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

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’.

2 The Minority of One

As the French Revolution raged, everyone in London knew about ‘Citizen Stanhope’. He was mercilessly lampooned in satirizing cartoons by Gillray, who enjoyed depicting him as an emaciated, wine-drinking sozzle-head rallying cockade-wearing mobs, usually with an equally emaciated, vexed-looking Pitt lurking about in the background.

As far as the Stanhope children were concerned, their father the freedom-lover was a domestic tyrant. Hester began to mimic him; demanding that her siblings never enter a room unless they first sent a servant to ask whether they could be admitted. She disapproved of her father’s many ‘republican’ measures, such as doing away with the carriage and horses his wife had relied upon to ferry her about. Louisa reacted with predictable exasperation. By then the relationship between them was becoming irretrievable. Hester went to elaborate lengths to keep the peace. In her own words:

Poor Lady Stanhope was quite unhappy about it: but when the whole family was looking glum and sulky, I thought of a way to set it all right again. I got myself a pair of stilts, and out I stumped along a dirty lane, where my father, who was always spying about through his glass, could see me.

So when I came home he said to me:

‘Why little girl, what have you been about? Where was it I saw you going upon a pair of – the devil knows what? – eh, girl?’

‘Oh! Papa, I thought, as you had laid down your horses, I would take a walk through the mud on stilts, for you know Papa, I don’t mind mud or anything – ’tis poor Lady Stanhope who minds these things, for she has always been very accustomed to her carriage, and her health is not very good.’

‘What’s that you say, little girl,’ said my father, turning his eyes away from me, and after a pause, ‘Well little girl, what say you if I brought a carriage again for Lady Stanhope?’

‘Why papa, I would say it was very kind of you.’

‘Well, well,’ he observed, ‘we will see; but damm it! No armorial bearings.’

So, some time afterwards, down came a new carriage and new horses from London, and thus by a little innocent frolic I made all parties happy again.1

Hester makes her father sound quite acceptably human, not at all a monster, and goodhearted beneath his somewhat autocratic exterior. Despite her claim, her ruse did not alter the growing coolness between her father and Louisa, whom all the children called ‘Mama’. Hester was old enough to observe cracks in the marriage and noted that ‘we children saw neither one nor the other’. It was usually Grizel who watched over the girls as they dressed for local balls and dances. ‘The Three Graces’, as she called them, were often up ‘all night, at least until five … dancing their hearts out’. But Grizel noted that Stanhope regularly took his daughters ‘some sixteen miles over the heavy Kent roads, waits patiently … and return[s] at seven in the morning’.2 He did this several times a week over the winter ‘season’, for at least three years. It is hardly the picture of an unloving father.

Acutely aware of her father’s embarrassing behaviour, Hester’s letters are primarily concerned with finding creative ways around his restrictions on her movements. Unlike most daughters of her generation, Stanhope was doing his best to discourage her from having anything to do with families he thought too ‘aristocratical’ or ‘too bourgeois society’. To her closest friend from this time, Evelyn St Clare, Hester complained about his guests. He spent much of his time with Varley, his great ally and friend, and the blacksmith to whom he apprenticed his sons. ‘Oh defend me from Citizens and Philosophers if this is the life they lead.’ But she was also proud of her father’s brilliance.

Hester came of age in the 1790s, a time of revolutionary enthusiasm and political agitation that created a generation of thinkers, poets and artists. But it also ushered in a new wave of repression in Britain, for which her uncle Pitt was directly responsible. He feared civil strife, whether it stemmed from revolutionaries, anarchists or reactionary ‘Church and King’ mobs. Pitt regarded societies like the Revolution Society, and the Corresponding Societies, which by now had acquired hundreds of members, especially in the industrial centres of the north and in Scotland, as a particular threat.

Unconcerned, Earl Stanhope forged strong ties with many of the Revolution’s loftier theorists, notably the Marquis de Condorcet, the mathematician and Revolutionary martyr, whom Stanhope felt to be his true brother-in-arms, and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.* Stanhope’s pacifist views were well known to these Frenchmen, as was his desire to see France and England ‘united by indissoluble bonds’.†

Hester was almost seventeen when Louis XVI was guillotined. Although reluctantly drawn into war, Pitt was of the widely-held opinion that this could only be a limited conflict. In fact, the conflict between the traditional foes would ultimately last, short intervals aside, for twenty-two years. Even Pitt’s great rival Charles James Fox, who had condemned the ‘madness’ of the war, conceded that the French regime had taken on a criminal nature. Under Robespierre and the Jacobins, political prisoners of all backgrounds – out-of-favour Girondins and generals as well as Marie Antoinette – had been sent to the ever-clattering guillotine. Walpole wrote that its ‘horrors make one abhor Lord Stanhope and his priestly firebrands’ and derided his pronouncements as the ‘ravings of a lunatic, imagining he could set the world on fire with phosphorus’.