Hester became a regular guest at Lady Stafford’s house in Whitehall, opposite the Horse Guards, and Granville in turn visited Pitt and saw her frequently at York Place. As intent as she was on her own crusade for his affections, she did not allow any details of Pitt’s battle for power to escape her, some of which likely provided more erotic leverage than she would have wanted her uncle to know. Politically, Hester had become a behind-the-scenes dynamo. That the brilliant and shrewd Canning consistently sought her opinion demonstrates the degree to which it was valued.
At first she was convinced her passion for Granville was returned. He would come to call on her; she was not always there or was delayed; he would wait for her, not wanting to miss the chance of seeing her. Having spent long months away at Walmer, if not in near solitude, then at least deprived of the many temptations of London, Hester was in a mood to be diverted. As part of Pitt’s inner corps of two, she was invited to a dizzying number of events. Her life was a Cruikshank caricature come to life; a never-ending round of dinners, parties and dances at which she came to know all the leading personalities of the day.
When Pitt and Hester returned to Walmer in April, Granville was invited. It seems that shortly after this, Hester and Granville became lovers. Physically, she thought Granville ‘perfection’. She certainly does not appear to have behaved like a shy virgin. Instead, she seems to have launched herself fearlessly into her new affair. If Granville’s record was anything to go by, he preferred sexually experienced – or married – women. He was also an enthusiastic collector of what he called ‘dirty Books’, preferably French, and when ‘infected with a Bibliomanie’ would hunt the bookshops for hours ‘in the hope of finding something curious’.
He met Hester for rides in St James’s Park. If they felt in need of more privacy, they would take the carriage out beyond the bucolic meadows surrounding Primrose Hill to Hampstead, warming themselves up with a drink in the village before wandering upwards onto the Heath, walking along its pathways around the ponds and through meadows, where the grass was no longer wet from the rain.
It would be misleading to think that the late Georgian era was not in some ways as rambunctiously sexual as our own. Although English society was hardly permissive, there was certainly a frank acknowledgement of sexual pleasure and desire, much more so in the Georgian and Regency periods than in the Victorian era.
The sort of erotic engravings that titillated Granville were all the rage. In Britain, probably best known at that time were those by the celebrated satirical illustrator Thomas Rowlandson; for instance, Meditation among the Tombs, a raunchy depiction of a couple making love against a church wall as a funeral takes place in the background, and The Willing Fair, which shows a couple in hasty coitus at their lunch table, the young woman’s mountainous buttocks visible, but her dress otherwise unruffled, from her perfectly coiffed hair and pearl-drop earring to the shoes still firmly on her feet. The implication of these prints being that in the Georgian era, when it might have been difficult for amorous couples to find privacy in their own homes, the fully-dressed ‘quickie’ was perhaps by no means uncommon.
In the first flush of her love affair with Granville, Hester did everything she could to look her best. She became guiltily familiar with Ackerman’s Repository, the bible of well-dressed women. Pitt had generously suggested she put all her purchases of new clothes on his account, but even he raised his eyebrows at the extravagance of her hasty pilgrimages to London’s best seamstresses, shoemakers, hatters, hosiers and glovers.
Although inclined to be critical of her looks, Hester was in fact quite vain. Men certainly found her extremely attractive. She said about herself later: ‘I was never what you call handsome, but brilliant. My teeth were brilliant, my complexion brilliant, my language – ah! – there it was – something striking and original that caught everyone’s attention.’
Other suitors idled in the wings, plenty of them handsome and eligible, but none apparently able to deflect Hester’s attention from her newfound object. Among them was William Noel Hill, the second son of Lord Berwick, already the Tory Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury and a clever diplomat a few years younger than her, who had been steadfastly pursuing her since her return to London.* Although he lacked Granville’s impossible good looks, he was a sympathetic, amusingly self-deprecating character, and Hester was fond of him. She enjoyed his flirtations, which seem to have been frank. He asked Hester to marry him. Hill was aware of his rival, but clearly had Hester in his sights for when – inevitably – that attraction waned. This was a possibility Hester considered so absurd she laughed about it with Granville, making a joke of the hapless Hill.
By the end of April 1804 Pitt had pulled off an impressive coup. At the King’s invitation, he was welcomed back into power with the approval of the former government, and in alliance with a significant faction of the Opposition. It was his intention to form a strong government that could withstand Napoleon. Even the threat of Fox’s powerful supporters could not moderate his optimism.
On 18 May 1804 Pitt, now almost forty-five, once again received from the King the seals of office as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Once more, Downing Street beckoned. Ten days later, on 28 May, across the Channel, at Saint-Cloud, the Senate proclaimed the thirty-five-year-old Napoleon to be ‘Emperor of the French Republic’. The coronation was to take place later that year. Pitt’s dance with Napoleon was beginning again.
Shortly after Pitt returned as Prime Minister, Hester was conducted around Downing Street, as liveried servants jumped to attention. She was in a triumphant mood; overnight, Pitt – and she – was now at the centre of the universe. She saw no noticeable elation on his part; but the old power had returned; his playfulness, which she had seen so much of, could dissolve in an instant. He went back to his old work habits, with the dogged persistence of a horse tethered to its plough.
By the end of May, she noticed that dark circles hollowed his eyes, and worried that all the good work of Walmer was already undone. His only concession to moderation was to substitute his preferred vintages with the occasional bottle of redcurrant wine; otherwise the standing order from Berry’s Wine Merchants continued as before. She would later remember how he would always drive himself hard. ‘People little knew what he had to do. Up at eight in the morning, with people enough to see for a week, obliged to talk all the time while he was at breakfast, and receiving first one, then another, until four o’clock; then eating a mutton chop, hurrying off to the House, and there badgered and compelled to speak and waste his lungs until two or three in the morning! – who could stand it?’
Her mocking wit was not reined in. Soon after being made Foreign Secretary, Lord Mulgrave came to stay, and when at breakfast he complained to Hester that he had been given a defective spoon, her response was typically quick. ‘Have you not yet discovered that Mr Pitt sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments to effect his ends?’
Despite high expectations and rousing support for Pitt, especially in the House of Commons, the new Prime Minister was forced to admit that his planned administration was not going to be as strong and inclusive as he had hoped. Pitt’s position was now entirely dependent on the King’s ministry and he faced a strengthened Opposition, making it impossible for him to hold a majority in the Commons. The last time he had taken office during the crisis of 1783, more than twenty years before, he had faced overwhelming odds and outright hostility. This time, he could not count either on the King’s longevity or his sanity; nor were his opponents likely to