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

Hester’s room was directly beneath Pitt’s chambers, and she often heard his footsteps pacing on the ceiling above her; she could even hear the clink of decanter against glass. From her room she could wander freely up the stone stairs to the bastion to spy on the night patrol or into the garden, no matter what the hour. Her windows overlooked the moat and the garden; a view which encompassed a magnificent magnolia tree. The scent of its opening flowers she would always afterwards associate with heightened expectation, a feeling that something marvellous was yet in wait for her.

Two pursuits she took up at Walmer became lifelong obsessions: stargazing and gardening. She made use of the tomes on astronomy from Pitt’s library, and often looked through the Herschel reflecting telescope, a gift from William Herschel, the Astronomer Royal, to Pitt so he could use it to watch for the invading fleet.

After overhearing Pitt tell a friend that Walmer was not as beautiful as it might be due to a lack of trees, Hester took action. As soon as her uncle was next called away to London, the transformation of the garden in his absence became Hester’s most ambitious project to date. She commissioned samples and seeds of plants from all over the country and managed to convince all the regiments quartered at Dover to help ‘in levelling, fetching turf, transplanting shrubs, flowers …’ for no extra pay, while she kept a close eye on them, commenting that by deploying some of her feminine charm, ‘with a few civil words, and occasionally, a present,’ the work was quickly done. She redesigned the main lawn, planted flower borders along Walmer’s distinctive thick yew hedges, and managed to import and plant some fully-grown horse chestnut trees, adding to the formal groves of yew and lime trees already planted by Pitt. On his return, she was thrilled with his reaction:

When Mr Pitt came down, he dismounted from his horse, and ascending the staircase, saw through a window, which commanded a view of the grounds, the improvements that had been made. ‘Dear me, Hester, why this is a miracle! I declare it is quite admirable; I could not have done it half so well myself.’3

By the autumn of 1803, the entire nation was braced for an invasion across the Channel. Walmer, and the entire south coast between the Cinque Ports, were the frontline. Pitt was disgusted with his successor, Addington, whom he thought devoid of all military vision. In his role as Lord Warden he announced he would step in, taking on a voluntary but highly symbolic military role as Colonel Commandant of the Cinque Port Volunteers, a corps of ‘gentlemen volunteers’. In his two-corned cocked hat, his buttoned red jacket, grey breeches and with his ceremonial sword, Pitt looked almost boyish that autumn, riding out, very often with Hester, to inspect the training of all battalions. War created the perfect climate for a fightback, and Pitt now lived as he meant to go on, mobilizing all his strengths, his health much improved.

The new mood also gave Hester a sense of mission. She felt both needed and useful. There was an exciting tension in her world, and few rules. A great deal about her strength of character is revealed by how she handled a group of would-be rapists one evening in Ramsgate.

Five of the Blues, half-drunk, not knowing who I was, walked after me and pursued me to my door. They had the impertinence to follow me up-stairs and one of them took hold of my gown. The maid came out, frightened out of her senses, but just at the moment, with my arm I gave the foremost of them such a push, that I sent him rolling the others down the stairs, with their swords rattling against the balusters. Next day, he appeared with a black patch as big as a saucer over his face, and when I went out there were the glasses looking at me and the footmen pointing me out – quite a sensation.4

It is easy to see why the troops nicknamed her the ‘Amazon’. She wore a jaunty riding habit, styled in bright red wool with military braid, buttoned up against the sea wind like a man’s greatcoat, and knee-high nankin boots. She loved to watch duelling soldiers, following all the moves closely, and rating them. She wrote to Jackson that Pitt ‘promoted’ her as nominal commander of her own ‘army’, ‘the first and last’ of the Berkshire Militia.

Adding to her contentment was the presence of her younger half-brothers. All the Stanhope boys were close by. James had decided to leave the navy to join the Guards, and was living close to Dover Castle. Charles had returned from Gibraltar, and for a time stayed at Walmer. He was soon promoted to the 57th Regiment, at Ashford. ‘Charles is by nature my favourite,’ she had confided to a friend several years earlier, ‘he has the least ability of the three, but a degree of openness and good nature which wins every heart, and an air of nobility his quizzical education can never destroy.’

About Mahon she was even cooler than before, however. The previous autumn, on his return from Europe, Pitt had appointed him Lieutenant-Governor of Dover Castle and made him colonel of one of his battalions. Mahon was about to be married. His choice of wife was Catherine Lucy Smith, one of Lord Robert Carrington’s four daughters. The wedding would be held that November at Deal Castle. Mahon found Hester’s presence very disquieting, for reasons that beg some interpretation. He wrote to his father-in-law:

I hope that Catherine does not see Hester much alone; this intimacy can be productive of no good consequences, but probably of much mischief. I have endeavoured this week to prevent it by painting with truth and sincerity and I trust with candour and impartiality what Hester’s character was and the evils that too great an intimacy might occasion.5

Almost certainly, Mahon’s account concerned Hester’s association with Camelford, who now filled newspapers with his brawls and duels, and continued to be tailed by Fouché’s spies.* Whatever the cause, there was something Mahon did not want Catherine to know and did not trust Hester to be discreet about, or he truly believed that his wife would be compromised in some way by associating with her. Either way, his letter shows that as far as he was concerned, his sister’s reputation had already been sacrificed.

By early 1804, the political winds were blowing in Pitt’s favour. Lord Grenville, his cousin and ally, had been repeatedly urging him to lead the Opposition factions against Addington; surely, he reasoned, together, they would form an unbeatable alliance. But Pitt was not prepared to capitulate to the Whigs. Frustrated, Grenville took the hitherto unthinkable course of aligning himself with the one man who had been their mutual arch-rival for two decades: Charles James Fox.

In February the King, now sixty-five, once more had an attack of the symptoms that afflicted him earlier, the second time in three years. His mental health was hotly debated. As soon as his father showed signs that could be construed as lunacy, the Prince of Wales began making plans for a new government, hosting numerous dinner parties for Pitt’s opponents. One of the Prince of Wales’s most valuable assistants in once more galvanizing the Whigs and forming the Fox-Grenville coalition had been the formidable Whig hostess, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. She proved to be a particularly effective go-between in the setting-up of meetings between her close friend Fox and Grenville, and was instrumental in trying to persuade George Canning – regarded as the cleverest of Pitt’s trusted Ministers of Parliament – that he should find a way to convince Pitt that his decision not to join them was political suicide.

In February, in a series of rousing parliamentary speeches, Pitt made a devastating assault on Addington, accusing him of almost criminal negligence in his inability to sufficiently protect the nation from invasion. Few failed to be moved. The writing was on the wall. Addington would have to go.

It was at one of Pitt’s gatherings that February that Hester met Lord Granville Leveson Gower.* Pitt thought highly of him, going so far as to observe, as though he were a connoisseur of male beauty, that he had the looks of ‘Hadrian’s Antinous’. Granville had been elected as Member of Parliament for Staffordshire at twenty-two, and before he was thirty had already served as a middle-ranking diplomat in Paris and Lille. In 1800, Pitt had made him a Lord of the Treasury, a position he was forced to give up when Pitt resigned a year later.

When Hester met him, Granville was thirty, a charmer, groomed for success by his wealthy, well-connected parents. An aristocratic bachelor, he was moneyed and refined, conversational and amusing. In country houses across England, he was being referred to as one of the best-looking men of his generation. His expensive tastes in travel, wine, gambling and women were indulged by his loving parents.

Hester was instantly besotted. Granville was politically ambitious, and clearly destined for success in the world of high diplomacy. Marriage to him would bring her exactly the sort of life she wanted: it would place her in the salons of Paris and St Petersburg, close to the corridors of power. She immediately began a campaign to make him fall in love with her, acquiring his sprightly mother, Lady Stafford, as her ‘leading female acquaintance’. She would have been acutely aware that the Staffords would have preferred their son to marry into a family able to confer the assurance of wealth, and she could offer no such enticement. All the same, she must have felt confident that with Pitt once more in the ascendant, her proximity to power might act in her favour. For the first time, she worried about what might be said about her in society and appears to have been almost relieved when she heard, two days before her twenty-eighth birthday, that Camelford had been fatally shot in a duel. She confided cryptically to her friend the diplomat Jackson: ‘Lord Camelford has been shot in a duel, and there is no chance of him recovering. You know my opinion of him, I believe, therefore can judge if I am not likely to lament his untimely end. He had vices, but also great virtues, but they were not known to the world at large.’*

Hester became a regular guest at Lady Stafford’s house in Whitehall, opposite the Horse Guards, and Granville in turn visited Pitt and saw her frequently at York Place. As intent as she was on her own crusade for his affections, she did not allow any details of Pitt’s battle for power to escape her, some of which likely provided more erotic leverage than she would have wanted her uncle to know. Politically, Hester had become a behind-the-scenes dynamo. That the brilliant and shrewd Canning consistently sought her opinion demonstrates the degree to which it was valued.

At first she was convinced her passion for Granville was returned. He would come to call on her; she was not always there or was delayed; he would wait for her, not wanting to miss the chance of seeing her. Having spent long months away at Walmer, if not in near solitude, then at least deprived of the many temptations of London, Hester was in a mood to be diverted. As part of Pitt’s inner corps of two, she was invited to a dizzying number of events. Her life was a Cruikshank caricature come to life; a never-ending round of dinners, parties and dances at which she came to know all the leading personalities of the day.

When Pitt and Hester returned to Walmer in April, Granville was invited. It seems that shortly after this, Hester and Granville became lovers. Physically, she thought Granville ‘perfection’. She certainly does not appear to have behaved like a shy virgin. Instead, she seems to have launched herself fearlessly into her new affair. If Granville’s record was anything to go by, he preferred sexually experienced – or married – women. He was also an enthusiastic collector of what he called ‘dirty Books’, preferably French, and when ‘infected with a Bibliomanie’ would hunt the bookshops for hours ‘in the hope of finding something curious’.

He met Hester for rides in St James’s Park. If they felt in need of more privacy, they would take the carriage out beyond the bucolic meadows surrounding Primrose Hill to Hampstead, warming themselves up with a drink in the village before wandering upwards onto the Heath, walking along its pathways around the ponds and through meadows, where the grass was no longer wet from the rain.

It would be misleading to think that the late Georgian era was not in some ways as rambunctiously sexual as our own. Although English society was hardly permissive, there was certainly a frank acknowledgement of sexual pleasure and desire, much more so in the Georgian and Regency periods than in the Victorian era.

The sort of erotic engravings that titillated Granville were all the rage. In Britain, probably best known at that time were those by the celebrated satirical illustrator Thomas Rowlandson; for instance, Meditation among the Tombs, a raunchy depiction of a couple making love against a church wall as a funeral takes place in the background, and The Willing Fair, which shows a couple in hasty coitus at their lunch table, the young woman’s mountainous buttocks visible, but her dress otherwise unruffled, from her perfectly coiffed hair and pearl-drop earring to the shoes still firmly on her feet. The implication of these prints being that in the Georgian era, when it might have been difficult for amorous couples to find privacy in their own homes, the fully-dressed ‘quickie’ was perhaps by no means uncommon.

In the first flush of her love affair with Granville, Hester did everything she could to look her best. She became guiltily familiar with Ackerman’s Repository, the bible of well-dressed women. Pitt had generously suggested she put all her purchases of new clothes on his account, but even he raised his eyebrows at the extravagance of her hasty pilgrimages to London’s best seamstresses, shoemakers, hatters, hosiers and glovers.

Although inclined to be critical of her looks, Hester was in fact quite vain. Men certainly found her extremely attractive. She said about herself later: ‘I was never what you call handsome, but brilliant. My teeth were brilliant, my complexion brilliant, my language – ah! – there it was – something striking and original that caught everyone’s attention.’

Other suitors idled in the wings, plenty of them handsome and eligible, but none apparently able to deflect Hester’s attention from her newfound object. Among them was William Noel Hill, the second son of Lord Berwick, already the Tory Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury and a clever diplomat a few years younger than her, who had been steadfastly pursuing her since her return to London.* Although he lacked Granville’s impossible good looks, he was a sympathetic, amusingly self-deprecating character, and Hester was fond of him. She enjoyed his flirtations, which seem to have been frank. He asked Hester to marry him. Hill was aware of his rival, but clearly had Hester in his sights for when – inevitably – that attraction waned. This was a possibility Hester considered so absurd she laughed about it with Granville, making a joke of the hapless Hill.

By the end of April 1804 Pitt had pulled off an impressive coup. At the King’s invitation, he was welcomed back into power with the approval of the former government, and in alliance with a significant faction of the Opposition. It was his intention to form a strong government that could withstand Napoleon. Even the threat of Fox’s powerful supporters could not moderate his optimism.

On 18 May 1804 Pitt, now almost forty-five, once again received from the King the seals of office as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Once more, Downing Street beckoned. Ten days later, on 28 May, across the Channel, at Saint-Cloud, the Senate proclaimed the thirty-five-year-old Napoleon to be ‘Emperor of the French Republic’. The coronation was to take place later that year. Pitt’s dance with Napoleon was beginning again.

Shortly after Pitt returned as Prime Minister, Hester was conducted around Downing Street, as liveried servants jumped to attention. She was in a triumphant mood; overnight, Pitt – and she – was now at the centre of the universe. She saw no noticeable elation on his part; but the old power had returned; his playfulness, which she had seen so much of, could dissolve in an instant. He went back to his old work habits, with the dogged persistence of a horse tethered to its plough.

By the end of May, she noticed that dark circles hollowed his eyes, and worried that all the good work of Walmer was already undone. His only concession to moderation was to substitute his preferred vintages with the occasional bottle of redcurrant wine; otherwise the standing order from Berry’s Wine Merchants continued as before. She would later remember how he would always drive himself hard. ‘People little knew what he had to do. Up at eight in the morning, with people enough to see for a week, obliged to talk all the time while he was at breakfast, and receiving first one, then another, until four o’clock; then eating a mutton chop, hurrying off to the House, and there badgered and compelled to speak and waste his lungs until two or three in the morning! – who could stand it?’

Her mocking wit was not reined in. Soon after being made Foreign Secretary, Lord Mulgrave came to stay, and when at breakfast he complained to Hester that he had been given a defective spoon, her response was typically quick. ‘Have you not yet discovered that Mr Pitt sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments to effect his ends?’

Despite high expectations and rousing support for Pitt, especially in the House of Commons, the new Prime Minister was forced to admit that his planned administration was not going to be as strong and inclusive as he had hoped. Pitt’s position was now entirely dependent on the King’s ministry and he faced a strengthened Opposition, making it impossible for him to hold a majority in the Commons. The last time he had taken office during the crisis of 1783, more than twenty years before, he had faced overwhelming odds and outright hostility. This time, he could not count either on the King’s longevity or his sanity; nor were his opponents likely to be swayed by threat of a general election, which had given him such critical leverage the first time around. In any case, clearly the war had to be his first concern. He would have to provide leadership, even if he met resistance at every step. When Pitt’s new Cabinet was hurriedly assembled, the Prime Minister himself assumed so much responsibility that many members joked it was ‘the new Administration of William and Pitt’.

While Pitt was preoccupied with consolidating his position, Hester was concerned with what appeared to be a slackening of interest on Granville’s part. In July, after Pitt appointed him a member of his Privy Council, Granville’s attentions waned. Letters that she sent him (signed with a big looped ‘H’), which once might have been replied to within a matter of hours, now took a day or more to summon a response. Once, he did not arrive for one of their pre-arranged walks; she found herself having to idle along a row of chestnut trees in Marylebone Fields ‘like any common strumpet’.

Had Hester known the truth behind Granville’s absences, it might have come as a shock. Granville was a serial romancer, not always a very faithful one, of a number of women. He had fathered two children with the married Lady Bessborough – Henrietta, always known as Harriet – sister of Lady Georgiana Spencer, a secret which they had managed to successfully conceal from everyone except Georgiana, whom they could trust. Nor did Hester realize that Harriet continued to exert a strong sexual and emotional power over Granville. (Their affair had begun in 1794, when Harriet was thirty-three, and he was twenty. She was by then already the mother of four children with her husband, among them, Caroline, who would grow up to become Lady Caroline Lamb.)

Harriet was well-known to Hester. Although Harriet was loyal to Georgiana’s fervently Whig ménage, like most of London society, both sisters had now thrown their parlour doors open to welcome Pitt’s niece, calling her ‘Hetty’. Of the two, Hester preferred Harriet, thinking her ‘ten times cleverer’ than her sister. It seemed to Hester that Georgiana’s ‘reputation was in great part, the effect of her position; for fine horses, fine carriages, and the éclat that attends a great personage wherever she goes, made up the greatest part of it’. Throughout that summer, as Hester agonized over her affair with Granville, Harriet frequently invited her to her residence at Cavendish House for a tête-à-tête or a small gathering. Hester noticed on one such visit that Granville had left Harriet a miniature statue of Antinous in the vestibule, identical to one he had given her. A fraught Hester was encouraged by the older woman, who was well practised in the art of eliciting confidential information, to pour out her worries.* Soon Harriet chided Granville:

Is it quite honourable, dear G, to encourage a passion you do not mean seriously to return? And which if you do not, must make the owner of it miserable? And how can you be certain of what lengths you or she may be drawn into? We know she has strong passions and indulges them with great latitude: may you not both of you be hurried further than you intend? If Mr Pitt knew even what had passed already, do you think he would like it?

In the same letter, Harriet pleads with Granville to spend the night at her house, rather than ‘sleeping at Mr Pitt’s’.6 Meanwhile, Hester’s quick scrawls to him are full of reminders about how welcome he is at Downing Street, telling he could always spend the night ‘if you prefer staying to driving back at night’.7

By early August 1804 Granville had neither broken off his affair with Hester nor entirely resumed it. He kept raising her hopes with some throwaway half-hearted comment or suggestion. Hester began hinting to her closest friends, as well as to Pitt himself, that she expected marriage. Suspecting this was not Granville’s intention and worried that the attachment was unhinging her, Pitt called Granville to Downing Street for a private talk. Granville, who was expecting a reprimand, was instead offered the highly prestigious post of Ambassador to St Petersburg, effective immediately. Pitt was anxious to prevent the embarrassing spectacle of his niece being publicly jilted. But he also needed Granville’s charm on his side. St Petersburg, the court of Tsar Alexander, could not have been a more critical posting: Pitt was endeavouring to form an alliance with Russia against Napoleon, and hoped to convince Austria, Prussia and Sweden to join, a move that would pave the way for the creation of the Third Coalition.

Granville, not brave enough to inform Hester in person, sent her this news by letter. He obviously dreaded the prospect of her making an embarrassing scene with Pitt. Granville’s departure was meant to be swift but owing to various delays, he was forced to linger in London for another two months, a highly awkward situation that was not helped by the disconcerting announcement of their engagement in one of the newspapers that September. (Granville assumed Hester had placed it herself, a charge she indignantly denied.) Harriet was greatly rattled, saying that ‘everyone is talking of it’ and adding, ‘I dread this subject coming on the tapis between you …’8 Perhaps Harriet feared that faced with an ultimatum, this time Granville might indeed decide to marry, a possibility that filled her with dread. (During his final preparations to leave, the physical affair between Harriet and Granville resumed.)

Right up to the last moment, Hester still teetered on the possibility of a change of plan, half-expecting Granville to turn up suddenly and ask her to go with him. A few days before he left on 11 October 1804, she wrote him a letter that has not survived, but apparently contained the warning words: ‘You shall see what I shall do’. Granville sealed up Hester’s letter and sent it, along with one of his own, to Harriet; he also showed it to Canning, along with a necklace he meant to give her, but Canning advised total silence. Harriet’s reply gives some indication of its content:

How strange Hetty’s note is. It admits but of two interpretations, neither of which I like to give it. The first (her meaning to destroy herself) is too horrible, and the second raises my indignation, and I don’t like believing that, finding there was no hope of your returning her passion enough to marry her, she resolv’d to indulge the inclination – which we know she possesses but too strongly – to the utmost, trusting to your honour for secrecy and to your absence for putting an end to what could not continue without danger. Hetty is so kind to me, it seems ungenerous in me to say this, and perhaps I am mistaken, but it is very odd. I shall always be kind to her, from a strange reason – she belongs in some manner to you.9