Читайте только на Литрес

Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.

Kitabı oku: «Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope», sayfa 3

Yazı tipi:

Within months of becoming a widower, Charles’s eye fell on Louisa Grenville, his late wife’s cousin. It was another politically advantageous marriage: Louisa’s father Henry Grenville had already served as Governor of Barbados and ambassador at Constantinople. Writing from Bath, Charles’s former sister-in-law, Harriot, described a day she spent with his bride-to-be over the summer of 1780: ‘Poor Louisa is a little of a Coward, and has not rode often enough to be a very good Horsewoman, but her Figure is remarkably pretty in a riding dress, and she looks vastly well upon her Horse.’ Louisa, apparently susceptible to Charles’s forceful personality, believed he was marked for a brilliant future.

Charles could see Louisa lacked the intellect and the wit of his first wife, but he craved the reassurance and the routine of marriage. At twenty-three, with her ash-blonde hair and blue eyes, Louisa was in all ways a contrast to the former Lady Mahon. Her background of privilege and carefully managed wealth was a different cut from the brilliant, volatile and impulsively spendthrift Pitts. Within months of being widowed, Charles remarried; within the year, the new Lady Mahon gave birth to their first son, Philip Henry, the future heir.

For both Charles and his former brother-in-law William Pitt, this was a time of rapid political advancement. Charles was elected for Chipping Wycombe (later known as High Wycombe) in Buckinghamshire, not as a radical, as he had first wished. Instead, his candidature had been endorsed by the Earl of Shelburne, most prominent among a small group of Whig parliamentarians still loyal to the ideals of Chatham. Like William Pitt, Charles passionately favoured the American rebels and parliamentary reform. Shortly afterwards, Pitt followed Charles into the House of Commons as an MP, aged just twenty-one. The two young men shared a common purpose, each determined that his voice would soon provide a rationale for a vision of a better England. At the time, it was greatly in vogue, especially among the Whigs, to appear to flirt with reform, but both Charles Stanhope and Pitt went further than most. It soon became obvious that of the two, it was Pitt who was born for a career in politics. Not only was he the more effective speaker and a naturally charismatic politician, he was unshakeably ambitious and ultimately a pragmatist. He always knew when to draw back. Charles, on the other hand, refused to climb down on any issue once he had taken a stand; he would prove both mercurial and unpopular.

Pitt’s ascent was spectacular. By the age of twenty-three, he found himself in the new Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shelburne, who preferred to stay in his comfortable house on Berkeley Square, offered Pitt the Downing Street house that had been given by King George II in the 1730s as official residence for the First Lord of the Treasury. (It was one of a row of townhouses; when Pitt moved in, it had only recently been renamed as No. 10.) Around this time Pitt wrote to Charles saying he hoped to visit him at Chevening. ‘I trust you will be in town in a very few days, for there are several things in which I am quite at a loss without you.’13 Whatever Pitt might have wanted to discuss, he evidently relied on Charles’s judgement.

On 19 December 1783, the twenty-four-year-old Pitt kissed the King’s hand as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the youngest Prime Minister in history. Hester, who was then seven, was well aware of the significance of this achievement and the importance of her uncle’s position. Pitt moved back to Downing Street, and saw a good deal of the Mahons, who often stayed with him. It was from the Prime Minister’s residence, at half past three in the morning on 3 June 1785, that a thrilled Charles wrote to his friend Joseph Banks, informing him that Louisa had just given birth to another boy, and that he would be ‘extremely flattered’ if he would be the child’s godfather.14 This was Hester’s second half-brother, Charles.15

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 in France, caused him and many others who had previously been supportive to feel revulsion for the sans-culottes. Despite this, Earl Stanhope believed France would remain true to the virtues of liberty and equality. From that autumn, he and his former brother-in-law would regard one another as little better than enemies.

* There was a family connection to the Banks through Lady Mahon, for one of her uncles, Henry Grenville, had married Banks’s aunt, Eleanor Margaret. Their young daughter, Louisa, one of Banks’s cousins, was also cousin to the Pitt sisters, and was a great friend of Lady Mahon’s sister Harriot, who was then nineteen.

* Perhaps it was her extreme discretion and tact that led the banker, Thomas Coutts, to declare Lady Chatham ‘the cleverest man of her time, in politics or business’. The Pitt women, especially in their maturity, seem to have been altogether formidable.

* The heroic image of the dying statesman collapsing in Parliament, surrounded by more than fifty noblemen, would be committed to legend by an expatriate Bostonian, painter John Singleton Copley, in his painting The Death of Chatham. It took Copley two years to complete, painstakingly recording each detail of dress and interior, with most of the portraits made from life, and was regarded by many as the greatest historical painting ever done in England.

* Writing in 1793 of what he termed ‘the era of Jacobinism’, Sir Nathaniel Wraxall noted ‘it was then that pantaloons, cropt hair, and shoestrings as well as the total abolition of buckles and ruffles, together with the disuse of hair powder, characterised men, while the ladies, having cut off those tresses which had done so much execution, exhibited heads rounded à la victime et à la guillotine, as if ready for the stroke of the axe’.

2 The Minority of One

As the French Revolution raged, everyone in London knew about ‘Citizen Stanhope’. He was mercilessly lampooned in satirizing cartoons by Gillray, who enjoyed depicting him as an emaciated, wine-drinking sozzle-head rallying cockade-wearing mobs, usually with an equally emaciated, vexed-looking Pitt lurking about in the background.

As far as the Stanhope children were concerned, their father the freedom-lover was a domestic tyrant. Hester began to mimic him; demanding that her siblings never enter a room unless they first sent a servant to ask whether they could be admitted. She disapproved of her father’s many ‘republican’ measures, such as doing away with the carriage and horses his wife had relied upon to ferry her about. Louisa reacted with predictable exasperation. By then the relationship between them was becoming irretrievable. Hester went to elaborate lengths to keep the peace. In her own words:

Poor Lady Stanhope was quite unhappy about it: but when the whole family was looking glum and sulky, I thought of a way to set it all right again. I got myself a pair of stilts, and out I stumped along a dirty lane, where my father, who was always spying about through his glass, could see me.

So when I came home he said to me:

‘Why little girl, what have you been about? Where was it I saw you going upon a pair of – the devil knows what? – eh, girl?’

‘Oh! Papa, I thought, as you had laid down your horses, I would take a walk through the mud on stilts, for you know Papa, I don’t mind mud or anything – ’tis poor Lady Stanhope who minds these things, for she has always been very accustomed to her carriage, and her health is not very good.’

‘What’s that you say, little girl,’ said my father, turning his eyes away from me, and after a pause, ‘Well little girl, what say you if I brought a carriage again for Lady Stanhope?’

‘Why papa, I would say it was very kind of you.’

‘Well, well,’ he observed, ‘we will see; but damm it! No armorial bearings.’

So, some time afterwards, down came a new carriage and new horses from London, and thus by a little innocent frolic I made all parties happy again.1

Hester makes her father sound quite acceptably human, not at all a monster, and goodhearted beneath his somewhat autocratic exterior. Despite her claim, her ruse did not alter the growing coolness between her father and Louisa, whom all the children called ‘Mama’. Hester was old enough to observe cracks in the marriage and noted that ‘we children saw neither one nor the other’. It was usually Grizel who watched over the girls as they dressed for local balls and dances. ‘The Three Graces’, as she called them, were often up ‘all night, at least until five … dancing their hearts out’. But Grizel noted that Stanhope regularly took his daughters ‘some sixteen miles over the heavy Kent roads, waits patiently … and return[s] at seven in the morning’.2 He did this several times a week over the winter ‘season’, for at least three years. It is hardly the picture of an unloving father.

Acutely aware of her father’s embarrassing behaviour, Hester’s letters are primarily concerned with finding creative ways around his restrictions on her movements. Unlike most daughters of her generation, Stanhope was doing his best to discourage her from having anything to do with families he thought too ‘aristocratical’ or ‘too bourgeois society’. To her closest friend from this time, Evelyn St Clare, Hester complained about his guests. He spent much of his time with Varley, his great ally and friend, and the blacksmith to whom he apprenticed his sons. ‘Oh defend me from Citizens and Philosophers if this is the life they lead.’ But she was also proud of her father’s brilliance.

Hester came of age in the 1790s, a time of revolutionary enthusiasm and political agitation that created a generation of thinkers, poets and artists. But it also ushered in a new wave of repression in Britain, for which her uncle Pitt was directly responsible. He feared civil strife, whether it stemmed from revolutionaries, anarchists or reactionary ‘Church and King’ mobs. Pitt regarded societies like the Revolution Society, and the Corresponding Societies, which by now had acquired hundreds of members, especially in the industrial centres of the north and in Scotland, as a particular threat.

Unconcerned, Earl Stanhope forged strong ties with many of the Revolution’s loftier theorists, notably the Marquis de Condorcet, the mathematician and Revolutionary martyr, whom Stanhope felt to be his true brother-in-arms, and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.* Stanhope’s pacifist views were well known to these Frenchmen, as was his desire to see France and England ‘united by indissoluble bonds’.

Hester was almost seventeen when Louis XVI was guillotined. Although reluctantly drawn into war, Pitt was of the widely-held opinion that this could only be a limited conflict. In fact, the conflict between the traditional foes would ultimately last, short intervals aside, for twenty-two years. Even Pitt’s great rival Charles James Fox, who had condemned the ‘madness’ of the war, conceded that the French regime had taken on a criminal nature. Under Robespierre and the Jacobins, political prisoners of all backgrounds – out-of-favour Girondins and generals as well as Marie Antoinette – had been sent to the ever-clattering guillotine. Walpole wrote that its ‘horrors make one abhor Lord Stanhope and his priestly firebrands’ and derided his pronouncements as the ‘ravings of a lunatic, imagining he could set the world on fire with phosphorus’.

Over the next few years, the ‘White Terror’ unleashed by Pitt would suspend constitutional freedoms, such as habeas corpus, and introduce the Treason and Sedition Act, the Unlawful Oaths Act and the Corresponding Societies Act. Determined to prevent any incitement to revolution, he instituted gagging measures such as the banning of public meetings, and employed indeterminate numbers of spies and informers. Hundreds of those deemed seditious would be arrested; many houses of Dissenters and Unitarians attacked and burnt.3 Stanhope was among those whose letters and communiqués were routinely intercepted and read. Although Pitt’s popularity sank – he was despised and pilloried in the radical press – he succeeded in consolidating power among the splintered Whigs. Indeed, his grip on Parliament during those repressive times would never be stronger.

By 1794 it would have been impossible for Hester to ignore the fact that her father was rapidly becoming a political pariah. Many on both sides in the House shunned his zealous views. But he was not merely a contrarian. A fierce champion of democracy, a pacifist and a republican, he saw himself as one of the few men in Parliament motivated by his conscience alone. For that reason, he adopted with particular pride the title ‘The Minority of One’, and even had a medal struck in his own honour.* Around this time, Coleridge wrote a poem, To Earl Stanhope.

But where Stanhope saw encroaching darkness, many of his fellow peers looked at him and saw precisely what Pitt warned them against, one of an emerging breed, a viperous ‘British Jacobin’. Stanhope’s exhortations not to interfere in the internal affairs of France appeared distinctly unpatriotic.

Pitt decided that his tolerance had been stretched far enough. He made a string of arrests. One of them was the Reverend Jeremiah Joyce, employed by Stanhope as his secretary and tutor for his two elder boys. Joyce was seized at Chevening, in front of the gawping Stanhope children.* That same night Stanhope was woken by a large crowd outside his house at 20 Mansfield Street, who at first shouted insults, then began breaking windows and throwing torches. Hester remembered her father telling them how he was forced to make his escape over the roof while the mob jeered. Stanhope was convinced the crowd had been paid to incite violence against him – even to cause his death. But this served to increase his radical activities.

Hester was torn between childhood pride in her father, whom she had always more or less sought to please, and the gnawing sense that ominous repercussions were about to fall on all their heads because of him. She enjoyed the notoriety of knowing clever radicals like the clergyman Horne Tooke. ‘I am an aristocrat,’ she told an amused Tooke, ‘and I make a boast of it’. When she told Tooke, ‘I hate a pack of dirty Jacobins that only want to get people out of a good place to get into it themselves,’ he roared with laughter, and had to admit she had a point.

But now Horne Tooke, like Jeremiah Joyce, was imprisoned in the Tower. Stanhope did his utmost to lobby on behalf of his imprisoned friends – Joyce, Hardy and Tooke among them – all of whom faced certain death if found guilty of high treason. Hester worried that if her father were arrested the same fate would await him.

Disgusted with political life, Stanhope would resign from the House of Lords by the end of the year. Two days before Christmas, to celebrate Joyce’s acquittal, in which he played no small role, Stanhope staged a grand ball at Chevening, inviting more than four hundred guests for dancing and feasting. He hoped to please Hester by making this her unofficial coming-out party. She was, her grandmother commented, ‘looking incomparably well’. How pleased she was to dance with the bumpkinish sons of local squires around a centrepiece display of life-size mannequins meant to depict prisoners being unchained, under a large banner emblazoned with ‘The Rights of Juries’, was not recorded.

Hester would look back upon this as a happy period. She was closer to Louisa now that she was of age, and theoretically in search of a husband, while her stepmother was grateful for any excuse to escape hers. There were visits to Bath and to Louisa’s Grenville relatives in London. ‘Every amusement that riding, visiting &c. can produce, they have had without interruption, and which the uncommon strength of Hester bears most amazingly, for none can keep up with her,’ wrote Grizel, apparently missing the irony that while her son would sooner see the monarchy dispatched, her granddaughter insisted it was her duty to attend a ball celebrating the Prince of Wales’s birthday.

In 1795, Hester heard that another notorious prisoner at Newgate, the self-declared millennial prophet Richard Brothers, had asked to see her. It would have been easy to dismiss Brothers as a raving lunatic; he was, after all, about to be transferred to Bedlam. Although arrested on charges of sedition, he had been found criminally insane. He had declared himself to be a prophet, the ‘nephew of the Almighty, descendant of David and ruler of the world’. Brothers informed her that she was among a select group of people he believed would play a profound role in the ‘future Kingdom’. He himself would be the future King, he told her, and she was a chosen one, destined to be the ‘Queen of the Jews’. One day, he informed her, she would ‘go to Jerusalem and lead back the chosen people; that, on her arrival in the Holy Land, mighty changes would take place in the world and that she would pass seven years in the desert’ before her destiny revealed itself to her.

Hester mentioned her visit to Brothers in somewhat scathing terms to Horne Tooke. He teased her that he and his colleagues intended to establish ‘a new hospital for the diseases of the mind’ and that she was to be placed in charge of it, ‘for nobody knows so well as you how to cure them’. It was true that, at nineteen, Hester had every reason to congratulate herself on being the possessor of a formidably shrewd, even intimidating intellect, able to spar with many of the sharpest wits of the period.

She cannot have failed to be impressed by her father’s unusually fertile mind. He was fascinated more than anything by clever mechanics and by the power that might be harnessed through the invention of ships that could be self-propelled. The design of docks, canals and bridges obsessed him to an equal degree; he saw a future driven by steam.

Throughout Hester’s childhood, Earl Stanhope worked on his great dream, to create a workable steamship; he designed several modest prototypes which he tested out on Chevening’s small lake, and on the Thames. As soon as Watt’s steam engine appeared, Stanhope tried to apply the new technology, experimenting for a decade with various ingenious but cumbersome designs. Soon he had a flotilla of boats, including his pride and joy, the 111-foot Kent, the ‘Stanhope Ambi-Navigator’, which weighed over 200 tons even before it was fitted out with its heavy steam engines and boilers.*

In the end, the Kent would neither win Stanhope his elusive dream, nor bring his family the satisfaction of seeing him publicly honoured. The sailing trials were delayed, first by the Navy Board, and then by the Admiralty itself. John Leard, the Admiralty-appointed commander of the Kent, was the first to alert Stanhope somewhat apologetically that there were those who would prefer that he did not succeed. ‘I have two charges,’ he wrote, ‘to shew their unwillingness to attend to anything belonging to the Kent. But it was all leveled at your Lordship. They are afraid of you.’4

Stanhope must have known that conservatism and hostility towards innovations at the Navy Board were hardly new. To many of the Admiralty Lords, new technology, no matter how exciting, could be a potential threat to comfortable financial arrangements and contracts. Orders were given to remove the ship’s steam engine. Stanhope was incensed.

It was Pitt’s revenge, or so it must have seemed. The Admiralty removed the unused boilers and refitted her as a gun-vessel, but soon the Navy Board had their way, and had her broken up.* To Stanhope, it was as though all his early promise and his scientific genius had been betrayed: it was perhaps the most crushing of all blows.

Early in January 1796, Hester’s sixteen-year-old sister Lucy eloped; it seems she was already pregnant. The man in question, Tom Taylor, was a pleasant-looking twenty-seven-year-old apothecary who had been living quietly in Sevenoaks, until catching sight of Lucy. Before she fled, Lucy left a note for Hester, the only person she believed she could trust, counting on her not to raise the alarm, and hopefully to delay telling their father. Hester turned to Pitt, who was only too aware of the lasting shame the elopement could bring upon the family, and after his intervention, Lucy returned with her suitor and meekly asked for her father’s permission to marry.

Whatever Stanhope gave Lucy as dowry, it was not enough to stop Taylor from accepting a highly prestigious position offered to him by Pitt, that of Comptroller General in the Customs Service. He had few qualifications for the job but Pitt assessed that he had an excellent brain, and would thrive quickly, which seems to have been the case. This sinecure in a government he loathed greatly angered Stanhope. Lucy, with a measure of her sister’s defiance, refused to bow to his pressure that Taylor should not take the job. An angry estrangement ensued. It was to become a familiar Stanhope pattern.

Later that year, Hester caused her own sensation, appearing alone at Lord Romney’s military review. It was the most spectacular event held in Kent in 1796, staged to celebrate Pitt’s government’s successful raising of volunteers – six thousand in that county alone – who would parade and perform splendid feats dressed in their brand-new regimentals; fencing; charging across the field to swipe the heads off turnips with their swords; and marching before a crowd of landowning families; a grand feast would be held in a tented encampment. As well as Pitt, the King and Queen were there; and their sons, the Duke of York, then commander of the British army, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Clarence and the future Duke of Kent.

Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.

Türler ve etiketler

Yaş sınırı:
0+
Litres'teki yayın tarihi:
12 mayıs 2019
Hacim:
622 s. 5 illüstrasyon
ISBN:
9780007380480
Telif hakkı:
HarperCollins
Metin
Средний рейтинг 0 на основе 0 оценок