Whatever Stanhope gave Lucy as dowry, it was not enough to stop Taylor from accepting a highly prestigious position offered to him by Pitt, that of Comptroller General in the Customs Service. He had few qualifications for the job but Pitt assessed that he had an excellent brain, and would thrive quickly, which seems to have been the case. This sinecure in a government he loathed greatly angered Stanhope. Lucy, with a measure of her sister’s defiance, refused to bow to his pressure that Taylor should not take the job. An angry estrangement ensued. It was to become a familiar Stanhope pattern.
Later that year, Hester caused her own sensation, appearing alone at Lord Romney’s military review. It was the most spectacular event held in Kent in 1796, staged to celebrate Pitt’s government’s successful raising of volunteers – six thousand in that county alone – who would parade and perform splendid feats dressed in their brand-new regimentals; fencing; charging across the field to swipe the heads off turnips with their swords; and marching before a crowd of landowning families; a grand feast would be held in a tented encampment. As well as Pitt, the King and Queen were there; and their sons, the Duke of York, then commander of the British army, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Clarence and the future Duke of Kent.
To Hester, who adored pomp, horses and dancing, and the sight of soldiers, the lure was obvious. Her father was equally determined that neither she nor the rest of the family should go; one corrupted daughter was quite enough.* The matter of getting there would prove more difficult than Lucy’s elopement; not least because Hester had to borrow both a carriage and something suitably elegant to wear. She found her first taste of freedom glorious. The fact that she was un-chaperoned was held to be highly improper. By the time Pitt arrived, she was something of a celebrity.
According to Hester, the King teased out of her stories of her father’s eccentricities. He took it into his head that she must be rescued, and carried back to Windsor to be made part of the Court.† Hester might have been willing, but Queen Charlotte did not seem enthusiastic. Nonetheless this marked the beginning of Hester’s firm friendship with the princes, of whom she would later say: ‘I loved all the princes, all, except George the Fourth – they were all so lively, so good-natured; people who would laugh at a straw.’
She was certainly ready to be noticed. When she was much older, she had an acute sense of what her beauty had once been:
At twenty, my complexion was like alabaster; and at five paces distance the sharpest eye could not discover my pearl necklace from my skin; my lips were of such a beautiful carnation, that without vanity, I assure you very few women had the like. A dark blue under the eyes, and the blue veins that were observable through the transparent skin, heightened the brilliancy of my features. Nor were the roses wanting in my cheeks; and to all this was added a permanency to my looks that no fatigue could impair.5
Until the sudden scandal with Lucy, Pitt had become quite remote from her; now the ice was broken. She made him laugh with a quip about his dog, who had made it into the gossip pages of The Morning Post and Fashionable World.* In contrast to her unorthodox father, he must have seemed the model of decisiveness and stability. ‘I thought it was better to be where I should have Mr Pitt at my side to help me, should he get into great difficulty.’ It would not be long before her uncle would come to be her touchstone for all important matters.
‘She had on a costume, which had nothing feminine about it, but the mask. She seemed very tall, very thin, very decided, very independent.’6 This is how the Duchesse de Gontant, a fashionable refugee from Paris, described Hester, meeting her at a masked ball in London around this time. These were rare qualities for a woman of twenty. Hester now made it her mission to get away from Chevening as much as possible. Her father relented under the barrage of her willpower and energy. Her grandmothers were anxious; the matter of whom she might marry was a pressing one. From them, the nod was given to Pitt to see that she was chaperoned when she was in London. This would be a thankless task, as society hostesses Mrs Pole and Lady Clarendon found out. ‘Don’t bother yourself about me; I am quite independent,’ she smiled at them, shocking them with her announcement that she was capable of making her own introductions. The Comtesse de Boigne, who met her en passant, observed she was ‘well-made’ and ‘fond of society, of dancing, and of any public function. She was something of a flirt … with ideas of striking originality’, although she noted dryly, ‘for a Stanhope, she was prudence itself’.7
Hester’s risk-taking instinct came to the fore. As far as she could see, in the wealthiest and most privileged circles, it was never enough to have merely good breeding and a title. Wit was what was prized above all, and she did her best to flaunt her own. With Pitt taking her part, Hester felt secure enough to be cleverly irreverent. She thought the Duchess of Rutland’s parties were a ‘heavy, dull business … all high breeding and bon ton’. As for the Duchess of Devonshire’s, ‘there they were, all that set, all yawning and wanting the evening to be spent, that they might be getting to the business they were after’.8 But Pitt did not wish Hester to be overly exposed to the ‘business’ she glibly refers to – bed-hopping; heavy drinking, whoring, juggling lines of credit and gambling away vast amounts late into the night. In the end, he took on the role of chaperone himself. He ‘remained with infinite kindness until four or five o’clock in the morning at balls which wearied him to distraction’, wrote the Comtesse de Boigne of Hester’s introduction to London society that year. ‘I have often seen him sitting in a corner, waiting with exemplary patience until Lady Hester should be pleased to end his sufferings.’9
By softening to the Stanhope tribe, Pitt may well have wondered what he had taken on. Griselda also turned to him, announcing her intention to marry John Tickell, an army officer from Hampshire. Earl Stanhope likened himself to King Lear; deserted by his daughters. But Hester, still semi-loyal to her father as well as her brothers, continued to return home, and when in London, to stay at Mansfield Street. There was in any case a well-established overlap between Pitt’s world and Stanhope’s, the fashionable world mingling with the radical elite. But Pitt, to a modest extent, had begun to subsidize Hester’s adventures.
By the time she was twenty-three, Hester had danced at ball after ball and dined on champagne and turtle all over town. Toasts were proposed to her beauty, much was made of her ‘magnificent and majestic figure’ and the way ‘roses and lilies were blended in [her] face’, and the way she ‘diffused happiness around [her]’.10 She had many admirers. Two men in particular, however, stood out.
George Bryan (‘Beau’) Brummell was the most fashionable man in London. Society hostesses sent him fawning invitations; even though he habitually ignored them for the most part, talked only to his friends and refused to dance. Here, finally, was someone Hester could share the latest intrigue with and count on to draw her away from any tedium. Hester laughed at his jokes, discussed horses with him (he named his favourite Stiletto) and adored his outrageous behaviour.* She affected some of his rebellious style, and paid ever greater attention to her dress. It is fairly certain Hester never seriously considered Brummell as a romantic prospect, nor vice versa. Nonetheless, a strong chemistry between them was noticed, and there was speculation she was in love, at least a little. He came up to her at a dinner and coolly took out her earrings in front of everyone, telling her they could not match the beauty of her skin, and spoiled the delicate line of her face. Brummell’s anarchic charm came as a heady relief to a fun-starved Hester.
It was the other man who appeared in Hester’s life who seemed to promise the possibility