WHAT did Lady Hester intend to do in Syria and in Palestine?
She did not intend to seek oblivion, for the necessity of getting herself talked about, and the thirst for a celebrity which she strove vainly to retain, formed part of her nature, and she never got rid of it.
She resembled closely her grandfather, Lord Chatham. She had not only his grey eyes, which anger darkened strangely, and of which no one was able, at that time, to stand the glance, but also the inexorable will, the terrible passions, the continuous tension of the mind in the direction of one single object without troubling about the obstacles to be overthrown or the means employed to conquer them.
Grattan, in the curious portrait which he has traced of the first Pitt, wrote: "The Minister was alone. Modern degeneracy had not touched him. An old-fashioned inflexibility governed this character which knew neither how to alter nor to become supple.... Creator, destroyer, reformer, he had received from Heaven all that was required to convoke men into a social group, to break their bonds or to reform them...." Lady Hester had inherited these astonishing gifts, which her unconventional education had still further strengthened. Under the eyes of her frightened governesses who had abandoned the impossible task of making her a young girl like the others, without the knowledge of her father and her stepmother, who, besides, were not interested in the matter, she sprouted forth luxuriantly. In the same way as her figure and her "little" foot, never constrained, developed magnificently, her luminous intelligence, her originality, her energy, her rough clear-sightedness forcibly asserted themselves. Never contradicted, she might be proud of her qualities and of her extraordinary faults, proud also of that indomitable character which she had alone formed and which never inclined before anyone, ignorant at once of the art of changing principles or that of humouring public opinion by half-loyal measures or proceedings.
Amongst all those wonderful women in which the eighteenth century, according to Burke, was so fertile, Lady Hester Stanhope has a place apart. The Duchess of Rutland, the Duchess of Gordon, the Duchess of Devonshire, Mrs. Bouverie, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Mrs. Crewe, Lady Bessborough, Lady Liverpool and many others, who had on their side fortune, beauty, charm, fascination and grace, cannot be compared to her. Morally and physically, Lady Hester is outside the picture. She is the echo, not only of the feminine character of her time, but of the characteristic tendencies of her age. Preoccupation with the Eastern problem, misanthropy, taste for action, hatred of hypocrisy, love of social questions and contempt for the people, were imperfectly embodied, but they were embodied all the same.
Her misfortune was to be a woman. So long as her uncle Pitt had been near her, she had been able to imagine that she had changed her sex. She had lived, acted and thought as a man, but as a man who would have been a beautiful woman and whom the admiration of the crowd retains far from the combats of politics and the struggle of life.
William Pitt had certainly been, according to the admirable phrase of Mirabeau, "the Minister of Preparations." He had seen the French Revolution approaching, and long before all others he had understood the danger of it. Joining then the fate of France—for which he entertained neither antipathy nor hatred—with that of the Revolution, he engaged England in that formidable struggle of which he could not foresee the issue. Killed by "the glance of Austerlitz," he died too soon to reap the fruit of his wonderful perspicacity. He died, above all, too soon for Hester Stanhope, whose future he had not assured. There did not fail, certainly, statesmen behind whom a pretty woman was bestirring herself, champion of their policy, to cite only that charming Georgina Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire, who displayed in Fox's favour an indomitable energy, not fearing to splash about in the mud and kiss butchers with her patrician lips in order to exercise the omnipotence of her persuasion over the Westminster shopkeepers at the time of the famous elections of 1784. So well that Pitt was to write to Wilberforce, who was anxious: "Westminster is going well in spite of the Duchess of Devonshire and other women of the people, but it is not known yet when the voting will be finished."
But the statesman chosen was only a screen which permitted the spirit of intrigue which breathed amongst the great ladies of the English aristocracy to have free course. For Lady Hester, William Pitt was the reason of existence. When he disappeared, what was she able to do?
He said to his niece, after having lived a long time with her, that he did not know whether she were more at her ease in the whirlpool of pleasures and fêtes, in the perplexity of politics or in the most profound solitude. Sometimes, in fact, Lady Hester went into Society eagerly and carried into the world her extraordinary brilliancy, her satire, humour and her biting wit, feared almost as much as the strokes of Gilray's pencil. Sometimes, she shut herself up with her uncle, serving him as secretary, astonishing him by the correctness of her judgment, by the comprehension and knowledge of men which this child of twenty years possessed, and without which the finest gifts of the understanding are reduced to sterility and do not descend from the domain of pure ideas to that of reality. Sometimes, she fled to Walmer Castle; and there, occupying herself in causing trees to be planted, in designing gardens, she bathed in silence and meditation. But now the world, she was surfeited with it!... She had just experienced the fragility of its infatuations. Politics! She was henceforth outside everything, and she had to witness the triumph of Pitt's enemies, the forgetfulness of his services. This power of money would have been necessary in order to struggle against the coteries of the drawing-room, the personal enmities which she had created. And she had only the pension of £1200 granted her in accordance with Pitt's last wish. There remained retirement. For the conquered, retirement is unendurable in the places which were witnesses of their past successes, unless they are surrounded by dear friends whose presence consoles them and makes them forget. Lord Camelford, whom she had thought for a moment of marrying, had quarrelled with the Pitts over a matter of money; he had given his sister—which assuredly he had the right to do—an estate which Lord Chatham hoped to inherit. Sir John Moore had just been killed. She dreamed of far-off solitudes, and she thought of undertaking an expedition which would cover her name with glory and whose fame would reach England.
Horace Walpole, an unsparing critic of his contemporaries, said of Chatham that he was "master of all the arts of dissimulation, slave of his passions, and that he simulated even extravagance to insure success." Under the smoke of gossip and tittle-tattle he hatches always a fire of truth. The second part of the portrait can apply as well to the granddaughter as to the grandfather. Lady Hester was enslaved by a redoubtable passion: ambition, and ambition without object. Well women incarnate almost always their aspirations, their desires, their admirations and their hatreds in living beings and real things: concrete which, after being the symbol of the abstract, is confounded with it to make only one. Lady Hester did not escape the common rule; solitude became little by little the means of getting herself still talked about; then became peopled by escorts, caravans and Arab chiefs; her ambition was not quicker than hatred of her enemies and disgust of England, and she determined upon this journey across the unknown East, journey which would serve at once her need of solitude and of celebrity in astonishing the world. Only, she possessed—as much on the side of Pitt as of Stanhope—a slight taste for eccentricity. She had no need to simulate an extravagance, which was natural to her; she was inclined to do nothing like other people.