Education is all paint - it does not alter the nature of the wood that lies under it, it only improves its appearance a little. Why I dislike education so much is, that it makes all people alike, until you have examined into them; and it sometimes is so long before you get to see under the varnish!
- Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839)
Before there was Gertrude Bell or any other modern female explorer there was Hester Stanhope. Three volumes of travels and three of memoirs published after her death record her extraordinary journeys and unconventional views.
Hester was headstrong and brilliant, and terrified people with her sharp tongue. Lord Byron met her in Greece and complained she had “a great disregard of received notion in her conversation as well as conduct”. Which is pretty rich, coming from Byron. Despite being a woman and a Christian, Hester defied tradition by riding into Damascus unveiled. “The crowds who watched must have been shocked into inaction” is the verdict of one biographer.
She was the eldest child of the 3rd Earl of Stanhope, whose wife was sister to William Pitt the Younger, Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister at 24 years old, and in 1800 went to live with her grandmother, the Countess of Chatham, widow of the ex-statesman and prime minister, William Pitt the elder. So Lady Hester could be counted to have lived in the households of the highest political circles. Her grandmother, the countess, Hester Pitt, who our Lady Hester was obviously named after died in 1803 at the age of 82. Our Hester was then 27 and still unmarried. She was on the shelf in our regency terminology.
Headstrong, she fell out with her father, but later went to live with her uncle, William Pitt the Younger. At this time, Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister and also unmarried. (Nothing scandalous here I believe though Lady Hester was accounted a great beauty) The Prime Minister needed a hostess and his niece had just finished doing duty to his mother. She did this task with great success and when Pitt was out of office, she served as his private secretary. In effect she was the unofficial First Lady, running his household and hosting Number 10’s dinner parties.
Upon his death the government awarded her £1200 a year. She first lived in Montagu Square in London, then moved to Wales but left England for the second act of her life in 1810. Being the grand daughter of a man who made his fortune after discovering an enormous diamond in India, she was all set up for a life of comfort. Instead, shaken by a failed love affair, she left England when she was in her 30s, never to return.
It is claimed that when she and her party (which included a man who became her lover) arrived in Athens, Lord Byron dived into the sea to greet her. En route to Cairo her ship encountered a storm and was shipwrecked on Rhodes. All possessions gone, the party had to borrow Turkish clothes. Here Lady Hester wore male garb. And this was how she met the Pasha. For the next two years she visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese, Athens, Constantinople, Rhodes, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
Her entourage to visit Palmyra was so large (22 camels just for her luggage) she was greeted as Queen Hester.
In 1815, she was now a fixture of the middle east. A document came into her possession that said a great treasure was hidden in the ruins of the mosque in Ashkelon. She journeyed there, and the governor of Jaffa was ordered to accompany her. They did not find the three million gold coins she thought she would find. But they did find a seven foot headless marble statue. She ordered it to be smashed into a thousand pieces and thrown into the sea. Aside from the horrific destruction, this was considered the first modern archealogical excavation of the Holy Lands.
One should note that Lady Hester began her travels and continued them while the Napoleonic Wars were taking place.
Now the last act of her life was her settling permanently in the Middle East. She settled in Sidon, in now Lebanon. These last years she provided sanctuary to the Druze and the local emir, Bashir Shihab II who at first greeted her with courtesy turned against her. However she had such power that she had near absolute authority over the surrounding districts. Truly, ‘Queen Hester.’
Ibrahim Pasha had to consult with her when he was about to invade Syria in 1832.
This did change. She accumulated debt, and when the money ran out, she became a recluse. Her servants began to take off with her possessions when she could not pay them any longer. She would not receive visitors in the end until it was dark, and then they would only see her hands and face.
Byron described Lady Hester as “that dangerous thing, a female wit”. To that she was seen as headstrong. Though too tall to be conventionally beautiful in her era – she measured nearly six feet – Hester was a striking and charismatic presence. In old age, she preserved her mystique by receiving visitors in a darkened room and making them drink a weird black concoction before they saw her. She also shaved her head for convenience, and wore a turban.
Hester spent the last seven years of her incredible life in her draughty fortress outside a Lebanese village, heavily in debt and going increasingly out of her mind. When asked if she wouldn’t prefer to return home and live out her days in relative comfort, she was contemptuous, insisting that she had no intention of going back to “knit or sew like an Englishwoman”. She died in her sleep in 1839, aged 63.
