Читать книгу Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope - Kirsten Ellis - Страница 11

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.