This misadventure did not prevent the young man from marrying, the same year, Lady Hester Pitt. The great Chatham entertained the highest opinion of his son-in-law.
"The exterior is pleasing," wrote he to Mr. James Grenville, "but it is in looking within that one finds invaluable treasures, a head to imagine, a heart to conceive and an arm to execute all that he can have there which is good, amiable and of good report."
By this marriage, he had three daughters: the extraordinary Hester, Griselda and Lucy Rachel. Left a widower five years later, he contracted a second marriage, with Louisa Grenville, by whom he had three children: Philip Henry; Charles, who was killed at Coruña; and James Hamilton, inspired no doubt by the spirit of equity, for he was a thorough Republican.
Grave political differences which arose from 1784 between Stanhope and Pitt sensibly cooled their friendship. The French Revolution separated them entirely. Lord Stanhope threw himself with ardour into the Opposition, through conviction at first, and then because he hated the victorious party, merely because it was the victorious party. He loved to act with a little minority, and, this tendency continually increasing, earned him in the House of Lords the surname of "the Minority of One."
From his childhood at Geneva he had preserved the taste for the exact sciences, and he attached his name to several scientific discoveries, of which the most astonishing was that of steam navigation. His children alone did not interest him. Lady Hester Stanhope, who inherited from him her love of independence and the uncompromising nature of her ideas, played the very devil, terrorising her governesses. From 1800 to 1803 she lived with the old Lady Chatham at Burton Pynsent, of illustrious memory, and her skill in protecting her brothers and sisters from the paternal experiments having attracted the attention of her uncle, William Pitt, he asked her to come and keep house for him. She was then twenty-seven.
This singular young girl, down to the death of the "Great Commoner" in January, 1806, was truly his confidante, his secretary, his right arm. Remarkably intelligent, bold and original, she played the part of a second Prime Minister. Pensions, titles, favours passed through her hands. Thrown back brusquely into the shade, after her uncle's death, she was unable to endure the tameness of an ordinary life. After some years of solitude in Wales, disgusted with the world and politics, she resolved to leave this England which was too prompt to forget.
Of the three men who had embarked with her on the Jason, one was her brother, James Hamilton Stanhope, captain in the 1st Foot Guards, who was going to rejoin his regiment at Cadiz; another, a friend, Mr. Nassau Sutton; and the last, a young doctor, Charles Meryon, who, instead of growing musty in the lecture-rooms of Oxford, was departing joyously for milder climes.
Between two showers—they were numerous!—Lady Hester Stanhope came and sat down on the bridge. She would have wished to forget; she would have wished to break with the past, at once too beautiful and too sad; but recollections rolled in upon her, countless invading waves which moaned and beat against the shores of her soul.
What had she left behind her which was worthy of regrets? Two sisters with whom she had never been in the least intimate, an insignificant brother, an old maniac father, altogether mad and democrat besides, which is the worst of mental aberrations. Singular old fellow truly, who slept, in winter, with wide-open windows!
Lady Hester reviewed the sad days of her neglected childhood. Her stepmother was an insipid creature, without interest in anything, who divided her time—Oh! in a very equal way—between her toilet-table and her box at the Opera. And during this time, Lord Stanhope hurried from his iron hand-press to his factory for making artificial tiles to exclude the snow and the rain, sprang to his reckoning-machine, from there rushed to his dockyard, where a steamboat was always on the look-out and always refused to move, entered, on the way, the Old Jewry, where some members of the Revolution Society were ready to submit to a speech, and drew up in return a motion to be brought forward in the House of Lords in order to prevent England from interfering in the internal government of France!... One childish recollection haunted Lady Hester until she was tired.