It is not clear whether Hester believed herself to be in love with Camelford, but she certainly saw a good deal of him that year. Despite his brush with the law, Camelford was regarded as a great catch. It was around this time, at a society gathering, that Hester met Lady Henrietta (Harriet) Bessborough, and she noted what the older woman made of her cousin, how he had ‘such delightful manners, such fascinating conversation, how charming, irresistible and well-bred’ he was. Hester and Camelford were sighted openly together a great deal – at plays, the opera, riding in St James’s Park, but more often on long excursions alone together to the countryside in his carriage, apparently making it a particular game to keep everyone in suspense, especially the Chathams. ‘How frightened Lady Chatham was for fear he should marry me!’ Hester recalled. Later, she described her behaviour around this time as ‘wild and reckless’. Their association was intense for at least eight months, and her wanderings with him took her as far as his estate at Boconnoc in Cornwall, where, if they wished it, they might have become lovers.18
Camelford suddenly transformed himself from being rather scruffy into something of a dandy. He looked like a man who had taken a sweetheart’s comment that he smarten himself up to mean that he should buy himself a new set of clothes from every fashionable tailor on Jermyn Street. But he kept his old brown coat, which he always wore with the collar turned up to his ears, and a slouch hat for one of his habits, apparently known only to Hester and his lawyer: do-gooding around the fleshpots and slums of Seven Dials, Southwark and Wapping. He would sometimes prowl these areas in disguise and press large sums of cash into the hands of those whose stories particularly affected him. He put £5,000 aside each year for his lawyer to distribute among the poor.
Hester appears to have influenced him to do things he would otherwise not have done. At her urging, Camelford approached Horne Tooke, with the suggestion that he put him forward as candidate for Old Sarum, Diamond Pitt’s famous ‘rotten borough’, located on land in Wiltshire he now owned. It was a move calculated to unnerve Earl Stanhope, who would be forced to concede that by bringing Tooke to Westminster, his daughter’s would-be suitor pulled off the coup of drawing attention to the very man whose cause he once championed, while at the same time showing up the scandalous loophole in the unreformed parliamentary system.19 There were dinners with Sir Francis Burdett, a rich radical politician friend of her father’s, who sympathized with Hester’s determination to ensure that her half-brother Mahon would not be strong-armed into surrendering his inheritance.
It was then that Hester devised a careful escape plan for Mahon, for which she secured Pitt’s approval. With the pledge of money from Burdett and another of her father’s former friends, William Lowther, the second Earl of Lonsdale, and the help of an urbane young diplomat, Francis James Jackson, Hester obtained a passport and letters of credit for Mahon, and recommendations that would ensure his acceptance for study at Erlangen University. She contrived a waiting carriage, and advised the time-honoured trick of using tied-together, twisted sheets to descend from a high bedroom window. Mahon’s successful escape early in 1801 caused a lifelong rift, not just with her father but also her grandmother Grizel, who bitterly blamed Hester for fomenting and publicizing family tensions.
Hester was perturbed only by the thought that her father might take his fury out on the ‘remaining captives’, Charles and James, whom she feared might be ‘flogged to death to make them confess what they are really ignorant [of]’. She would hear that Louisa too had reached breaking point, and would soon demand a separation.
For much of 1801, Hester came and went to London freely, while staying at the Pitt family home at Burton Pynsent in Somerset, where her grandmother left her free to do much as she liked, riding ‘at least twenty miles a day, and often forty’. She would be remembered from this time ‘as the intrepid girl who used to break in her friend’s vicious horses for them’.20
By now Hester was the same age as her mother when she died. Although mindful of the freedom her unmarried state gave her, she was certainly aware that everyone close to her was anxious she make a good match. But she seems to have been reluctant.
She had suitors, including a wealthy landowner’s son, ‘Mr Methuen of Corsham’, with whom she danced repeatedly at the Assembly Rooms during the 1801 season in Bath, but turned them down. Something of her defiance for the institution – any institution – of courtship and marriage is revealed by a remark she made around this time to Jackson. ‘I have been going to be married fifty times in my life; said to have been married half as often, and run away with once. But provided I have my own way, the world may have theirs and welcome.’
On 5 February 1801 Pitt formally resigned over the King’s refusal to grant Catholic emancipation, after a term as Prime Minister that had lasted for seventeen years. Overnight, Pitt was no longer the invulnerable creature Hester had grown accustomed to. He was £45,000 in debt and faced bankruptcy; he was ‘very unwell … gouty and nervous’. He declined the King’s offer to pay his debts, but he would accept a personal loan put up by a circle of his friends, including Wilberforce. Hester’s chance to repay her uncle’s kindness would come later that year.
She appears to have been as astonished as everyone else when Camelford disappeared at the end of October 1801, shortly after the announcement that war with France was at an end, although she suspected where he might have gone. She would soon write to her friend Jackson, now British Minister in Paris, asking if he knew anything. ‘If I may ask a question of you, how is Lord Camelford? I like him better than people do in general, and am anxious about him, after the strange reports I have heard, but do not answer if you do not like it.’21
Almost immediately, she began to prepare her own plans for departure, something that was unthinkable without being accompanied. She hoped to meet with Mahon – and perhaps Camelford. Whom she petitioned for funds is not known – she had no money of her own. She chose a stolid, elderly and well-connected couple, the Egertons, who planned to leave, although not until the following spring. ‘You may wonder why I have not fixed upon more dashing persons for companions …’ she wrote to Jackson. ‘I shall have perfect liberty to act in all respects as is most pleasing to myself … they want a companion, and I want a nominal chaperone.’22
In the meantime, in early 1802, she went to Weymouth to be one of her cousin Sir Sidney Smith’s party. She did not miss the fact that Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales, cast lascivious looks at her thirty-seven-year-old cousin. Indeed, Hester’s presence was requested so often by Princess Caroline as a ruse so that she could also have Smith along that many assumed she was the Princess’s new lady in waiting. Hester enjoyed renewing her friendship with the royal family, and the rapport she formed with the Duke of York allowed her to make him a proposition concerning her brothers, Charles and James, now sixteen and thirteen. She secured a commission for Charles in the 25th Foot, based in Gibraltar; while James was to go into the navy as a midshipman. With this in place, all that was required was for another escape plan to be laid. Once again it was successful, and the boys took up their new lives.
By the end of April 1802 Hester learned exactly what Camelford had been up to. It was splashed over the newspapers. What was not reported was that the French authorities considered him a serious threat as soon as news of his disappearance reached them: Napoleon’s Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, lost no time in putting out an alert that he be apprehended. But Camelford managed to baffle everyone (including a spy sent to Paris at his brother-in-law Lord Grenville’s expense to make discreet enquiries about the peer’s whereabouts). He slipped in and out of France undetected, spending several months lying low in Geneva and Italy. By the end of March 1802 Camelford had entered Paris, having adopted an American alias, with French travel papers issued in the name of ‘John Rushworth’.
Camelford intended to be in Paris on 5 April, the day