So, for Hester, 1809 began as a year of terrible sorrow. It was hard for her to see much point to her life in London. Her one concern was James, who although he had recovered physically from his ordeal, showed every sign of what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. On 27 April, at Montagu Square, Hester rewrote her will, which she had witnessed by Colonel Anderson. With Charles dead, she made James the heir to all her belongings, as well as her share in their dead mother’s estate, which they would be entitled to only if their uncle Lord Chatham died without issue.
She and James had decided to go abroad together for a while. Sicily was to be their destination. The balmy island climate had long been considered the best place for convalescence, but getting there was not an altogether easy proposition. All but the most determined travellers deferred their journey to Europe around this time; Hester and James would have to find passage on a naval frigate. With the French chafing at the blockade, private vessels, although tolerated in the main, were generally thought too dangerous. Still, Hester had friends in high places; arrangements would be made.
In the meantime, Hester set about packing up Montagu Square. She took a small set of rooms at 14 Green Street, just off Oxford Street, and cast about for somewhere to rent cheaply for the summer. Soon after Moore’s departure the previous year, she had gone to Bath for several weeks, and on one of her lengthier jaunts had discovered the beautiful scenery of the Wye Valley in Wales.
She returned to Builth Wells, an otherwise unprepossessing, rather closed-faced town that sat on some of the most bucolic landscape she had ever seen. On her last visit she had stayed at the Royal Oak (now the Lion Hotel) for several weeks. This time her past happiness was a painful reminder of what she had lost: she stayed no more than a night in May 1809, before making her way further up the valley.
On that first visit, Hester had befriended the town’s best-known residents, the Reverend Price and his son Thomas, both fiery Welsh nationalists she had taken a great liking to. For the time being, father and son offered Hester kindly, lively company, though if she had come to Wales to find quiet, she would hardly have found it in the Prices’ dining room, which was invariably full of impressionable, idealistic young men, shouting and speaking in Welsh, then apologizing and translating for the English-speakers. Although remote, it was not as removed from the war as one might suppose. The Black Mountains had several camps where French prisoners of war were being held; Thomas Price spent part of his time teaching them Welsh.
It was to Reverend Price that Hester had written to ask if she could rent a property on the banks of the Irfon, three miles from town, that she remembered seeing the previous year. ‘Glan Irfon’ was a simple, dark-slate-walled gabled farmhouse, sheltered by a ridge, with a pleasant view overlooking meadows. By late spring the landscape would have been soft and green, with hill-slopes full of lazing cattle and forest-like thickets; wildflowers everywhere and wild roses tumbling over the hedgerows. The farmhouse was never meant to sleep more than four or so people; there was only one other guest bedroom. During the time Hester was there, with James and other visitors, as well as Elizabeth Williams, it was packed to the rafters.
By the time Hester arrived in the Wye Valley, she had made a new acquaintance. The friendship she would form with the flamboyant Venezuelan revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda would do much to help her recover her enthusiasm for life, and galvanize her ambitions. He was fifty-nine to her thirty-three, well-built and olive-skinned with piercing hazel eyes, his greying hair tied back in a ponytail which gave him a piratical look.
On 29 April 1809 Miranda scrawled his first impressions of Hester on the back of a dinner invitation from James, who declared his sister was ‘very anxious’ to make his acquaintance:
I have dined with Lady Hester Stanhope who enchanted me with her amiability, erudition, and liberal conversation. At one time she talked about Rome and Italy, which she had visited; at another time she talked about Greece, which she wished to visit and which she was not able to see when she was in Naples. She also talked about Venezuela whose independence she wished to see established upon a basis of rational liberty. In this connection she said to me that her uncle Mr Pitt had upon various occasions talked to her with interest and warmth about this affair, and had particularly lauded my patriotic ideas. Ever since Lady Hester had wished to become acquainted with me, and had also wished to visit my interesting country. She said further that if I needed a recruit of her species, she was ready to follow me there though it should be to do nothing else than to manage schools and hospitals. All this she descanted upon with greatest jocularity and grace until midnight when I retired most highly impressed with her conversation, good judgement … and interesting person. She is one of the most delightful women I have ever known – and if her behaviour accords with my first impressions – she is certainly a rarity among her sex.8
Pitt had first encountered Miranda in 1790, and initially encouraged his idea of a British-sponsored expedition to South America. But he may have deliberately made sure the dashing, much-travelled, multi-lingual ladykiller did not meet his niece. By 1809 Miranda’s life history was a complicated one that had encompassed manifold allegiances. In the name of fighting for liberty, his many adventures had already included stints as a Spanish military officer, a colonel in the Russian army, and a commander of French Revolutionary forces in the Netherlands. Whichever country he was in, he was invariably accused of being an enemy spy. Around London, Miranda was celebrated for his spell-binding tirades at the tables of Charles Fox, Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce.
Shortly after their first meeting, Hester dined with Miranda again, and this time Bentham – Miranda’s neighbour on Grafton Street – was present.* Within two weeks Miranda was calling Hester ‘Querida’ and told his friends that she was ‘the most delicious woman I have yet encountered’.9 This, from a man whose nickname was ‘the Casanova of the New World’, was indeed a high compliment.
In Wales, Hester lost no time in writing to Miranda. She knew that he was anxious for definite action to bring about Venezuelan independence, his ‘Great Cause’ he called it, in pursuit of which he had already accumulated considerable debts. Just as she had been with Moore, she was sympathetic to Miranda’s misadventures in his attempts to interest Canning and Castlereagh in funding his proposed expedition. She shared admiration for his zeal with Bentham and Wilberforce – the former was already drafting legislation for the new Venezuelan Republic, while the latter, who found Miranda ‘very entertaining and instructive’, hoped he would be of some influence in abolishing slavery in his own country.10 Miranda promised to come out to see her in August. She replied in a slightly teasing letter dated 31 July 1809:
I cannot wait until I receive your letter to express how much I am delighted with the prospect of seeing you in this part of the world; I wish I could flatter myself with the idea that I could contribute to your amusement while here … and that you will spend as much more of yr time as you can spare from yr books, a certain number of which I suppose travel with you …11
The farmhouse, she told him with some circumspection, would be too small and cramped for him to find comfortable, and she suggested he stay at the Royal Oak. All the same, he seems to have dined with her every night, bringing with him his two flutes – ebony and silver – on which he played melancholy tunes. Miranda remained long enough to ride with Hester through the Brecon mountains to Abergavenny