Meanwhile, there was not a great deal of respect between Mahon and his father. Pitt’s connections had gained Mahon a sinecure; and with his father-in-law’s help, he had embarked on a political career, that year becoming Tory MP for Windsor and later successfully running for Hull. He had tried, and ultimately failed, to take legal action against his father, accusing him of squandering the family estate.
Hester took the house in Montagu Square as a home not just for herself, but for her brothers, Charles and James, when they were on leave, aware that they needed to make a good impression to move up in the world. When ‘the boys’ were in town, she always had breakfast on the table from nine to twelve, ‘with tea and coffee and chicken, and tongue, and cold meat, and all that’. It was the first time she had ever had a house of her own; for the next month or so, she set about furnishing it in her own style ‘with everything customary in fashionable life’. Some of the furniture she had brought over from Downing Street, where she had decided it had been of ‘no use’, including some of the stiff, formal leather-backed sofas and chairs Pitt had used for his bad back and camp beds for her brothers’ officer friends whenever they stayed the night.
Her ménage included the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Williams, formerly a servant in Pitt’s household. Elizabeth and her sister Louisa were the daughters of Pitt’s trusted equerry, Edward Williams; they came with him from Holwood to Walmer and Putney Heath, and for a time they were educated at his expense. Bright, gentle and pretty, Elizabeth had been Pitt’s particular favourite, and had been in his service at York Place. As well as Miss Williams, Hester employed a housekeeper, a doorman and a small number of servants, among them Ann Fry, the girl who had become pregnant at Chevening. Calling herself ‘Mrs’ Fry now, Ann told Hester that she had managed to spend nine years at a respectable institution in London – Mrs Davis’s Boarding School for Girls – ‘without anyone guessing she was a mother’.1 Now she had come to Hester to beg employment and to be given shelter. In the years to come, both Elizabeth Williams and Ann Fry were to find their lives inextricably bound up with the path their mistress was to take.
If Hester needed any reminder of the descent that even an aristocratic lady like herself could face if her fortunes turned entirely, she did not have to look far. On nearby Paddington Street, just off Baker Street, there was a large workhouse, whose inmates included the old and infirm, lunatics, orphans, foundling children and vagrants. Among them could be found formerly beautiful, once-fêted mistresses of wealthy men, now discarded, destitute and shunned.
She was well aware of how thin was the line between having a lover and becoming a kept mistress. Nearby Gloucester Place was full of wealthy mistresses and courtesans, some discreet, some ostentatious. One of them was Harriette Wilson. Another was Mary Ann Clarke, the blonde mistress of the King’s son, the Duke of York, then Commander-in-Chief of the army. Mary Ann, who was sometimes glimpsed walking along Bond Street with a retinue of African servants, would be undone by too flagrantly using her influence to sell army commissions; the Duke would desert her in 1809. But for the moment, she held amusing soirées full of uniformed men, and if the Duke was there, Hester and her brothers would often drop in. Although not overly impressed with Mary Ann, she loved to poke fun at the Duchess, whom she described as ‘a painted wife, with half a dozen fine gentlemen about her, shaking the hair-powder on her face’ and ordering the windows open ‘at dinner time, in a cold November day, to let out the smells of a parcel of dogs’. It was quite natural, she thought, with such an ‘uncomfortable home’ that the Duke thought himself ‘at liberty to take a little pleasure elsewhere’. Although she could be blind to her own lapses of romantic judgement, Hester was a shrewd observer of those of others. Hester mimicked women like Mary Ann, rolling her eyes, sucking in her cheeks, smirking and assuming her mock-lascivious look. She may have been damning, and she tried to ensure that her brothers were never prey to such women – ‘the rascally set’ she called them. But as she was well aware, being a woman in Georgian London could be a precarious business.
Hester was now thirty. Having discovered the freedom of independence, she was loath to give it up. Some of that independence meant that she was free to establish friendships with men of her choosing, and if it was considered slightly scandalous that she was an unmarried woman in a house that was often full of men this was how she preferred it. One of her most persistent callers was William Noel Hill, fresh from a diplomatic posting in Austria, evidently still holding out hopes that Hester might settle down with him.* That October, once again, Harriet Bessborough set the rumour mill in motion:
Ly. Hol [Lady Holland] told me yesterday as certain that Hetty’s marriage with Mr Hill is declared and is to take place immediately: can this be so? If it is, il est bien bon. God bless you. I wish it may be true, for I sincerely wish poor Hetty to be well and comfortably settled.2
The engagement never materialized. Feeling himself rejected, the disgruntled Hill commented around this time that he thought Hester ‘must have some strong occupation’ or outlet for her talents. Sardonically, Hester began to refer to him as ‘Christ Jesus’, resenting his preachings. Some months later, Canning’s visits had also become noticeably frequent. In March 1807 he accepted the position of Foreign Secretary, and the degree to which he continued to seek out Hester’s company indicates how useful he found her political insights.
In July 1807 a familiar face from her Walmer days came back into her orbit. She had met Sir John Moore when he was in command at nearby Shorncliffe Camp, and immediately liked him, finding the Scottish-born-and-bred soldier refreshingly scornful of politicians. Then – as again now – he was a particularly handsome man; tall, with his greying locks close-cropped and his military greatcoat and necktie always slightly askew. Now he came to see her, to pay his respects and talk about Pitt. He found her changed, perhaps less impetuous. Her political understanding, her mental quickness and her familiarity with the preoccupations he faced, impressed him. It may not have taken long for Hester and Moore to realize they wished to spend more time in each other’s company.
Judging by the trust and respect, and sheer frequency, of the letters that followed, Moore, who had managed to remain a bachelor all these years, may well have felt that he had finally met his match. Pitt’s old offer to make her one of his generals was a standing joke between them. Moore was forty-seven, and was in many ways a far more realistic choice for Hester than Granville. It would not have been his nature to mislead her, and he also had an air of sophistication unusual for a soldier, spoke several European languages and had already distinguished himself in America in the War of Independence and among other posts, in Corsica, the West Indies and Egypt. A complicity grew between them, much more than mere friendship. Moore seems to have been good for Hester; the influence of his methodical but passionate nature allowed her to regulate her otherwise erratic moods.
On his return to London Moore had been informed that his services would be welcome in Spain, but not as Commander of the Peninsular Campaign as had been widely predicted. It was a humiliating blow. Moore did not mix well with authority; his superiors and the current administration generally frustrated and exasperated him. In October 1807, a peace treaty was signed with Portugal, followed by another with Spain in January. Both Canning and Castlereagh, the Secretary of War, were impatient to make a real strike at the French. A decision was made to send the British army already in Portugal, reinforced with an expeditionary force from Britain, to support the Spanish.
With Hester, Moore felt free to pick over every conceivable angle of his position, to fulminate about what he thought of Castlereagh’s military plans (‘plausible verbose nonsense and a sort of gibberish’, he complained to her) instead of having to censor himself. She was indignant on his behalf, perhaps – and this would have been