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Hester Lucy Stanhope

Kent, 1776 - 1839, Dar Jun

BiographyLC name authority n 80056889
LC Heading: Stanhope, Hester, Lady, 1776-1839

Biography;

Stanhope, Lady Hester Lucy (1776–1839), traveller, was born on 12 March 1776 at Chevening, Kent, the eldest daughter of Charles Stanhope, Viscount Mahon (afterwards third Earl Stanhope) (1753–1816), and his first wife, Lady Hester Pitt (1755–1780), who was a daughter of the first earl of Chatham and the favourite sister of William Pitt the younger. When the young Hester was four years old her mother died, and shortly afterwards her father remarried. Hester was a strong-willed child, and she grew up to become a proud, independent, and imperious woman. Having received no offers of marriage she remained at Chevening until 1800, when her grandmother offered her a home. In 1803 she gratefully accepted her uncle William Pitt's invitation to stay with him at Walmer Castle, where he lived while out of office, and she moved with him to London when he again became prime minister. This was the happiest period of her life, when she was at the very centre of things. She was devoted to Pitt and helped him in every way possible, particularly by acting as his hostess and lady of the house. She was attractive and high-spirited, and she cheered Pitt in his last few years, but her high-handed manner and sharp tongue aroused resentment in some of Pitt's colleagues and guests.

This brief brilliant period ended with Pitt's death in 1806. As Pitt had wished, parliament voted Lady Hester a pension, but only of £1200 a year. For the next few years she led an aimless and unhappy life; she was now a person of little importance and she found this intolerable. She became irritable and quarrelled with friends and relations. In 1809 she suffered a double tragedy when both General Sir John Moore (to whom she perhaps considered herself engaged) and her half-brother Charles were killed at the battle of Corunna. Feeling that she must get away from England she took ship first to Gibraltar and then to Malta, where in May 1810 she met Michael Bruce (b. 1787), the son of a wealthy businessman, who was travelling for pleasure. A passionate love affair followed, and they started living together.

After a couple of months in Malta, a year in and about Constantinople, and a shipwreck off Rhodes, Hester and Michael reached Cairo, where Mehmet Ali Pasha received them with honours and pageantry. A tour in the Holy Land and Lebanon followed. No one really knew quite who Lady Hester was (was she perhaps the daughter of the king of England?) but everyone knew that she was a great personage and must be treated as such. She travelled in style, made lavish gifts to pashas and others in authority, and arrogated to herself the right to do very much as she pleased. She was warned that when she reached ‘fanatical’ Damascus she must wear a veil and conform to convention in other ways, but this she refused to do. Unveiled, tall, and impressive in her Turkish male clothes she entered the city on horseback and made a great sensation. She queened it in Damascus for three months while she began to plan her next and most adventurous journey, to Palmyra. She was not, in fact, much interested in the ruins of the ancient city, but the prospect of being the first European woman ever to reach it no doubt excited her, and she took great pride and pleasure in achieving the journey in the (well-paid) company of Bedouin and their sheikhs rather than that of officials and soldiers. On 17 March 1813 she rode triumphantly into Palmyra at the head of a cavalcade of Bedouin. They and the inhabitants of the village put on a show for her and, as she liked to believe, she was crowned Queen of the Desert under the triumphal arch. This was one of the great moments of her life, described in enthusiastic letters and never forgotten.

Hester now decided that the time had come for Michael to return to England as his father wished; she would stay in Syria. Michael duly left on 7 October 1813 to travel overland to Constantinople and thence to Europe. They never met again.

Before leaving England in 1810 Hester had engaged a young doctor, Charles Meryon, as her physician. He had accompanied her and Michael in their travels and it was well that he was still with her, for soon after Michael left she fell ill and almost died. It was thought probable that she had caught the plague which was then rife in the country. Early in 1814 she was well enough to be moved and was taken to the place which was to be her home for some years, the former convent of Mar Elias on the first slopes of the mountains behind Sidon.

In 1815 Lady Hester persuaded the Ottoman authorities to join her in a fruitless search for buried treasure and in 1816 to mount a pitiless punitive expedition against a group of villages to avenge the death of a friend of hers who had been murdered somewhere in that area. Many of the expenses of these activities fell to her, and she found herself seriously short of money. The costs of her extravagant progress through the Near East had largely been met by the flow of funds from Michael Bruce's father, but this had now ceased and she was left with little but her pension. She had to borrow, and gradually sank deeper into debt. She worried about her debts and yet could not refrain from spending money, although now she spent it in different, less ostentatious, ways. After living some years at Mar Elias she moved to Dar Jun, a more remote spot higher in the hills, where she repaired an old building, added others, laid out gardens, and surrounded the whole with a wall. Here she lived with an unruly household of some thirty servants and slaves for the rest of her life. She no longer travelled, indeed seldom left the house, and she spent much of her time musing about the occult sciences, with which she gradually became obsessed.

Lady Hester also took an active interest in the events going on around her. During successive episodes of civil strife in Lebanon in the 1820s and 1830s, and particularly during the siege of Acre by Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in 1831–2, she gave sanctuary to numerous refugees, among them deserters and others on whom Ibrahim and Amir Bashir of Lebanon wanted to lay hands. Despite threats and persecution she refused to give them up, put guards on her gates, and gloried in defying the ‘bloody tyrant’ Bashir and his master Ibrahim.

Lady Hester's health deteriorated as she grew older. She suffered not only from serious physical ailments but also from nervous instability; bouts of temper and near hysteria were succeeded by exhaustion and depression. She broke off almost all contact with her family and yet blamed them for neglecting her. Whereas in the past she had written innumerable letters—often several thousand words in length—to friends and relations she now wrote very few. She brooded over the past, compared her present ‘misery’ to her great days with Pitt, and frequently and vehemently declared that she would never return to England, for which she had conceived a violent aversion. In her later years she lived in near squalor in one or two rooms and never went beyond the outer wall. Her chief solace was talking for hours on end, almost always at night, to Meryon or to the occasional visitor from Europe. Even when she was ill and tired she could summon up enough strength and liveliness of manner to entertain the few visitors she thought worth receiving. Those so favoured were often obliged to sit with her until the small hours, listening to her reminiscences and to speculations and pronouncements about religion, astrology, her own mystic powers, and the prophecies in which she believed or half-believed.

Meanwhile Lady Hester's debts continued to mount, and one of her chief creditors asked Mehmet Ali Pasha to help him recover what was owed. Mehmet Ali took the matter up with the British consul-general, who referred it to London. Eventually the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, decided that if no other solution could be found Lady Hester's pension must be stopped for payment of the debt. She was informed of this by a letter dated 10 January 1838. She reacted with a last great burst of letter writing—indignant and defiant letters went to all concerned or who might be concerned, including Queen Victoria. In August, although she was weak and ill, she sent Meryon home to arrange for publication of these letters in newspapers, which he did, to no good effect. She dismissed most of her servants, all but closed up the gate in her wall, and took to her bed. She died on 23 June 1839 at Dar Jun, and was buried there, probably the next day.

Norman N. Lewis
Sources Duchess of Cleveland, The life and letters of Lady Hester Stanhope (1914) · [C. L. Meryon], Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope as related by herself in conversations with her physician: comprising her opinions and anecdotes of some of the most remarkable persons of her time, 3 vols. (1845) · [C. L. Meryon], The travels of the Lady Hester Stanhope forming the completion of her memoirs, as narrated by her physician, 3 vols. (1846) · I. Bruce, The nun of Lebanon: the love affair of Lady Hester Stanhope and Michael Bruce (1951) · Bruce family papers, Bodl. Oxf., MSS Eng. c. 5751–5759 · H. Stanhope, letters to H. Oakes, V&A NAL, XVI F48E · letters from Lady Hester Stanhope to General Richard Grenville, BL, Add. MS 42057 · J. Haslip, Lady Hester Stanhope (1934) · A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East (1844) · Syria and Egypt under the last five sultans of Turkey: being experiences ... of Mr Consul-General Barker, ed. E. B. B. Barker, 2 vols. (1876) · H. Stanhope, letters to Dr Meryon and others, CKS, Stanhope papers, U1590, 56/1/1–56/1/6 and C247A · corresp. of Dr C. L. Meryon, Wellcome L., Western manuscripts collection, 5687–5689 · N. N. Lewis, ‘The anger of Lady Hester Stanhope: some letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, John Lewis Burckhardt and William John Bankes’, Travellers in the Levant: voyagers and visionaries, ed. S. Searight and M. Wagstaff (2001)
Archives BL OIOC, letters containing advice for females undertaking desert travel, MS Eur. C. 740 · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and papers, MSS Eng. C. 5751–5759 · Bodl. Oxf., letters · CKS, corresp. and papers :: BL, letters to Richard Grenville, Add. MS 42057 · BM, letters to Sir Joseph Banks, DTC 19–20 · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Sir William Napier; letters · CKS, letters to C. L. Meryon and others, U1590, 56/1/1–56/1/6 and CA 247A · Cumbria AS, Carlisle, corresp. with Lord Lonsdale · NA Scot., corresp. with Lord Haddington · NRA, priv. coll., letters to William Dacres Adams · Sandon Hall, Staffordshire, Harrowby Manuscript Trust, corresp. with Lord Bute and Lady Bute · TNA: PRO, corresp. with Stratford Canning, FO 352 · V&A NAL, Forster collection, letters to Sir H. Oakes, XVI F48E
Likenesses R. J. Hamerton, lithograph, BM, NPG [see illus.]
Wealth at death see report of Consul Moore to Lord Stanhope, 1839, Duchess of Cleveland, Life and letters, 427–9
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Norman N. Lewis, ‘Stanhope, Lady Hester Lucy (1776–1839)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/26247, accessed 20 Oct 2015]

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Last Updated8/7/24

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