After overhearing Pitt tell a friend that Walmer was not as beautiful as it might be due to a lack of trees, Hester took action. As soon as her uncle was next called away to London, the transformation of the garden in his absence became Hester’s most ambitious project to date. She commissioned samples and seeds of plants from all over the country and managed to convince all the regiments quartered at Dover to help ‘in levelling, fetching turf, transplanting shrubs, flowers …’ for no extra pay, while she kept a close eye on them, commenting that by deploying some of her feminine charm, ‘with a few civil words, and occasionally, a present,’ the work was quickly done. She redesigned the main lawn, planted flower borders along Walmer’s distinctive thick yew hedges, and managed to import and plant some fully-grown horse chestnut trees, adding to the formal groves of yew and lime trees already planted by Pitt. On his return, she was thrilled with his reaction:
When Mr Pitt came down, he dismounted from his horse, and ascending the staircase, saw through a window, which commanded a view of the grounds, the improvements that had been made. ‘Dear me, Hester, why this is a miracle! I declare it is quite admirable; I could not have done it half so well myself.’3
By the autumn of 1803, the entire nation was braced for an invasion across the Channel. Walmer, and the entire south coast between the Cinque Ports, were the frontline. Pitt was disgusted with his successor, Addington, whom he thought devoid of all military vision. In his role as Lord Warden he announced he would step in, taking on a voluntary but highly symbolic military role as Colonel Commandant of the Cinque Port Volunteers, a corps of ‘gentlemen volunteers’. In his two-corned cocked hat, his buttoned red jacket, grey breeches and with his ceremonial sword, Pitt looked almost boyish that autumn, riding out, very often with Hester, to inspect the training of all battalions. War created the perfect climate for a fightback, and Pitt now lived as he meant to go on, mobilizing all his strengths, his health much improved.
The new mood also gave Hester a sense of mission. She felt both needed and useful. There was an exciting tension in her world, and few rules. A great deal about her strength of character is revealed by how she handled a group of would-be rapists one evening in Ramsgate.
Five of the Blues, half-drunk, not knowing who I was, walked after me and pursued me to my door. They had the impertinence to follow me up-stairs and one of them took hold of my gown. The maid came out, frightened out of her senses, but just at the moment, with my arm I gave the foremost of them such a push, that I sent him rolling the others down the stairs, with their swords rattling against the balusters. Next day, he appeared with a black patch as big as a saucer over his face, and when I went out there were the glasses looking at me and the footmen pointing me out – quite a sensation.4
It is easy to see why the troops nicknamed her the ‘Amazon’. She wore a jaunty riding habit, styled in bright red wool with military braid, buttoned up against the sea wind like a man’s greatcoat, and knee-high nankin boots. She loved to watch duelling soldiers, following all the moves closely, and rating them. She wrote to Jackson that Pitt ‘promoted’ her as nominal commander of her own ‘army’, ‘the first and last’ of the Berkshire Militia.
Adding to her contentment was the presence of her younger half-brothers. All the Stanhope boys were close by. James had decided to leave the navy to join the Guards, and was living close to Dover Castle. Charles had returned from Gibraltar, and for a time stayed at Walmer. He was soon promoted to the 57th Regiment, at Ashford. ‘Charles is by nature my favourite,’ she had confided to a friend several years earlier, ‘he has the least ability of the three, but a degree of openness and good nature which wins every heart, and an air of nobility his quizzical education can never destroy.’
About Mahon she was even cooler than before, however. The previous autumn, on his return from Europe, Pitt had appointed him Lieutenant-Governor of Dover Castle and made him colonel of one of his battalions. Mahon was about to be married. His choice of wife was Catherine Lucy Smith, one of Lord Robert Carrington’s four daughters. The wedding would be held that November at Deal Castle. Mahon found Hester’s presence very disquieting, for reasons that beg some interpretation. He wrote to his father-in-law:
I hope that Catherine does not see Hester much alone; this intimacy can be productive of no good consequences, but probably of much mischief. I have endeavoured this week to prevent it by painting with truth and sincerity and I trust with candour and impartiality what Hester’s character was and the evils that too great an intimacy might occasion.5
Almost certainly, Mahon’s account concerned Hester’s association with Camelford, who now filled newspapers with his brawls and duels, and continued to be tailed by Fouché’s spies.* Whatever the cause, there was something Mahon did not want Catherine to know and did not trust Hester to be discreet about, or he truly believed that his wife would be compromised in some way by associating with her. Either way, his letter shows that as far as he was concerned, his sister’s reputation had already been sacrificed.
By early 1804, the political winds were blowing in Pitt’s favour. Lord Grenville, his cousin and ally, had been repeatedly urging him to lead the Opposition factions against Addington; surely, he reasoned, together, they would form an unbeatable alliance. But Pitt was not prepared to capitulate to the Whigs. Frustrated, Grenville took the hitherto unthinkable course of aligning himself with the one man who had been their mutual arch-rival for two decades: Charles James Fox.
In February the King, now sixty-five, once more had an attack of the symptoms that afflicted him earlier, the second time in three years. His mental health was hotly debated. As soon as his father showed signs that could be construed as lunacy, the Prince of Wales began making plans for a new government, hosting numerous dinner parties for Pitt’s opponents. One of the Prince of Wales’s most valuable assistants in once more galvanizing the Whigs and forming the Fox-Grenville coalition had been the formidable Whig hostess, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. She proved to be a particularly effective go-between in the setting-up of meetings between her close friend Fox and Grenville, and was instrumental in trying to persuade George Canning – regarded as the cleverest of Pitt’s trusted Ministers of Parliament – that he should find a way to convince Pitt that his decision not to join them was political suicide.
In February, in a series of rousing parliamentary speeches, Pitt made a devastating assault on Addington, accusing him of almost criminal negligence in his inability to sufficiently protect the nation from invasion. Few failed to be moved. The writing was on the wall. Addington would have to go.
It was at one of Pitt’s gatherings that February that Hester met Lord Granville Leveson Gower.* Pitt thought highly of him, going so far as to observe, as though he were a connoisseur of male beauty, that he had the looks of ‘Hadrian’s Antinous’. Granville had been elected as Member of Parliament for Staffordshire at twenty-two, and before he was thirty had already served as a middle-ranking diplomat in Paris and Lille. In 1800, Pitt had made him a Lord of the Treasury, a position he was forced to give up when Pitt resigned a year later.
When Hester met him, Granville was thirty, a charmer, groomed for success by his wealthy, well-connected parents. An aristocratic bachelor, he was moneyed and refined, conversational and amusing. In country houses across England, he was being referred to as one of the best-looking men of his generation. His expensive tastes in travel, wine, gambling and women were indulged by his loving parents.
Hester was instantly besotted. Granville was politically ambitious, and clearly destined for success in the world of high diplomacy. Marriage to him would bring her exactly the sort of life she wanted: it would place her in the salons of Paris and St Petersburg, close to the corridors of power. She immediately began a campaign to make him fall in love with her, acquiring his sprightly mother, Lady Stafford, as her ‘leading female acquaintance’. She would have been acutely aware that the