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

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an accurate prediction. Five years later, Granville would marry Lady Harriet Cavendish, Georgiana’s daughter, his former lover’s niece. As soon as it was decently possible, Harriet, or Harryo as she was called, adopted both children from her husband’s former liaison with her aunt. Harryo was apparently prepared to extend her affections to the children, but retained a lifelong jealousy of Harriet, whose influence over Granville remained undiminished.)

      Hester compounded her humiliation by pursuing Granville with a torrent of letters, which soon afterwards she would look back upon with mortification. He did not burn them as she asked; they are by turns plaintive, self-recriminatory and confessional. She wanted him to know how she suffered:

      You know that I loved you! Yes, to idolatry; still I wd by no means have you to understand that I offer this as a vindication for the folly of my conduct, on the contrary … the natural levity of my disposition offers no excuse, as from the first moment I discovered that every thought was devoted to you, which was too early in our acquaintance …12

      She reminded him of the ‘sacred seal of confidence’ agreed between them; and tried to undo the damage of the ‘miserable scrap’ written to him as ‘the dread hour approached’ on the eve of his departure, which was ‘like the hour of death to me’. Pitt, she told him, urged her to put him out of her thoughts: ‘God, what a dunce!’ She wanted to apologize for her behaviour, but claimed she could not control it. ‘I have often told you I was born a tyrant; it is therefore in vain for me to deceive myself’ – and to exonerate him. She blamed herself for being so passionate. ‘As a man, how could you have acted otherwise, persecuted by the affections of a woman whose only object was to gain you, at any price, & who felt but too conscious you never shared the passion you inspired. Oh strange fatality!’13 One of her sentences trails off pitifully, ‘My heart is at this moment breaking …’

      Although he had done everything possible for Hester, Pitt was horrified. Every day, the newspapers reported suicides, of sad and varied circumstances and methods, described in graphic detail. The official verdict on any suicide was always the same: ‘lunacy’. ‘Self-murder’ was considered deeply shameful. Pitt’s many biographers have never examined the impact that his niece’s suicide attempt might have had on his ability to function, on his own inner sense of confidence, perhaps because he kept it so well hidden. But it is possible that Hester’s crisis was a blow that precipitated his own descent into ill-health. He felt responsible; he may also have felt guilty, not only for concocting the plan to take Granville away from her, but perhaps even for drawing her attention to him in the first place. There are consistent reports of Pitt’s distraction at the end of August that corroborate Hester’s account of her own growing unhappiness and instability. One official noted on 31 August 1804 that he had seen Pitt ‘completely under the influence of anxiety and depression’, and another observer saw him walking alone early in the morning in St James’s Park, ‘looking like death with his eyes staring out of his head’.

      As soon as she was able, in early November, Hester fled to Walmer. Pitt had extracted from her the promise that she would never again harm herself and that she would try to forget Granville.14 While she recovered, Hester consoled herself with the fact that she continued ‘to please Mr Pitt more than ever, if I may judge by his kindness, which if possible, augments’. Still she brooded, refusing to believe that Granville never loved her or intended to marry her.

      Although secluded away – first on the Kentish coast and later in Putney – Hester was by no means forgotten, either in London or in St Petersburg. Harriet and Granville exchanged a series of semi-cryptic letters discussing her. Hester’s whereabouts, and the reason for the lengthy amount of time she had remained away from London, apparently remained topics of great interest in society. On 5 March Harriet wrote to Granville:

      Harriet also told him she saw Hester’s would-be suitor, William Noel Hill, and discussed ‘Hetty’, and gathered that at one time there had been ‘great tendresses between them’ until Granville had come along ‘and had driven all the others out’. Harriet had a firm suspicion Hester was pregnant. She wrote to Granville:

      My Sis and all her family returned home from a ball last night full of Hetty and the story of the accouchement which they insist upon which she affichés – that is, she goes out without rouge, much fairer than she was, and so languid and faint that she did faint at Mad. Dupre’s. I wonder what all this means. I should not have any doubt after the letter I saw, only you say nothing of it. From my soul I pity her.16

      On 28 June, Harriet wrote again that she had talked with Pitt’s close colleague George Rose about her suspicions about Hester being pregnant. She refers to this as:

      … that other circumstance so much believ’d in London. I told him I was certain, what-ever passed between them before his departure, he never gave her the least reason to imagine he had any thoughts of her as a wife; that I believed all the stories were false, but if true, that my opinion of [Granville] was such I was sure it must have been her fault as much as his. He agreed with me in this, but Heaven knows how it is to end.17

      The fact that Harriet went to great lengths to relay these conversations in such detail in her correspondence suggests that Granville refused to give her a straight answer.

      The possibility that Hester was indeed pregnant is intriguing. She deliberately made sure Harriet did not see her for months. Even so, she was glimpsed at least once by her sister. Georgiana’s assessing eyes would have been familiar with every sign. Apparently, she was convinced. Still, it would have certainly suited all those who would have preferred to see Fox in place of Pitt if indeed it became widely known that Hester had fallen from grace in such a way. Hester did make at least one and possibly several brief visits to London during this otherwise unusually reclusive time; she had also been sighted in February by Lady Stafford, Lord Granville’s mother, who wrote to her son:

      I was sadly disappointed the other day when I saw Ly. Hester Stanhope with Susan. I had figured her to myself as very pretty, in Place of which she look’d like a middle-aged married woman with a dingey Complexion, no Rouge, a broad Face and an unbecoming fur cap.18

      That certainly was a vision calculated to cure any romantic nostalgia.

      At Walmer that winter Hester was often alone. Expecting Pitt to return at Easter, she had been busily distracting herself with a surprise for him. At the very edge of Walmer’s grounds, she had often walked by a deep chalk quarry, which had been left as a bleak ravine. She sent the resident gardener, Burfield, to Maidstone to bring back ‘creepers, furze and broom’, which she used to soften the overall effect, having landscaped fully-grown trees and shrubs in amongst the ferns and mossy hollows. It became her own secret garden, a place that somehow represented for her the transformative powers she knew she possessed. But Pitt, prevented by work and ill-health, was never again to return to Walmer.

      She and Pitt agreed that it was better for her to live separately for a time. Pitt wanted to avoid any kind of scandal or emotional turbulence. The months between March 1805 and January 1806 are unaccounted for, nor do any letters seem to have been preserved from this time. Where was she living? Harriet, it seems, rarely lost an opportunity to track down her erstwhile friend, especially when she sensed a tantalizing secret. In August 1805 she noted: ‘Hetty is living by herself in London, with Mr Hill there from Morning till Night. Mr Pitt is displeased with her for something.’19 By December she commented that Hester

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