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

When Hester came to live here in 1806, Edgware Road was known as Watling Street, part of the old Roman road to St Albans. No. 4 would be her home for just over three years. It was close to Marylebone Fields (now Regent’s Park), and just a short hackney ride from some of her haunts: Jermyn Street for cheese at Paxton & Whitfield; Hatchards bookshop and the Royal Academy on Piccadilly; Hookham’s Circulating Library and Burlington Arcade and her equestrian outfitter, Mr S. Clark of Golden Square. Her local shops were on New Quebec Street, which had a butcher, dairyman, cheesemonger, tea dealer and grocer. In the mews was a livery stable where horses could be hired; Hester would go to ride with what she termed the ‘swinish multitude’ in Hyde Park whenever she could on Sundays, not just at the fashionable hour of five o’clock, when ‘the Ring’ was so full of elegant coaches the air was thick with ochre dust.

After Pitt’s death, Hester found herself in a limbo on all fronts. Although a royal pension had been granted her, it would not commence until 30 June, and the various formalities attached to it would all take time. After legal fees and other costs, it would be reduced to less than £1,000 per annum. If she was cautious, and especially if she lived away from London, she ought to have been able to manage comfortably on such an amount.

Fox, in a mood of beneficence, made Hester an offer that may in fact have come from the King himself, and must have imagined she could not refuse it. She was given a choice of residences. One was apparently ‘as good as ten thousand pounds a year’. As Hester recalled, ‘He was to make me ranger of some park, with a house; and then I was to have a house in town, and the rest was to be done the way they shuffle those things through the public offices.’ The alternative was for her to live in a grace-and-favour royal apartment, possibly at Windsor Castle, although this was conditional on her becoming a courtier. Hester rejected both offers: ‘I rather chose to live independent’. When Fox’s emissary Mr Ward told her she would live to repent her refusal, she told him that it was not

… from a personal disregard from Mr Fox that she refused; because when I asked Mr Pitt, upon one occasion, who was the cleverest man in England, he answered, ‘Mr Fox’; but as the world only knew Mr Pitt and Mr Fox as opposed [sic] to each other, I should be considered as receiving benefits from Mr Pitt’s enemy.

As for Mahon, she loathed him more than ever before. He reneged on the promise he had made Pitt, to shoulder the expenses accumulated by his brothers for their military uniforms and provisions, and refused to vouch for their debts. He told her that as far as he was concerned his promise to Pitt was now void. Horrified, Hester had replied: ‘Good God, would you have your brothers arrested?’ to which he answered, ‘It would not be the first time that a Captain of a regiment had gone to gaol.’ Pitt’s friend, William Lowther, the second Earl of Lonsdale, came to the rescue, giving James a draft for two thousand pounds, a loan that Hester, in time, repaid.

Meanwhile, there was not a great deal of respect between Mahon and his father. Pitt’s connections had gained Mahon a sinecure; and with his father-in-law’s help, he had embarked on a political career, that year becoming Tory MP for Windsor and later successfully running for Hull. He had tried, and ultimately failed, to take legal action against his father, accusing him of squandering the family estate.

Hester took the house in Montagu Square as a home not just for herself, but for her brothers, Charles and James, when they were on leave, aware that they needed to make a good impression to move up in the world. When ‘the boys’ were in town, she always had breakfast on the table from nine to twelve, ‘with tea and coffee and chicken, and tongue, and cold meat, and all that’. It was the first time she had ever had a house of her own; for the next month or so, she set about furnishing it in her own style ‘with everything customary in fashionable life’. Some of the furniture she had brought over from Downing Street, where she had decided it had been of ‘no use’, including some of the stiff, formal leather-backed sofas and chairs Pitt had used for his bad back and camp beds for her brothers’ officer friends whenever they stayed the night.

Her ménage included the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Williams, formerly a servant in Pitt’s household. Elizabeth and her sister Louisa were the daughters of Pitt’s trusted equerry, Edward Williams; they came with him from Holwood to Walmer and Putney Heath, and for a time they were educated at his expense. Bright, gentle and pretty, Elizabeth had been Pitt’s particular favourite, and had been in his service at York Place. As well as Miss Williams, Hester employed a housekeeper, a doorman and a small number of servants, among them Ann Fry, the girl who had become pregnant at Chevening. Calling herself ‘Mrs’ Fry now, Ann told Hester that she had managed to spend nine years at a respectable institution in London – Mrs Davis’s Boarding School for Girls – ‘without anyone guessing she was a mother’.1 Now she had come to Hester to beg employment and to be given shelter. In the years to come, both Elizabeth Williams and Ann Fry were to find their lives inextricably bound up with the path their mistress was to take.

If Hester needed any reminder of the descent that even an aristocratic lady like herself could face if her fortunes turned entirely, she did not have to look far. On nearby Paddington Street, just off Baker Street, there was a large workhouse, whose inmates included the old and infirm, lunatics, orphans, foundling children and vagrants. Among them could be found formerly beautiful, once-fêted mistresses of wealthy men, now discarded, destitute and shunned.

She was well aware of how thin was the line between having a lover and becoming a kept mistress. Nearby Gloucester Place was full of wealthy mistresses and courtesans, some discreet, some ostentatious. One of them was Harriette Wilson. Another was Mary Ann Clarke, the blonde mistress of the King’s son, the Duke of York, then Commander-in-Chief of the army. Mary Ann, who was sometimes glimpsed walking along Bond Street with a retinue of African servants, would be undone by too flagrantly using her influence to sell army commissions; the Duke would desert her in 1809. But for the moment, she held amusing soirées full of uniformed men, and if the Duke was there, Hester and her brothers would often drop in. Although not overly impressed with Mary Ann, she loved to poke fun at the Duchess, whom she described as ‘a painted wife, with half a dozen fine gentlemen about her, shaking the hair-powder on her face’ and ordering the windows open ‘at dinner time, in a cold November day, to let out the smells of a parcel of dogs’. It was quite natural, she thought, with such an ‘uncomfortable home’ that the Duke thought himself ‘at liberty to take a little pleasure elsewhere’. Although she could be blind to her own lapses of romantic judgement, Hester was a shrewd observer of those of others. Hester mimicked women like Mary Ann, rolling her eyes, sucking in her cheeks, smirking and assuming her mock-lascivious look. She may have been damning, and she tried to ensure that her brothers were never prey to such women – ‘the rascally set’ she called them. But as she was well aware, being a woman in Georgian London could be a precarious business.

Hester was now thirty. Having discovered the freedom of independence, she was loath to give it up. Some of that independence meant that she was free to establish friendships with men of her choosing, and if it was considered slightly scandalous that she was an unmarried woman in a house that was often full of men this was how she preferred it. One of her most persistent callers was William Noel Hill, fresh from a diplomatic posting in Austria, evidently still holding out hopes that Hester might settle down with him.* That October, once again, Harriet Bessborough set the rumour mill in motion:

Ly. Hol [Lady Holland] told me yesterday as certain that Hetty’s marriage with Mr Hill is declared and is to take place immediately: can this be so? If it is, il est bien bon. God bless you. I wish it may be true, for I sincerely wish poor Hetty to be well and comfortably settled.2

The engagement never materialized. Feeling himself rejected, the disgruntled Hill commented around this time that he thought Hester ‘must have some strong occupation’ or outlet for her talents. Sardonically, Hester began to refer to him as ‘Christ Jesus’, resenting his preachings. Some months later, Canning’s visits had also become noticeably frequent. In March 1807 he accepted the position of Foreign Secretary, and the degree to which he continued to seek out Hester’s company indicates how useful he found her political insights.

In July 1807 a familiar face from her Walmer days came back into her orbit. She had met Sir John Moore when he was in command at nearby Shorncliffe Camp, and immediately liked him, finding the Scottish-born-and-bred soldier refreshingly scornful of politicians. Then – as again now – he was a particularly handsome man; tall, with his greying locks close-cropped and his military greatcoat and necktie always slightly askew. Now he came to see her, to pay his respects and talk about Pitt. He found her changed, perhaps less impetuous. Her political understanding, her mental quickness and her familiarity with the preoccupations he faced, impressed him. It may not have taken long for Hester and Moore to realize they wished to spend more time in each other’s company.

Judging by the trust and respect, and sheer frequency, of the letters that followed, Moore, who had managed to remain a bachelor all these years, may well have felt that he had finally met his match. Pitt’s old offer to make her one of his generals was a standing joke between them. Moore was forty-seven, and was in many ways a far more realistic choice for Hester than Granville. It would not have been his nature to mislead her, and he also had an air of sophistication unusual for a soldier, spoke several European languages and had already distinguished himself in America in the War of Independence and among other posts, in Corsica, the West Indies and Egypt. A complicity grew between them, much more than mere friendship. Moore seems to have been good for Hester; the influence of his methodical but passionate nature allowed her to regulate her otherwise erratic moods.

On his return to London Moore had been informed that his services would be welcome in Spain, but not as Commander of the Peninsular Campaign as had been widely predicted. It was a humiliating blow. Moore did not mix well with authority; his superiors and the current administration generally frustrated and exasperated him. In October 1807, a peace treaty was signed with Portugal, followed by another with Spain in January. Both Canning and Castlereagh, the Secretary of War, were impatient to make a real strike at the French. A decision was made to send the British army already in Portugal, reinforced with an expeditionary force from Britain, to support the Spanish.

With Hester, Moore felt free to pick over every conceivable angle of his position, to fulminate about what he thought of Castlereagh’s military plans (‘plausible verbose nonsense and a sort of gibberish’, he complained to her) instead of having to censor himself. She was indignant on his behalf, perhaps – and this would have been something entirely novel for both of them – recognizing the pleasure of being two against the world.

It is fair to guess that Moore might not have been her choice when she was younger, nor she his, but now they were no longer so young. In March 1808 she was thirty-two, and she must have recognized that Moore was not the kind of man to make her suffer deliberately. As often happens when people know they are about to be separated, emotions surfaced at the last minute. By the time of Moore’s departure, they both realized the extent of their attachment. What precisely had been agreed between them is not clear. Everything about his letters to her from the frontline suggests that he felt very tenderly towards her, greatly respected her opinions and actively missed her. He trusted her with highly confidential information about his superiors. She meanwhile appeared to be full of the sort of optimistic energy and quiet purpose that only a woman confident in a new love can be.

Her brothers would be leaving for Spain too. The hope that they might be near Moore at least gave her greater confidence that she would see them all safe again.

In the autumn of 1808 British forces marched into Spain and Portugal, in the sanguine belief that the patriots would soon loosen the French grip on the country, and expecting to be greeted with open arms by the inhabitants. Immense amounts of financial aid and military provisions had been shipped to the insurgents. Yet the British were in for a shock. The Spanish and Portuguese armies were disorganized and poorly commanded; as well as shortages of food, clothing and equipment, there was a complete lack of cavalry and artillery.

After his arrival, first in Portugal and then in Spain, Moore wrote to Hester every few days, letters of great length and unwavering fondness. It is clear that hers are just as urgent and detailed, and that she is all the time worrying about him in the field, and about his reputation, which is under fire from ministers at home; she sends him every useful tidbit she can. ‘I believe they will make no attack on me until they see how I extricate myself here,’ he tells her, adding that he intends to let the public judge him by releasing his letters, ‘which contain a plain narrative’. He hopes she can look at them all before he publishes them, he tells her, ‘if ever I have the pleasure of seeing you again’. He reassures her that although he has not yet seen Charles with the 50th, he has ‘at last contrived an arrangement … with Sir Henry, who is the most liberal of men, to take the 50th with me’ so that Charles should be with him as aide-de-camp soon. He tells Hester: ‘I wish you were here with us. The climate now is charming; and we should give you riding enough, and in your red habit à la Amazone, you would animate and do us much good.’3

A month later, on 20 November, from Salamanca, Moore reassures her again after she has written to him asking him to receive James too. ‘I can refuse you nothing,’ he tells her. He advises her to notify James that he must obtain leave to come to Spain and join him, but warns her: ‘He will, however come too late; I shall be already beaten. I am within four marches of the French, with only a third of my force, and as the Spaniards have been dispatched in all quarters, my junction with the other two-thirds is very precarious. When we do join, we shall be very inferior to the enemy, we have been completely deceived … and now the discovery comes a little too late.’4

Moore disagreed with his government’s military tactics in Spain from the outset. Left in command in the Peninsula, he was faced with overwhelming odds. Moore’s troops left Salamanca for Old Castile on 11 December, hoping to distract the French away from Madrid. Very soon afterwards, however, he heard that not only had Madrid fallen, but that Napoleon, having only now realized the British were there, was unleashing the full force of his army against them – some 80,000 men. Knowing there was no glory in a vanquished army, Moore immediately realized his only objective was to save his forces from annihilation, and marched them north in the hope they would be smoothly evacuated by the Royal Navy.

For more than two weeks after the fall of Madrid, things seemed to be going well. By the end of December, though, a combination of poor logistics and horrendous weather caused chaos on both sides. By 27 December, Moore had managed to reach what appeared to be reasonable safety, and the next day began what would become known as the ‘retreat to Corunna’. His forces were then joined by some 6,000 Spanish soldiers, many barely able to stand, malnourished and a great number succumbing to infectious diseases such as dysentery, typhus and cholera. Soon the mood of desperation spread to the redcoats, and discipline began to break down. Moore would have been horrified at the trail of theft, rape and murder left behind by his fine battalions. By the time his depleted army reached Corunna, it was in a disastrous state. The ships had been held up, while the French were pressing hard, and before the British could be evacuated they were subjected to heavy bombardment.

At Corunna on 16 January 1809 Moore made a last-ditch stand against intensified assault by Marshal Soult. Late that afternoon, while directing his reserves, Moore was cut down by a cannonball volley that seemed to onlookers to strike from nowhere. It shattered his vital organs and bones; it was clear to those who ran to help him that he was beyond help, although he was not, it seems, disfigured. Moore’s long-time companion and closest friend Colonel Paul Anderson was with him. When two surgeons came hurrying up to him, he told them they would do better to attend injured soldiers; he knew he was dying. As he lay on his camp bed, the anxious faces of his men pressed around; he tried to give Anderson instructions for his mother and sister, and asked about other officers who had been wounded. At that moment, young James Stanhope rushed up in time to catch the General’s last words: ‘Stanhope, remember me to your sister.’

It was a memorably graceful death; he was buried on the ramparts of Corunna the following day. By 17 January most of the British troops had managed to board the waiting HMS Victory – later known to the world as Nelson’s ship at the Battle of Trafalgar – and the following day, the entire fleet sailed for home. They would not receive a hero’s welcome when they arrived on 23 January. Instead, a bewildered British public would watch aghast as Moore’s headless army returned, having lost some 2,000 men, with one-fifth of their number missing, presumed dead, and several thousand more wounded and sick.

Hester heard the news about Moore within hours of the Victory’s arrival. She was devastated. Everything she had begun to hope for – a new life – had been taken away from her at a stroke. In the first days after Moore’s death, Hester behaved like a war widow.

What she did not learn immediately was that her brother – ‘dearest, delightful amusing Charles’ – died the same afternoon as Moore. A bullet ripped through his heart as he turned to congratulate his men in the 50th Regiment, which Moore had put him in charge of. ‘Moore received his death-blow shortly after, and my poor brother fell nearly at the same time. Thank heaven the latter did not suffer one instant … the gallant General lived for three hours, but the agony he was in never deranged his senses; he was perfectly collected …’ It was Colonel Anderson who brought her the news, and who stayed while she broke down. Continuing her letter to an unidentified friend, she confides:

You may wonder why I tell you all this; but grief has its peculiarities, and thinking of nothing else but those I have lost, I like to talk of them, and the only one I have devoted my time to since is Colonel Anderson, knowing the nature of my feelings, the instant he arrived in town he came to me and told me everything in detail.5

She went on to say it was a miracle that James survived; his cloak had been shot through, he was hit and wounded; four men standing close to him were mown down by a cannonball. ‘I feel as though I have just waked from a horrid dream …’6

Grief left a powerful mark on Hester. Within the space of three years, she had lost her favourite brother, and two dearly loved men, one of whom might have become her husband. To those whom she felt had engineered the circumstances that had led to the débâcle at Corunna, and who now came to offer her sympathy, like Canning and her uncle Chatham, she was cold. She felt deeply aggrieved for Moore, aware that in the souring of the public opinion about the Peninsular War, the general had played a part. She especially blamed Castlereagh for his readiness in the House of Commons to inculpate Moore; on that subject she felt ‘my indignation is so great that I should have torn out his black heart’.7 She immediately wrote to the Prime Minister, her cousin Lord Grenville, in a tone brimming with accusation, fearing that he would somehow deny Moore ‘the honours he is so well entitled to from his country’. She wanted him to know of the ‘unlimited confidence’ that Pitt had ‘placed in Sir John Moore’s judgement and exertions’, adding that ‘no man could have been more ill-treated than the General’.* Hester was clearly worried that his reputation would be tarnished – ‘I have great apprehensions that they will even persecute him beyond the grave, by blackening his memory …’.

So, for Hester, 1809 began as a year of terrible sorrow. It was hard for her to see much point to her life in London. Her one concern was James, who although he had recovered physically from his ordeal, showed every sign of what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. On 27 April, at Montagu Square, Hester rewrote her will, which she had witnessed by Colonel Anderson. With Charles dead, she made James the heir to all her belongings, as well as her share in their dead mother’s estate, which they would be entitled to only if their uncle Lord Chatham died without issue.

She and James had decided to go abroad together for a while. Sicily was to be their destination. The balmy island climate had long been considered the best place for convalescence, but getting there was not an altogether easy proposition. All but the most determined travellers deferred their journey to Europe around this time; Hester and James would have to find passage on a naval frigate. With the French chafing at the blockade, private vessels, although tolerated in the main, were generally thought too dangerous. Still, Hester had friends in high places; arrangements would be made.

In the meantime, Hester set about packing up Montagu Square. She took a small set of rooms at 14 Green Street, just off Oxford Street, and cast about for somewhere to rent cheaply for the summer. Soon after Moore’s departure the previous year, she had gone to Bath for several weeks, and on one of her lengthier jaunts had discovered the beautiful scenery of the Wye Valley in Wales.

She returned to Builth Wells, an otherwise unprepossessing, rather closed-faced town that sat on some of the most bucolic landscape she had ever seen. On her last visit she had stayed at the Royal Oak (now the Lion Hotel) for several weeks. This time her past happiness was a painful reminder of what she had lost: she stayed no more than a night in May 1809, before making her way further up the valley.

On that first visit, Hester had befriended the town’s best-known residents, the Reverend Price and his son Thomas, both fiery Welsh nationalists she had taken a great liking to. For the time being, father and son offered Hester kindly, lively company, though if she had come to Wales to find quiet, she would hardly have found it in the Prices’ dining room, which was invariably full of impressionable, idealistic young men, shouting and speaking in Welsh, then apologizing and translating for the English-speakers. Although remote, it was not as removed from the war as one might suppose. The Black Mountains had several camps where French prisoners of war were being held; Thomas Price spent part of his time teaching them Welsh.

It was to Reverend Price that Hester had written to ask if she could rent a property on the banks of the Irfon, three miles from town, that she remembered seeing the previous year. ‘Glan Irfon’ was a simple, dark-slate-walled gabled farmhouse, sheltered by a ridge, with a pleasant view overlooking meadows. By late spring the landscape would have been soft and green, with hill-slopes full of lazing cattle and forest-like thickets; wildflowers everywhere and wild roses tumbling over the hedgerows. The farmhouse was never meant to sleep more than four or so people; there was only one other guest bedroom. During the time Hester was there, with James and other visitors, as well as Elizabeth Williams, it was packed to the rafters.

By the time Hester arrived in the Wye Valley, she had made a new acquaintance. The friendship she would form with the flamboyant Venezuelan revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda would do much to help her recover her enthusiasm for life, and galvanize her ambitions. He was fifty-nine to her thirty-three, well-built and olive-skinned with piercing hazel eyes, his greying hair tied back in a ponytail which gave him a piratical look.