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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

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Lady Hester Stanhope

1776-1839

I like traveling of all things; it is a constant change of ideas.

—LADY HESTER STANHOPE

Born in the Age of Revolution, Lady Hester Stanhope is remembered today as a passionate and intrepid traveler in an age when women were discouraged from being adventurous. She was a woman who thrived at the center of British politics, spent over thirty years in the Middle East dressed like a man, took younger men for lovers, and died destitute and alone in an isolated Lebanese village. The story of her life from drawing room to desert was marked by scandal and intrigue.

Lady Hester was born in 1776 at Chevening in Kent to a distinguished and eccentric family of adventurers and statesmen. Her name, Hester, was a favorite name of her maternal relatives, the Pitts, and a rather unusual and unconventional name for the period. From birth, she was a headstrong and domineering child, determined to have her own way. Raised by a succession of nannies and governesses, she alternately bullied and smothered her younger siblings. A rambunctious tomboy, Hester was a demon on horseback, but had no use for the feminine arts of embroidery and music. At the age of eight, she commandeered a rowboat and tried to make her way to France. She might have made it, too, if her furious governesses hadn’t come after her. As a young woman, when her father forbade her to attend the royal review at their neighbor Lord Romney’s, where all the gentry of Kent gathered to pay homage to the sovereign, she caused a sensation when she showed up without a chaperone. She charmed George III, who wanted to whisk her off to Windsor much to the queen’s chagrin.

Hester was considered to be the favorite of her father’s children, when he remembered their existence. Certainly she was the only one of the earl’s six children who wasn’t afraid of him, for she stood up to him on numerous occasions in her siblings’ defense. The third Earl Stanhope was a brilliant but eccentric scientist and inventor who also had strange ideas about education, including for girls, sending Hester to tend turkeys on the common. He also had an unpredictable temper. Father and daughter got along swimmingly until the day he held a knife to her throat.

Fleeing her father’s tyranny, she went to live with her uncle William Pitt the Younger.
²⁶When he returned to power as prime minister in 1804, Hester was in her element, acting as a political hostess, his unofficial adviser, and a go-between with those who hoped to curry favor with her uncle. This was the happiest period of her life, where she was in the thick of things. Tall and striking, with a bawdy sense of humor, she loved to make off-color jokes that shocked the more staid members of society. Disdaining women as frivolous, Hester was happiest in the company of men who were handsome, intelligent, and slightly in love with her. She had many admirers, including Beau Brummel and her cousin Lord Camelford, but no offers of marriage. Hester was too independent and outspoken for most men to consider her for a wife. Her uncle remarked once that he did not know whether she was an angel or a devil.

When Hester met handsome man-about-town Granville Leveson-Gower, her uncle’s protégé, she fell violently in love for the first time. She made her feelings obvious not just to Granville but to everyone in society. Gossip spread, particularly when his visits to 10 Downing Street necessitated an overnight stay. But Granville never had any intention of marrying her; if anything he was more interested in her connection to Pitt than to her. Her uncle decided to take matters in hand, shipping Granville off to Russia as an ambassador. Granville gave the old excuse that he was in love with someone else and decamped. Distraught by his rejection, Hester tried to commit suicide by swallowing poison. Shattered, she wrote to a friend, “My heart points like a compass to the North.” Hester retreated to Walmer Castle to lick her wounds while rumors flew that she had a miscarriage.

When Pitt finally expired after years of hard drinking he made sure that Hester was taken care of with a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year, a pitiful sum for an aristocratic woman used to living in high style. It was quite a comedown for Hester, after being so close to the corridors of power. Her status had dropped and it was intolerable. She was suddenly confronted with genteel poverty, caught between two worlds, among other things unable to afford a coach and horses, though walking in London without a maid was something only prostitutes did. “A poor gentlewoman is the worst thing in the world,” she declared.

After her brother’s death in Spain fighting Napoleon, Hester decided to leave England to travel. Her brother James was due to rejoin his regiment in Cadiz; Hester planned to accompany him and then continue on to Sicily and beyond. She hired a young physician, Charles Meryon, as a medical companion. Wtih her maid, Meryon, and her brother James, Hester used her former position to demand transport from the Royal Navy to Gibraltar. She left England in 1810, not knowing then that she would never see her homeland again. As she drew further away from England, the years of grief dropped away, she looked younger, and her old vitality returned. She cut her hair short, which suited her. In Gibraltar, Hester was feted by polite society. At a dinner party, she met Michael Bruce, who was twelve years younger than her. He was highly educated and charming, with a rich father who’d made his fortune in India. Meryon, who disliked him, conceded that “he was handsome enough to move any lady’s head.”

They became lovers and travel companions, flouting convention. But Hester wasn’t stupid; she knew that one day it would have to end. His father had plans for Michael to have a political career. Not caring a fig about her own reputation but worried about his, she wrote his father a letter stating her intentions toward his son. “At this very moment, while loving him to distraction, I look forward to the period when I must resign him to some thrice happy woman really worthy of him.” It wasn’t long before news of their affair reached England, and Hester’s brother James was shocked, challenging Michael to a duel.

They traveled on to Greece and Turkey; from Constantinople they planned to head to Cairo in Egypt. She had no purposes for her travels, although at one point she came up with the harebrained scheme of getting permission to travel to France, where she imagined she would ingratiate herself with Napoleon and study his character in order to report back to the English a way that they could defeat him. Fortunately the French ambassador thought better of issuing her a passport, thereby putting the kibosh on what could have turned out to be an international incident.

While shipwrecked on Rhodes, Hester’s party lost all their clothes and had to wear Turkish costumes. Lady Hester found them so comfortable and convenient that she adopted the outfit for the rest of her life. As she traveled in style throughout the Middle East, spending lavishly, rumors spread in the region that she was an English princess. While no one knew who she was, everyone sensed that she must be someone of great importance and must be treated as such. She was received in state by the pasha, Mehmet Ali, in Cairo. She traveled to Jerusalem and Acre and other, lesser-known cities.

When she reached Damascus, Lady Hester refused to wear the veil or change out of her men’s clothes to enter the city, despite the warnings she received that it was an anti-Christian community. Instead she rode in unveiled at midday. The people of Damascus didn’t know what hit them, but their amazement turned to enthusiasm and she was hailed as a queen. In 1813, she decided to travel to Palmyra, site of Queen Zenobia’s ancient kingdom, despite the route going through a desert filled with potentially dangerous Bedouins. Only three Englishmen had attempted the trip before, and all had failed. Dressing as a Bedouin, Hester took with her a caravan of twenty-two camels to carry all her baggage. The local Bedouins were so impressed by her courage that they came to see her. When she arrived in Palmyra, she was crowned in celebration. From then on, she became known as “Queen Hester.”

That was the high point of Hester’s life. When her lover, Michael Bruce, learning of his father’s illness, planned to return to England, he proposed marriage. Hester refused. She had made a promise to his father and she intended to keep it. There was nothing for her back home. In the Middle East she was considered somebody. Although she had high hopes that she and Michael would have a long, loving correspondence as friends, it was not to be. He wrote her only three times over an eighteen-month period after his return. His offer to send her a thousand pounds a year was also another empty promise. Hester was left to live on her pension from the government, which should have gone far in the Middle East but not for a woman who was used to living and traveling in high style.

Part of the problem was that Hester opened her doors to any British traveler who came her way, entertaining them lavishly. She also gave sanctuary to numerous refugees during episodes of civil war in Lebanon. She had no intentions of downsizing just because she had no money. In 1815, Hester decided to mount an expedition to search for buried treasure in the city of Ascalon after discovering clues in an ancient parchment. After receiving permission from the sultan, she requested funds from the British government but was denied. The expedition’s only find was a large statue, which Hester destroyed for fear of being accused of smuggling antiquities; this act earned her enmity from generations of archeologists appalled that she would destroy an artifact. The cost of the expedition increased her already burdensome financial problems.

Her faithful maid died in 1828, and Charles Meryon left her finally to return to England in 1831, where he married and started a family of his own. But he returned twice to see her, worried about her health and safety. She’d moved to Djoun, a remote abandoned monastery in the Lebanese mountains. Ruling her household of thirty slaves and servants with a mixture of laxity and an iron fist, she turned more and more to Eastern mysticism and medicine. Her eccentricities increased as she began to lose her grip on reality. She began to believe that the Mahdi, the ruler expected by some Muslims to establish a reign of righteousness throughout the world, was about to appear and make her his bride.

Her pension was finally cut off by the government to pay off her debts. She sent a constant stream of letters to Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, and Queen Victoria herself, but her letters were never answered. She eventually became a recluse, and her servants took the opportunity to steal whatever they could get their hands on to sell to pay their wages. Increasingly she would only see visitors after dark, and then would only let them see her hands and face. After her death, the British consul found thirty-five rooms full of junk and scavenging cats.

She was buried in her garden at Djoun, until her tomb was destroyed during a civil war. Reburied in the garden of the British ambassador’s summer residence, she rested there in peace until 2004, when her ashes were scattered over the ruins of her former home. Hester would probably have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for the faithful Meryon, who wrote three volumes of memoirs about his travels with her, giving the world a picture of a woman who chose the excitement of travel and adventure into the unknown, mysterious Middle East instead of the constricted life of a spinster in London’s regimented society.