Upon this point I ventured to observe, that much admiration was generally expressed of Mr. C.’s features, more especially of the forehead. (The reader is probably familiar with Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of him.) “Good God!” she exclaimed, “what fools people are! A man in London does not even know what his next door neighbour is; but he sees him go in and out, and he says, he has a fine open countenance and a fine forehead. Some people thought Mr. C. had a fine forehead, because it was bald. There was not one feature or one limb in C. but what was vulgar, except his teeth, and I am not sure those were not false: and why I think so is, that once, in the House of Commons, he spit blood in his pocket-handkerchief, and said he had a dreadful toothache. People don’t spit blood with toothaches.
“I recollect once, when we were sitting at breakfast, C. began reading some advertisements about Macassar Oil and those sort of things, and pretended not to know what they meant; and afterwards my maid told me that she entered his dressing-room when he was at Putney, and was shown by his valet one of the finest dressing-cases she had ever seen, filled with all sorts of perfumes, which his man drew out one by one before her.”
Lady Hester went on (for of Mr. C. she could never speak calmly, and his name once introduced was sure to lead to an angry diatribe), “Oh! Lord, when I think of his duplicity! for it was not on matters of this sort only, but in everything that he was deceitful. I only regret that he ever took me in as he did. But he was so artful as to make me believe at last in his protestations of admiration for Mr. Pitt; and as Mr. Pitt was surrounded by such fools as C—tl—h and H—k—b—y,[66] I thought he might be useful to him in lightening his labours, for he was clever and wrote well, whilst Mr. Pitt could never trust Lord C. to draw up an official paper, without having to cross out and correct half of it. But the first time I saw him I thought him insincere, and told Mr. Pitt so, and I did not scruple to add how much I disliked him. ‘Oh!’ Mr. Pitt replied, ‘he is very amusing, and when you have seen more of him you will think so too.’—‘Well, we shall see,’ said I. ‘You must like him,’ rejoined Mr. Pitt, ‘he is so brilliant.’ I answered, ‘Well, if I must I must’—but I never did. It is true I took a great deal of pains to get him into favour again, when he was out of favour with Mr. Pitt, but it was because I really believed him to be Mr. Pitt’s friend, and thought he would be another strong horse in the stable. It was so with Sir H*** P*****. The first time I saw his face, I thought I had never seen so bad a countenance: it was the spirit of evil rising up before me; and I was not mistaken in his case any more than in the other.
“Oh! when I think of C.’s deceit: how he used to come to me, and cry out, ‘Ah, Lady Hester, what have I not done to please you? I have drunk a glass of wine with that fool H.; a glass of wine!—such a glass of wine!—’twas like physic to me.’ Why, I have seen him, at Mr. Pitt’s table, pretend not to hear when Lord H. spoke to him. Mr. Pitt used to say, ‘What does he mean by all this? If he does not like him, why does he come to my table when he is to be there? But I know how I could reconcile them; if I would but give C. a place in the cabinet, he would make it up directly; but he shan’t have it. No,’ said he, ‘C. shall never have a place in the cabinet whilst I have a voice.’
“His duplicity was perfect. He used to say to me, ‘My dear Lady Hester, how could I ever drink a glass of wine with a man whom I have so ridiculed, whom I have made verses on?’ and after that I have seen him professing the warmest friendship for this same man, the object of so much ridicule and contempt. I have still by me one of his letters—one of the only two I ever kept—that he wrote me, of four sheets, before Mr. Pitt’s death (and which I always kept, because I feared how it would be), in which he goes on, for ten pages I really think, with ‘My dearest Lady Hester, what is the meaning of all this? I know no more of all that is passing than the child unborn. Do write to me; do tell me; they have made Lord Mulgrave minister,’ &c.; and all this time he was...!
“One day Miss Williams saw the paragraph in the newspaper where Mr. C. was gazetted as prime minister, and she immediately brought it, and showed it to me. I said to her, ‘Was ever anything so monstrous? why, when he paces those rooms in Downing Street, which have witnessed his lies and his deceit, the very stones will rise up to crush him.’ I remember, when Mr. Pitt was lying ill at Bath, one day there were no letters. Charles came in, and Mr. Pitt said, ‘Are there no letters?’—‘None,’ replied Charles; ‘nothing but that C. is going on very well.’—‘Very well!’ was Mr. Pitt’s reply; ‘to be sure he will go on very well, as long as he has got your sister to guide him; but if ever she quits him, that ambitious —— of his—badly ambitious—will soon spoil all the good Hester has done for him.’ How could he live in Downing Street, and enter those rooms where I have had him before me, crying like a child—yes, doctor, I used to make him cry and blubber like a schoolboy—and making a thousand protestations, which he never kept! How could he dare to talk of Mr. Pitt’s principles![67]
“He sent me once a fine copy of verses—they were very well written—in which he compared Mr. Pitt to a bound eagle. Oh! how Lord Temple tried to steal them! He snatched them away from me one evening, when he, James, and I were together, and, jumping into a chair, held them out of my reach. I was so angry that I pulled a fine repeater out of his fob, and dashed it the ground. He then ran into the street without his hat, and James after him, and the watchman took him for a thief, and joined in the pursuit: but I got them back.” Lady Hester here made a pause, and then added: “I know C. would, if he could, he and all his creatures, have annihilated me.
“Another reason why Mr. Pitt disliked C. was, that he was not to be trusted. Mr. Pitt used to say, ‘I don’t understand what it is that people mean, when they go and repeat every word they hear in society to their intimate friend, their as myself.’ For he had seen in ‘The Oracle’ whole conversations:[68] not that C. put them in himself, but that he told them to some friend, and then, a week or a fortnight after, one saw, ‘We are credibly informed—we have reason to believe,’ with every syllable Mr. Pitt had talked about, put down as a piece of exclusive political information.”
August 10.—I went to Mar Elias, and remained a couple of days. In the morning of the 10th, Lady Hester Stanhope, in the course of conversation, said, “I must send you to the chief of the serpents. You don’t know what that means—I’ll tell you. There is a cavern in a distant part of this country, inhabited by a great serpent, who has hundreds of others at his command. He has got the head of a man, the body of a serpent, and wings: he has been seen by many persons, and it is all perfectly true: perhaps you don’t believe in such things?” This was an embarrassing question; but I tried to evade the difficulty, by observing, that nothing was impossible to the Almighty. “Well,” rejoined Lady Hester, “you shall go and take a drawing of the cave.”
She asked me what had become of Tom Moore. I said he had latterly made a profession of faith, and had written a book to prove himself a good Catholic. “I dare say it was very well written,” said she; “I always liked that man.”—“It might be well written,” I replied, “but his other works have been more read.”—“What are they?” she asked. I enumerated them; and, among the rest, his life of Sheridan, of Byron, and of Lord E. F. “Ah! those I should like to read,” observed Lady Hester; “we must get them.”[69]