By 1794 it would have been impossible for Hester to ignore the fact that her father was rapidly becoming a political pariah. Many on both sides in the House shunned his zealous views. But he was not merely a contrarian. A fierce champion of democracy, a pacifist and a republican, he saw himself as one of the few men in Parliament motivated by his conscience alone. For that reason, he adopted with particular pride the title ‘The Minority of One’, and even had a medal struck in his own honour.* Around this time, Coleridge wrote a poem, To Earl Stanhope.
But where Stanhope saw encroaching darkness, many of his fellow peers looked at him and saw precisely what Pitt warned them against, one of an emerging breed, a viperous ‘British Jacobin’. Stanhope’s exhortations not to interfere in the internal affairs of France appeared distinctly unpatriotic.
Pitt decided that his tolerance had been stretched far enough. He made a string of arrests. One of them was the Reverend Jeremiah Joyce, employed by Stanhope as his secretary and tutor for his two elder boys. Joyce was seized at Chevening, in front of the gawping Stanhope children.* That same night Stanhope was woken by a large crowd outside his house at 20 Mansfield Street, who at first shouted insults, then began breaking windows and throwing torches. Hester remembered her father telling them how he was forced to make his escape over the roof while the mob jeered. Stanhope was convinced the crowd had been paid to incite violence against him – even to cause his death. But this served to increase his radical activities.
Hester was torn between childhood pride in her father, whom she had always more or less sought to please, and the gnawing sense that ominous repercussions were about to fall on all their heads because of him. She enjoyed the notoriety of knowing clever radicals like the clergyman Horne Tooke. ‘I am an aristocrat,’ she told an amused Tooke, ‘and I make a boast of it’. When she told Tooke, ‘I hate a pack of dirty Jacobins that only want to get people out of a good place to get into it themselves,’ he roared with laughter, and had to admit she had a point.
But now Horne Tooke, like Jeremiah Joyce, was imprisoned in the Tower.† Stanhope did his utmost to lobby on behalf of his imprisoned friends – Joyce, Hardy and Tooke among them – all of whom faced certain death if found guilty of high treason. Hester worried that if her father were arrested the same fate would await him.
Disgusted with political life, Stanhope would resign from the House of Lords by the end of the year. Two days before Christmas, to celebrate Joyce’s acquittal, in which he played no small role, Stanhope staged a grand ball at Chevening, inviting more than four hundred guests for dancing and feasting. He hoped to please Hester by making this her unofficial coming-out party. She was, her grandmother commented, ‘looking incomparably well’. How pleased she was to dance with the bumpkinish sons of local squires around a centrepiece display of life-size mannequins meant to depict prisoners being unchained, under a large banner emblazoned with ‘The Rights of Juries’, was not recorded.
Hester would look back upon this as a happy period. She was closer to Louisa now that she was of age, and theoretically in search of a husband, while her stepmother was grateful for any excuse to escape hers. There were visits to Bath and to Louisa’s Grenville relatives in London. ‘Every amusement that riding, visiting &c. can produce, they have had without interruption, and which the uncommon strength of Hester bears most amazingly, for none can keep up with her,’ wrote Grizel, apparently missing the irony that while her son would sooner see the monarchy dispatched, her granddaughter insisted it was her duty to attend a ball celebrating the Prince of Wales’s birthday.
In 1795, Hester heard that another notorious prisoner at Newgate, the self-declared millennial prophet Richard Brothers, had asked to see her. It would have been easy to dismiss Brothers as a raving lunatic; he was, after all, about to be transferred to Bedlam. Although arrested on charges of sedition, he had been found criminally insane. He had declared himself to be a prophet, the ‘nephew of the Almighty, descendant of David and ruler of the world’. Brothers informed her that she was among a select group of people he believed would play a profound role in the ‘future Kingdom’. He himself would be the future King, he told her, and she was a chosen one, destined to be the ‘Queen of the Jews’. One day, he informed her, she would ‘go to Jerusalem and lead back the chosen people; that, on her arrival in the Holy Land, mighty changes would take place in the world and that she would pass seven years in the desert’ before her destiny revealed itself to her.
Hester mentioned her visit to Brothers in somewhat scathing terms to Horne Tooke. He teased her that he and his colleagues intended to establish ‘a new hospital for the diseases of the mind’ and that she was to be placed in charge of it, ‘for nobody knows so well as you how to cure them’. It was true that, at nineteen, Hester had every reason to congratulate herself on being the possessor of a formidably shrewd, even intimidating intellect, able to spar with many of the sharpest wits of the period.
She cannot have failed to be impressed by her father’s unusually fertile mind. He was fascinated more than anything by clever mechanics and by the power that might be harnessed through the invention of ships that could be self-propelled. The design of docks, canals and bridges obsessed him to an equal degree; he saw a future driven by steam.
Throughout Hester’s childhood, Earl Stanhope worked on his great dream, to create a workable steamship; he designed several modest prototypes which he tested out on Chevening’s small lake, and on the Thames. As soon as Watt’s steam engine appeared, Stanhope tried to apply the new technology, experimenting for a decade with various ingenious but cumbersome designs. Soon he had a flotilla of boats, including his pride and joy, the 111-foot Kent, the ‘Stanhope Ambi-Navigator’, which weighed over 200 tons even before it was fitted out with its heavy steam engines and boilers.*
In the end, the Kent would neither win Stanhope his elusive dream, nor bring his family the satisfaction of seeing him publicly honoured. The sailing trials were delayed, first by the Navy Board, and then by the Admiralty itself. John Leard, the Admiralty-appointed commander of the Kent, was the first to alert Stanhope somewhat apologetically that there were those who would prefer that he did not succeed. ‘I have two charges,’ he wrote, ‘to shew their unwillingness to attend to anything belonging to the Kent. But it was all leveled at your Lordship. They are afraid of you.’4
Stanhope must have known that conservatism and hostility towards innovations at the Navy Board were hardly new. To many of the Admiralty Lords, new technology, no matter how exciting, could be a potential threat to comfortable financial arrangements and contracts.† Orders were given to remove the ship’s steam engine. Stanhope was incensed.
It was Pitt’s revenge, or so it must have seemed. The Admiralty removed the unused boilers and refitted her as a gun-vessel, but soon the Navy Board had their way, and had her broken up.* To Stanhope, it was as though all his early promise and his scientific genius had been betrayed: it was perhaps the most crushing of all blows.†
Early in January 1796, Hester’s sixteen-year-old sister Lucy eloped; it seems she was already pregnant. The man in question, Tom Taylor, was a pleasant-looking twenty-seven-year-old apothecary who had been living quietly in Sevenoaks, until catching sight of Lucy. Before she fled, Lucy left a note for Hester, the only person she believed she could trust, counting on her not to raise