Hester Stanhope: A Family Episode

In 1786, the death of the second Earl Stanhope brought to the House of Lords one of the oddest peers who ever sat there. The third Earl, a tall, bony, gawkv figure, had been delicate as a child, and had been sent by anxious parents to be educated in Switzerland. Here his physical health improved, but the young man fell victim to a mental contagion that in time the majority of his fellow-countrymen were to regard as moral leprosy: Geneva was alive with Rousseauism, and young Lord Mahon (as he then was) succumbed to the prevalent fever. On his return home, however, his extreme political convictions were at first held in check by his affection for his young wife, Hester, daughter of the Elder and sister of the Younger Pitt. After her death at the age of twenty-five, he found some distraction in his passion for science, which led him to devote twenty years to the construction of a model ship propelled by steam—offered to, and promptly declined by, the Admiralty, in 1793.