This much at least is certain, that no man ever had a nobler or more devoted wife. She survived him to witness the glories and almost the death of her second son, dying in April 1808. At Orwell there is a picture of her by Gainsborough, painted in 1747, dressed in white with jewels, with a pleasant rather than a beautiful face. There is another portrait at Chevening painted in 1750, which represents her with auburn hair, a long upper lip, and a nose slightly turned up; comely and intelligent, but no more. Mrs. Montagu rather confirms this impression: 'I believe Lady Hester Grenville is very good-humoured, which is the principal article in the happiness of the Marriage State. Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,'[267] and so forth; from which we may infer that Lady Hester was not at any rate a reigning toast. Her appearances are rare but full of tenderness; she watched over her husband with exquisite devotion; furthering and anticipating his wishes, which were often fanciful and extravagant; shielding his moments of nervous prostration with the wings of an angel. On her rested often, if not always, the care of his affairs, often, if not always, disordered, and all the burdens of household management. For many months she was his sole channel of communication with the outer world. The wives of statesmen are not invariably successful, though they are generally devoted; but none was ever more absorbed in her high but harassing duty. In all the bitterness of that bitter time, when her husband seemed surrounded by implacable enmities, no one found a word to say against her. Pitt's choice seems to have been as wise as it was deliberate.
Camelford, from whom the worst interpretation can always be obtained, says: 'His marriage was unexpected. He was no longer young, and his infirmities made him older than his years, when, upon a visit to Mr. Grenville at Wotton, Lady Hester made an impression upon him that was the more extraordinary as she was by no means new to him. The first hints he gave of his intentions were eagerly seized by her, saying she should be unworthy the honour he proposed to her if she could hesitate a moment in accepting it. With a very common understanding and totally devoid of tenderness, or of any feeling but pride and ambition, she contrived to make herself a good wife to him by a devotion and attachment that knew no bounds. She lived only in his glory, and that vanity absorbed every other idea of her mind. She was his nurse, his flatterer, his housekeeper and steward, and, though her talent was by no means economy, yet she could submit to any privation that would gratify his wants or his caprices. If he loved anyone it must be her who had no love but for him, or rather for his reputation. Yet I saw no sacrifices on his part for her ease and quiet or to the essential comforts of her life.'
As to Lady Hester's having a 'very common understanding' and being 'totally devoid of tenderness' we need not rest on tradition, though that is all the other way; for the superiority of her understanding and her tenderness are amply proved by the admirable letters published from the Pretyman Papers by Lord Ashbourne; and her devotion to her husband is attested by Camelford himself. How he became acquainted with the details of courtship, usually mysterious enough, and in those days more veiled than in these, we need not trouble to inquire. When it took place Pitt was taking time which he could ill spare to write letters of anxious and affectionate solicitude to Camelford at Cambridge, and receiving in return the most unbounded assurances of grateful devotion.
Pitt's love letters, alas! survive; the treasures of his wife, but the despair of posterity. That a great genius presumably in love should send such stilted, pompous, artificial documents as tokens of his passion to the object of his affections is one of the mysteries of brain and heart. They are as wretched in their way as the letters of Burns to Clarinda, and shall not be quoted here.
Having paid his betrothed a flying visit at Stowe, the blithe bridegroom had as usual to proceed to Bath, where he remained a fortnight inditing these execrable epistles of rhetorical affection.
CHAPTER XVII.
On November 14, the very day of the opening of1754. Parliament, Pitt brought forward a bill for the relief of the Chelsea Pensioners, who, from receiving their pensions a year in arrear, fell inextricably into the hands of usurers. He was in haste to perform this useful duty, for on November 16 he was married by special licence to Lady Hester at Argyll Buildings, Dr. Ayscough officiating; and Solomon and Esther, as Lady Townshend called them, thence departed for the honeymoon to West's house of Wickham in Kent. That interval of seclusion did not last long, but it would seem to have effected a striking transformation. The marriage marks a new ascent in Pitt's career; love seemed to have transformed him; always powerful and eloquent, he became sublime. Into his former qualities there had passed an inspiration kindred to the divine passion which makes the poet. The timid warblers of the grove, as he was afterwards to call them, the politicians who sought quiet lives and safe places, the arch-jobber himself who had for years deluded him, were in an instant to realise that a new terror was added to life. For on November 25 he was once more in the House of Commons. At this time, just before or just after the meeting of Parliament, he had come to open words with Newcastle. The Duke had offered the usual palliatives. 'Fewer words, if you please, my Lord,' replied Pitt contemptuously, 'for your words have long lost all weight with me.' Fox had said much the same to Newcastle in March. The new Minister had therefore been grossly insulted by the two first men in the House of Commons. He must have felt that there were menacing symptoms in the political horizon. It is strange, therefore, to find Walpole writing that, as 'Newcastle had secured by employments almost every material speaker in Parliament,' it was hoped that the session might pass in settling election petitions.[268]
It seems incredible that the Duke can have so flattered himself. But no doubt he relied on two main considerations. One was that, though official discipline was then incomparably more lax than now, it was scarcely possible for Pitt or Fox to mean mischief so long as they kept their places, and these they had not resigned. The other was this. The General Election had just been conducted under his auspices, and had returned a House of Commons devoted to himself. Indeed in all England there were only forty-two contests. In some Continental countries a general election always returns a ministerial majority; there are mysteries connected with the proceeding of which only ministers have the key. This to some extent was the case in England at this period; and no Secretary of the Treasury, no Martin or Robinson, understood his particular business better than Newcastle. But whatever his illusions, they were soon destined to be disturbed, for on November 25 Pitt opened fire on him. Of that famous scene and outburst we are fortunate enough to possess two brilliant descriptions: one by Horace Walpole, and one, even more graphic, which has the additional value of being written by Pitt's rival, Henry Fox. Fox, writing in a white heat of generous admiration, describes it summarily as 'the finest speech that ever Pitt spoke, and perhaps the most remarkable.' This last epithet was probably due to the fact that the speech was apparently made on the spur of the moment. The occasion was one of those election petitions on which the Duke had relied as a sedative and a pastime for his faithful Commons. Wilkes, the pleasant, worthless demagogue, who was afterwards to cause so much trouble, had petitioned against the return of Delaval, the sitting member for Berwick. Delaval had defended his seat in a speech full of wit and buffoonery, which kept the House in a roar of laughter; much the same speech, one would guess, that Pitt himself had delivered on the proceedings at his own election for Seaford when those were attacked. But to-day he was in a different mood, and, as the debate proceeded, came down from the gallery where he was seated, and intervened with a frown. He was 'astonished to hear this merriment when such a matter was concerned. Was the dignity of the House on so sure a foundation that we could afford to shake it with scoffs?' In an instant the House was cowed into silence, like schoolboys found in fault by their master. You could have heard a pin drop as he continued.