Читать книгу Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope - Kirsten Ellis - Страница 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When gentle hearts in faithful union join

And mix the Hero with the Patriot’s line

With every charm uniting every grace

And all the virtues of the Temple race

The happy omen we with joy admit

And bless the match of Stanhope and of Pitt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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