PART I
There are few true stories that are distinguished by a well-marked moral. If we study human chronicles we generally find the ungodly flourishing permanently like a green bay-tree, and the righteous apparently forsaken and begging his bread. But it occasionally happens that a human life illustrates some moral lesson with the triteness and crudity of a Sunday-school book, and of such is the career of Lady Hester Stanhope, a Pitt on the mother's side, and more of a Pitt in temper and disposition than her grandfather, the great Commoner himself. Her story contains the useful but conventional lesson that pride goeth before a fall, and that all earthly glory is but vanity, together with a warning against the ambition that o'erleaps itself, and ends in failure and humiliation. That humanity will profit by such a lesson, whether true or invented for didactic purposes, is doubtful, but at least Nature has done her best for once to usurp the seat of the preacher, 'to point a moral and adorn a tale.' Lady Hester, who was born on March 12,1776, was the eldest daughter of Charles, third Earl of Stanhope, by his first wife Hester, daughter of the great Lord Chatham. Lord Stanhope seems to have been an uncomfortable person, who combined scientific research with democratic principles, and contrived to quarrel with most of his family. In order to live up to his theories he laid down his carriage and horses, effaced the armorial bearings from his plate, and removed from his walls some famous tapestry, because it was 'so d----d aristocratical.' If one of his daughters happened to look better than usual in a becoming hat or frock, he had the garment laid away, and something coarse put in its place. The children were left almost entirely to the care of governesses and tutors, their step-mother, the second Lady Stanhope (a Grenville by birth) being a fashionable fine lady, who devoted her whole time to her social duties, while Lord Stanhope was absorbed by his scientific pursuits. The home was not a happy one, either for the three girls of the first marriage, or for the three sons of the second. In 1796 Rachel, the youngest daughter, eloped with a Sevenoaks apothecary named Taylor, and was cast off by her family; and in 1800 Griselda, the second daughter, married a Mr. Tekell, of Hampshire. In this year Hester left her home, which George III used to call Democracy Hall, and went to live with her grandmother, the Dowager Lady Stanhope.
On the death of Lady Stanhope in 1803, Lady Hester was offered a home by her uncle, William Pitt, with whom she remained until his death in 1806. Pitt became deeply attached to his handsome, high-spirited niece. He believed in her sincerity and affection for himself, admired her courage and cleverness, laughed at her temper, and encouraged her pride. She seems to have gained a considerable influence over her uncle, and contrived to have a finger in most of the ministerial pies. When reproached for allowing her such unreserved liberty of action in state affairs, Pitt was accustomed to reply, 'I let her do as she pleases; for if she were resolved to cheat the devil himself, she would do it.' 'And so I would,' Lady Hester used to add, when she told the story. If we may believe her own account, Pitt told her that she was fit to sit between Augustus and Mæcenas, and assured her that 'I have plenty of good diplomatists, but they are none of them military men; and I have plenty of good officers, but not one of them is worth sixpence in the cabinet. If you were a man, Hester, I would send you on the Continent with 60,000 men, and give you carte blanche, and I am sure that not one of my plans would fail, and not one soldier would go with his boots unblacked.' This admiration, according to the same authority, was shared by George III, who one day on the Terrace at Windsor informed Mr. Pitt that he had got a new and superior minister in his room, and one, moreover, who was a good general. 'There is my new minister,' he added, pointing at Lady Hester. 'There is not a man in my kingdom who is a better politician, and there is not a woman who better adorns her sex. And let me say, Mr. Pitt, you have not reason to be proud you are a minister, for there have been many before you, and will be many after you; but you have reason to be proud of her, who unites everything that is great in man and woman.'
All this must, of course, be taken with grains of salt, but it is certain that Lady Hester occupied a position of almost unparalleled supremacy for a woman, that she dispensed patronage, lectured ministers, and snubbed princes. On one occasion Lord Mulgrave, who had just been appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, found a broken egg-spoon on the breakfast-table at Walmer, and asked, 'How can Mr. Pitt have such a spoon as this?' 'Don't you know,' retorted Lady Hester, 'that Mr. Pitt sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments wherewith to effect his ends?' Again, when Mr. Addington wished to take the title of Lord Raleigh, Lady Hester determined to prevent what she regarded as a desecration of a great name. She professed to have seen a caricature, which she minutely described, representing Mr. Addington as Sir Walter Raleigh, and the King as Queen Elizabeth. Mr. Pitt, believing the story, repeated it to Addington and others, with the result that messengers were despatched to all the print-shops to buy up the whole impression. Of course no such caricature was to be found, but the prospective peer had received a fright, and chose the inoffensive title of Lord Sidmouth. Lady Hester despised Lord Liverpool for a well-meaning blunderer, but she hated and distrusted Canning, whom she was accustomed to describe as a fiery, red-headed Irish politician, who was never staunch to any person or any party; and she declared that by her scoldings she had often made him blubber like a schoolboy. It cannot be supposed that her ladyship was popular with the numerous persons, high and low, who came under the ban of her displeasure, or suffered from her pride; but she was young, handsome, and witty, her position was unassailable, and as long as her uncle chose to laugh at her insolence and her eccentricities, no lesser power presumed to frown.
For her beauty in youth we must again take her own account on trust, since she never consented to sit for her portrait, and in old age her recollection of her vanished charms may have been coloured by some pardonable exaggeration. 'At twenty,' she told a chronicler, 'my complexion was like alabaster, and at five paces distant the sharpest eyes could not discover my pearl necklace from my skin. My lips were of such a beautiful carnation that, without vanity, I can assure you, very few women had the like. A dark-blue shade under the eyes, and the blue veins that were observable through the transparent skin, heightened the brilliancy of my features. Nor were the roses wanting in my cheeks; and to all this was added a permanency in my looks that no sort of fatigue could impair.' She was fond of relating an anecdote of a flattering impertinence on the part of Beau Brummell, who, meeting her at a ball, coolly took the earrings out of her ears, telling her that she should not wear such things, as they hid the fine turn of her cheek, and the set of head upon her neck. Lady Hester frankly admitted, however, that it was her brilliant colouring that made her beauty, and once observed, in reply to a compliment on her appearance: 'If you were to take every feature in my face, and lay them one by one on the table, there is not a single one that would bear examination. The only thing is that, put together and lighted up, they look well enough. It is homogeneous ugliness, and nothing more.'
With Pitt's death in January, 1806, as by the stroke of a magic wand, all the power, all the glory, and all the grandeur came to a sudden end, and the great minister's favourite niece fell to the level of a private lady, with a moderate income, no influence, and a host of enemies. On his deathbed, Pitt had asked that an annuity of £1500 might be granted to Lady Hester, but in the end only £1200 was awarded to her, a trifling income for one with such exalted ideas of her own importance. A house was taken in Montagu Square, where Lady Hester entertained her half-brothers, Charles and James Stanhope, when their military duties allowed of their being in town. Here she led but a melancholy life, for her means would not allow of her keeping a carriage, and she fancied that it was incompatible with her dignity to drive in a hackney-coach, or to walk out attended by a servant. In 1809 Charles Stanhope, like his chief, Sir John Moore, fell at Corunna. Charles was Lady Hester's favourite brother, and tradition says that Sir John Moore was her lover. Be that as it may, she broke up her establishment in town at this time, and retired to a lonely cottage in Wales, where she amused herself in superintending her dairy and physicking the poor. But she suffered in health and spirits, the contrast of the present with the past was too bitter to be endured in solitude, and in 1810 she decided to go abroad, and spend a year or two in the south. A young medical man, Dr. Meryon, [Footnote: Afterwards Lady Hester's chronicler.] was engaged to accompany her as her travelling physician, and the party further consisted of her brother, James Stanhope, and a friend, Mr. Nassau Sutton, together with two or three servants. Lady Hester was only thirty when her uncle died, but it does not seem to have been considered that she required any chaperonage, either at home or on her travels, nor does it appear that Lord Stanhope (who lived till 1816) took any further interest in her proceedings.
On February 10, 1810, the travellers sailed for the Mediterranean on board the frigate Jason. It is not necessary to follow them over the now familiar ground of the early part of their tour. Gibraltar (whence Captain Stanhope left to join his regiment at Cadiz), Malta, Athens, Constantinople, these were the first stopping-places, and in each Lady Hester was treated with great respect by the authorities, and went her own way in defiance of all native customs and prejudices. At Athens her party was joined by Lord Sligo, who was making some excavations in the neighbourhood, and by Lord Byron, who had just won fresh laurels by swimming the Hellespont. Lady Hester formed but a poor opinion of the poet, whose affectations she used to mimic with considerable effect. 'I think Lord Byron was a strange character,' she said, many years later. 'His generosity was for a motive, his avarice was for a motive; one time he was mopish, and nobody was to speak to him; another, he was for being jocular with everybody.... At Athens I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many others: for as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? Many a one picks up some old book that nobody knows anything about, and gets his ideas out of it. He had a great deal of vice in his looks--his eyes set close together, and a contracted brow. O Lord! I am sure he was not a liberal man, whatever else he might be. The only good thing about his looks was this part [drawing her hand under her cheek, and down the front of her neck], and the curl on his forehead.'