Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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