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

It had hitherto been my fate to lead the strangest, as well as the most unforgettable life … I shall therefore gladly profit by this occasion to improve my mind, terribly neglected, and recover that flow of spirits natural to me but which a constant state of anxiety has rendered very unequal … It would be my wish when brought into society to appear as happy as I naturally might feel from the kindness of my uncles, but the heartfelt gratitude I feel towards them would at this moment rather serve to give me a contrary appearance for I should unavoidably be led to draw comparisons between their conduct and that which I have been used to, painful reflections must of course follow, but this will shortly wear off when the treatment I have been in the habit of receiving is less pressed in my mind.17

It is not clear whether Hester believed herself to be in love with Camelford, but she certainly saw a good deal of him that year. Despite his brush with the law, Camelford was regarded as a great catch. It was around this time, at a society gathering, that Hester met Lady Henrietta (Harriet) Bessborough, and she noted what the older woman made of her cousin, how he had ‘such delightful manners, such fascinating conversation, how charming, irresistible and well-bred’ he was. Hester and Camelford were sighted openly together a great deal – at plays, the opera, riding in St James’s Park, but more often on long excursions alone together to the countryside in his carriage, apparently making it a particular game to keep everyone in suspense, especially the Chathams. ‘How frightened Lady Chatham was for fear he should marry me!’ Hester recalled. Later, she described her behaviour around this time as ‘wild and reckless’. Their association was intense for at least eight months, and her wanderings with him took her as far as his estate at Boconnoc in Cornwall, where, if they wished it, they might have become lovers.18

Camelford suddenly transformed himself from being rather scruffy into something of a dandy. He looked like a man who had taken a sweetheart’s comment that he smarten himself up to mean that he should buy himself a new set of clothes from every fashionable tailor on Jermyn Street. But he kept his old brown coat, which he always wore with the collar turned up to his ears, and a slouch hat for one of his habits, apparently known only to Hester and his lawyer: do-gooding around the fleshpots and slums of Seven Dials, Southwark and Wapping. He would sometimes prowl these areas in disguise and press large sums of cash into the hands of those whose stories particularly affected him. He put £5,000 aside each year for his lawyer to distribute among the poor.

Hester appears to have influenced him to do things he would otherwise not have done. At her urging, Camelford approached Horne Tooke, with the suggestion that he put him forward as candidate for Old Sarum, Diamond Pitt’s famous ‘rotten borough’, located on land in Wiltshire he now owned. It was a move calculated to unnerve Earl Stanhope, who would be forced to concede that by bringing Tooke to Westminster, his daughter’s would-be suitor pulled off the coup of drawing attention to the very man whose cause he once championed, while at the same time showing up the scandalous loophole in the unreformed parliamentary system.19 There were dinners with Sir Francis Burdett, a rich radical politician friend of her father’s, who sympathized with Hester’s determination to ensure that her half-brother Mahon would not be strong-armed into surrendering his inheritance.

It was then that Hester devised a careful escape plan for Mahon, for which she secured Pitt’s approval. With the pledge of money from Burdett and another of her father’s former friends, William Lowther, the second Earl of Lonsdale, and the help of an urbane young diplomat, Francis James Jackson, Hester obtained a passport and letters of credit for Mahon, and recommendations that would ensure his acceptance for study at Erlangen University. She contrived a waiting carriage, and advised the time-honoured trick of using tied-together, twisted sheets to descend from a high bedroom window. Mahon’s successful escape early in 1801 caused a lifelong rift, not just with her father but also her grandmother Grizel, who bitterly blamed Hester for fomenting and publicizing family tensions.

Hester was perturbed only by the thought that her father might take his fury out on the ‘remaining captives’, Charles and James, whom she feared might be ‘flogged to death to make them confess what they are really ignorant [of]’. She would hear that Louisa too had reached breaking point, and would soon demand a separation.

For much of 1801, Hester came and went to London freely, while staying at the Pitt family home at Burton Pynsent in Somerset, where her grandmother left her free to do much as she liked, riding ‘at least twenty miles a day, and often forty’. She would be remembered from this time ‘as the intrepid girl who used to break in her friend’s vicious horses for them’.20

By now Hester was the same age as her mother when she died. Although mindful of the freedom her unmarried state gave her, she was certainly aware that everyone close to her was anxious she make a good match. But she seems to have been reluctant.

She had suitors, including a wealthy landowner’s son, ‘Mr Methuen of Corsham’, with whom she danced repeatedly at the Assembly Rooms during the 1801 season in Bath, but turned them down. Something of her defiance for the institution – any institution – of courtship and marriage is revealed by a remark she made around this time to Jackson. ‘I have been going to be married fifty times in my life; said to have been married half as often, and run away with once. But provided I have my own way, the world may have theirs and welcome.’

On 5 February 1801 Pitt formally resigned over the King’s refusal to grant Catholic emancipation, after a term as Prime Minister that had lasted for seventeen years. Overnight, Pitt was no longer the invulnerable creature Hester had grown accustomed to. He was £45,000 in debt and faced bankruptcy; he was ‘very unwell … gouty and nervous’. He declined the King’s offer to pay his debts, but he would accept a personal loan put up by a circle of his friends, including Wilberforce. Hester’s chance to repay her uncle’s kindness would come later that year.

She appears to have been as astonished as everyone else when Camelford disappeared at the end of October 1801, shortly after the announcement that war with France was at an end, although she suspected where he might have gone. She would soon write to her friend Jackson, now British Minister in Paris, asking if he knew anything. ‘If I may ask a question of you, how is Lord Camelford? I like him better than people do in general, and am anxious about him, after the strange reports I have heard, but do not answer if you do not like it.’21

Almost immediately, she began to prepare her own plans for departure, something that was unthinkable without being accompanied. She hoped to meet with Mahon – and perhaps Camelford. Whom she petitioned for funds is not known – she had no money of her own. She chose a stolid, elderly and well-connected couple, the Egertons, who planned to leave, although not until the following spring. ‘You may wonder why I have not fixed upon more dashing persons for companions …’ she wrote to Jackson. ‘I shall have perfect liberty to act in all respects as is most pleasing to myself … they want a companion, and I want a nominal chaperone.’22

In the meantime, in early 1802, she went to Weymouth to be one of her cousin Sir Sidney Smith’s party. She did not miss the fact that Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales, cast lascivious looks at her thirty-seven-year-old cousin. Indeed, Hester’s presence was requested so often by Princess Caroline as a ruse so that she could also have Smith along that many assumed she was the Princess’s new lady in waiting. Hester enjoyed renewing her friendship with the royal family, and the rapport she formed with the Duke of York allowed her to make him a proposition concerning her brothers, Charles and James, now sixteen and thirteen. She secured a commission for Charles in the 25th Foot, based in Gibraltar; while James was to go into the navy as a midshipman. With this in place, all that was required was for another escape plan to be laid. Once again it was successful, and the boys took up their new lives.

By the end of April 1802 Hester learned exactly what Camelford had been up to. It was splashed over the newspapers. What was not reported was that the French authorities considered him a serious threat as soon as news of his disappearance reached them: Napoleon’s Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, lost no time in putting out an alert that he be apprehended. But Camelford managed to baffle everyone (including a spy sent to Paris at his brother-in-law Lord Grenville’s expense to make discreet enquiries about the peer’s whereabouts). He slipped in and out of France undetected, spending several months lying low in Geneva and Italy. By the end of March 1802 Camelford had entered Paris, having adopted an American alias, with French travel papers issued in the name of ‘John Rushworth’.

Camelford intended to be in Paris on 5 April, the day he knew Napoleon planned to attend a review at the Tuileries, where English visitors might present themselves to him at the Salle des Ambassadeurs, but two days beforehand, Fouché had him arrested after he was sighted at the Palais-Royal. Camelford had with him a small, specially designed magazine pistol, able to fire nine shots in succession without reloading, the perfect weapon for close-range assassination. If any doubted his target was Napoleon, the French police report was unequivocal:

Lord Camelford, first cousin of Mr Pitt, brother-in-law of Lord Grenville and near-relative of Sidney Smith, gives much money to the émigré Chouans living in London, particularly to Limoëlan, whom he sees often. His close relationship with these scoundrels gave him the idea that he himself should assassinate the First Consul.23

Yet Camelford was able to save himself by his gift of the gab. When interrogated by Fouché, he presented a passionate case for being an admirer of France, citing his close association with Earl Stanhope and Horne Tooke. Aside from the offending weapon, nothing could be found to support Fouché’s suspicions. Camelford was escorted to Boulogne, warned never to return and put on a ship to England.

Undoubtedly Hester must have seen Camelford. One way or another, her travel plans were put on hold. Whatever occurred at this juncture between them remains a mystery. There had undeniably been an infatuation and most likely a physical affair. But if she had toyed with him as a marriage partner she knew that, despite his wealth, he was full of darkness and rough edges. He drank, fought and was used to bedding the women he came across in ports and brothels. Perhaps the truth can be found in a comment she made many years later, that ‘the violence of my character [is] something like Lord Camelford’s’. Together, they were too volatile and headstrong to last.

On her way to join the Egertons at Dover, Hester stopped at Pitt’s residence at Walmer Castle, with the intention of staying no more than a few days before setting sail. The visit proved to be longer than expected. Pitt had been suffering periodic fits of stomach pains, cramps and vomiting, usually exacerbated by overwork, but this relapse was particularly extreme. She stayed long enough to supervise his recovery, and to demonstrate that ‘I have talents as a nurse’. Pitt was reluctant to see her go.

That October, the Egertons and Hester travelled first to Lyon, where they were met by a very grown-up Mahon. There had been so much anticipation on both sides that the meeting was almost anti-climactic. Hester was anxious to see Mahon’s transformation into a cultured gentleman, but her first impression was somewhat critical. He ‘converses not pleasantly, like a Frenchman out of humour’, she noted, although she was impressed at the extent of knowledge he had acquired, and noticed he studied ‘from morning to night’. At Hester’s urging, they crossed Mount Cenis in the French Alps by mule, undoubtedly a tortuous enterprise for the Egertons.

Brother and sister parted angrily in Florence after an explosive argument. It appears that she had trusted him with a confidence and that he took a vehemently moral stance against her; certainly his subsequent treatment of her suggests he viewed her as a ‘fallen woman’. ‘In truth, his conduct disgusted me extremely,’ she wrote. From this moment on, Mahon’s treatment of his sister was very frosty, even vindictive.

A larger drama was now the backdrop to their travels. War was declared against France in May 1803; the Treaty of Amiens had lasted less than fourteen months. After a winter spent in Naples and Venice, Hester’s patience with the Egertons had frayed too. Mrs Egerton, she noted scathingly, was ‘a fidget married to a fool’. In Germany the Egertons dithered about their itinerary, not wanting to budge from the communities of English expatriates, infuriating Hester by deciding in the end not to go to Vienna or Berlin – or Paris, while the chance still remained. By now Camelford had returned to France, only to be apprehended once again, and incarcerated for a time in the infamous Temple prison, before his release was engineered, no doubt through Pitt’s and Grenville’s efforts.

Hester was away for almost nine months. When she returned to England again in July 1803, Pitt gently informed her that his mother – her grandmother – had died that April. Burton Pynsent had passed to the Chathams. She was not, of course, on speaking terms with her remaining grandmother, Grizel. She was homeless.

* Condorcet would go on to inspire one of the most enduring achievements of the Revolutionary period, the founding of the scientific Institut de France, which replaced the Old Regime’s Académie des Sciences and prestigious Académie Française, which would not be revived until 1815. His friendship with Earl Stanhope was indeed close; he asked the Englishman to become a guardian to his child in the event of his arrest and execution.

† When, in February 1792, Talleyrand – who would go on to become Napoleon’s Foreign Minister – came to London seeking support for the cause, he went directly to the famous Earl, hoping he might act as a mediator with Pitt. It was no good: Pitt curtly ignored them both. Despite this, for the duration of his stay, Talleyrand was the toast of London’s leading revolutionary sympathizers and Dissenters. Stanhope made sure Hester accompanied him to a dinner held in Talleyrand’s honour in Hackney. No doubt he thought she could benefit by observing that not all revolutionaries were unwashed rabble.

* In January 1795, Lord Stanhope’s vote was recorded as being ‘in the minority of one’, after the House was divided 61–1 against his second protest at the interference in the internal affairs of France; the one being himself.

* Jeremiah Joyce had been amongst a band of English and American expatriates drawn to Paris in the winter of 1792, hopeful that the tide would soon turn, and that revolution would come to England. He was a member of both the Society for Constitutional Information and the LCS.

† Horne Tooke was one of the most celebrated radicals to be arrested; his memoirs were a best-seller.

* The Admiralty, whom Earl Stanhope had sufficiently intrigued to part-finance the Kent (on which he had already spent £8,000 of his own money), were waiting to see whether the ship could live up to the claims of its inventor, although they had pronounced steam navigation ‘a wild scheme’. Still, the newly-formed Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture was so impressed by the Kent they made Stanhope one of their vice-presidents.

† Scientific shipbuilding in Britain was then practically non-existent. When the Kent finally sailed from Deptford on 22 February 1797, reaching Chatham on 1 March, the crew had been placed under instructions not to use the boilers; only Stanhope’s ‘vibrators’ or oars were tested and they were hand-operated and employed only to ferry the ship downstream from Deptford. The official report on the Kent’s performance seems to have been a thinly-veiled stitch-up; ostensibly praising the ship for its speed and weatherability, but evaluating it as though it were an ordinary vessel. By finding one elaborate reason after another not to witness it performing under steam, they would not be in a position to comment on it. The Kafkaesque farce that ensued lasted until the end of the decade. Nor could Stanhope take his invention elsewhere; the deal he had signed with the Admiralty meant they owned the ship’s bond, while he remained responsible for many of its expenses. Finally he was curtly informed that ‘an invention of this kind could never be applied to any advantageous purpose in His Majesty’s Navy’.

* Stanhope’s next invention was the Stanhope Weatherer, which he believed would be the ‘perfect’ frigate, but the Commissioners were as disparaging as before. Yet in 1816, the year Stanhope died, a Captain Tuckey would sail out on a mission to explore the Congo in a new vessel built for the purpose by the shipbuilder Seppings. Called the Congo, it was acknowledged officially as being almost identical in design to the Weatherer. Not long afterwards, the design for the Congo won the government stamp of approval; and Seppings’s ship became almost universally adopted by the merchant service. And so, the ghost of Stanhope’s Weatherer found its way into countless ports in far-off lands after all.

† Stanhope was perhaps too inventive for his own good. Still, several enduring inventions bear his name. The Stanhope printing press, for which he pioneered a process of stereotyping designed to reduce costs, was later acquired by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, along with his system of logotypes. The Stanhope lens, a small but powerful microscopic lens, was the only invention of his that achieved widespread commercial success during his lifetime. Many of Stanhope’s designs – from his calculating machines (‘The Stanhope Demonstrator, an Instrument for performing Logical Operations’) to his steam-powered vessels, as well as his innovations for canal construction – using a system of inclined planks and improved locks – would ultimately be perfected by others.

* Stanhope’s distaste for the royal family was by then shared by large numbers of British citizens. The previous year, at the height of his unpopularity, on his way to the House of Lords in October 1795, the King’s coach was pelted with stones amid cries of ‘Down with George!’

† King George III habitually appointed women he liked or admired to the Court, a sinecure viewed as a form of social advancement for women of the middle classes. Between 1786 and 1791, the writer Fanny Burney was employed as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte; for which she was given an apartment at Windsor, a maid and footman to attend her and £200 a year. Her only duties were to help the Queen select her outer garments and to make witty conversation, but she found the position socially humiliating and stifling.

* Pitt had, that year, vexed squires across the land by the introduction of his tax on both dogs and hair-powder; although the fashion for the latter waned virtually overnight, the Englishman’s attachment to his dog remained. Hester is said to have joked that Pitt’s great hound at Holwood was so fat it should be taxed twice.

* ‘Brummell would commit … freaks at the house of parvenus, or people who were not exactly of haut ton, where, sometimes at dinner, he would all of a sudden make horrible ludicrous grimaces, as if he had found a hair in his soup, or would abruptly ask for some strange Palmyrene sauce, or any out of the way name that nobody ever heard of, and then pretend he could not eat his soup without it,’ Hester remembered of his outrageous behaviour. Palmyra was evidently a topic of conversation even then.

† Camelford House, fronting Oxford Street, near Park Lane, which had been built for the 1st Baron of Camelford, was demolished in 1913 to make way for a ‘cinematograph palace’.

3 The Company of Men

Pitt offered Hester a life with him, on the condition that she avoid Camelford, ‘whom’, as Hester put it, ‘he liked personally as much as [I] did, but considerations of propriety obliged him to keep him at a distance’. He knew her too well to tell her what she must do, but he certainly knew how to ask her to respect his terms.

Pitt remained Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and had made his home at Walmer Castle. He had already done much to improve the speckled-stone castle with its bulbous bastions, one of a line of coastal forts built by Henry VIII as protection against the invasion the Tudor monarch feared would come from the combined forces of France and Spain. For Pitt, this was where he hoped to recover his health, repair the appalling state of his personal finances and spend more time reading and gardening. Hester was quickly caught up by day-to-day distractions at Walmer. She informed Jackson:

Here, then I am happy to a degree; exactly in the sort of society I most like. There are generally three or four men staying in the house, and we dine eight or ten almost every other day. Military and naval characters are constantly welcome here; women are not, I suppose, because they do not form any part of our society. You may guess, then, what a pretty fuss they make over me.1

That Hester felt most at ease in the company of men we have already seen; she knew what to expect from them and, as a rule, was far more stimulated by their interests, their talk of war and politics, horses and journeys, and tended to be amused rather than offended by their dirtier jokes. She gave the impression of knowing more about worldly matters than she would have others believe. Something of this quality was sensed by her uncle, who told her he did not know if she were ‘a devil or an angel’.

Many of Pitt’s friends and colleagues were also not sure what to make of Hester in her decidedly public new role. She was a talented mimic; her timing was perfect and often cleverly nasty. She could be sharp and scintillating; she also made flippant off-colour jokes, commenting on the shape of a man’s bottom, for instance, ‘He would not do for a hussar’ and laughing at one of Pitt’s visitors, who made a sweepingly low bow with his hat and a stoop in front of her: ‘One would think he was looking under the bed for the great business.’ Pitt did reprimand her: ‘You are too bad, Hester,’ he would say, adding weakly, ‘You should not be so personal.’ But he seems to have enjoyed her witticisms, and being teased out of his usual intimidating aloofness. Above all, she felt close to him. Hester would remember that ‘He used sometimes to say to me when talking away after my fashion, “You put me so in mind of my Father!”’

An observer of her at the time, the nineteen-year-old William Napier, the future general, wrote: ‘Lady Hester … was very attractive, so rapid and decided was her conversation, so full of humour and keen observation, and withal so friendly and instructive, that it was quite impossible not to fall at once into her direction and become her slave.’2

What became clear was that after the successive deaths of two sisters and his mother, Pitt warmed to having her loving and vivacious presence in his life. She was exuberant and irreverent, a player of innocent pranks. Although he continued to watch over her sisters Lucy and Griselda, it was Hester who became the privileged keeper of many of his past and future confidences, and his châtelaine at Walmer.* She was a sympathetic ear and could be surprisingly non-judgemental. Of his campaigns to eradicate sedition, which so enraged her father, she would later say that ‘[he] used to say that Tom Paine was quite in the right, but then he would add, “What [was] I to do?”’ She found that she had a unique influence; a position that must surely have been gratifying.

One of the first things that strikes a visitor to Walmer today is how – for a castle – altogether intimate and informal it feels. It is easy to imagine Hester feeling content and self-important here. From the dining room, with the doors open, they could watch the spray over the Goodwin Sands and the great panorama of the Channel. She could choose her hours; she was free to stay for after-dinner discussions, and frequently to add her opinion. War stratagems and news from Westminster were constantly mulled over. Although he was courted by the Opposition, Pitt wished to maintain his mandate within the existing government; his return to power was germinating.