Читать книгу Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope - Kirsten Ellis - Страница 10

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’.