Yet nothing out of the ordinary seemed to distinguish the earlier Pitt clan. They knew themselves to be descended from the Pitts in Hampshire and Dorset, mostly gentry, with several eminent local magnates among them. It was the family fortune-maker, Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt, who set the trend for greatness. In 1673, when Thomas Pitt had just turned twenty, much to the disquiet of his mother he announced he was taking off for India, joining the East India Company as a lowly clerk. His beginnings were humble: a trading practice on the salty banks of Balasore, a fetid but profitable British cantonment in Orissa. But not content with slaving for the Company, he absconded and began to buy goods from Indian merchants, shipping them back to England on his own account. He also made the first of many trips to Persia, primarily on the lookout for well-bred horses. There was nothing that so riled the East India Company as a turncoat agent like Pitt. But he showed himself to be a skilled negotiator, capable of passionate, even brutal fits of ranting, but expressed with such force and persuasion that he quickly established a kind of rogue authority. Even his rivals admired his energy, his belief that the future of England’s success in the world depended on opportunistic profit-seekers like him. In the end the East India Company decided they had better have him on their side. Pitt was able to buy respectability along with the medieval borough of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, for which he later successfully ran as Member of Parliament.4 In 1698, following a parliamentary ruling that relaxed restrictions on trade in India, allowing interlopers to follow Pitt’s example and deal freely, the Company decided to appoint none other than their notorious old adversary as Governor of Madras. For eleven years, the Madras Residency echoed with his blustering rages. Family legends about Diamond Pitt’s bombastic personality were picked over for generations.
It was Thomas Pitt’s second daughter, Lucy, a great beauty of her day, who first brought together the Pitts and the Stanhopes. Lucy Pitt could have had her pick of any number of suitors, but it was the dashing, hard-drinking and impetuous James Stanhope, a man twice her age, a hero in the War of the Spanish Succession, who took her fancy. The Stanhopes were a clan of diplomats and warriors. James was the son of Alexander Stanhope, the grandson of Philip Stanhope, whom Charles I had in 1628 created Earl of Chesterfield. Despite his inherent dislike of foreigners, Alexander himself had been distinguished as a diplomat in the time of Oliver Cromwell and was William III’s ambassador at Madrid and afterwards at The Hague. In 1708, as commander of the British forces in Spain, James led his men in the capture of Minorca and the nearby naval base of Fort Mahon.
Shortly after the couple’s marriage, George I made James Stanhope successively Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons. From their house in Whitehall, they became a formidable, glamorous political couple. By 1717, James had become one of George I’s most trusted confidants, and he was rewarded with the sinecure of Chief Minister, and raised to the peerage as Viscount Mahon, thus earning the Stanhope title. It soon became necessary to find a family mansion. Because of its relative proximity to London, Chevening, tucked away in the chalky hills of the North Downs in Kent, surrounded by enchanting countryside, was thought suitable.5
Lucy Pitt put her own strong mark on Chevening, the family estate where her great-granddaughter would grow up. The original house, built in 1620 and attributed to Inigo Jones, and the 3,500-acre estate were bought in 1717 for £28,000, some £10,000 of which was paid with Lucy’s dowry. While her husband was continuously busy in high office, Lucy preoccupied herself between her frequent pregnancies with supervising extensive alterations to their new house. A thermometer-shaped canal was created in front of the house – where black swans, geese and wild birds still flock – and extensive gardens were laid out in a formal pattern of box hedges, yew trees and intersecting pathways fashionable at the time; meanwhile the original doll’s-house design of the house was extended with pavilions and the forecourt enclosed with elegant wrought-iron gates, with the Stanhope crest triumphantly on top.
A new road was created to make a stately loop along the high ridge on Star Hill, where pheasants still whir through woods of silver beech on the one side, allowing the contemplation of far-reaching vistas across Chevening and the surrounding countryside on the other. Anyone passing would marvel at one particular spot along the road – a sudden and unexpected vista through a towering arcade of trees in which the prospect of Chevening is perfectly framed. This view especially pleased Lucy, who designed it, planting the row of trees and coaxing them to form an arch, nicknamed the Keyhole.
It was this landscape that the young Hester Stanhope would grow up to love, more than the house itself. It was on these wide undulating hills that she would first learn to ride. The view through the Keyhole took on a magical significance for her. It was the portal through which four generations of her family had passed, and an unchanging link to the women of her family, her namesakes.
Diamond Pitt’s grandson, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, came to be regarded as the greatest politician of his time. Known to a generation as ‘the Great Commoner’, he was revered as the man who had led the country through the Seven Years War, presiding over a series of victories, wresting the provinces of Quebec and Montreal from French settlers, thereby bringing much of the eastern seaboard of North America under British control, and reinforcing British supremacy in India. His granddaughter would be raised on accounts of his thunderous orations and grandiloquent gestures in the House of Commons.
Chatham’s firstborn child, Hester Pitt, now Lady Mahon, always had every expectation that her lot in life should include both the grand lifestyle and intellectual stimulation that had always surrounded her. Yet her father, despite his brilliance, had also been profligate, almost maniacally so, and was too debt-ridden to offer any suitor she might have an enticing dowry. Much of the family money had been plunged into renovating and beautifying Chatham’s house and garden at Hayes, near the village of Bromley in Kent. It was left to her mother’s relatives, the Grenvilles, one of the most powerful Whig aristocratic families, to provide the bare minimum that might be expected for a ‘polite’ marriage: jewellery and the endowment of a thousand pounds to the young couple.
There were five in the Pitt brood – John, Harriot, William and James as well as Hester – all born within five years of one another. Unlike most girls at the time, Hester Pitt benefited from a careful education, being tutored at home along with her brothers, one of whom, William, would follow in the family political tradition and earn the distinction of becoming Britain’s youngest Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four. By the time William left to study at Cambridge university, where he would be admitted as an undergraduate to Pembroke Hall at the age of fourteen – an achievement which was as exceptional then as today – brother and sister were proficient in the classical languages, able to translate ancient Greek at sight with impressive fluency, and apt to quote long passages from Thucydides and Polybius.6
In all ways, as she entered the first year of her marriage, Lady Mahon – a slender, self-possessed girl with wide, expressive dark eyes – was an advanced young woman at the height of her powers. She was described by a family friend as ‘one of the most accomplished persons of the age’.7 It would have been impossible for her not to have a political consciousness: not only her father, but her great-grandfather, grandfather and uncle had all been Members of Parliament.
Shortly before he married Hester Pitt, Charles had returned to England after more than ten years away in Europe. His family had moved to Geneva in 1763 when Charles was ten, in the hope that the better climate would improve the health of their ailing elder son Philip, who nonetheless died of consumption six months later at the age of seventeen. Philip was the son on whom all hopes were pinned, while Charles had been so obstinate as a child his parents called him ‘the little Devil’. The Stanhopes had stayed on so that Charles might continue his education. Geneva was then the centre of extreme radical thought, where the theories of the city’s famous residents Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire were respected. At a young age, Charles was fired with enthusiasm for social reform,