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one who had never held any political office. (By comparison, her cousin, Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of Acre, had been awarded a pension of £1,000.) Grizel and Lucy were also provided for, and received £600 each. The King understood Pitt’s request to be somewhat unusual, but he granted it in the knowledge that Pitt wished it. Besides, he had always liked Hester’s spirit.

      Pitt’s funeral on Saturday, 22 February 1806, was a solemn and grand event. Preceded by fifes, drums and trumpets, the cortège passed from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, and was attended by a black-suited multitude of all the Members of Parliament and the peerage, as well as three royal dukes. Pitt’s elder brother Chatham, along with the Stanhope brothers, walked beside the coffin, following the same route as the procession in 1778 for Lord Chatham; once again the Abbey’s cavernous halls echoed the name of William Pitt, Prime Minister. For two days, Pitt’s body had lain in state in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, hung with banners of the Chatham arms. Tens of thousands of mourners paid their respects. Many were visibly affected during the ceremony: Wilberforce was seen crying openly, Mulgrave was ‘scarcely … able to support himself’, and Canning described ‘a feeling of loneliness & dismay which I have never felt half so strongly before’. Even Fox was heard to say that it was ‘as if there was something missing in the world – a chasm, a blank that cannot be supplied’. Amongst them, dressed in black, a stricken, dry-eyed Hester watched as Pitt’s body was lowered into the Chatham family vault.

* Pitt’s bachelor status puzzled the nation. It seemed that he somehow lacked the nerve for marriage. In the twenty-first century it is easy to speculate that he may have had homosexual tendencies but there seems to be no evidence for this. What Hester thought about this state of affairs is difficult to decipher. That she would later tell Meryon that she believed Eleanor Eden was ‘the only women Pitt had ever loved’ might be misleading. She, like many close to Pitt, concluded that his life was absolutely wedded to politics.

* But there was something else, about which it seems the entire family closed ranks: the birth of an illegitimate child in Europe that was certainly Camelford’s. The mother’s identity was never revealed. Shortly after the time Hester had travelled with Mahon in Italy, Lord Grenville had written to Camelford on 10 February 1803, just before his ill-fated arrest in France, with news ‘of a very painful communication which I have to make to you and which it is of the utmost importance for you to know’. More tantalizingly, Grenville had been informed that Camelford had fathered a child, a daughter, about whom the young peer had apparently known nothing. The child had been discreetly adopted immediately after birth. By August 1810, the mother would be vaguely described as being now ‘principally abroad’. No money was ever requested. In my opinion, the possibility that Hester might in fact have been the mother and gone abroad to have the child cannot be ruled out, and would certainly explain her eldest brother’s reaction to her in Florence.

* Lord Granville Leveson Gower, who would become 1st Earl Granville in 1833, is variously referred to here as Leveson Gower and Granville, the name used by his intimates.

* Camelford’s fateful duel had taken place in the early hours of the morning in the meadows outside Holland House in Kensington; he died on 10 March 1804, aged twenty-nine. He was buried in the crypt of St Anne’s Church in Dean Street, Soho.

* While William Noel Hill’s elder brother Lord Berwick was wealthy, with a stately pile in Shropshire, Hill was less so. Famously, the two brothers stood against one another in the Shrewsbury elections of 1796, each spending what others would have regarded as fortunes several times over to secure votes in a spectacularly corrupt campaign. Hill won, and kept his seat as a Tory MP until 1812.

* Hester was aware that Harriet devoured French novels; she might not have known that one of her favourites was Les Liaisons dangereuses, and that she had teased Granville for being a little like Valmont.

* There are conflicting reports of Hester’s whereabouts and condition throughout this time: in a letter to her son on 7 March 1805, Lady Stafford mentions going to the King’s ball at Windsor the previous Monday, where she says ‘Ly S was there’ and that ‘Ly B’ was not.

       4 A Summoning of Strength

      Today, a passer-by stopping at the corner of Montagu Square (which Hester always pronounced ‘Mountague’) might peer curiously at No. 4, a plain, three-storeyed, brown-brick building in a row of elegant Georgian townhouses. It overlooks a long, rectangular garden, planted with plane trees and orderly flower beds, which like most of London’s private gardens can only be entered with a resident’s key. Hester might well have enjoyed the irony that had she lived several generations later, she might not have needed to go to the Middle East: by then, the Middle East would have come to her. Hardly more than a hundred metres away is Edgware Road, which although a greyer, less vibrant version of Beirut’s Hamra, is nonetheless a mecca for London’s Arab community, bustling with newsstands touting the latest copies of L’Orient Le Jour and men in cafés puffing away at narguileh pipes. Black-robed women flit by; supermarkets sell mahmoul cakes, orange-blossom water and zahtar along with other staples for anyone homesick for the sight of Mount Lebanon.

      When Hester came to live here in 1806, Edgware Road was known as Watling Street, part of the old Roman road to St Albans. No. 4 would be her home for just over three years. It was close to Marylebone Fields (now Regent’s Park), and just a short hackney ride from some of her haunts: Jermyn Street for cheese at Paxton & Whitfield; Hatchards bookshop and the Royal Academy on Piccadilly; Hookham’s Circulating Library and Burlington Arcade and her equestrian outfitter, Mr S. Clark of Golden Square. Her local shops were on New Quebec Street, which had a butcher, dairyman, cheesemonger, tea dealer and grocer. In the mews was a livery stable where horses could be hired; Hester would go to ride with what she termed the ‘swinish multitude’ in Hyde Park whenever she could on Sundays, not just at the fashionable hour of five o’clock, when ‘the Ring’ was so full of elegant coaches the air was thick with ochre dust.

      After Pitt’s death, Hester found herself in a limbo on all fronts. Although a royal pension had been granted her, it would not commence until 30 June, and the various formalities attached to it would all take time. After legal fees and other costs, it would be reduced to less than £1,000 per annum. If she was cautious, and especially if she lived away from London, she ought to have been able to manage comfortably on such an amount.

      Fox, in a mood of beneficence, made Hester an offer that may in fact have come from the King himself, and must have imagined she could not refuse it. She was given a choice of residences. One was apparently ‘as good as ten thousand pounds a year’. As Hester recalled, ‘He was to make me ranger of some park, with a house; and then I was to have a house in town, and the rest was to be done the way they shuffle those things through the public offices.’ The alternative was for her to live in a grace-and-favour royal apartment, possibly at Windsor Castle, although this was conditional on her becoming a courtier. Hester rejected both offers: ‘I rather chose to live independent’. When Fox’s emissary Mr Ward told her she would live to repent her refusal, she told him that it was not

      … from a personal disregard from Mr Fox that she refused; because when I asked Mr Pitt, upon one occasion, who was the cleverest man in England, he answered, ‘Mr Fox’; but as the world only knew Mr Pitt and Mr Fox as opposed [sic] to each other, I should be considered as receiving benefits from Mr Pitt’s enemy.

      As for Mahon, she loathed him more than ever before. He reneged on the promise he

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