LITMIR.BIZ

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than her. When she met him at a family dinner shortly before Christmas 1799, she had not seen him since they were both infants. His looks were fierce and wild; he was six foot two inches tall, powerfully muscled and dark. He was the sole heir to the Camelford fortune, and the owner of vast estates in Cornwall and Dorset, as well as a palatial London mansion, with an income of more than £20,000 a year (roughly £1 million in today’s money).^†

      From the start, it looked as though history might repeat itself; the Pitts and the Stanhopes destined to find their way to one another once again. She would say she ‘admired Lord C’s character, and in some things, imitated him’. He was, she said, ‘a true Pitt, and like me, his blood fired at a fraud or a bad action’. Camelford was notorious. He was known for having shot a fellow Royal Navy officer, apparently in cold blood, and his life was a tangle of duels and skirmishes. He had a sailor’s taste for prize-fighting, and was often seen at the ring. He was a connoisseur of pistols and swords. If anyone introduced Hester to her later love of weaponry and to the art of the duel, it was him. She certainly took up both passions at this time with an unusual relish. Not many men would have been willing to show a young woman how to fight, but Camelford was.

      It was obvious that Camelford was hell-bent on doing something extraordinary. He was already the veteran of remarkable travels, notching up exploits as far away as Chile, Malacca and Ceylon, and having landed at Madras, had sailed to the Red Sea and crossed the desert from Suez to Alexandria. He felt a rivalry with their mutual cousin, Captain Sidney Smith, who months before had defeated Napoleon at Acre. They both knew what the Emperor had famously fumed about Smith: ‘That man made me miss my destiny.’ Smith was a hard act to follow, but Camelford had every expectation that he would find a way to out-do him.

      At the beginning of 1799, Camelford had been arrested on a shingle beach in Deal for trying to cross the Channel on a smuggling boat, then a prosecutable offence. He had on him nothing but some money, a pair of pistols, a short, two-edged dagger, and a letter of introduction in French to Paul Barras, considered by the Pitt administration to be the most shrewd and unscrupulous of Napoleon’s advisers. A discreet royal pardon was given, on condition he resign his captaincy in the navy, a terrible humiliation. Speculation remained rife that Camelford, who spoke flawless French, intended to infiltrate himself into France and offer himself as a turncoat intelligence agent, a role that he hoped might bring him close to Barras – or Napoleon himself. The London Chronicle reported that he had ‘been prompted by a too ardent desire to perform some feat of desperation, by which, he thought, the cause of Europe might be served’ – in other words, a political assassination.

      Hester appears to have been struck with admiration for her danger-seeking, intrigue-loving cousin. The attraction was mutual. She is widely credited as being the only woman he loved, aside from his beautiful sister, Anne. Soon after meeting her, he moved into a bachelor apartment, first on Baker Street, near Pitt’s house, then to New Bond Street.

      Another clue that reveals Camelford’s feelings for Hester was his sudden appearance at the House of Lords, alongside the equally conspicuous Earl Stanhope, returned after a five-year absence. The House was debating Pitt’s and Lord Grenville’s rejection of Napoleon’s Christmas Day offer to negotiate peace. On 28 January 1800, Earl Stanhope, along with a small group in the Opposition, cast his vote to express disapproval, while Lord Grenville reiterated the administration’s position. The vote, 92 to 6, was unsurprising. What baffled everyone there was the fact that Camelford voted with the Opposition, for despite his erratic attendance in the House, Camelford had always voted reliably for Pitt and Grenville. The following day, after Stanhope made a speech to the Lords ‘on his knees’ to reconsider, the House divided once more. This time, Stanhope found only one other peer willing to take sides with him: Camelford. Hester’s father was not pleased to find himself supported: minority of two had no triumph to it. ‘Why!’ he harrumphed to Camelford afterwards, ‘you spoiled that division!’¹¹ If Camelford had wanted some measure of Hester’s father’s approval, he certainly did not get it.

      The following month Camelford challenged one of his closest friends to a duel over Hester. Camelford was charged with grievous assault, but before it could go to the courts, which would have meant the explicit revelation of the details of the slight, the matter was quietly disposed of by a cash settlement.¹²

      Pitt put his foot down. Hester was ordered back to Chevening. Whatever liberty her father might have allowed her in the past, he now curtailed. They were now all locked in at night. Hester alternately raged and moped, protesting at her own lack of freedom and at her father’s treatment of her brothers. Mahon was then eighteen, his movements far more circumscribed than Hester’s had ever been. He bitterly resented that he had not been sent to school nor prepared for university. As for Hester’s middle brother Charles, she was shocked to see he ‘could hardly write legibly’ and ‘cannot spell three words’.¹³ None of them was remotely equipped to ‘shift for themselves’.

      Earl Stanhope was determined to dissolve his hereditary privileges, but this could only be achieved if Mahon agreed to break his entailment once he had reached his majority, in other words to sign away his inheritance. Stanhope, whose expenditure on his various experiments now amounted to many tens of thousands of pounds, was growing short of funds. He wanted eventually to sell Chevening, and was prepared to barter with his eldest son over a suitable lump sum if he complied.

      On her return to Chevening early in the spring of 1800, Hester wrote to her older married friend Evelyn. ‘I want to ask advice about an unfortunate woman who was my playfellow and whose faults and misfortunes have given me great concern … I am too inexperienced to know how to act.’¹⁴ Might she possibly have been asking for advice for herself, and needing to conceal her own difficulties? It is not clear.

      Hester later claimed that Ann Fry, a young chambermaid at Chevening, came to her in tears. She was pregnant. A house where the girl could spend her confinement was quietly arranged. The fact that her child would be baptized at the village church later that year despite her stubborn silence about who had fathered the child is intriguing, for the church rarely gave charity to unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children; a chaplain’s first task was always to establish the identity of the father, who might contribute to the child’s keep.¹⁵ In light of Hester’s later remarks and her own material support for the girl, the possibility that her father, or one of her brothers, may have been responsible cannot be overlooked.

      Whatever the cause, around this time, some kind of violent confrontation occurred between Hester and her father. He lost his temper and pinned her to the wall, threatening her with a dagger. ‘The Logician often has said that from the hour I was born I have been a stranger to fear. I certainly felt no fear when he held a knife to my throat – only pity for the arm that held it; but this was a feeling I should rather not again experience …’¹⁶ She fled as soon as she could, taking little with her, and promising her brothers she would do what she could to help them. Camelford pressed her to stay with their uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Chatham, at their St James’s home; Pitt was drawn into the debate about who should take care of the runaway. His initial reaction is revealing; he worried that Hester might be untameable, and might bring scandal with her. ‘Under no circumstances could I offer her a home in my own house,’ he wrote at the time. Recovering from raw shock, Hester wrote to her grandmother, the Dowager Chatham:

      It had hitherto been my fate to lead the strangest, as well as the most unforgettable life … I shall therefore gladly profit by this occasion to improve my mind, terribly neglected, and recover that flow of spirits natural to me but which a constant state of anxiety has rendered very unequal … It would be my wish when brought into society to appear as happy as I naturally might feel from the kindness of my uncles, but the heartfelt gratitude I feel towards them would at this moment rather serve to give me a contrary appearance for I should unavoidably be led to draw

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