It is fair to guess that Moore might not have been her choice when she was younger, nor she his, but now they were no longer so young. In March 1808 she was thirty-two, and she must have recognized that Moore was not the kind of man to make her suffer deliberately. As often happens when people know they are about to be separated, emotions surfaced at the last minute. By the time of Moore’s departure, they both realized the extent of their attachment. What precisely had been agreed between them is not clear. Everything about his letters to her from the frontline suggests that he felt very tenderly towards her, greatly respected her opinions and actively missed her. He trusted her with highly confidential information about his superiors. She meanwhile appeared to be full of the sort of optimistic energy and quiet purpose that only a woman confident in a new love can be.
Her brothers would be leaving for Spain too. The hope that they might be near Moore at least gave her greater confidence that she would see them all safe again.
In the autumn of 1808 British forces marched into Spain and Portugal, in the sanguine belief that the patriots would soon loosen the French grip on the country, and expecting to be greeted with open arms by the inhabitants. Immense amounts of financial aid and military provisions had been shipped to the insurgents. Yet the British were in for a shock. The Spanish and Portuguese armies were disorganized and poorly commanded; as well as shortages of food, clothing and equipment, there was a complete lack of cavalry and artillery.
After his arrival, first in Portugal and then in Spain, Moore wrote to Hester every few days, letters of great length and unwavering fondness. It is clear that hers are just as urgent and detailed, and that she is all the time worrying about him in the field, and about his reputation, which is under fire from ministers at home; she sends him every useful tidbit she can. ‘I believe they will make no attack on me until they see how I extricate myself here,’ he tells her, adding that he intends to let the public judge him by releasing his letters, ‘which contain a plain narrative’. He hopes she can look at them all before he publishes them, he tells her, ‘if ever I have the pleasure of seeing you again’. He reassures her that although he has not yet seen Charles with the 50th, he has ‘at last contrived an arrangement … with Sir Henry, who is the most liberal of men, to take the 50th with me’ so that Charles should be with him as aide-de-camp soon. He tells Hester: ‘I wish you were here with us. The climate now is charming; and we should give you riding enough, and in your red habit à la Amazone, you would animate and do us much good.’3
A month later, on 20 November, from Salamanca, Moore reassures her again after she has written to him asking him to receive James too. ‘I can refuse you nothing,’ he tells her. He advises her to notify James that he must obtain leave to come to Spain and join him, but warns her: ‘He will, however come too late; I shall be already beaten. I am within four marches of the French, with only a third of my force, and as the Spaniards have been dispatched in all quarters, my junction with the other two-thirds is very precarious. When we do join, we shall be very inferior to the enemy, we have been completely deceived … and now the discovery comes a little too late.’4
Moore disagreed with his government’s military tactics in Spain from the outset. Left in command in the Peninsula, he was faced with overwhelming odds. Moore’s troops left Salamanca for Old Castile on 11 December, hoping to distract the French away from Madrid. Very soon afterwards, however, he heard that not only had Madrid fallen, but that Napoleon, having only now realized the British were there, was unleashing the full force of his army against them – some 80,000 men. Knowing there was no glory in a vanquished army, Moore immediately realized his only objective was to save his forces from annihilation, and marched them north in the hope they would be smoothly evacuated by the Royal Navy.
For more than two weeks after the fall of Madrid, things seemed to be going well. By the end of December, though, a combination of poor logistics and horrendous weather caused chaos on both sides. By 27 December, Moore had managed to reach what appeared to be reasonable safety, and the next day began what would become known as the ‘retreat to Corunna’. His forces were then joined by some 6,000 Spanish soldiers, many barely able to stand, malnourished and a great number succumbing to infectious diseases such as dysentery, typhus and cholera. Soon the mood of desperation spread to the redcoats, and discipline began to break down. Moore would have been horrified at the trail of theft, rape and murder left behind by his fine battalions. By the time his depleted army reached Corunna, it was in a disastrous state. The ships had been held up, while the French were pressing hard, and before the British could be evacuated they were subjected to heavy bombardment.
At Corunna on 16 January 1809 Moore made a last-ditch stand against intensified assault by Marshal Soult. Late that afternoon, while directing his reserves, Moore was cut down by a cannonball volley that seemed to onlookers to strike from nowhere. It shattered his vital organs and bones; it was clear to those who ran to help him that he was beyond help, although he was not, it seems, disfigured. Moore’s long-time companion and closest friend Colonel Paul Anderson was with him. When two surgeons came hurrying up to him, he told them they would do better to attend injured soldiers; he knew he was dying. As he lay on his camp bed, the anxious faces of his men pressed around; he tried to give Anderson instructions for his mother and sister, and asked about other officers who had been wounded. At that moment, young James Stanhope rushed up in time to catch the General’s last words: ‘Stanhope, remember me to your sister.’
It was a memorably graceful death; he was buried on the ramparts of Corunna the following day. By 17 January most of the British troops had managed to board the waiting HMS Victory – later known to the world as Nelson’s ship at the Battle of Trafalgar – and the following day, the entire fleet sailed for home. They would not receive a hero’s welcome when they arrived on 23 January. Instead, a bewildered British public would watch aghast as Moore’s headless army returned, having lost some 2,000 men, with one-fifth of their number missing, presumed dead, and several thousand more wounded and sick.
Hester heard the news about Moore within hours of the Victory’s arrival. She was devastated. Everything she had begun to hope for – a new life – had been taken away from her at a stroke. In the first days after Moore’s death, Hester behaved like a war widow.
What she did not learn immediately was that her brother – ‘dearest, delightful amusing Charles’ – died the same afternoon as Moore. A bullet ripped through his heart as he turned to congratulate his men in the 50th Regiment, which Moore had put him in charge of. ‘Moore received his death-blow shortly after, and my poor brother fell nearly at the same time. Thank heaven the latter did not suffer one instant … the gallant General lived for three hours, but the agony he was in never deranged his senses; he was perfectly collected …’ It was Colonel Anderson who brought her the news, and who stayed while she broke down. Continuing her letter to an unidentified friend, she confides:
You may wonder why I tell you all this; but grief has its peculiarities, and thinking of nothing else but those I have lost, I like to talk of them, and the only one I have devoted my time to since is Colonel Anderson, knowing the nature of my feelings, the instant he arrived in town he came to me and told me everything in detail.5
She went on to say it was a miracle that James survived; his cloak had been shot through, he was hit and wounded; four men standing close to him were mown down by a cannonball. ‘I feel as though I have just waked from a horrid dream …’6
Grief left a powerful mark on Hester. Within the space of three years, she had lost her favourite brother, and two dearly loved men, one of whom might have become her husband. To those whom she felt had engineered the circumstances that had led to the débâcle at Corunna, and who now came to offer her sympathy, like Canning and her uncle Chatham, she was cold. She felt deeply aggrieved for Moore, aware that in the souring of the public opinion about the Peninsular War, the general had played a part. She especially blamed Castlereagh for his readiness in the House of Commons to inculpate Moore; on that subject she felt ‘my indignation is so great that I should have torn out his