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

Hester’s anguish, when she discovered that Granville intended to abandon her, was so great that she did indeed try to kill herself.10 She did not say whether she did this at Downing Street, York Place or Putney, but she was undoubtedly in London. It must have been on 7 or 8 October. She posted her letter to Granville first. Hester’s body proved to be stronger than she supposed, as she would later confide. She was violently sick, enough to expel the fatal dose, although she managed to severely poison herself, causing damage to her liver, kidneys and lungs. Hester’s suicide attempt was a grave shock to Pitt. He did not call his own doctor, Sir Walter Farquhar (who also tended the gossipy Spencer sisters), but summoned another eminent physician, Dr Henry Cline. Hester was to say that she intended to kill herself, although laudanum was also commonly used to induce abortion. Both the doctor and the servants who attended her would have been sworn to secrecy.

In the immediate aftermath of the overdose, she was in such discomfort from her injured organs that she could not sleep for twelve days, nor could she keep any solid food down. She was in misery not just at the failure at her attempt but because of her physical pain. As she would tell her doctor many years later, she put a lancet under her pillow, hinting that she might once more attempt suicide. She also recalled that even when she was out of danger, for some weeks she remained an alarming scarlet colour, and her forehead was continually prickled with sweat. One of her visitors was her suitor William Noel Hill, who made her smile weakly, comparing her appearance to that of Christ’s on the cross: ‘You will set a crown of thorns on your head – you will sweat blood presently’.11

Hester was convinced that Harriet – with the help of the Devonshire House circle – had conspired against her, and had encouraged Granville to believe she was less than he deserved. From Hester’s perspective, Harriet did not want Granville to escape her clutches. (This turned out to be an accurate prediction. Five years later, Granville would marry Lady Harriet Cavendish, Georgiana’s daughter, his former lover’s niece. As soon as it was decently possible, Harriet, or Harryo as she was called, adopted both children from her husband’s former liaison with her aunt. Harryo was apparently prepared to extend her affections to the children, but retained a lifelong jealousy of Harriet, whose influence over Granville remained undiminished.)

Hester compounded her humiliation by pursuing Granville with a torrent of letters, which soon afterwards she would look back upon with mortification. He did not burn them as she asked; they are by turns plaintive, self-recriminatory and confessional. She wanted him to know how she suffered:

You know that I loved you! Yes, to idolatry; still I wd by no means have you to understand that I offer this as a vindication for the folly of my conduct, on the contrary … the natural levity of my disposition offers no excuse, as from the first moment I discovered that every thought was devoted to you, which was too early in our acquaintance …12

She reminded him of the ‘sacred seal of confidence’ agreed between them; and tried to undo the damage of the ‘miserable scrap’ written to him as ‘the dread hour approached’ on the eve of his departure, which was ‘like the hour of death to me’. Pitt, she told him, urged her to put him out of her thoughts: ‘God, what a dunce!’ She wanted to apologize for her behaviour, but claimed she could not control it. ‘I have often told you I was born a tyrant; it is therefore in vain for me to deceive myself’ – and to exonerate him. She blamed herself for being so passionate. ‘As a man, how could you have acted otherwise, persecuted by the affections of a woman whose only object was to gain you, at any price, & who felt but too conscious you never shared the passion you inspired. Oh strange fatality!’13 One of her sentences trails off pitifully, ‘My heart is at this moment breaking …’

Although he had done everything possible for Hester, Pitt was horrified. Every day, the newspapers reported suicides, of sad and varied circumstances and methods, described in graphic detail. The official verdict on any suicide was always the same: ‘lunacy’. ‘Self-murder’ was considered deeply shameful. Pitt’s many biographers have never examined the impact that his niece’s suicide attempt might have had on his ability to function, on his own inner sense of confidence, perhaps because he kept it so well hidden. But it is possible that Hester’s crisis was a blow that precipitated his own descent into ill-health. He felt responsible; he may also have felt guilty, not only for concocting the plan to take Granville away from her, but perhaps even for drawing her attention to him in the first place. There are consistent reports of Pitt’s distraction at the end of August that corroborate Hester’s account of her own growing unhappiness and instability. One official noted on 31 August 1804 that he had seen Pitt ‘completely under the influence of anxiety and depression’, and another observer saw him walking alone early in the morning in St James’s Park, ‘looking like death with his eyes staring out of his head’.

As soon as she was able, in early November, Hester fled to Walmer. Pitt had extracted from her the promise that she would never again harm herself and that she would try to forget Granville.14 While she recovered, Hester consoled herself with the fact that she continued ‘to please Mr Pitt more than ever, if I may judge by his kindness, which if possible, augments’. Still she brooded, refusing to believe that Granville never loved her or intended to marry her.

Although secluded away – first on the Kentish coast and later in Putney – Hester was by no means forgotten, either in London or in St Petersburg. Harriet and Granville exchanged a series of semi-cryptic letters discussing her. Hester’s whereabouts, and the reason for the lengthy amount of time she had remained away from London, apparently remained topics of great interest in society. On 5 March Harriet wrote to Granville:

Hetty is still at Walmer, where she has been very ill and confin’d to her room for some time. I wonder whether my fears were justified … She publishes everywhere your having completely jilted her. I always fear’d this.*15

Harriet also told him she saw Hester’s would-be suitor, William Noel Hill, and discussed ‘Hetty’, and gathered that at one time there had been ‘great tendresses between them’ until Granville had come along ‘and had driven all the others out’. Harriet had a firm suspicion Hester was pregnant. She wrote to Granville:

My Sis and all her family returned home from a ball last night full of Hetty and the story of the accouchement which they insist upon which she affichés – that is, she goes out without rouge, much fairer than she was, and so languid and faint that she did faint at Mad. Dupre’s. I wonder what all this means. I should not have any doubt after the letter I saw, only you say nothing of it. From my soul I pity her.16

On 28 June, Harriet wrote again that she had talked with Pitt’s close colleague George Rose about her suspicions about Hester being pregnant. She refers to this as:

… that other circumstance so much believ’d in London. I told him I was certain, what-ever passed between them before his departure, he never gave her the least reason to imagine he had any thoughts of her as a wife; that I believed all the stories were false, but if true, that my opinion of [Granville] was such I was sure it must have been her fault as much as his. He agreed with me in this, but Heaven knows how it is to end.17

The fact that Harriet went to great lengths to relay these conversations in such detail in her correspondence suggests that Granville refused to give her a straight answer.

The possibility that Hester was indeed pregnant is intriguing. She deliberately made sure Harriet did not see her for months. Even so, she was glimpsed at least once by her sister. Georgiana’s assessing eyes would have been familiar with every sign. Apparently, she was convinced. Still, it would have certainly suited all those who would have preferred to see Fox in place of Pitt if indeed it became widely known that Hester had fallen from grace in such a way. Hester did make at least one and possibly several brief visits to London during this otherwise unusually reclusive time; she had also been sighted in February by Lady Stafford, Lord Granville’s mother, who wrote to her son:

I was sadly disappointed the other day when I saw Ly. Hester Stanhope with Susan. I had figured her to myself as very pretty, in Place of which she look’d like a middle-aged married woman with a dingey Complexion, no Rouge, a broad Face and an unbecoming fur cap.18

That certainly was a vision calculated to cure any romantic nostalgia.

At Walmer that winter Hester was often alone. Expecting Pitt to return at Easter, she had been busily distracting herself with a surprise for him. At the very edge of Walmer’s grounds, she had often walked by a deep chalk quarry, which had been left as a bleak ravine. She sent the resident gardener, Burfield, to Maidstone to bring back ‘creepers, furze and broom’, which she used to soften the overall effect, having landscaped fully-grown trees and shrubs in amongst the ferns and mossy hollows. It became her own secret garden, a place that somehow represented for her the transformative powers she knew she possessed. But Pitt, prevented by work and ill-health, was never again to return to Walmer.

She and Pitt agreed that it was better for her to live separately for a time. Pitt wanted to avoid any kind of scandal or emotional turbulence. The months between March 1805 and January 1806 are unaccounted for, nor do any letters seem to have been preserved from this time. Where was she living? Harriet, it seems, rarely lost an opportunity to track down her erstwhile friend, especially when she sensed a tantalizing secret. In August 1805 she noted: ‘Hetty is living by herself in London, with Mr Hill there from Morning till Night. Mr Pitt is displeased with her for something.’19 By December she commented that Hester had been seeing a great deal of her cousin, and possibly living under the same roof: ‘I saw Sir Sydney [sic] Smith yesterday, he has been living with Hetty. I wonder whether acting the part of a consolateur!’20

Hester developed a particular disdain for women like Harriet and Georgiana, so apparently decorous, artful and ‘modern’, yet bankrolled and ultimately controlled by their rich husbands, whose censure they feared beyond any passion they felt for their lovers. She had grown up in the era in which Mary Wollstonecraft had stated in print that society made a fatal mistake by allowing women only the role of domestic slave or ‘alluring mistress’ without recourse to any financial freedom, and by encouraging women to think only of their looks and charms. This was a viewpoint that Hester instinctively held and she expressed it by her actions. But she was no radical polemicist – her father had cured her of that. Hester would have thought feeble-minded Wollstonecraft’s urgings that society divest itself of the monarchy, the military and the church, and she certainly did not believe in the social equality that Wollstonecraft maintained was as necessary to happiness between a man and a woman. If anything, she was an aristocratic individualist, with more than a touch about her of Lord Stanhope’s Minority of One.

Hester was not the only one who felt her reputation was under attack. The winter of 1805 was particularly fraught for Pitt, who was coming under increasing fire from the Opposition. Despite his intensified efforts to create a broader-based administration, he was unable to lure the Fox and Grenville factions into the government, a rapprochement that could only be successful if an agreement could be reached between the King and the Prince of Wales. As long as their estrangement continued, so did their respective vetoes on Fox and Grenville. Pitt was forced to fall back on his last resort – to patch up his friendship with Addington, and the sixty MPs who took their lead from him, whose support he now desperately needed.

A window on these proceedings is provided in a letter written to ‘Dearest Lady H’ from an extremely agitated Canning, dated 1 January 1805, in which he expresses his shock at Pitt’s decision. He is replying to a letter Hester had sent him the day before in which she had obviously ‘leaked’ the information to him that Addington was to be made a Minister, and that he himself was not; the inference being that Canning had obviously expected to be made Foreign Secretary, and had now found that the position will be going to Pitt’s old loyalist, Lord Mulgrave. He wrote to her early that morning, after ‘as much sleep as I could get after such a letter’ and told her ‘… I am nothing, I cannot help it; I cannot face the House of Commons or walk the streets in the state of things as I am’.21 It is a lengthy, detailed and personal letter, in which he agonizes about his colleagues, written in the kind of shorthand that suggests he had long since let her into the inner workings of his mind. He asks her to intercede with ‘Mr P’ on his behalf:

Through you I come to him with more confidence in not being misunderstood … You stood instead of pages of preface and apology and are a vouchee for us to each other that we mean each other kindly and fairly.22

Canning clearly expected her to still be privy to the sort of confidences from Pitt that kept him writhing in anticipation. Many of Pitt’s ministers had pointedly suggested to Pitt that her influence on state matters would not be tolerated. Pitt laughed this off as an absurdity. Hester would later say:

There might be some apparent levity, both as regarded affairs of the Cabinet and my own, but I always knew what I was doing. When Mr Pitt was reproached for allowing me such unreserved liberty of action in State matters, and in affairs where his friends advised him to question me on the motives of my conduct, he always answered: I let her do as she pleases, for if she were resolved to cheat the devil, she could do it.

The mood towards Pitt had soured. The fact that Britain was at war – engaged on two fronts now, having committed the country to the Spanish conflict – enraged his countrymen further. Pitt’s popularity sank lower when, in February 1805, he presented his budget to the Commons requesting a loan of £20 million and further tax rises on salt, postal services, horses, property and legacies.

Meanwhile the Opposition was seeking out damning evidence wherever it could. Finally a chink in Pitt’s armour came in the form of the Tenth Report of the Commission of Naval Inquiry, which had been set up as a watchdog over the navy’s management practices. It was the perfect opportunity to point the finger of financial indiscretion at the otherwise incorruptible Pitt. The matter became one of grave moral laxity, on which the very integrity of the administration rested. Even Pitt’s dearest friends, such as Wilberforce, were moved to vote against him.

When the vote took place on 9 April 1805, the numbers were equal, so that the Speaker, whose face ‘turned white as ashes’, was forced to cast the deciding ballot. After a pause of ten minutes, the visibly uneasy Speaker announced his vote against the government. Pitt was seen leaning in his chair, pushing his little cocked hat down to obscure his face, so that only those near to him could see that tears coursed down his cheeks.

Hester knew him well enough to let him be, knowing that after the humiliation of such a defeat, and having so many among his former followers vote against him, he needed comfort more than righteous indignation. From that point on, she felt contempt for a great many of those men she had formerly entertained on Pitt’s behalf. The stirrings by those loyal to Pitt but now anxious for the formation of a new administration were increasing, but they did not dare to act while he was still in power.

Early in January 1806, the devastating news of Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz and the collapse of the Third Coalition proved to be Pitt’s death-blow. Hester rushed to his side and was deeply shocked to see his altered appearance when he was brought to Putney Heath. As he was helped out of his carriage, she knew he would not survive long. ‘I said to myself, “It is all over with him.” He was supported by the arms of two people, and had a stick, or two sticks, in his hands, and as he came up, panting for breath.’

Traditional dinners were held at Downing Street without Pitt. On 18 January, Pitt ordered Hester to attend the official celebration of Queen Charlotte’s birthday, insisting he did not want her social life to be curtailed. An issue of the Lady’s Magazine for the following month describes her appearance at the event:

Lady Hester Stanhope, was, as usual, dressed with much style and elegance, in black and green velvet ornamented with embossed gold, and studded with rubies, which had a most brilliant effect. Headdress: feathers and diamonds.23

Parliament opened on 21 January 1806. The mood was subdued; the Opposition agreed to defer their action to bring down the administration for a week, as they waited to see how long Pitt might last. On the morning of 23 January, Pitt agreed to pray, saying that he had ‘neglected prayer too much to allow him to hope that it could be very efficacious now’. He then asked to rewrite his will. Had he not managed this last act, Hester’s future might have been quite different. Pitt knew he had only debts to leave behind him, but he also knew that his request for specific bequests would receive serious consideration by the Crown and by Parliament.

James would recall that Hester was infuriated that Pitt’s doctor, Farquhar, would not let her in to see Pitt for a final farewell. But when the doctor had slipped out for dinner, she went into his room.

Though even then wandering a little, he immediately recollected her, and with his usual angelic mildness wished her future happiness, and gave her a most solemn blessing and affectionate farewell. On her leaving the room I entered it; and for some time afterwards Mr Pitt continued to speak of her, and several times repeated, ‘Dear soul! I know she loves me. Where is Hester? Is Hester gone?’24

Pitt died later that day, and Hester cut a lock of his grey hair before his body was removed. She would keep it all her days in a little pearl locket, as one of her most precious possessions.

Within a week of Pitt’s death, the House of Commons voted to put £40,000 towards Pitt’s personal debts – the present-day equivalent would be more than £2 million. In addition, the King personally granted Pitt’s dying wish to leave Hester and her sisters with pensions. Hester would be given £1,200 a year – around £60,000 today. It was an extraordinary sum for one who had never held any political office. (By comparison, her cousin, Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of Acre, had been awarded a pension of £1,000.) Grizel and Lucy were also provided for, and received £600 each. The King understood Pitt’s request to be somewhat unusual, but he granted it in the knowledge that Pitt wished it. Besides, he had always liked Hester’s spirit.

Pitt’s funeral on Saturday, 22 February 1806, was a solemn and grand event. Preceded by fifes, drums and trumpets, the cortège passed from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, and was attended by a black-suited multitude of all the Members of Parliament and the peerage, as well as three royal dukes. Pitt’s elder brother Chatham, along with the Stanhope brothers, walked beside the coffin, following the same route as the procession in 1778 for Lord Chatham; once again the Abbey’s cavernous halls echoed the name of William Pitt, Prime Minister. For two days, Pitt’s body had lain in state in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, hung with banners of the Chatham arms. Tens of thousands of mourners paid their respects. Many were visibly affected during the ceremony: Wilberforce was seen crying openly, Mulgrave was ‘scarcely … able to support himself’, and Canning described ‘a feeling of loneliness & dismay which I have never felt half so strongly before’. Even Fox was heard to say that it was ‘as if there was something missing in the world – a chasm, a blank that cannot be supplied’. Amongst them, dressed in black, a stricken, dry-eyed Hester watched as Pitt’s body was lowered into the Chatham family vault.

* Pitt’s bachelor status puzzled the nation. It seemed that he somehow lacked the nerve for marriage. In the twenty-first century it is easy to speculate that he may have had homosexual tendencies but there seems to be no evidence for this. What Hester thought about this state of affairs is difficult to decipher. That she would later tell Meryon that she believed Eleanor Eden was ‘the only women Pitt had ever loved’ might be misleading. She, like many close to Pitt, concluded that his life was absolutely wedded to politics.

* But there was something else, about which it seems the entire family closed ranks: the birth of an illegitimate child in Europe that was certainly Camelford’s. The mother’s identity was never revealed. Shortly after the time Hester had travelled with Mahon in Italy, Lord Grenville had written to Camelford on 10 February 1803, just before his ill-fated arrest in France, with news ‘of a very painful communication which I have to make to you and which it is of the utmost importance for you to know’. More tantalizingly, Grenville had been informed that Camelford had fathered a child, a daughter, about whom the young peer had apparently known nothing. The child had been discreetly adopted immediately after birth. By August 1810, the mother would be vaguely described as being now ‘principally abroad’. No money was ever requested. In my opinion, the possibility that Hester might in fact have been the mother and gone abroad to have the child cannot be ruled out, and would certainly explain her eldest brother’s reaction to her in Florence.

* Lord Granville Leveson Gower, who would become 1st Earl Granville in 1833, is variously referred to here as Leveson Gower and Granville, the name used by his intimates.

* Camelford’s fateful duel had taken place in the early hours of the morning in the meadows outside Holland House in Kensington; he died on 10 March 1804, aged twenty-nine. He was buried in the crypt of St Anne’s Church in Dean Street, Soho.

* While William Noel Hill’s elder brother Lord Berwick was wealthy, with a stately pile in Shropshire, Hill was less so. Famously, the two brothers stood against one another in the Shrewsbury elections of 1796, each spending what others would have regarded as fortunes several times over to secure votes in a spectacularly corrupt campaign. Hill won, and kept his seat as a Tory MP until 1812.

* Hester was aware that Harriet devoured French novels; she might not have known that one of her favourites was Les Liaisons dangereuses, and that she had teased Granville for being a little like Valmont.

* There are conflicting reports of Hester’s whereabouts and condition throughout this time: in a letter to her son on 7 March 1805, Lady Stafford mentions going to the King’s ball at Windsor the previous Monday, where she says ‘Ly S was there’ and that ‘Ly B’ was not.

4 A Summoning of Strength

Today, a passer-by stopping at the corner of Montagu Square (which Hester always pronounced ‘Mountague’) might peer curiously at No. 4, a plain, three-storeyed, brown-brick building in a row of elegant Georgian townhouses. It overlooks a long, rectangular garden, planted with plane trees and orderly flower beds, which like most of London’s private gardens can only be entered with a resident’s key. Hester might well have enjoyed the irony that had she lived several generations later, she might not have needed to go to the Middle East: by then, the Middle East would have come to her. Hardly more than a hundred metres away is Edgware Road, which although a greyer, less vibrant version of Beirut’s Hamra, is nonetheless a mecca for London’s Arab community, bustling with newsstands touting the latest copies of L’Orient Le Jour and men in cafés puffing away at narguileh pipes. Black-robed women flit by; supermarkets sell mahmoul cakes, orange-blossom water and zahtar along with other staples for anyone homesick for the sight of Mount Lebanon.