hours ‘in the hope of finding something curious’.

He met Hester for rides in St James’s Park. If they felt in need of more privacy, they would take the carriage out beyond the bucolic meadows surrounding Primrose Hill to Hampstead, warming themselves up with a drink in the village before wandering upwards onto the Heath, walking along its pathways around the ponds and through meadows, where the grass was no longer wet from the rain.

It would be misleading to think that the late Georgian era was not in some ways as rambunctiously sexual as our own. Although English society was hardly permissive, there was certainly a frank acknowledgement of sexual pleasure and desire, much more so in the Georgian and Regency periods than in the Victorian era.

The sort of erotic engravings that titillated Granville were all the rage. In Britain, probably best known at that time were those by the celebrated satirical illustrator Thomas Rowlandson; for instance, Meditation among the Tombs, a raunchy depiction of a couple making love against a church wall as a funeral takes place in the background, and The Willing Fair, which shows a couple in hasty coitus at their lunch table, the young woman’s mountainous buttocks visible, but her dress otherwise unruffled, from her perfectly coiffed hair and pearl-drop earring to the shoes still firmly on her feet. The implication of these prints being that in the Georgian era, when it might have been difficult for amorous couples to find privacy in their own homes, the fully-dressed ‘quickie’ was perhaps by no means uncommon.

In the first flush of her love affair with Granville, Hester did everything she could to look her best. She became guiltily familiar with Ackerman’s Repository, the bible of well-dressed women. Pitt had generously suggested she put all her purchases of new clothes on his account, but even he raised his eyebrows at the extravagance of her hasty pilgrimages to London’s best seamstresses, shoemakers, hatters, hosiers and glovers.

Although inclined to be critical of her looks, Hester was in fact quite vain. Men certainly found her extremely attractive. She said about herself later: ‘I was never what you call handsome, but brilliant. My teeth were brilliant, my complexion brilliant, my language – ah! – there it was – something striking and original that caught everyone’s attention.’

Other suitors idled in the wings, plenty of them handsome and eligible, but none apparently able to deflect Hester’s attention from her newfound object. Among them was William Noel Hill, the second son of Lord Berwick, already the Tory Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury and a clever diplomat a few years younger than her, who had been steadfastly pursuing her since her return to London.* Although he lacked Granville’s impossible good looks, he was a sympathetic, amusingly self-deprecating character, and Hester was fond of him. She enjoyed his flirtations, which seem to have been frank. He asked Hester to marry him. Hill was aware of his rival, but clearly had Hester in his sights for when – inevitably – that attraction waned. This was a possibility Hester considered so absurd she laughed about it with Granville, making a joke of the hapless Hill.

By the end of April 1804 Pitt had pulled off an impressive coup. At the King’s invitation, he was welcomed back into power with the approval of the former government, and in alliance with a significant faction of the Opposition. It was his intention to form a strong government that could withstand Napoleon. Even the threat of Fox’s powerful supporters could not moderate his optimism.

On 18 May 1804 Pitt, now almost forty-five, once again received from the King the seals of office as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Once more, Downing Street beckoned. Ten days later, on 28 May, across the Channel, at Saint-Cloud, the Senate proclaimed the thirty-five-year-old Napoleon to be ‘Emperor of the French Republic’. The coronation was to take place later that year. Pitt’s dance with Napoleon was beginning again.

Shortly after Pitt returned as Prime Minister, Hester was conducted around Downing Street, as liveried servants jumped to attention. She was in a triumphant mood; overnight, Pitt – and she – was now at the centre of the universe. She saw no noticeable elation on his part; but the old power had returned; his playfulness, which she had seen so much of, could dissolve in an instant. He went back to his old work habits, with the dogged persistence of a horse tethered to its plough.

By the end of May, she noticed that dark circles hollowed his eyes, and worried that all the good work of Walmer was already undone. His only concession to moderation was to substitute his preferred vintages with the occasional bottle of redcurrant wine; otherwise the standing order from Berry’s Wine Merchants continued as before. She would later remember how he would always drive himself hard. ‘People little knew what he had to do. Up at eight in the morning, with people enough to see for a week, obliged to talk all the time while he was at breakfast, and receiving first one, then another, until four o’clock; then eating a mutton chop, hurrying off to the House, and there badgered and compelled to speak and waste his lungs until two or three in the morning! – who could stand it?’

Her mocking wit was not reined in. Soon after being made Foreign Secretary, Lord Mulgrave came to stay, and when at breakfast he complained to Hester that he had been given a defective spoon, her response was typically quick. ‘Have you not yet discovered that Mr Pitt sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments to effect his ends?’

Despite high expectations and rousing support for Pitt, especially in the House of Commons, the new Prime Minister was forced to admit that his planned administration was not going to be as strong and inclusive as he had hoped. Pitt’s position was now entirely dependent on the King’s ministry and he faced a strengthened Opposition, making it impossible for him to hold a majority in the Commons. The last time he had taken office during the crisis of 1783, more than twenty years before, he had faced overwhelming odds and outright hostility. This time, he could not count either on the King’s longevity or his sanity; nor were his opponents likely to be swayed by threat of a general election, which had given him such critical leverage the first time around. In any case, clearly the war had to be his first concern. He would have to provide leadership, even if he met resistance at every step. When Pitt’s new Cabinet was hurriedly assembled, the Prime Minister himself assumed so much responsibility that many members joked it was ‘the new Administration of William and Pitt’.

While Pitt was preoccupied with consolidating his position, Hester was concerned with what appeared to be a slackening of interest on Granville’s part. In July, after Pitt appointed him a member of his Privy Council, Granville’s attentions waned. Letters that she sent him (signed with a big looped ‘H’), which once might have been replied to within a matter of hours, now took a day or more to summon a response. Once, he did not arrive for one of their pre-arranged walks; she found herself having to idle along a row of chestnut trees in Marylebone Fields ‘like any common strumpet’.

Had Hester known the truth behind Granville’s absences, it might have come as a shock. Granville was a serial romancer, not always a very faithful one, of a number of women. He had fathered two children with the married Lady Bessborough – Henrietta, always known as Harriet – sister of Lady Georgiana Spencer, a secret which they had managed to successfully conceal from everyone except Georgiana, whom they could trust. Nor did Hester realize that Harriet continued to exert a strong sexual and emotional power over Granville. (Their affair had begun in 1794, when Harriet was thirty-three, and he was twenty. She was by then already the mother of four children with her husband, among them, Caroline, who would grow up to become Lady Caroline Lamb.)

Harriet was well-known to Hester. Although Harriet was loyal to Georgiana’s fervently Whig ménage, like most of London society, both sisters had now thrown their parlour doors open to welcome Pitt’s niece, calling her ‘Hetty’. Of the two, Hester preferred Harriet, thinking her ‘ten times cleverer’ than her sister. It seemed to Hester that Georgiana’s ‘reputation was in great part, the effect of her position; for fine horses, fine carriages, and the éclat that attends a great personage wherever she goes, made up the greatest part of it’. Throughout that summer, as Hester agonized over her affair with Granville, Harriet frequently invited her to her residence at Cavendish House for a tête-à-tête or a small gathering. Hester noticed on one such visit that Granville had left Harriet a miniature statue of Antinous in the vestibule, identical to one he had given her. A fraught Hester was encouraged by the older woman, who was well practised in the art of eliciting confidential information, to pour out her worries.* Soon Harriet chided Granville:

Is it quite honourable, dear G, to encourage a passion you do not mean seriously to return? And which if you do not, must make the owner of it miserable? And how can you be certain of what lengths you or she may be drawn into? We know she has strong passions and indulges them with great latitude: may you not both of you be hurried further than you intend? If Mr Pitt knew even what had passed already, do you think he would like it?

In the same letter, Harriet pleads with Granville to spend the night at her house, rather than ‘sleeping at Mr Pitt’s’.⁶ Meanwhile, Hester’s quick scrawls to him are full of reminders about how welcome he is at Downing Street, telling he could always spend the night ‘if you prefer staying to driving back at night’.⁷

By early August 1804 Granville had neither broken off his affair with Hester nor entirely resumed it. He kept raising her hopes with some throwaway half-hearted comment or suggestion. Hester began hinting to her closest friends, as well as to Pitt himself, that she expected marriage. Suspecting this was not Granville’s intention and worried that the attachment was unhinging her, Pitt called Granville to Downing Street for a private talk. Granville, who was expecting a reprimand, was instead offered the highly prestigious post of Ambassador to St Petersburg, effective immediately. Pitt was anxious to prevent the embarrassing spectacle of his niece being publicly jilted. But he also needed Granville’s charm on his side. St Petersburg, the court of Tsar Alexander, could not have been a more critical posting: Pitt was endeavouring to form an alliance with Russia against Napoleon, and hoped to convince Austria, Prussia and Sweden to join, a move that would pave the way for the creation of the Third Coalition.

Granville, not brave enough to inform Hester in person, sent her this news by letter. He obviously dreaded the prospect of her making an embarrassing scene with Pitt. Granville’s departure was meant to be swift but owing to various delays, he was forced to linger in London for another two months, a highly awkward situation that was not helped by the disconcerting announcement of their engagement in one of the newspapers that September. (Granville assumed Hester had placed it herself, a charge she indignantly denied.) Harriet was greatly rattled, saying that ‘everyone is talking of it’ and adding, ‘I dread this subject coming on the tapis between you …’⁸ Perhaps Harriet feared that faced with an ultimatum, this time Granville might indeed decide to marry, a possibility that filled her with dread. (During his final preparations to leave, the physical affair between Harriet and Granville resumed.)

Right up to the last moment, Hester still teetered on the possibility of a change of plan, half-expecting Granville to turn up suddenly and ask her to go with him. A few days before he left on 11 October 1804, she wrote him a letter that has not survived, but apparently contained the warning words: ‘You shall see what I shall do’. Granville sealed up Hester’s letter and sent it, along with one of his own, to Harriet; he also showed it to Canning, along with a necklace he meant to give her, but Canning advised total silence. Harriet’s reply gives some indication of its content:

How strange Hetty’s note is. It admits but of two interpretations, neither of which I like to give it. The first (her meaning to destroy herself) is too horrible, and the second raises my indignation, and I don’t like believing that, finding there was no hope of your returning her passion enough to marry her, she resolv’d to indulge the inclination – which we know she possesses but too strongly – to the utmost, trusting to your honour for secrecy and to your absence for putting an end to what could not continue without danger. Hetty is so kind to me, it seems ungenerous in me to say this, and perhaps I am mistaken, but it is very odd. I shall always be kind to her, from a strange reason – she belongs in some manner to you.⁹

Hester’s anguish, when she discovered that Granville intended to abandon her, was so great that she did indeed try to kill herself.¹⁰ She did not say whether she did this at Downing Street, York Place or Putney, but she was undoubtedly in London. It must have been on 7 or 8 October. She posted her letter to Granville first. Hester’s body proved to be stronger than she supposed, as she would later confide. She was violently sick, enough to expel the fatal dose, although she managed to severely poison herself, causing damage to her liver, kidneys and lungs. Hester’s suicide attempt was a grave shock to Pitt. He did not call his own doctor, Sir Walter Farquhar (who also tended the gossipy Spencer sisters), but summoned another eminent physician, Dr Henry Cline. Hester was to say that she intended to kill herself, although laudanum was also commonly used to induce abortion. Both the doctor and the servants who attended her would have been sworn to secrecy.

In the immediate aftermath of the overdose, she was in such discomfort from her injured organs that she could not sleep for twelve days, nor could she keep any solid food down. She was in misery not just at the failure at her attempt but because of her physical pain. As she would tell her doctor many years later, she put a lancet under her pillow, hinting that she might once more attempt suicide. She also recalled that even when she was out of danger, for some weeks she remained an alarming scarlet colour, and her forehead was continually prickled with sweat. One of her visitors was her suitor William Noel Hill, who made her smile weakly, comparing her appearance to that of Christ’s on the cross: ‘You will set a crown of thorns on your head – you will sweat blood presently’.¹¹

Hester was convinced that Harriet – with the help of the Devonshire House circle – had conspired against her, and had encouraged Granville to believe she was less than he deserved. From Hester’s perspective, Harriet did not want Granville to escape her clutches. (This turned out to be an accurate prediction. Five years later, Granville would marry Lady Harriet Cavendish, Georgiana’s daughter, his former lover’s niece. As soon as it was decently possible, Harriet, or Harryo as she was called, adopted both children from her husband’s former liaison with her aunt. Harryo was apparently prepared to extend her affections to the children, but retained a lifelong jealousy of Harriet, whose influence over Granville remained undiminished.)

Hester compounded her humiliation by pursuing Granville with a torrent of letters, which soon afterwards she would look back upon with mortification. He did not burn them as she asked; they are by turns plaintive, self-recriminatory and confessional. She wanted him to know how she suffered:

You know that I loved you! Yes, to idolatry; still I wd by no means have you to understand that I offer this as a vindication for the folly of my conduct, on the contrary … the natural levity of my disposition offers no excuse, as from the first moment I discovered that every thought was devoted to you, which was too early in our acquaintance …¹²

She reminded him of the ‘sacred seal of confidence’ agreed between them; and tried to undo the damage of the ‘miserable scrap’ written to him as ‘the dread hour approached’ on the eve of his departure, which was ‘like the hour of death to me’. Pitt, she told him, urged her to put him out of her thoughts: ‘God, what a dunce!’ She wanted to apologize for her behaviour, but claimed she could not control it. ‘I have often told you I was born a tyrant; it is therefore in vain for me to deceive myself’ – and to exonerate him. She blamed herself for being so passionate. ‘As a man, how could you have acted otherwise, persecuted by the affections of a woman whose only object was to gain you, at any price, & who felt but too conscious you never shared the passion you inspired. Oh strange fatality!’¹³ One of her sentences trails off pitifully, ‘My heart is at this moment breaking …’

Although he had done everything possible for Hester, Pitt was horrified. Every day, the newspapers reported suicides, of sad and varied circumstances and methods, described in graphic detail. The official verdict on any suicide was always the same: ‘lunacy’. ‘Self-murder’ was considered deeply shameful. Pitt’s many biographers have never examined the impact that his niece’s suicide attempt might have had on his ability to function, on his own inner sense of confidence, perhaps because he kept it so well hidden. But it is possible that Hester’s crisis was a blow that precipitated his own descent into ill-health. He felt responsible; he may also have felt guilty, not only for concocting the plan to take Granville away from her, but perhaps even for drawing her attention to him in the first place. There are consistent reports of Pitt’s distraction at the end of August that corroborate Hester’s account of her own growing unhappiness and instability. One official noted on 31 August 1804 that he had seen Pitt ‘completely under the influence of anxiety and depression’, and another observer saw him walking alone early in the morning in St James’s Park, ‘looking like death with his eyes staring out of his head’.

As soon as she was able, in early November, Hester fled to Walmer. Pitt had extracted from her the promise that she would never again harm herself and that she would try to forget Granville.¹⁴ While she recovered, Hester consoled herself with the fact that she continued ‘to please Mr Pitt more than ever, if I may judge by his kindness, which if possible, augments’. Still she brooded, refusing to believe that Granville never loved her or intended to marry her.

Although secluded away – first on the Kentish coast and later in Putney – Hester was by no means forgotten, either in London or in St Petersburg. Harriet and Granville exchanged a series of semi-cryptic letters discussing her. Hester’s whereabouts, and the reason for the lengthy amount of time she had remained away from London, apparently remained topics of great interest in society. On 5 March Harriet wrote to Granville:

Hetty is still at Walmer, where she has been very ill and confin’d to her room for some time. I wonder whether my fears were justified … She publishes everywhere your having completely jilted her. I always fear’d this.*¹⁵

Harriet also told him she saw Hester’s would-be suitor, William Noel Hill, and discussed ‘Hetty’, and gathered that at one time there had been ‘great tendresses between them’ until Granville had come along ‘and had driven all the others out’. Harriet had a firm suspicion Hester was pregnant. She wrote to Granville:

My Sis and all her family returned home from a ball last night full of Hetty and the story of the accouchement which they insist upon which she affichés – that is, she goes out without rouge, much fairer than she was, and so languid and faint that she did faint at Mad. Dupre’s. I wonder what all this means. I should not have any doubt after the letter I saw, only you say nothing of it. From my soul I pity her.¹⁶

On 28 June, Harriet wrote again that she had talked with Pitt’s close colleague George Rose about her suspicions about Hester being pregnant. She refers to this as:

… that other circumstance so much believ’d in London. I told him I was certain, what-ever passed between them before his departure, he never gave her the least reason to imagine he had any thoughts of her as a wife; that I believed all the stories were false, but if true, that my opinion of [Granville] was such I was sure it must have been her fault as much as his. He agreed with me in this, but Heaven knows how it is to end.¹⁷

The fact that Harriet went to great lengths to relay these conversations in such detail in her correspondence suggests that Granville refused to give her a straight answer.

The possibility that Hester was indeed pregnant is intriguing. She deliberately made sure Harriet did not see her for months. Even so, she was glimpsed at least once by her sister. Georgiana’s assessing eyes would have been familiar with every sign. Apparently, she was convinced. Still, it would have certainly suited all those who would have preferred to see Fox in place of Pitt if indeed it became widely known that Hester had fallen from grace in such a way. Hester did make at least one and possibly several brief visits to London during this otherwise unusually reclusive time; she had also been sighted in February by Lady Stafford, Lord Granville’s mother, who wrote to her son:

I was sadly disappointed the other day when I saw Ly. Hester Stanhope with Susan. I had figured her to myself as very pretty, in Place of which she look’d like a middle-aged married woman with a dingey Complexion, no Rouge, a broad Face and an unbecoming fur cap.¹⁸

That certainly was a vision calculated to cure any romantic nostalgia.

At Walmer that winter Hester was often alone. Expecting Pitt to return at Easter, she had been busily distracting herself with a surprise for him. At the very edge of Walmer’s grounds, she had often walked by a deep chalk quarry, which had been left as a bleak ravine. She sent the resident gardener, Burfield, to Maidstone to bring back ‘creepers, furze and broom’, which she used to soften the overall effect, having landscaped fully-grown trees and shrubs in amongst the ferns and mossy hollows. It became her own secret garden, a place that somehow represented for her the transformative powers she knew she possessed. But Pitt, prevented by work and ill-health, was never again to return to Walmer.

She and Pitt agreed that it was better for her to live separately for a time. Pitt wanted to avoid any kind of scandal or emotional turbulence. The months between March 1805 and January 1806 are unaccounted for, nor do any letters seem to have been preserved from this time. Where was she living? Harriet, it seems, rarely lost an opportunity to track down her erstwhile friend, especially when she sensed a tantalizing secret. In August 1805 she noted: ‘Hetty is living by herself in London, with Mr Hill there from Morning till Night. Mr Pitt is displeased with her for something.’¹⁹ By December she commented that Hester had been seeing a great deal of her cousin, and possibly living under the same roof: ‘I saw Sir Sydney [sic] Smith yesterday, he has been living with Hetty. I wonder whether acting the part of a consolateur!’²⁰

Hester developed a particular disdain for women like Harriet and Georgiana, so apparently decorous, artful and ‘modern’, yet bankrolled and ultimately controlled by their rich husbands, whose censure they feared beyond any passion they felt for their lovers. She had grown up in the era in which Mary Wollstonecraft had stated in print that society made a fatal mistake by allowing women only the role of domestic slave or ‘alluring mistress’ without recourse to any financial freedom, and by encouraging women to think only of their looks and charms. This was a viewpoint that Hester instinctively held and she expressed it by her actions. But she was no radical polemicist – her father had cured her of that. Hester would have thought feeble-minded Wollstonecraft’s urgings that society divest itself of the monarchy, the military and the church, and she certainly did not believe in the social equality that Wollstonecraft maintained was as necessary to happiness between a man and a woman. If anything, she was an aristocratic individualist, with more than a touch about her of Lord Stanhope’s Minority of One.

Hester was not the only one who felt her reputation was under attack. The winter of 1805 was particularly fraught for Pitt, who was coming under increasing fire from the Opposition. Despite his intensified efforts to create a broader-based administration, he was unable to lure the Fox and Grenville factions into the government, a rapprochement that could only be successful if an agreement could be reached between the King and the Prince of Wales. As long as their estrangement continued, so did their respective vetoes on Fox and Grenville. Pitt was forced to fall back on his last resort – to patch up his friendship with Addington, and the sixty MPs who took their lead from him, whose support he now desperately needed.

A window on these proceedings is provided in a letter written to ‘Dearest Lady H’ from an extremely agitated Canning, dated 1 January 1805, in which he expresses his shock at Pitt’s decision. He is replying to a letter Hester had sent him the day before in which she had obviously ‘leaked’ the information to him that Addington was to be made a Minister, and that he himself was not; the inference being that Canning had obviously expected to be made Foreign Secretary, and had now found that the position will be going to Pitt’s old loyalist, Lord Mulgrave. He wrote to her early that morning, after ‘as much sleep as I could get after such a letter’ and told her ‘… I am nothing, I cannot help it; I cannot face the House of Commons or walk the streets in the state of things as I am’.²¹ It is a lengthy, detailed and personal letter, in which he agonizes about his colleagues, written in the kind of shorthand that suggests he had long since let her into the inner workings of his mind. He asks her to intercede with ‘Mr P’ on his behalf:

Through you I come to him with more confidence in not being misunderstood … You stood instead of pages of preface and apology and are a vouchee for us to each other that we mean each other kindly and fairly.²²

Canning clearly expected her to still be privy to the sort of confidences from Pitt that kept him writhing in anticipation. Many of Pitt’s ministers had pointedly suggested to Pitt that her influence on state matters would not be tolerated. Pitt laughed this off as an absurdity. Hester would later say:

There might be some apparent levity, both as regarded affairs of the Cabinet and my own, but I always knew what I was doing. When Mr Pitt was reproached for allowing me such unreserved liberty of action in State matters, and in affairs where his friends advised him to question me on the motives of my conduct, he always answered: I let her do as she pleases, for if she were resolved to cheat the devil, she could do it.

The mood towards Pitt had soured. The fact that Britain was at war – engaged on two fronts now, having committed the country to the Spanish conflict – enraged his countrymen further. Pitt’s popularity sank lower when, in February 1805, he presented his budget to the Commons requesting a loan of £20 million and further tax rises on salt, postal services, horses, property and legacies.

Meanwhile the Opposition was seeking out damning evidence wherever it could. Finally a chink in Pitt’s armour came in the form of the Tenth Report of the Commission of Naval Inquiry, which had been set up as a watchdog over the navy’s management practices. It was the perfect opportunity to point the finger of financial indiscretion at the otherwise incorruptible Pitt. The matter became one of grave moral laxity, on which the very integrity of the administration rested. Even Pitt’s dearest friends, such as Wilberforce, were moved to vote against him.

When the vote took place on 9 April 1805, the numbers were equal, so that the Speaker, whose face ‘turned white as ashes’, was forced to cast the deciding ballot. After a pause of ten minutes, the visibly uneasy Speaker announced his vote against the government. Pitt was seen leaning in his chair, pushing his little cocked hat down to obscure his face, so that only those near to him could see that tears coursed down his cheeks.

Hester knew him well enough to let him be, knowing that after the humiliation of such a defeat, and having so many among his former followers vote against him, he needed comfort more than righteous indignation. From that point on, she felt contempt for a great many of those men she had formerly entertained on Pitt’s behalf. The stirrings by those loyal to Pitt but now anxious for the formation of a new administration were increasing, but they did not dare to act while he was still in power.

Early in January 1806, the devastating news of Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz and the collapse of the Third Coalition proved to be Pitt’s death-blow. Hester rushed to his side and was deeply shocked to see his altered appearance when he was brought to Putney Heath. As he was helped out of his carriage, she knew he would not survive long. ‘I said to myself, “It is all over with him.” He was supported by the arms of two people, and had a stick, or two sticks, in his hands, and as he came up, panting for breath.’

Traditional dinners were held at Downing Street without Pitt. On 18 January, Pitt ordered Hester to attend the official celebration of Queen Charlotte’s birthday, insisting he did not want her social life to be curtailed. An issue of the Lady’s Magazine for the following month describes her appearance at the event:

Lady Hester Stanhope, was, as usual, dressed with much style and elegance, in black and green velvet ornamented with embossed gold, and studded with rubies, which had a most brilliant effect. Headdress: feathers and diamonds.²³

Parliament opened on 21 January 1806. The mood was subdued; the Opposition agreed to defer their action to bring down the administration for a week, as they waited to see how long Pitt might last. On the morning of 23 January, Pitt agreed to pray, saying that he had ‘neglected prayer too much to allow him to hope that it could be very efficacious now’. He then asked to rewrite his will. Had he not managed this last act, Hester’s future might have been quite different. Pitt knew he had only debts to leave behind him, but he also knew that his request for specific bequests would receive serious consideration by the Crown and by Parliament.

James would recall that Hester was infuriated that Pitt’s doctor, Farquhar, would not let her in to see Pitt for a final farewell. But when the doctor had slipped out for dinner, she went into his room.

Though even then wandering a little, he immediately recollected her, and with his usual angelic mildness wished her future happiness, and gave her a most solemn blessing and affectionate farewell. On her leaving the room I entered it; and for some time afterwards Mr Pitt continued to speak of her, and several times repeated, ‘Dear soul! I know she loves me. Where is Hester? Is Hester gone?’²⁴

Pitt died later that day, and Hester cut a lock of his grey hair before his body was removed. She would keep it all her days in a little pearl locket, as one of her most precious possessions.

Within a week of Pitt’s death, the House of Commons voted to put £40,000 towards Pitt’s personal debts – the present-day equivalent would be more than £2 million. In addition, the King personally granted Pitt’s dying wish to leave Hester and her sisters with pensions. Hester would be given £1,200 a year – around £60,000 today. It was an extraordinary sum for one who had never held any political office. (By comparison, her cousin, Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of Acre, had been awarded a pension of £1,000.) Grizel and Lucy were also provided for, and received £600 each. The King understood Pitt’s request to be somewhat unusual, but he granted it in the knowledge that Pitt wished it. Besides, he had always liked Hester’s spirit.

Pitt’s funeral on Saturday, 22 February 1806, was a solemn and grand event. Preceded by fifes, drums and trumpets, the cortège passed from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, and was attended by a black-suited multitude of all the Members of Parliament and the peerage, as well as three royal dukes. Pitt’s elder brother Chatham, along with the Stanhope brothers, walked beside the coffin, following the same route as the procession in 1778 for Lord Chatham; once again the Abbey’s cavernous halls echoed the name of William Pitt, Prime Minister. For two days, Pitt’s body had lain in state in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, hung with banners of the Chatham arms. Tens of thousands of mourners paid their respects. Many were visibly affected during the ceremony: Wilberforce was seen crying openly, Mulgrave was ‘scarcely … able to support himself’, and Canning described ‘a feeling of loneliness & dismay which I have never felt half so strongly before’. Even Fox was heard to say that it was ‘as if there was something missing in the world – a chasm, a blank that cannot be supplied’. Amongst them, dressed in black, a stricken, dry-eyed Hester watched as Pitt’s body was lowered into the Chatham family vault.

* Pitt’s bachelor status puzzled the nation. It seemed that he somehow lacked the nerve for marriage. In the twenty-first century it is easy to speculate that he may have had homosexual tendencies but there seems to be no evidence for this. What Hester thought about this state of affairs is difficult to decipher. That she would later tell Meryon that she believed Eleanor Eden was ‘the only women Pitt had ever loved’ might be misleading. She, like many close to Pitt, concluded that his life was absolutely wedded to politics.

* But there was something else, about which it seems the entire family closed ranks: the birth of an illegitimate child in Europe that was certainly Camelford’s. The mother’s identity was never revealed. Shortly after the time Hester had travelled with Mahon in Italy, Lord Grenville had written to Camelford on 10 February 1803, just before his ill-fated arrest in France, with news ‘of a very painful communication which I have to make to you and which it is of the utmost importance for you to know’. More tantalizingly, Grenville had been informed that Camelford had fathered a child, a daughter, about whom the young peer had apparently known nothing. The child had been discreetly adopted immediately after birth. By August 1810, the mother would be vaguely described as being now ‘principally abroad’. No money was ever requested. In my opinion, the possibility that Hester might in fact have been the mother and gone abroad to have the child cannot be ruled out, and would certainly explain her eldest brother’s reaction to her in Florence.

* Lord Granville Leveson Gower, who would become 1st Earl Granville in 1833, is variously referred to here as Leveson Gower and Granville, the name used by his intimates.

* Camelford’s fateful duel had taken place in the early hours of the morning in the meadows outside Holland House in Kensington; he died on 10 March 1804, aged twenty-nine. He was buried in the crypt of St Anne’s Church in Dean Street, Soho.

* While William Noel Hill’s elder brother Lord Berwick was wealthy, with a stately pile in Shropshire, Hill was less so. Famously, the two brothers stood against one another in the Shrewsbury elections of 1796, each spending what others would have regarded as fortunes several times over to secure votes in a spectacularly corrupt campaign. Hill won, and kept his seat as a Tory MP until 1812.

* Hester was aware that Harriet devoured French novels; she might not have known that one of her favourites was Les Liaisons dangereuses, and that she had teased Granville for being a little like Valmont.

* There are conflicting reports of Hester’s whereabouts and condition throughout this time: in a letter to her son on 7 March 1805, Lady Stafford mentions going to the King’s ball at Windsor the previous Monday, where she says ‘Ly S was there’ and that ‘Ly B’ was not.

4 A Summoning of Strength

Today, a passer-by stopping at the corner of Montagu Square (which Hester always pronounced ‘Mountague’) might peer curiously at No. 4, a plain, three-storeyed, brown-brick building in a row of elegant Georgian townhouses. It overlooks a long, rectangular garden, planted with plane trees and orderly flower beds, which like most of London’s private gardens can only be entered with a resident’s key. Hester might well have enjoyed the irony that had she lived several generations later, she might not have needed to go to the Middle East: by then, the Middle East would have come to her. Hardly more than a hundred metres away is Edgware Road, which although a greyer, less vibrant version of Beirut’s Hamra, is nonetheless a mecca for London’s Arab community, bustling with newsstands touting the latest copies of L’Orient Le Jour and men in cafés puffing away at narguileh pipes. Black-robed women flit by; supermarkets sell mahmoul cakes, orange-blossom water and zahtar along with other staples for anyone homesick for the sight of Mount Lebanon.

When Hester came to live here in 1806, Edgware Road was known as Watling Street, part of the old Roman road to St Albans. No. 4 would be her home for just over three years. It was close to Marylebone Fields (now Regent’s Park), and just a short hackney ride from some of her haunts: Jermyn Street for cheese at Paxton & Whitfield; Hatchards bookshop and the Royal Academy on Piccadilly; Hookham’s Circulating Library and Burlington Arcade and her equestrian outfitter, Mr S. Clark of Golden Square. Her local shops were on New Quebec Street, which had a butcher, dairyman, cheesemonger, tea dealer and grocer. In the mews was a livery stable where horses could be hired; Hester would go to ride with what she termed the ‘swinish multitude’ in Hyde Park whenever she could on Sundays, not just at the fashionable hour of five o’clock, when ‘the Ring’ was so full of elegant coaches the air was thick with ochre dust.

After Pitt’s death, Hester found herself in a limbo on all fronts. Although a royal pension had been granted her, it would not commence until 30 June, and the various formalities attached to it would all take time. After legal fees and other costs, it would be reduced to less than £1,000 per annum. If she was cautious, and especially if she lived away from London, she ought to have been able to manage comfortably on such an amount.

Fox, in a mood of beneficence, made Hester an offer that may in fact have come from the King himself, and must have imagined she could not refuse it. She was given a choice of residences. One was apparently ‘as good as ten thousand pounds a year’. As Hester recalled, ‘He was to make me ranger of some park, with a house; and then I was to have a house in town, and the rest was to be done the way they shuffle those things through the public offices.’ The alternative was for her to live in a grace-and-favour royal apartment, possibly at Windsor Castle, although this was conditional on her becoming a courtier. Hester rejected both offers: ‘I rather chose to live independent’. When Fox’s emissary Mr Ward told her she would live to repent her refusal, she told him that it was not

… from a personal disregard from Mr Fox that she refused; because when I asked Mr Pitt, upon one occasion, who was the cleverest man in England, he answered, ‘Mr Fox’; but as the world only knew Mr Pitt and Mr Fox as opposed [sic] to each other, I should be considered as receiving benefits from Mr Pitt’s enemy.

As for Mahon, she loathed him more than ever before. He reneged on the promise he had made Pitt, to shoulder the expenses accumulated by his brothers for their military uniforms and provisions, and refused to vouch for their debts. He told her that as far as he was concerned his promise to Pitt was now void. Horrified, Hester had replied: ‘Good God, would you have your brothers arrested?’ to which he answered, ‘It would not be the first time that a Captain of a regiment had gone to gaol.’ Pitt’s friend, William Lowther, the second Earl of Lonsdale, came to the rescue, giving James a draft for two thousand pounds, a loan that Hester, in time, repaid.

Meanwhile, there was not a great deal of respect between Mahon and his father. Pitt’s connections had gained Mahon a sinecure; and with his father-in-law’s help, he had embarked on a political career, that year becoming Tory MP for Windsor and later successfully running for Hull. He had tried, and ultimately failed, to take legal action against his father, accusing him of squandering the family estate.

Hester took the house in Montagu Square as a home not just for herself, but for her brothers, Charles and James, when they were on leave, aware that they needed to make a good impression to move up in the world. When ‘the boys’ were in town, she always had breakfast on the table from nine to twelve, ‘with tea and coffee and chicken, and tongue, and cold meat, and all that’. It was the first time she had ever had a house of her own; for the next month or so, she set about furnishing it in her own style ‘with everything customary in fashionable life’. Some of the furniture she had brought over from Downing Street, where she had decided it had been of ‘no use’, including some of the stiff, formal leather-backed sofas and chairs Pitt had used for his bad back and camp beds for her brothers’ officer friends whenever they stayed the night.

Her ménage included the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Williams, formerly a servant in Pitt’s household. Elizabeth and her sister Louisa were the daughters of Pitt’s trusted equerry, Edward Williams; they came with him from Holwood to Walmer and Putney Heath, and for a time they were educated at his expense. Bright, gentle and pretty, Elizabeth had been Pitt’s particular favourite, and had been in his service at York Place. As well as Miss Williams, Hester employed a housekeeper, a doorman and a small number of servants, among them Ann Fry, the girl who had become pregnant at Chevening. Calling herself ‘Mrs’ Fry now, Ann told Hester that she had managed to spend nine years at a respectable institution in London – Mrs Davis’s Boarding School for Girls – ‘without anyone guessing she was a mother’.¹ Now she had come to Hester to beg employment and to be given shelter. In the years to come, both Elizabeth Williams and Ann Fry were to find their lives inextricably bound up with the path their mistress was to take.

If Hester needed any reminder of the descent that even an aristocratic lady like herself could face if her fortunes turned entirely, she did not have to look far. On nearby Paddington Street, just off Baker Street, there was a large workhouse, whose inmates included the old and infirm, lunatics, orphans, foundling children and vagrants. Among them could be found formerly beautiful, once-fêted mistresses of wealthy men, now discarded, destitute and shunned.

She was well aware of how thin was the line between having a lover and becoming a kept mistress. Nearby Gloucester Place was full of wealthy mistresses and courtesans, some discreet, some ostentatious. One of them was Harriette Wilson. Another was Mary Ann Clarke, the blonde mistress of the King’s son, the Duke of York, then Commander-in-Chief of the army. Mary Ann, who was sometimes glimpsed walking along Bond Street with a retinue of African servants, would be undone by too flagrantly using her influence to sell army commissions; the Duke would desert her in 1809. But for the moment, she held amusing soirées full of uniformed men, and if the Duke was there, Hester and her brothers would often drop in. Although not overly impressed with Mary Ann, she loved to poke fun at the Duchess, whom she described as ‘a painted wife, with half a dozen fine gentlemen about her, shaking the hair-powder on her face’ and ordering the windows open ‘at dinner time, in a cold November day, to let out the smells of a parcel of dogs’. It was quite natural, she thought, with such an ‘uncomfortable home’ that the Duke thought himself ‘at liberty to take a little pleasure elsewhere’. Although she could be blind to her own lapses of romantic judgement, Hester was a shrewd observer of those of others. Hester mimicked women like Mary Ann, rolling her eyes, sucking in her cheeks, smirking and assuming her mock-lascivious look. She may have been damning, and she tried to ensure that her brothers were never prey to such women – ‘the rascally set’ she called them. But as she was well aware, being a woman in Georgian London could be a precarious business.

Hester was now thirty. Having discovered the freedom of independence, she was loath to give it up. Some of that independence meant that she was free to establish friendships with men of her choosing, and if it was considered slightly scandalous that she was an unmarried woman in a house that was often full of men this was how she preferred it. One of her most persistent callers was William Noel Hill, fresh from a diplomatic posting in Austria, evidently still holding out hopes that Hester might settle down with him.* That October, once again, Harriet Bessborough set the rumour mill in motion:

Ly. Hol [Lady Holland] told me yesterday as certain that Hetty’s marriage with Mr Hill is declared and is to take place immediately: can this be so? If it is, il est bien bon. God bless you. I wish it may be true, for I sincerely wish poor Hetty to be well and comfortably settled.²

The engagement never materialized. Feeling himself rejected, the disgruntled Hill commented around this time that he thought Hester ‘must have some strong occupation’ or outlet for her talents. Sardonically, Hester began to refer to him as ‘Christ Jesus’, resenting his preachings. Some months later, Canning’s visits had also become noticeably frequent. In March 1807 he accepted the position of Foreign Secretary, and the degree to which he continued to seek out Hester’s company indicates how useful he found her political insights.

In July 1807 a familiar face from her Walmer days came back into her orbit. She had met Sir John Moore when he was in command at nearby Shorncliffe Camp, and immediately liked him, finding the Scottish-born-and-bred soldier refreshingly scornful of politicians. Then – as again now – he was a particularly handsome man; tall, with his greying locks close-cropped and his military greatcoat and necktie always slightly askew. Now he came to see her, to pay his respects and talk about Pitt. He found her changed, perhaps less impetuous. Her political understanding, her mental quickness and her familiarity with the preoccupations he faced, impressed him. It may not have taken long for Hester and Moore to realize they wished to spend more time in each other’s company.

Judging by the trust and respect, and sheer frequency, of the letters that followed, Moore, who had managed to remain a bachelor all these years, may well have felt that he had finally met his match. Pitt’s old offer to make her one of his generals was a standing joke between them. Moore was forty-seven, and was in many ways a far more realistic choice for Hester than Granville. It would not have been his nature to mislead her, and he also had an air of sophistication unusual for a soldier, spoke several European languages and had already distinguished himself in America in the War of Independence and among other posts, in Corsica, the West Indies and Egypt. A complicity grew between them, much more than mere friendship. Moore seems to have been good for Hester; the influence of his methodical but passionate nature allowed her to regulate her otherwise erratic moods.

On his return to London Moore had been informed that his services would be welcome in Spain, but not as Commander of the Peninsular Campaign as had been widely predicted. It was a humiliating blow. Moore did not mix well with authority; his superiors and the current administration generally frustrated and exasperated him. In October 1807, a peace treaty was signed with Portugal, followed by another with Spain in January. Both Canning and Castlereagh, the Secretary of War, were impatient to make a real strike at the French. A decision was made to send the British army already in Portugal, reinforced with an expeditionary force from Britain, to support the Spanish.

With Hester, Moore felt free to pick over every conceivable angle of his position, to fulminate about what he thought of Castlereagh’s military plans (‘plausible verbose nonsense and a sort of gibberish’, he complained to her) instead of having to censor himself. She was indignant on his behalf, perhaps – and this would have been something entirely novel for both of them – recognizing the pleasure of being two against the world.

It is fair to guess that Moore might not have been her choice when she was younger, nor she his, but now they were no longer so young. In March 1808 she was thirty-two, and she must have recognized that Moore was not the kind of man to make her suffer deliberately. As often happens when people know they are about to be separated, emotions surfaced at the last minute. By the time of Moore’s departure, they both realized the extent of their attachment. What precisely had been agreed between them is not clear. Everything about his letters to her from the frontline suggests that he felt very tenderly towards her, greatly respected her opinions and actively missed her. He trusted her with highly confidential information about his superiors. She meanwhile appeared to be full of the sort of optimistic energy and quiet purpose that only a woman confident in a new love can be.

Her brothers would be leaving for Spain too. The hope that they might be near Moore at least gave her greater confidence that she would see them all safe again.

In the autumn of 1808 British forces marched into Spain and Portugal, in the sanguine belief that the patriots would soon loosen the French grip on the country, and expecting to be greeted with open arms by the inhabitants. Immense amounts of financial aid and military provisions had been shipped to the insurgents. Yet the British were in for a shock. The Spanish and Portuguese armies were disorganized and poorly commanded; as well as shortages of food, clothing and equipment, there was a complete lack of cavalry and artillery.

After his arrival, first in Portugal and then in Spain, Moore wrote to Hester every few days, letters of great length and unwavering fondness. It is clear that hers are just as urgent and detailed, and that she is all the time worrying about him in the field, and about his reputation, which is under fire from ministers at home; she sends him every useful tidbit she can. ‘I believe they will make no attack on me until they see how I extricate myself here,’ he tells her, adding that he intends to let the public judge him by releasing his letters, ‘which contain a plain narrative’. He hopes she can look at them all before he publishes them, he tells her, ‘if ever I have the pleasure of seeing you again’. He reassures her that although he has not yet seen Charles with the 50th, he has ‘at last contrived an arrangement … with Sir Henry, who is the most liberal of men, to take the 50th with me’ so that Charles should be with him as aide-de-camp soon. He tells Hester: ‘I wish you were here with us. The climate now is charming; and we should give you riding enough, and in your red habit à la Amazone, you would animate and do us much good.’³

A month later, on 20 November, from Salamanca, Moore reassures her again after she has written to him asking him to receive James too. ‘I can refuse you nothing,’ he tells her. He advises her to notify James that he must obtain leave to come to Spain and join him, but warns her: ‘He will, however come too late; I shall be already beaten. I am within four marches of the French, with only a third of my force, and as the Spaniards have been dispatched in all quarters, my junction with the other two-thirds is very precarious. When we do join, we shall be very inferior to the enemy, we have been completely deceived … and now the discovery comes a little too late.’⁴

Moore disagreed with his government’s military tactics in Spain from the outset. Left in command in the Peninsula, he was faced with overwhelming odds. Moore’s troops left Salamanca for Old Castile on 11 December, hoping to distract the French away from Madrid. Very soon afterwards, however, he heard that not only had Madrid fallen, but that Napoleon, having only now realized the British were there, was unleashing the full force of his army against them – some 80,000 men. Knowing there was no glory in a vanquished army, Moore immediately realized his only objective was to save his forces from annihilation, and marched them north in the hope they would be smoothly evacuated by the Royal Navy.

For more than two weeks after the fall of Madrid, things seemed to be going well. By the end of December, though, a combination of poor logistics and horrendous weather caused chaos on both sides. By 27 December, Moore had managed to reach what appeared to be reasonable safety, and the next day began what would become known as the ‘retreat to Corunna’. His forces were then joined by some 6,000 Spanish soldiers, many barely able to stand, malnourished and a great number succumbing to infectious diseases such as dysentery, typhus and cholera. Soon the mood of desperation spread to the redcoats, and discipline began to break down. Moore would have been horrified at the trail of theft, rape and murder left behind by his fine battalions. By the time his depleted army reached Corunna, it was in a disastrous state. The ships had been held up, while the French were pressing hard, and before the British could be evacuated they were subjected to heavy bombardment.

At Corunna on 16 January 1809 Moore made a last-ditch stand against intensified assault by Marshal Soult. Late that afternoon, while directing his reserves, Moore was cut down by a cannonball volley that seemed to onlookers to strike from nowhere. It shattered his vital organs and bones; it was clear to those who ran to help him that he was beyond help, although he was not, it seems, disfigured. Moore’s long-time companion and closest friend Colonel Paul Anderson was with him. When two surgeons came hurrying up to him, he told them they would do better to attend injured soldiers; he knew he was dying. As he lay on his camp bed, the anxious faces of his men pressed around; he tried to give Anderson instructions for his mother and sister, and asked about other officers who had been wounded. At that moment, young James Stanhope rushed up in time to catch the General’s last words: ‘Stanhope, remember me to your sister.’

It was a memorably graceful death; he was buried on the ramparts of Corunna the following day. By 17 January most of the British troops had managed to board the waiting HMS Victory – later known to the world as Nelson’s ship at the Battle of Trafalgar – and the following day, the entire fleet sailed for home. They would not receive a hero’s welcome when they arrived on 23 January. Instead, a bewildered British public would watch aghast as Moore’s headless army returned, having lost some 2,000 men, with one-fifth of their number missing, presumed dead, and several thousand more wounded and sick.

Hester heard the news about Moore within hours of the Victory’s arrival. She was devastated. Everything she had begun to hope for – a new life – had been taken away from her at a stroke. In the first days after Moore’s death, Hester behaved like a war widow.

What she did not learn immediately was that her brother – ‘dearest, delightful amusing Charles’ – died the same afternoon as Moore. A bullet ripped through his heart as he turned to congratulate his men in the 50th Regiment, which Moore had put him in charge of. ‘Moore received his death-blow shortly after, and my poor brother fell nearly at the same time. Thank heaven the latter did not suffer one instant … the gallant General lived for three hours, but the agony he was in never deranged his senses; he was perfectly collected …’ It was Colonel Anderson who brought her the news, and who stayed while she broke down. Continuing her letter to an unidentified friend, she confides:

You may wonder why I tell you all this; but grief has its peculiarities, and thinking of nothing else but those I have lost, I like to talk of them, and the only one I have devoted my time to since is Colonel Anderson, knowing the nature of my feelings, the instant he arrived in town he came to me and told me everything in detail.⁵

She went on to say it was a miracle that James survived; his cloak had been shot through, he was hit and wounded; four men standing close to him were mown down by a cannonball. ‘I feel as though I have just waked from a horrid dream …’⁶

Grief left a powerful mark on Hester. Within the space of three years, she had lost her favourite brother, and two dearly loved men, one of whom might have become her husband. To those whom she felt had engineered the circumstances that had led to the débâcle at Corunna, and who now came to offer her sympathy, like Canning and her uncle Chatham, she was cold. She felt deeply aggrieved for Moore, aware that in the souring of the public opinion about the Peninsular War, the general had played a part. She especially blamed Castlereagh for his readiness in the House of Commons to inculpate Moore; on that subject she felt ‘my indignation is so great that I should have torn out his black heart’.⁷ She immediately wrote to the Prime Minister, her cousin Lord Grenville, in a tone brimming with accusation, fearing that he would somehow deny Moore ‘the honours he is so well entitled to from his country’. She wanted him to know of the ‘unlimited confidence’ that Pitt had ‘placed in Sir John Moore’s judgement and exertions’, adding that ‘no man could have been more ill-treated than the General’.* Hester was clearly worried that his reputation would be tarnished – ‘I have great apprehensions that they will even persecute him beyond the grave, by blackening his memory …’.

So, for Hester, 1809 began as a year of terrible sorrow. It was hard for her to see much point to her life in London. Her one concern was James, who although he had recovered physically from his ordeal, showed every sign of what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. On 27 April, at Montagu Square, Hester rewrote her will, which she had witnessed by Colonel Anderson. With Charles dead, she made James the heir to all her belongings, as well as her share in their dead mother’s estate, which they would be entitled to only if their uncle Lord Chatham died without issue.

She and James had decided to go abroad together for a while. Sicily was to be their destination. The balmy island climate had long been considered the best place for convalescence, but getting there was not an altogether easy proposition. All but the most determined travellers deferred their journey to Europe around this time; Hester and James would have to find passage on a naval frigate. With the French chafing at the blockade, private vessels, although tolerated in the main, were generally thought too dangerous. Still, Hester had friends in high places; arrangements would be made.

In the meantime, Hester set about packing up Montagu Square. She took a small set of rooms at 14 Green Street, just off Oxford Street, and cast about for somewhere to rent cheaply for the summer. Soon after Moore’s departure the previous year, she had gone to Bath for several weeks, and on one of her lengthier jaunts had discovered the beautiful scenery of the Wye Valley in Wales.

She returned to Builth Wells, an otherwise unprepossessing, rather closed-faced town that sat on some of the most bucolic landscape she had ever seen. On her last visit she had stayed at the Royal Oak (now the Lion Hotel) for several weeks. This time her past happiness was a painful reminder of what she had lost: she stayed no more than a night in May 1809, before making her way further up the valley.

On that first visit, Hester had befriended the town’s best-known residents, the Reverend Price and his son Thomas, both fiery Welsh nationalists she had taken a great liking to. For the time being, father and son offered Hester kindly, lively company, though if she had come to Wales to find quiet, she would hardly have found it in the Prices’ dining room, which was invariably full of impressionable, idealistic young men, shouting and speaking in Welsh, then apologizing and translating for the English-speakers. Although remote, it was not as removed from the war as one might suppose. The Black Mountains had several camps where French prisoners of war were being held; Thomas Price spent part of his time teaching them Welsh.

It was to Reverend Price that Hester had written to ask if she could rent a property on the banks of the Irfon, three miles from town, that she remembered seeing the previous year. ‘Glan Irfon’ was a simple, dark-slate-walled gabled farmhouse, sheltered by a ridge, with a pleasant view overlooking meadows. By late spring the landscape would have been soft and green, with hill-slopes full of lazing cattle and forest-like thickets; wildflowers everywhere and wild roses tumbling over the hedgerows. The farmhouse was never meant to sleep more than four or so people; there was only one other guest bedroom. During the time Hester was there, with James and other visitors, as well as Elizabeth Williams, it was packed to the rafters.

By the time Hester arrived in the Wye Valley, she had made a new acquaintance. The friendship she would form with the flamboyant Venezuelan revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda would do much to help her recover her enthusiasm for life, and galvanize her ambitions. He was fifty-nine to her thirty-three, well-built and olive-skinned with piercing hazel eyes, his greying hair tied back in a ponytail which gave him a piratical look.

On 29 April 1809 Miranda scrawled his first impressions of Hester on the back of a dinner invitation from James, who declared his sister was ‘very anxious’ to make his acquaintance:

I have dined with Lady Hester Stanhope who enchanted me with her amiability, erudition, and liberal conversation. At one time she talked about Rome and Italy, which she had visited; at another time she talked about Greece, which she wished to visit and which she was not able to see when she was in Naples. She also talked about Venezuela whose independence she wished to see established upon a basis of rational liberty. In this connection she said to me that her uncle Mr Pitt had upon various occasions talked to her with interest and warmth about this affair, and had particularly lauded my patriotic ideas. Ever since Lady Hester had wished to become acquainted with me, and had also wished to visit my interesting country. She said further that if I needed a recruit of her species, she was ready to follow me there though it should be to do nothing else than to manage schools and hospitals. All this she descanted upon with greatest jocularity and grace until midnight when I retired most highly impressed with her conversation, good judgement … and interesting person. She is one of the most delightful women I have ever known – and if her behaviour accords with my first impressions – she is certainly a rarity among her sex.⁸

Pitt had first encountered Miranda in 1790, and initially encouraged his idea of a British-sponsored expedition to South America. But he may have deliberately made sure the dashing, much-travelled, multi-lingual ladykiller did not meet his niece. By 1809 Miranda’s life history was a complicated one that had encompassed manifold allegiances. In the name of fighting for liberty, his many adventures had already included stints as a Spanish military officer, a colonel in the Russian army, and a commander of French Revolutionary forces in the Netherlands. Whichever country he was in, he was invariably accused of being an enemy spy. Around London, Miranda was celebrated for his spell-binding tirades at the tables of Charles Fox, Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce.

Shortly after their first meeting, Hester dined with Miranda again, and this time Bentham – Miranda’s neighbour on Grafton Street – was present.* Within two weeks Miranda was calling Hester ‘Querida’ and told his friends that she was ‘the most delicious woman I have yet encountered’.⁹ This, from a man whose nickname was ‘the Casanova of the New World’, was indeed a high compliment.

In Wales, Hester lost no time in writing to Miranda. She knew that he was anxious for definite action to bring about Venezuelan independence, his ‘Great Cause’ he called it, in pursuit of which he had already accumulated considerable debts. Just as she had been with Moore, she was sympathetic to Miranda’s misadventures in his attempts to interest Canning and Castlereagh in funding his proposed expedition. She shared admiration for his zeal with Bentham and Wilberforce – the former was already drafting legislation for the new Venezuelan Republic, while the latter, who found Miranda ‘very entertaining and instructive’, hoped he would be of some influence in abolishing slavery in his own country.¹⁰ Miranda promised to come out to see her in August. She replied in a slightly teasing letter dated 31 July 1809:

I cannot wait until I receive your letter to express how much I am delighted with the prospect of seeing you in this part of the world; I wish I could flatter myself with the idea that I could contribute to your amusement while here … and that you will spend as much more of yr time as you can spare from yr books, a certain number of which I suppose travel with you …¹¹

The farmhouse, she told him with some circumspection, would be too small and cramped for him to find comfortable, and she suggested he stay at the Royal Oak. All the same, he seems to have dined with her every night, bringing with him his two flutes – ebony and silver – on which he played melancholy tunes. Miranda remained long enough to ride with Hester through the Brecon mountains to Abergavenny and other beauty spots, staying at small inns along the route.

The question of whether Hester had an affair with Miranda has been raised many times. Almost all of Miranda’s biographers boldly assert this was the case. The stronger possibility, given the age difference, is that she did not. Yet there was undoubtedly something of an erotic charge between them, and a passionate enthusiasm to their meetings. Hester did not seem to care what others thought of their travelling together or the fact that they were often alone together. Both were flamboyant extroverts who craved public acclaim, and in Hester, Miranda clearly recognized a kindred spirit. But although he was regularly unfaithful to the mother of his two sons, Sarah Andrews, he was not seeking a permanent replacement. What is certain is that within a short time, they had achieved the kind of intimacy only very close friends can manage.

He called her ‘the divine Irenide’, a teasing reference to the woman she might become in ‘his’ South America. Miranda may have been a daredevil and a dreamer, but his dreams had real substance. He inspired Hester to think that life could be different and better. Miranda’s belief that men and women should be equal in society, and that women should be admitted to higher education and free to direct their talents where they saw fit, was probably for Hester a revolutionary idea (and to her far sweeter on Miranda’s lips than the same notions already expressed by Mary Wollstonecraft). In his new South America, there would be no limit to human achievement; the new Venezuela would be the most enticing of all future meritocracies, set against marvels of natural beauty and without the weight of the old, exhausted, and over-refined cultures of England and Europe. Certainly, he caused Hester to rethink much of what she believed about a great many things; and once Miranda had begun opening doors in her mind, it was hard for her to shut them.

As summer drew to an end, Hester packed up once more. Like anyone who moves around a great deal, she seems to have felt a certain fatigue towards her belongings. She left behind two of her prized possessions, large paintings of Pitt and the Duke of York.¹² She also planted an orange blossom tree – the ancient symbol of marriage and fertility – at the foot of the farmhouse garden.¹³ Perhaps this was a gesture towards what she felt had been taken away from her, or an expression of hope that her chances were not all over – or perhaps there was something that had been precious to her that she wanted to bury underneath it.

When Charles Meryon stepped through the door of Hester’s temporary lodgings at Green Street, he was surprised to be met not by a footman or maid, but by a foreign-looking gentleman who introduced himself as General Miranda.¹⁴ Meryon, who was still only partially qualified, was completing his medical studies at St Thomas’s. Nonetheless, ‘Dr Meryon’ was ushered directly into the dining room to sit at a table, which was scattered with maps and books.

The man whose future would for ever be entangled with Hester’s was tall and slender, with pleasant, somewhat deferential features, and a mouth that had a tendency to curve upwards into a smile no matter what his mood. His chestnut hair was fashionably close-cropped, and he often blinked his long sand-coloured lashes. He had pink-rimmed eyes. Unknown to Hester, his eyes were raw from crying. Four days earlier, a nineteen-year-old girl with whom he had been conducting an affair had died as she gave birth to their daughter. By cruel coincidence the day of her funeral – Tuesday, 9 January 1810 – was the same day he had received a note from Hester summoning him. One of Meryon’s friends was the son of Dr Cline, under whom he studied, and his name had been put forward.

By the time Meryon left that night, he had accepted all Hester’s terms. They were to spend a year or more in Sicily. He had to be ready to leave immediately. She asked him about his family at Rye, and about his travels to France. He was startled when she suddenly changed the subject and told him that she hoped she could rely on his discretion. She related an anecdote about a certain doctor employed by someone she knew, and whose name was also familiar to Meryon, who lost his practice after saying of a patient after her death that she ‘was one of the most beautiful corpses he had ever seen, and that he had stood contemplating her for a quarter of an hour’. This woman had been ‘a person of rank’, like herself, Hester warned, and that doctor’s ‘comment, made in an unguarded moment to a friend, ruined him’.

Certainly, as he mulled over the meeting that night, Meryon must have wondered at what an extraordinary turn his life had just taken.

Around three in the morning on 13 January 1810 Hester closed the door of 14 Green Street for the last time. James and his army friend Nassau Sutton were already in Portsmouth, as was Meryon; she had also sent her servants Elizabeth Williams and Ann Fry ahead of her. There were no witnesses to her sudden mood of agitation. By the time she reached Portsmouth late that evening, a steady icy rain assaulted the carriage windows. Instead of feeling tired, when she settled into her room at the George Inn on the High Street, Hester’s mind was racing.¹⁵

Indecision plagued her. The previous week, she had sent a flurry of letters to Miranda; she had requested immediate replies, indeed she called for a ‘verbal answer’. Miranda dined with her twice that week. Something was discussed between them, something so important to Hester that it could not be written down. When her emotions were engaged, Hester often acted precipitously. That week, it seems that without too much discretion, Hester put out her own feelers on Miranda’s behalf. She approached Lord Mulgrave, an old Pitt loyalist, to see whether the Admiralty might offer Miranda passage at least part of the way to Caracas.

Perhaps she misunderstood one of Miranda’s throwaway comments: that he would go away with her if he could, if they were on their way to South America. Judging by her actions in the week before her departure, whatever he said was strong enough for her to consider changing her own plans. He seems to have told her to await word from him, while he toyed with the possibility that he might join her in Portsmouth, either to bid her farewell, or even – and he may not have expected her to truly believe this – to board a frigate together.

On 15 January, having not heard from him but expecting him to materialize at any moment, Hester could bear the uncertainty no longer. That afternoon, around four o’clock, she wrote a long letter – insistent and urgent – to Miranda:

As I cannot guess what you have done, I can only advise in case you have done nothing adverse to what I propose. The wind is foul & has every chance of remaining so. I should at all events leave town on Wednesday morning & go with Seymour, with his present convoy, if we cannot manage what I now recommend. There are 3 convoys here, one for the West Indies, which runs for the South, one for the Straits & one for Lisbon, the latter of which the Manilla [sic] belongs to. There are no less than 12 frigates exclusive of Line of Battle attached to these convoys & certainly the Manilla [sic] might well be spared – Seymour has no objection whatever (& he mentioned even solicited) to take you all the way though he fears you will be uncomfortable … I should at any rate go with Seymour if you can leave town Wednesday & Doctor Maryan [sic] on Thursday night by mail or Thursday morning in a chaise, we shall be able to embark this Friday … The town is quite full but I will get you lodgings in time for you if you write tomorrow night – I am quite well … I entreat you, come off on Wednesday, if the wind is the same. Do not be deceived about it – there is a fine weather cock on Chesterfield House. If the wind remains from the South, to West & North West, they cannot sail. God bless you …¹⁶

The letter details preparations Captain Seymour is ready to make on his behalf:

Seymour has a fire, is putting up bulkheads, will accommodate your maids on sophas [sic] in your own cabin & will manage the baggage as well as he can – and insists that once they have set off he will be duty-bound to carry his passengers all the way – They cannot refuse you his ship to go on with from Lisbon.¹⁷

She apologizes for sending the express so that the letter would reach him by one o’clock that night, a service which cost a shilling per mile. In order to receive the letter, Miranda would have had to pay almost £4, an astronomical sum.¹⁸

Miranda clearly considered leaving on the same ship as Hester, but he was weighing up his options. He was aware of the latest reports from Spain, which was now almost entirely subjugated by Napoleon’s armies, and he was convinced that soon the British government would find it impossible to disregard the Spanish-American cause, and would become as favourable to his plans as it had hitherto been ‘vacillating and contradictory’. Replying to Hester six days later, it is clear that he had probably made up his mind by the time she reached Portsmouth. It is a gentle letter to his ‘dear and amiable Lady Hester’ apologizing for not replying earlier – ‘What series of disappointments, and vexation follows you now? But your superior mind is above them I hope’ – and telling her that he envies James the ‘pleasing task’ of taking ‘peculiar care of his inestimable Sister’. He told her she was ‘irreplaceable’, that she was ‘dear and beloved’ and wished she ‘was near to copmunicate [sic] & to give advice’ and ends:

And do not forget that if a Profile of devine [sic] Irenide was ever to be taken (and I think it ought), you promised me a Copy

Farewell – better in Greek

Ever & sincerely yours

M¹⁹

Hester replied in a similar graceful tone, with none of her earlier urgency. But she was hurt. The winds, which had been perfect, changed. Despite all the hurry for departure, they had no choice but to wait. In the end, they would stay in Portsmouth almost an entire frustrating month. She let Miranda think she was already on her way.²⁰ Calling each other lifelong friends, they would never see one another again.

She took disconsolate walks along the harbour, which was crowded with captured French warships used as prison hulks, their masts removed and decks refitted with odd-looking huts for the guards. She gazed at HMS Victory. Having returned from the blockade of the Russian fleet, its gigantic frame had been hauled up on to land in the Royal Dockyards to be refitted. In the winter of 1808, the Victory had been sent out as a troop ship with the remaining forces of General Sir John Moore’s army; her dear Charles had been on board. Within three months, the ship had returned with Moore’s defeated army, the wounded James among them. James had brought with him two small parcels of possessions, one that had belonged to Charles, the other to Moore; correspondence and notes that were now bloodstained, as well as her own letters to both men. Colonel Anderson had given her a lock of Moore’s hair and his bloodstained glove. These had been too precious for her to leave behind; she had them with her now. The sight of the Victory broke her heart.

On 9 February, knowing finally she would leave the next day, Hester wrote a last farewell letter, late at night, feeling wretched and alone. She knew the sight of her handwriting made him blanch but she could not help it. It was to Granville, who she knew had recently married. It is undated, a wild, ungainly sprawl:

The wind is fair, the ship soon in sight, we embark tomorrow morning … I hope you will respect my absence a little … Think sometimes of me when I am far, far off which now will soon be the case. May every blessing attend you & when we meet again I hope it will be with equal joy on both sides, once more. God bless you … I fear I shall scarce be able to send this.²¹

Early the next morning, they left from King’s Quay in the Royal Dockyards, boarding the war-bound Royal Navy vessel Jason, a regular fifth-rate frigate carrying dispatches for Lisbon, accompanied by the Jamaica, a larger third-rater, for transporting the 4th and 28th Regiments under convoy, to be sent off to the frontline in Spain from Gibraltar. With one last look, Hester turned to watch England drift away. As she described it to herself, the coming weeks and year would ‘decide her fate’.

* William Noel Hill would go on to a distinguished diplomatic career, first in Austria, then Turin, returning for a time to be an MP for Marlborough, then taking up duties again as a diplomat in Naples.

* Pitt had intended Moore to fight Napoleon’s armies in France, making a bold landing, and with a spectacular showdown, partnered by an army to be led by Sir Sidney Smith. ‘He promised General Moore the command of 30,000 men; indeed of all the disposable force of the country, if he thought such a force necessary.’ (The plan was not adopted; Moore did not think it was tactically prudent, as he made plain in his Narrative of the Campaign of the British Army in Spain, published posthumously that same year.)

* Bentham observed Hester’s interest in going out to South America, and they had discussed the idea of establishing Quaker schools in Venezuela based on the so-called Lancaster method. Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) was an English educationist who had developed a system of schooling based on non-denominational, monitorial principles.

5 Love and Escape

Gibraltar was not the ‘abroad’ Hester had in mind when she left England. The island, although bathed in strong sunshine, struck her as squalid and small-minded. In some ways, it seemed merely a rougher version of the regimental life she had left behind at Walmer. The knowledge that both Charles and Sir John Moore had passed this way so recently depressed her. She could see no joy in the faces of the Spanish refugees who thronged the cramped, cobbled alleys. She was, however, warmly welcomed by the Governor, Colonel Colin Campbell, a doughty Scotsman, who invited Hester and James to stay with him in the official residence, known by all as the Convent, an austere former Franciscan monastery.

In the meantime Meryon was becoming familiar with what was required of him in his new role. He wrote to his family that his employer was ‘on the whole, much better than when we left England. She rises at midday, breakfasts in her chamber, and at one or two, makes her appearance. At this time I converse with her about her health, if occasion require, or walk with her for half an hour in the Convent garden. I then ride, read, or amuse myself as I please, for the rest of the day until dinner-time.’ Warming to his theme, he added, ‘Her disposition is the most obliging you can possibly conceive, and the familiar and kind manner in which she treats me has the best effect on persons around me, from all of whom, through her, I experience the politest civilities.’¹

To brighten the mood, the Colonel staged a series of dinner parties – the first for Hester’s birthday on 12 March – inviting any high-placed acquaintances he could find. Within barely a fortnight of one another, two Englishmen – Michael Bruce and the Marquess of Sligo, Howe Peter Browne – had arrived in Gibraltar. Both men were curious to meet Hester.

At twenty-three, Michael Bruce, the son of Patrick Crauford Bruce, a rich nabob, was undeniably good-looking, tall and slim, with fine tanned skin, fledgling sideburns on his downy cheeks, grave blue eyes and long lashes. When he smiled, he revealed beautiful, even white teeth. The night Hester met him, Campbell staged his dinner party in the ballroom, which had been fashioned from the nave of an adjacent chapel. Hester found herself looking into Bruce’s eyes, studying the exact colour; as well as each button and the fabric of his jacket; the delicate indentations in his wrists, and watching his handsome head and neck as he turned to refill a glass. Afterwards the party had wandered into the courtyard garden, stuck about with dragon trees. Hester and Bruce stayed talking there for a while, sitting by a small fountain.

Bruce came from enterprising, rather exotic Scottish stock. In the late eighteenth century, one of his forebears, the explorer James Bruce, made epic voyages through Syria, Egypt, Arabia and Abyssinia (Ethiopia), where he had been the first European to reach the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile.* Hester learned that Bruce had been born in Bombay and that his mother had been a great beauty, painted by Romney. His father, an East India Company man, had founded a highly successful importing business. It was a delightful life for a beloved first son in a household full of servants who doted on him, to whom pet monkeys and caparisoned elephants were commonplace. He and his mother and siblings had returned to England when he was five. He had gone to Eton and St John’s College, Cambridge. He admitted to being a good rower, and told her that his father, having become a banker, had embarked on another career as a Member of Parliament, buying various seats, including one in Rye, one of the Cinque Ports.

Bruce had been away from England for almost three years – his father hoped he might become a diplomat. In Scandinavia he had met all the princes and nobles, and had instructions from his father to continue onwards to mingle with rarefied society in St Petersburg and Moscow. But he never got there, although he was in Copenhagen in 1807 when Canning gave the order for the British fleet to launch a hasty, unprovoked pre-emptive attack on the city. Outraged, Bruce took the Danish side, and had been the first British civilian to return to the city and give an eyewitness account of the destruction.*

It would emerge that Hester and Bruce were linked, in a roundabout way, through the misdeeds and deeds of men with whom she had been on intimate terms. Her second cousin, Lord Grenville, had been a neighbour and friend of Bruce’s father, and in 1807 had bartered a seat in Ireland to be accepted by Crauford Bruce if he would agree to pay off the present incumbent with the exact amount of the debt (some £2,500) he was owed by a certain Lord Camelford, Grenville’s brother-in-law, who had recently died. That this same Camelford had been Hester’s first lover, Bruce was, of course, unaware.

There were other coincidental crossings of paths. When Bruce’s father saw him off on his travels, bound for the royal courts of St Petersburg and Moscow, he had every expectation that his son would be warmly received by Ambassador Lord Granville Leveson Gower in St Petersburg, to whom he had a letter of introduction.

But the last association could not have failed to make Hester sad. Instead of going to Russia, Bruce had gone to Spain. Towards the end of 1808 he went to the Peninsula, to tour the battlefronts, hoping to present himself as a ‘free lance’ to Sir John Moore, a particular hero of his. Moore had been ‘very civil and kind’ to him at Salamanca, and with the general’s consent, he had made his way to Madrid – alone – just as the French were massing around the city, with the apparent aim of bringing back news of the enemy’s movements. It was obvious nothing could be done to prevent the capital from falling. Just before the attack, in the dead of night, Bruce had walked his way out, covering a distance of twenty-eight miles on foot to reach the safety of Aranjuez. He then retreated alongside Moore’s army to Corunna, an experience that made him deeply bitter. He held Wellesley – soon to be the Duke of Wellington – personally responsible.

Three days before Moore and Charles Stanhope were killed, Bruce had still been at Corunna. Was he present at the battle, or had he managed to avoid it? Had he also met Hester’s brothers? Neither he nor James ever mention this detail; it is safe to assume he stayed out of danger’s way. If he despised Wellesley, he reserved an even greater hatred for ‘Bony’.

It is easy to see that Bruce, with his strong political opinions, would have been immediately disarmed by Hester’s equally confrontational attitudes. Her forthrightness in discussion about the war and military tactics impressed him. Meryon noted that at this time she ‘often mention[ed] Mr Pitt’s opinion of her fitness for military command. Had she been a man and a soldier, she would have been what the French call a sabreur; for never was anyone so fond of wielding weapons and of boasting of her capability of using them as she was.’ Hester boasted to the young man that she liked daggers, but ‘her favourite weapon was the mace’.² Wilful and independent, with her impressive connections, she immediately signalled a challenge. Her more sophisticated, ironic utterances caused Bruce to question his own, somewhat more woodenly expressed views.

The other dinner guest at the Colonel’s table was Howe Peter Browne, the second Marquess of Sligo. Having only recently succeeded to his father’s title, he was now impulsively in command of a considerable fortune and impressive estates in Ireland. He was embarked on a tour of the Mediterranean, and planned to join Lord Byron, who was, like Bruce, a Cambridge contemporary and friend. The chance meeting with Bruce seemed fortuitous; there was much back-slapping and laughter.

Certainly Hester liked Sligo. At twenty-four, a year older than Bruce, Sligo affected something of the look that would soon become known as Byronic: he had grown his hair so it hung in tendrils. He was fond of quoting lengths of poetry, often in Greek, and forever making allusions to classical literature, but always in a way that seemed wittily louche. There was something very boyish about his soft plumpness and his gleeful humour, despite his evident attempts at corruption, and Bruce’s teasing hints at his promiscuity. He was immediately deferential to Hester, and always aware of her, leaning in close when they sat together. Bruce noticed this from the first, and became more reckless with Hester himself that same evening, teasing her, becoming more animated. When he left that night, he pressed her hand to his lips and looked at her face, touching her cheek gently as he did so.

At what point did the sexual hesitancy of the woman who had begun to believe herself past her prime give way to the passion that she so craved? It came as a pleasant shock to her to discover that she still had power over such a man, especially so deliciously unformed a creature as Bruce.

At thirty-four, Hester looked, in this new climate, younger than when she had set off from Portsmouth. Bruce put her age at no more than twenty-eight. She had cut her hair to shoulder-length, and the ‘cropt’ look suited her; she held the curls back from her face with woven strips of cloth. Her face struck many as enigmatic: she had learned to put on an inscrutable look, a habit, she would say, she got from Pitt. Unless she would have it otherwise, ‘nobody can ever observe in me changes in my countenance; or I will venture, what was in me,’ she said. She was vain enough to know that her looks might not outlast the attraction; she wasn’t deluded about her chances with Bruce.

Still, Hester was falling passionately in love. Powerful restless emotions were brought to the surface. Despair and tragedy had forced her vibrant and impetuous nature underground. But now, the physical attraction gave her an oddly gratifying sensation of danger. Once again, she was on a high wire, hostage to an unpredictable outcome. She was captivated by Bruce’s half-cocked, enquiring smile, the weight of his hand lightly touching her shoulder, the way he turned for a last backward glance as he disappeared out into the night. She did not want to let him go.

Within days of meeting Hester, perhaps trying to out-do Bruce, Sligo committed the extravagance of hiring an armed brig, the Pylades, for six months, and set about outfitting it, hiring some twenty or thirty hands. In his rush to assemble a working crew he chose to ignore the fact that his ablest men were in fact bound to the navy, a key detail he would later come to regret. Both Sligo and Bruce announced independently that they had changed their plans. They agreed that they would travel on together to Palermo: she could consider them her advance guard, for they would send her word on the situation there, as there were rumours that Napoleon’s armies threatened to invade Sicily.

Now James too suddenly changed his plans. It is obvious from later letters that Bruce confessed the ‘connection’ and ‘unguarded affection for his sister’ almost immediately. Although disapproving, James had seemed to accept the liaison, but he had no intention of being around to witness it. Privately, he urged Hester ‘to be prudent, and to lay herself as little as possible to the observation of the world’. On 2 April James received an official letter, which he chose to view as a summons, informing him that the battalion of Guards to which he belonged had arrived at Cadiz and were now readying themselves for the campaign. Although he had been granted permission for six months’ absence and had promised Hester he would accompany her to Sicily, he decided to leave immediately. Nassau Sutton, who was to have been of their party, would go with him.

When it came to saying goodbye to James, Hester could not bear to be the one left behind. When the Colonel informed her that a suitable frigate, the Cerebus, would be sailing for Malta, from which the onward journey to Sicily could be made, she asked him to arrange for passage to be prepared three days ahead of her brother’s departure. On 7 April 1810, stiffly refusing to cry, brother and sister embraced each other on the docks, and parted ways.

Hester sailed into Valletta harbour on 21 April, in time for Easter celebrations. The Governor, Major-General Sir Hildebrand Oakes, sent one of his men to meet her, bearing traditional almond-paste figolli along with an unexpected invitation to stay at the official residence.

But Hester had already made arrangements to stay with Malta’s Deputy Commissariat General, Alexander Fernandes, and his wife Sarah, who were close friends of John David and Louisa Jane, the elder sister of Elizabeth Williams. The Davids had by now been living as a married couple in Valletta for three years. Both men had been offered administrative posts in Malta through their connections with Pitt; David had risen in the ranks of the commissariat and was now in charge of the King’s bakery; Fernandes was his direct superior. The Williams sisters were overjoyed to see one another again; Louisa Jane was bursting with pride over her first child, Hester Louisa, who was now two years old. Hester was both namesake and godmother. The Fernandeses lived close to the harbour, having made their home in what used to be a lodge for the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. Hester liked Sarah, an unusually resourceful woman who was mulling over a speculative venture to manage a farm on the island of Lampedusa; she was to go on ahead with their son, a remarkably brave thing to be contemplating, while her husband remained in Malta.³

Meanwhile, the news from Sicily was confusing, and their plans hung in the balance. After a week with the Fernandeses, Meryon was aware of a rising tension between all parties. He observed that his employer, who had been all sweetness at the commencement of their stay, was demonstrating her unpredictable temper. She had, he noted:

… contrived to affront almost all the women in the place. She has the most thorough contempt for her sex, at least that part of it who converse on nothing but visits, caps and bonnets and such frivolous subjects. Hence it is that the moment she discovers one to be of that class, and her knowledge of mankind very soon puts her in possession of a person’s character, she seldom fails to manifest her disgust and to give rise to as much disgust as she feels. She accepts no invitations except from General Oakes, and therefore cuts me off, who necessarily go only where she does, from many pleasant parties.

With no word from Bruce, Hester was fretting. However, to her delight, within ten days, instead of a letter Bruce turned up. With him came Sligo, and Hester’s cousin, Lord Ebrington, whom they had brought along with them from Palermo.* Hester, Meryon noted, suddenly glowed, and was good-humoured again. Not bothering to conceal his annoyance, Meryon reported to his parents that ‘Bruce is handsome enough to move any lady’s heart that is not too much a valetudinarian to find a moment for love … I don’t like Mr Bruce. He seems desirous of excluding me from the Governor’s parties, with whom he is intimate, and of inducing Lady Hester not to bring me forward so much as her accustomed goodness prompts her to do.’ No word was spoken of Bruce’s departure, and Meryon was forced to conclude: ‘However, as he will always be with us, we shall find it to our mutual interest to be as agreeable to each other as possible.’ He resented Bruce, envying his easy arrogance, his ‘allowance of £2000 a year, and bills of unlimited credit besides’.

Hester – with Bruce, Sligo and Ebrington in tow – now found herself dining with exactly the sort of people she thought that she had left behind in London and being subjected to the same kind of scrutiny. Bruce explained to all of them that as a friend of James, he had taken his place as Hester’s escort, a display of chivalry that struck some as a little forced. Sligo, rather jealous, abruptly announced his departure for Greece.

Knowing she was being gossiped about infuriated Hester. When she met another of Bruce’s Cambridge friends, John Cam Hobhouse, he was taken aback at her vehemence. ‘I met Mr Bruce and Lady Hester Stanhope, a masculine woman, who says she would as soon live with packhorses as with women. I met her again the next day at dinner. She seemed to me a violent, peremptory person.’ As an afterthought, however, Hobhouse added mildly, ‘We went together to the Opera.’

Malta’s Governor, General Oakes, became one of Hester’s great admirers. They quickly recognized one another as kindred minds; indulgent and humorous, he became something of a father-figure. At the great event of the Maltese season that summer, he gave Hester place of honour. For the celebration ball for King George III’s birthday on 4 June, there were races and at night the grand palace ballroom was lit with candles, and a small orchestra assembled to play.

Oakes insisted that Hester and her party should take advantage of his palace, built for the summer heat, five miles out of town. It was at the Palacio de St Antonio, with cool breezes and views across the sea from their bedroom, that the lovers found some much-wanted privacy. Meryon was banished to a room in a separate wing. He made no comment on the couple, whose whisperings and low laughter he often heard gaily echoing up from the garden, other than to mention that she was suffering from a complaint that meant she was ‘confined to her bedchamber for ten days’. Hester and Bruce made use of the General’s boat to explore the nearby coastline, and find secluded bays where they could enjoy lazy picnics.

Two months earlier, Meryon had written glowingly of his new employer: ‘She is the best lady that ever breathed and makes me grateful for the kind treatment I have received from her.’ Now, on 15 June, he conceded of Bruce that ‘although his age, his person, his known gallantry would be enough to make the tongue of scandal wag against any other woman who, unmarried and in her prime, should trust herself with a single man in a large house, and in the country, yet Lady Hester contrives to do anything that others could not, without incurring the same blame that they would. Besides, she is mended in her health considerably of late, and really begins to look rather winning.’

The relationship began with a strong physical attraction. Neither of them wanted to resist it, nor saw any reason to. There was no way around the age difference. Hester seems to have been willing to live for the happiness of the moment, for as long as it might last. She was conventional enough to find the thought of claiming him in any permanent way – through marriage – somewhat shocking. If she considered it, the thought of becoming his wife repelled rather than excited her. Very early on she believed their eventual separation was inevitable, a sense Bruce may have been too inexperienced to have developed.

On the morning of 27 June the lovers embarked upon a course of action. No doubt this was determined by Hester. She decided that she would write privately and directly to Bruce’s father and make her intentions clear. It was a highly unusual thing to do, the sort of action only a worldly-wise woman – and someone scrupulous about honour – would take. She informed Crauford Bruce – paying the most flowery tributes to his son’s ‘elevated and Statesmanlike mind, his brilliant talents to say nothing of his beautiful person’ – that ‘to know him is to love & admire him, & and I do both!

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