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

Over the next few years, the ‘White Terror’ unleashed by Pitt would suspend constitutional freedoms, such as habeas corpus, and introduce the Treason and Sedition Act, the Unlawful Oaths Act and the Corresponding Societies Act. Determined to prevent any incitement to revolution, he instituted gagging measures such as the banning of public meetings, and employed indeterminate numbers of spies and informers. Hundreds of those deemed seditious would be arrested; many houses of Dissenters and Unitarians attacked and burnt.3 Stanhope was among those whose letters and communiqués were routinely intercepted and read. Although Pitt’s popularity sank – he was despised and pilloried in the radical press – he succeeded in consolidating power among the splintered Whigs. Indeed, his grip on Parliament during those repressive times would never be stronger.

By 1794 it would have been impossible for Hester to ignore the fact that her father was rapidly becoming a political pariah. Many on both sides in the House shunned his zealous views. But he was not merely a contrarian. A fierce champion of democracy, a pacifist and a republican, he saw himself as one of the few men in Parliament motivated by his conscience alone. For that reason, he adopted with particular pride the title ‘The Minority of One’, and even had a medal struck in his own honour.* Around this time, Coleridge wrote a poem, To Earl Stanhope.

But where Stanhope saw encroaching darkness, many of his fellow peers looked at him and saw precisely what Pitt warned them against, one of an emerging breed, a viperous ‘British Jacobin’. Stanhope’s exhortations not to interfere in the internal affairs of France appeared distinctly unpatriotic.

Pitt decided that his tolerance had been stretched far enough. He made a string of arrests. One of them was the Reverend Jeremiah Joyce, employed by Stanhope as his secretary and tutor for his two elder boys. Joyce was seized at Chevening, in front of the gawping Stanhope children.* That same night Stanhope was woken by a large crowd outside his house at 20 Mansfield Street, who at first shouted insults, then began breaking windows and throwing torches. Hester remembered her father telling them how he was forced to make his escape over the roof while the mob jeered. Stanhope was convinced the crowd had been paid to incite violence against him – even to cause his death. But this served to increase his radical activities.

Hester was torn between childhood pride in her father, whom she had always more or less sought to please, and the gnawing sense that ominous repercussions were about to fall on all their heads because of him. She enjoyed the notoriety of knowing clever radicals like the clergyman Horne Tooke. ‘I am an aristocrat,’ she told an amused Tooke, ‘and I make a boast of it’. When she told Tooke, ‘I hate a pack of dirty Jacobins that only want to get people out of a good place to get into it themselves,’ he roared with laughter, and had to admit she had a point.

But now Horne Tooke, like Jeremiah Joyce, was imprisoned in the Tower.† Stanhope did his utmost to lobby on behalf of his imprisoned friends – Joyce, Hardy and Tooke among them – all of whom faced certain death if found guilty of high treason. Hester worried that if her father were arrested the same fate would await him.

Disgusted with political life, Stanhope would resign from the House of Lords by the end of the year. Two days before Christmas, to celebrate Joyce’s acquittal, in which he played no small role, Stanhope staged a grand ball at Chevening, inviting more than four hundred guests for dancing and feasting. He hoped to please Hester by making this her unofficial coming-out party. She was, her grandmother commented, ‘looking incomparably well’. How pleased she was to dance with the bumpkinish sons of local squires around a centrepiece display of life-size mannequins meant to depict prisoners being unchained, under a large banner emblazoned with ‘The Rights of Juries’, was not recorded.

Hester would look back upon this as a happy period. She was closer to Louisa now that she was of age, and theoretically in search of a husband, while her stepmother was grateful for any excuse to escape hers. There were visits to Bath and to Louisa’s Grenville relatives in London. ‘Every amusement that riding, visiting &c. can produce, they have had without interruption, and which the uncommon strength of Hester bears most amazingly, for none can keep up with her,’ wrote Grizel, apparently missing the irony that while her son would sooner see the monarchy dispatched, her granddaughter insisted it was her duty to attend a ball celebrating the Prince of Wales’s birthday.

In 1795, Hester heard that another notorious prisoner at Newgate, the self-declared millennial prophet Richard Brothers, had asked to see her. It would have been easy to dismiss Brothers as a raving lunatic; he was, after all, about to be transferred to Bedlam. Although arrested on charges of sedition, he had been found criminally insane. He had declared himself to be a prophet, the ‘nephew of the Almighty, descendant of David and ruler of the world’. Brothers informed her that she was among a select group of people he believed would play a profound role in the ‘future Kingdom’. He himself would be the future King, he told her, and she was a chosen one, destined to be the ‘Queen of the Jews’. One day, he informed her, she would ‘go to Jerusalem and lead back the chosen people; that, on her arrival in the Holy Land, mighty changes would take place in the world and that she would pass seven years in the desert’ before her destiny revealed itself to her.

Hester mentioned her visit to Brothers in somewhat scathing terms to Horne Tooke. He teased her that he and his colleagues intended to establish ‘a new hospital for the diseases of the mind’ and that she was to be placed in charge of it, ‘for nobody knows so well as you how to cure them’. It was true that, at nineteen, Hester had every reason to congratulate herself on being the possessor of a formidably shrewd, even intimidating intellect, able to spar with many of the sharpest wits of the period.

She cannot have failed to be impressed by her father’s unusually fertile mind. He was fascinated more than anything by clever mechanics and by the power that might be harnessed through the invention of ships that could be self-propelled. The design of docks, canals and bridges obsessed him to an equal degree; he saw a future driven by steam.

Throughout Hester’s childhood, Earl Stanhope worked on his great dream, to create a workable steamship; he designed several modest prototypes which he tested out on Chevening’s small lake, and on the Thames. As soon as Watt’s steam engine appeared, Stanhope tried to apply the new technology, experimenting for a decade with various ingenious but cumbersome designs. Soon he had a flotilla of boats, including his pride and joy, the 111-foot Kent, the ‘Stanhope Ambi-Navigator’, which weighed over 200 tons even before it was fitted out with its heavy steam engines and boilers.*

In the end, the Kent would neither win Stanhope his elusive dream, nor bring his family the satisfaction of seeing him publicly honoured. The sailing trials were delayed, first by the Navy Board, and then by the Admiralty itself. John Leard, the Admiralty-appointed commander of the Kent, was the first to alert Stanhope somewhat apologetically that there were those who would prefer that he did not succeed. ‘I have two charges,’ he wrote, ‘to shew their unwillingness to attend to anything belonging to the Kent. But it was all leveled at your Lordship. They are afraid of you.’4

Stanhope must have known that conservatism and hostility towards innovations at the Navy Board were hardly new. To many of the Admiralty Lords, new technology, no matter how exciting, could be a potential threat to comfortable financial arrangements and contracts.† Orders were given to remove the ship’s steam engine. Stanhope was incensed.

It was Pitt’s revenge, or so it must have seemed. The Admiralty removed the unused boilers and refitted her as a gun-vessel, but soon the Navy Board had their way, and had her broken up.* To Stanhope, it was as though all his early promise and his scientific genius had been betrayed: it was perhaps the most crushing of all blows.†

Early in January 1796, Hester’s sixteen-year-old sister Lucy eloped; it seems she was already pregnant. The man in question, Tom Taylor, was a pleasant-looking twenty-seven-year-old apothecary who had been living quietly in Sevenoaks, until catching sight of Lucy. Before she fled, Lucy left a note for Hester, the only person she believed she could trust, counting on her not to raise the alarm, and hopefully to delay telling their father. Hester turned to Pitt, who was only too aware of the lasting shame the elopement could bring upon the family, and after his intervention, Lucy returned with her suitor and meekly asked for her father’s permission to marry.

Whatever Stanhope gave Lucy as dowry, it was not enough to stop Taylor from accepting a highly prestigious position offered to him by Pitt, that of Comptroller General in the Customs Service. He had few qualifications for the job but Pitt assessed that he had an excellent brain, and would thrive quickly, which seems to have been the case. This sinecure in a government he loathed greatly angered Stanhope. Lucy, with a measure of her sister’s defiance, refused to bow to his pressure that Taylor should not take the job. An angry estrangement ensued. It was to become a familiar Stanhope pattern.

Later that year, Hester caused her own sensation, appearing alone at Lord Romney’s military review. It was the most spectacular event held in Kent in 1796, staged to celebrate Pitt’s government’s successful raising of volunteers – six thousand in that county alone – who would parade and perform splendid feats dressed in their brand-new regimentals; fencing; charging across the field to swipe the heads off turnips with their swords; and marching before a crowd of landowning families; a grand feast would be held in a tented encampment. As well as Pitt, the King and Queen were there; and their sons, the Duke of York, then commander of the British army, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Clarence and the future Duke of Kent.

To Hester, who adored pomp, horses and dancing, and the sight of soldiers, the lure was obvious. Her father was equally determined that neither she nor the rest of the family should go; one corrupted daughter was quite enough.* The matter of getting there would prove more difficult than Lucy’s elopement; not least because Hester had to borrow both a carriage and something suitably elegant to wear. She found her first taste of freedom glorious. The fact that she was un-chaperoned was held to be highly improper. By the time Pitt arrived, she was something of a celebrity.

According to Hester, the King teased out of her stories of her father’s eccentricities. He took it into his head that she must be rescued, and carried back to Windsor to be made part of the Court.† Hester might have been willing, but Queen Charlotte did not seem enthusiastic. Nonetheless this marked the beginning of Hester’s firm friendship with the princes, of whom she would later say: ‘I loved all the princes, all, except George the Fourth – they were all so lively, so good-natured; people who would laugh at a straw.’

She was certainly ready to be noticed. When she was much older, she had an acute sense of what her beauty had once been:

At twenty, my complexion was like alabaster; and at five paces distance the sharpest eye could not discover my pearl necklace from my skin; my lips were of such a beautiful carnation, that without vanity, I assure you very few women had the like. A dark blue under the eyes, and the blue veins that were observable through the transparent skin, heightened the brilliancy of my features. Nor were the roses wanting in my cheeks; and to all this was added a permanency to my looks that no fatigue could impair.5

Until the sudden scandal with Lucy, Pitt had become quite remote from her; now the ice was broken. She made him laugh with a quip about his dog, who had made it into the gossip pages of The Morning Post and Fashionable World.* In contrast to her unorthodox father, he must have seemed the model of decisiveness and stability. ‘I thought it was better to be where I should have Mr Pitt at my side to help me, should he get into great difficulty.’ It would not be long before her uncle would come to be her touchstone for all important matters.

‘She had on a costume, which had nothing feminine about it, but the mask. She seemed very tall, very thin, very decided, very independent.’6 This is how the Duchesse de Gontant, a fashionable refugee from Paris, described Hester, meeting her at a masked ball in London around this time. These were rare qualities for a woman of twenty. Hester now made it her mission to get away from Chevening as much as possible. Her father relented under the barrage of her willpower and energy. Her grandmothers were anxious; the matter of whom she might marry was a pressing one. From them, the nod was given to Pitt to see that she was chaperoned when she was in London. This would be a thankless task, as society hostesses Mrs Pole and Lady Clarendon found out. ‘Don’t bother yourself about me; I am quite independent,’ she smiled at them, shocking them with her announcement that she was capable of making her own introductions. The Comtesse de Boigne, who met her en passant, observed she was ‘well-made’ and ‘fond of society, of dancing, and of any public function. She was something of a flirt … with ideas of striking originality’, although she noted dryly, ‘for a Stanhope, she was prudence itself’.7

Hester’s risk-taking instinct came to the fore. As far as she could see, in the wealthiest and most privileged circles, it was never enough to have merely good breeding and a title. Wit was what was prized above all, and she did her best to flaunt her own. With Pitt taking her part, Hester felt secure enough to be cleverly irreverent. She thought the Duchess of Rutland’s parties were a ‘heavy, dull business … all high breeding and bon ton’. As for the Duchess of Devonshire’s, ‘there they were, all that set, all yawning and wanting the evening to be spent, that they might be getting to the business they were after’.8 But Pitt did not wish Hester to be overly exposed to the ‘business’ she glibly refers to – bed-hopping; heavy drinking, whoring, juggling lines of credit and gambling away vast amounts late into the night. In the end, he took on the role of chaperone himself. He ‘remained with infinite kindness until four or five o’clock in the morning at balls which wearied him to distraction’, wrote the Comtesse de Boigne of Hester’s introduction to London society that year. ‘I have often seen him sitting in a corner, waiting with exemplary patience until Lady Hester should be pleased to end his sufferings.’9

By softening to the Stanhope tribe, Pitt may well have wondered what he had taken on. Griselda also turned to him, announcing her intention to marry John Tickell, an army officer from Hampshire. Earl Stanhope likened himself to King Lear; deserted by his daughters. But Hester, still semi-loyal to her father as well as her brothers, continued to return home, and when in London, to stay at Mansfield Street. There was in any case a well-established overlap between Pitt’s world and Stanhope’s, the fashionable world mingling with the radical elite. But Pitt, to a modest extent, had begun to subsidize Hester’s adventures.

By the time she was twenty-three, Hester had danced at ball after ball and dined on champagne and turtle all over town. Toasts were proposed to her beauty, much was made of her ‘magnificent and majestic figure’ and the way ‘roses and lilies were blended in [her] face’, and the way she ‘diffused happiness around [her]’.10 She had many admirers. Two men in particular, however, stood out.

George Bryan (‘Beau’) Brummell was the most fashionable man in London. Society hostesses sent him fawning invitations; even though he habitually ignored them for the most part, talked only to his friends and refused to dance. Here, finally, was someone Hester could share the latest intrigue with and count on to draw her away from any tedium. Hester laughed at his jokes, discussed horses with him (he named his favourite Stiletto) and adored his outrageous behaviour.* She affected some of his rebellious style, and paid ever greater attention to her dress. It is fairly certain Hester never seriously considered Brummell as a romantic prospect, nor vice versa. Nonetheless, a strong chemistry between them was noticed, and there was speculation she was in love, at least a little. He came up to her at a dinner and coolly took out her earrings in front of everyone, telling her they could not match the beauty of her skin, and spoiled the delicate line of her face. Brummell’s anarchic charm came as a heady relief to a fun-starved Hester.

It was the other man who appeared in Hester’s life who seemed to promise the possibility of a serious attachment. Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, Baron of Boconnoc, was her cousin, a year older than her. When she met him at a family dinner shortly before Christmas 1799, she had not seen him since they were both infants. His looks were fierce and wild; he was six foot two inches tall, powerfully muscled and dark. He was the sole heir to the Camelford fortune, and the owner of vast estates in Cornwall and Dorset, as well as a palatial London mansion, with an income of more than £20,000 a year (roughly £1 million in today’s money).†

From the start, it looked as though history might repeat itself; the Pitts and the Stanhopes destined to find their way to one another once again. She would say she ‘admired Lord C’s character, and in some things, imitated him’. He was, she said, ‘a true Pitt, and like me, his blood fired at a fraud or a bad action’. Camelford was notorious. He was known for having shot a fellow Royal Navy officer, apparently in cold blood, and his life was a tangle of duels and skirmishes. He had a sailor’s taste for prize-fighting, and was often seen at the ring. He was a connoisseur of pistols and swords. If anyone introduced Hester to her later love of weaponry and to the art of the duel, it was him. She certainly took up both passions at this time with an unusual relish. Not many men would have been willing to show a young woman how to fight, but Camelford was.

It was obvious that Camelford was hell-bent on doing something extraordinary. He was already the veteran of remarkable travels, notching up exploits as far away as Chile, Malacca and Ceylon, and having landed at Madras, had sailed to the Red Sea and crossed the desert from Suez to Alexandria. He felt a rivalry with their mutual cousin, Captain Sidney Smith, who months before had defeated Napoleon at Acre. They both knew what the Emperor had famously fumed about Smith: ‘That man made me miss my destiny.’ Smith was a hard act to follow, but Camelford had every expectation that he would find a way to out-do him.

At the beginning of 1799, Camelford had been arrested on a shingle beach in Deal for trying to cross the Channel on a smuggling boat, then a prosecutable offence. He had on him nothing but some money, a pair of pistols, a short, two-edged dagger, and a letter of introduction in French to Paul Barras, considered by the Pitt administration to be the most shrewd and unscrupulous of Napoleon’s advisers. A discreet royal pardon was given, on condition he resign his captaincy in the navy, a terrible humiliation. Speculation remained rife that Camelford, who spoke flawless French, intended to infiltrate himself into France and offer himself as a turncoat intelligence agent, a role that he hoped might bring him close to Barras – or Napoleon himself. The London Chronicle reported that he had ‘been prompted by a too ardent desire to perform some feat of desperation, by which, he thought, the cause of Europe might be served’ – in other words, a political assassination.

Hester appears to have been struck with admiration for her danger-seeking, intrigue-loving cousin. The attraction was mutual. She is widely credited as being the only woman he loved, aside from his beautiful sister, Anne. Soon after meeting her, he moved into a bachelor apartment, first on Baker Street, near Pitt’s house, then to New Bond Street.

Another clue that reveals Camelford’s feelings for Hester was his sudden appearance at the House of Lords, alongside the equally conspicuous Earl Stanhope, returned after a five-year absence. The House was debating Pitt’s and Lord Grenville’s rejection of Napoleon’s Christmas Day offer to negotiate peace. On 28 January 1800, Earl Stanhope, along with a small group in the Opposition, cast his vote to express disapproval, while Lord Grenville reiterated the administration’s position. The vote, 92 to 6, was unsurprising. What baffled everyone there was the fact that Camelford voted with the Opposition, for despite his erratic attendance in the House, Camelford had always voted reliably for Pitt and Grenville. The following day, after Stanhope made a speech to the Lords ‘on his knees’ to reconsider, the House divided once more. This time, Stanhope found only one other peer willing to take sides with him: Camelford. Hester’s father was not pleased to find himself supported: minority of two had no triumph to it. ‘Why!’ he harrumphed to Camelford afterwards, ‘you spoiled that division!’11 If Camelford had wanted some measure of Hester’s father’s approval, he certainly did not get it.

The following month Camelford challenged one of his closest friends to a duel over Hester. Camelford was charged with grievous assault, but before it could go to the courts, which would have meant the explicit revelation of the details of the slight, the matter was quietly disposed of by a cash settlement.12

Pitt put his foot down. Hester was ordered back to Chevening. Whatever liberty her father might have allowed her in the past, he now curtailed. They were now all locked in at night. Hester alternately raged and moped, protesting at her own lack of freedom and at her father’s treatment of her brothers. Mahon was then eighteen, his movements far more circumscribed than Hester’s had ever been. He bitterly resented that he had not been sent to school nor prepared for university. As for Hester’s middle brother Charles, she was shocked to see he ‘could hardly write legibly’ and ‘cannot spell three words’.13 None of them was remotely equipped to ‘shift for themselves’.

Earl Stanhope was determined to dissolve his hereditary privileges, but this could only be achieved if Mahon agreed to break his entailment once he had reached his majority, in other words to sign away his inheritance. Stanhope, whose expenditure on his various experiments now amounted to many tens of thousands of pounds, was growing short of funds. He wanted eventually to sell Chevening, and was prepared to barter with his eldest son over a suitable lump sum if he complied.

On her return to Chevening early in the spring of 1800, Hester wrote to her older married friend Evelyn. ‘I want to ask advice about an unfortunate woman who was my playfellow and whose faults and misfortunes have given me great concern … I am too inexperienced to know how to act.’14 Might she possibly have been asking for advice for herself, and needing to conceal her own difficulties? It is not clear.

Hester later claimed that Ann Fry, a young chambermaid at Chevening, came to her in tears. She was pregnant. A house where the girl could spend her confinement was quietly arranged. The fact that her child would be baptized at the village church later that year despite her stubborn silence about who had fathered the child is intriguing, for the church rarely gave charity to unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children; a chaplain’s first task was always to establish the identity of the father, who might contribute to the child’s keep.15 In light of Hester’s later remarks and her own material support for the girl, the possibility that her father, or one of her brothers, may have been responsible cannot be overlooked.

Whatever the cause, around this time, some kind of violent confrontation occurred between Hester and her father. He lost his temper and pinned her to the wall, threatening her with a dagger. ‘The Logician often has said that from the hour I was born I have been a stranger to fear. I certainly felt no fear when he held a knife to my throat – only pity for the arm that held it; but this was a feeling I should rather not again experience …’16 She fled as soon as she could, taking little with her, and promising her brothers she would do what she could to help them. Camelford pressed her to stay with their uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Chatham, at their St James’s home; Pitt was drawn into the debate about who should take care of the runaway. His initial reaction is revealing; he worried that Hester might be untameable, and might bring scandal with her. ‘Under no circumstances could I offer her a home in my own house,’ he wrote at the time. Recovering from raw shock, Hester wrote to her grandmother, the Dowager Chatham: