To their doting Uncle William, Hester was the tomboy he called ‘the Jockey Girl’, Griselda was ‘the little Book-devourer’, Lucy, ‘the Beauty’.
It seems that early on, Hester had acquired both her rebellious streak and her ability to present a stalwart face to the world. When she was eight, on a family outing to the beach at Hastings on the Kentish coast, she slipped away unnoticed, clambered aboard a boat and rowed herself out to sea, utterly confident that she would be able to navigate her way to France. The fast current swept her away from the pebbly shore, but she later claimed she had not been frightened, merely amused by the look of pure terror on her governess’s face. In her memory, she was always that precocious, self-aware girl, only happy when acting of her own volition.
On his father’s death in 1786 Charles became the third Earl Stanhope. As the new Earl his presence in Parliament took on an immediate edge when he disagreed publicly with Pitt over the latter’s establishment of a Consolidated Fund to reduce the national debt, arguing with him vociferously and publishing a pamphlet against the scheme, much to the Prime Minister’s embarrassment.16 To his family, it seemed as though almost overnight they were dealing with a different man, one prepared to be openly hostile to his former close friend and ally. There were other changes. He began to criticize his wife’s taste in clothes, in the theatre, in friends. He was a hard man to live with, often going into what his family called one of his ‘republican fits’. Chastised for the things that gave her pleasure, Louisa quickly lost her bloom, although James, the third and last son, was born in 1788.
Hester recalled once going to find her father at the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, former Governor of Bengal and Governor-General of India, after he took it upon himself to become an independent observer of the judicial system. (He attended every session religiously; and since proceedings began in February 1788 and lasted until Hastings’ acquittal in 1795, this was no small undertaking.) She would recall:
I can recollect, when I was ten or twelve years old, going off to Hastings’ trial. My garter somehow came off, and was picked up by Lord Grey, then a young man. At this hour, as if it were before me in a picture, I can see before me his handsome, but very pale face, his broad forehead; his corbeau coat, with cut-steel buttons; his white satin waistcoat and breeches; and the buckles in his shoes. He saw from whom the garter fell; but in observing my confusion, did not wish to increase it, and with infinite delicacy gave the garter to the person who sat there to serve tea and coffee.17
Hester was on the brink of adolescence already; aware of the power of simply being a young woman. Her father took measures to repress his daughter’s budding sexuality, such that Louisa feared that in society the girls would get a reputation as drabs. ‘My father,’ remembered Hester years later, ‘always checked any propensity to finery in dress. If any of us happened to look better than usual in a particular hat or frock, he was sure to have it put away the next day, and to have something coarse substituted in its place.’
Even so, by the time she was twelve, Hester was used to a rather sophisticated life, split between London and the country, along with young Philip, who was known by all now simply as ‘Mahon’, a name which stuck. She appears to have been her father’s favourite ‘when he bothered to notice any of them’. Earl Stanhope imposed upon his children a type of education that from today’s perspective seems almost guaranteed to create intellectual frustration for an intelligent child. He was determined that his children should, as Rousseau propounded in Émile, ‘learn nothing from books that experience can teach them’, a regime he prescribed until each child was about twelve. He restricted their exposure to books of all sorts, including the Bible and any prayer books, until such time when he judged that ‘nature’s lessons’ had been thoroughly learned. Considering the fact that he was a voracious reader himself, and the possessor of an impressive, highly eclectic library, this was extraordinary.
Any impression that Stanhope ignored his children’s education altogether would be false. He made sure they mastered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as French, and developed complicated games of logic for them, frequently setting them philosophical problems. Hester seems to be the only one amongst them who responded to this regime; her name for her father was tellingly sarcastic: ‘The Logician’. She was painfully aware that not all fathers apprenticed their sons to the local blacksmith in order to teach them humility and the fundamentals of mechanics. Unlike her own mother, who read and wrote Greek, Latin and French by the time she was twelve, Hester – whose intelligence was never in question – unconsciously absorbed the Rousseauian ethos. Hester recalled the rare occasions when she was summoned to her father’s study.
He would turn to me and say, ‘Now we must talk a little philosophy,’ and then with his two legs stuck up on the sides of the grate, he would begin. ‘Well, well,’ he would say, after I had talked a little, ‘that is not bad reasoning but the basis is bad’. My father, with all his mathematical knowledge, said I was the best logician he ever saw – I could split a hair. ‘Talk to the point’ was his cry; and I could bring truth to a point as sharp as a needle. The last time he saw me he repeated the same words, and said I had but one fault, which was being too fond of royalty.
From a very early age, she nourished the sense that she was quicker and cleverer than others; physically she was impatient, confident and advanced beyond her years. She did not respond well to petty punishments. She recalled one governess ‘had our backs pinched in by boards, that were drawn tight with all the force the maid could use; and as for me, they would have squeezed me to the size of a puny miss – a thing impossible!’ Another attempted to reshape her feet, trying to flatten her high instep.
She spent much time bolting about the countryside on horseback and dominating her siblings in a quasi-maternal role. She played pranks on staid Griselda, the most conventional of the girls; taunting her into violent fights, knocking over furniture and leaving them both scratched and bruised. Guitar and voice lessons were acceptable to the young Hester. ‘The first amuses her and the latter I hope will be of use to me in softening her voice,’ Grizel commented. Perhaps because of her father’s restrictions, Hester rebelled by being ever alert to the latest fashions.* ‘She has a very good taste for dress; but one of her jokes is to overdo the fashion in something or other when she comes to me, to amuse me or make me laugh,’ Grizel wrote to Lady Chatham.18 As she entered adolescence, it seems Hester liked to charm and shock in equal measure.
When the Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789, Earl Stanhope was jubilant. Many admired the way in which the French people had revolted in the name of liberty. Stanhope’s idealistic fervour for the principles of the Revolution intensified; he was instrumental in forming the Revolution Society, and was a natural choice as chairman. He determined to divest himself of his peerage and signed all his correspondence as ‘Citizen Stanhope’. He ordered that the armorial bearings be taken down from Chevening’s gates, much to the disgust of the servants. His speeches in support of the revolutionaries, and his Letter to Burke, his refutation to the man the French regarded as the Englishman most antagonistic to their Revolution, quickly translated and distributed, carried his name into the remotest corners of France. The teenage Hester must have been aware that for many French people, her renegade aristocratic father’s name meant more even than Pitt’s or Chatham’s.
Fear that London mobs might follow the example from across the Channel began to grow. At first, Pitt’s attitude was measured; although he evinced some sympathy for its early reforms, events swiftly moved to harden his heart: the mounting radicalism of the Jacobins, and news of the grisly butchering of priests and prisoners