Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope - Kirsten Ellis

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any case, clearly the war had to be his first concern. He would have to provide leadership, even if he met resistance at every step. When Pitt’s new Cabinet was hurriedly assembled, the Prime Minister himself assumed so much responsibility that many members joked it was ‘the new Administration of William and Pitt’.

      While Pitt was preoccupied with consolidating his position, Hester was concerned with what appeared to be a slackening of interest on Granville’s part. In July, after Pitt appointed him a member of his Privy Council, Granville’s attentions waned. Letters that she sent him (signed with a big looped ‘H’), which once might have been replied to within a matter of hours, now took a day or more to summon a response. Once, he did not arrive for one of their pre-arranged walks; she found herself having to idle along a row of chestnut trees in Marylebone Fields ‘like any common strumpet’.

      Had Hester known the truth behind Granville’s absences, it might have come as a shock. Granville was a serial romancer, not always a very faithful one, of a number of women. He had fathered two children with the married Lady Bessborough – Henrietta, always known as Harriet – sister of Lady Georgiana Spencer, a secret which they had managed to successfully conceal from everyone except Georgiana, whom they could trust. Nor did Hester realize that Harriet continued to exert a strong sexual and emotional power over Granville. (Their affair had begun in 1794, when Harriet was thirty-three, and he was twenty. She was by then already the mother of four children with her husband, among them, Caroline, who would grow up to become Lady Caroline Lamb.)

      Is it quite honourable, dear G, to encourage a passion you do not mean seriously to return? And which if you do not, must make the owner of it miserable? And how can you be certain of what lengths you or she may be drawn into? We know she has strong passions and indulges them with great latitude: may you not both of you be hurried further than you intend? If Mr Pitt knew even what had passed already, do you think he would like it?

      In the same letter, Harriet pleads with Granville to spend the night at her house, rather than ‘sleeping at Mr Pitt’s’.6 Meanwhile, Hester’s quick scrawls to him are full of reminders about how welcome he is at Downing Street, telling he could always spend the night ‘if you prefer staying to driving back at night’.7

      By early August 1804 Granville had neither broken off his affair with Hester nor entirely resumed it. He kept raising her hopes with some throwaway half-hearted comment or suggestion. Hester began hinting to her closest friends, as well as to Pitt himself, that she expected marriage. Suspecting this was not Granville’s intention and worried that the attachment was unhinging her, Pitt called Granville to Downing Street for a private talk. Granville, who was expecting a reprimand, was instead offered the highly prestigious post of Ambassador to St Petersburg, effective immediately. Pitt was anxious to prevent the embarrassing spectacle of his niece being publicly jilted. But he also needed Granville’s charm on his side. St Petersburg, the court of Tsar Alexander, could not have been a more critical posting: Pitt was endeavouring to form an alliance with Russia against Napoleon, and hoped to convince Austria, Prussia and Sweden to join, a move that would pave the way for the creation of the Third Coalition.

      Granville, not brave enough to inform Hester in person, sent her this news by letter. He obviously dreaded the prospect of her making an embarrassing scene with Pitt. Granville’s departure was meant to be swift but owing to various delays, he was forced to linger in London for another two months, a highly awkward situation that was not helped by the disconcerting announcement of their engagement in one of the newspapers that September. (Granville assumed Hester had placed it herself, a charge she indignantly denied.) Harriet was greatly rattled, saying that ‘everyone is talking of it’ and adding, ‘I dread this subject coming on the tapis between you …’8 Perhaps Harriet feared that faced with an ultimatum, this time Granville might indeed decide to marry, a possibility that filled her with dread. (During his final preparations to leave, the physical affair between Harriet and Granville resumed.)

      Right up to the last moment, Hester still teetered on the possibility of a change of plan, half-expecting Granville to turn up suddenly and ask her to go with him. A few days before he left on 11 October 1804, she wrote him a letter that has not survived, but apparently contained the warning words: ‘You shall see what I shall do’. Granville sealed up Hester’s letter and sent it, along with one of his own, to Harriet; he also showed it to Canning, along with a necklace he meant to give her, but Canning advised total silence. Harriet’s reply gives some indication of its content:

      How strange Hetty’s note is. It admits but of two interpretations, neither of which I like to give it. The first (her meaning to destroy herself) is too horrible, and the second raises my indignation, and I don’t like believing that, finding there was no hope of your returning her passion enough to marry her, she resolv’d to indulge the inclination – which we know she possesses but too strongly – to the utmost, trusting to your honour for secrecy and to your absence for putting an end to what could not continue without danger. Hetty is so kind to me, it seems ungenerous in me to say this, and perhaps I am mistaken, but it is very odd. I shall always be kind to her, from a strange reason – she belongs in some manner to you.9

      Hester’s anguish, when she discovered that Granville intended to abandon her, was so great that she did indeed try to kill herself.10 She did not say whether she did this at Downing Street, York Place or Putney, but she was undoubtedly in London. It must have been on 7 or 8 October. She posted her letter to Granville first. Hester’s body proved to be stronger than she supposed, as she would later confide. She was violently sick, enough to expel the fatal dose, although she managed to severely poison herself, causing damage to her liver, kidneys and lungs. Hester’s suicide attempt was a grave shock to Pitt. He did not call his own doctor, Sir Walter Farquhar (who also tended the gossipy Spencer sisters), but summoned another eminent physician, Dr Henry Cline. Hester was to say that she intended to kill herself, although laudanum was also commonly used to induce abortion. Both the doctor and the servants who attended her would have been sworn to secrecy.

      In the immediate aftermath of the overdose, she was in such discomfort from her injured organs that she could not sleep for twelve days, nor could she keep any solid food down. She was in misery not just at the failure at her attempt but because of her physical pain. As she would tell her doctor many years later, she put a lancet under her pillow, hinting that she might once more attempt suicide. She also recalled that even when she was out of danger, for some weeks she remained an alarming scarlet colour, and her forehead was continually prickled with sweat. One of her visitors was her suitor William Noel Hill, who made her smile weakly, comparing her appearance to that of Christ’s on the cross: ‘You will set a crown of thorns on your head – you will sweat blood presently’.11

      Hester was convinced that Harriet – with the help of the Devonshire House circle – had conspired against her, and had encouraged Granville to believe she

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