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

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.