Odd this day

Coates
4 min readFeb 12, 2023

--

12 February, or — as it’s also known — 185th anniversary of the day Lady Hester Stanhope wrote to Queen Victoria in high dudgeon to say

Few things are more disgraceful and inimical to Royalty than giving commands without examining all their different bearings

Lady Hester Stanhope — a contemporary illustration, showing her in fur-trimmed robes and a turban on the back of a black horse

Hester was mightily peeved that the government was threatening not to pay her pension unless she paid her debts. She’d been awarded £1,200 a year by George III “in recognition of the services rendered by her family”.

This was a reference to the fact that her uncle was William Pitt the Younger, and she’d been “his hostess and lady of the house” in his Downing Street years. Pitt died in 1806 at just 46 (perhaps because of the vast quantities of port he used to put away), leaving Hester, at 30, at a loose end. She became close to General Sir John Moore, but he died in 1809 at the Battle of Corunna. So she skipped the country.

She met a man called Michael Bruce in Malta and started travelling with him, and — according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — after Constantinople and 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.

Hester essentially seemed to have learned the lesson that if you go about behaving as if you’re allowed to be doing what you’re doing, you’ll be allowed to do it. Told she couldn’t enter Damascus without a veil, she went in without one, and in Turkish male dress. Then she became the first western woman to enter Palmyra,

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 … 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.

It was later that year that things began to go awry financially. Michael left for England. This was Hester’s decision, but he (or at least his father) had been funding the travel, so this was the time to start cutting back on her expenses. This she did not do.

She settled in a not exactly small house on Mount Lebanon, where she

laid out gardens, and … lived with an unruly household of some thirty servants and slaves

Lady Hester’s final home, at Djoumi (now Joun), on Mount Lebanon, in 1837 — image shows mountainous landscape, with a palatial house on a peak in the middle distance, and people in native dress in the foreground
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

She also got involved in local politics, putting up refugees and deserters from local warfare in the 1820s and 30s. Mehmet Ali Pasha, Ottoman ruler of Egypt, and maker of some of this warfare, became less impressed with her than he had been when she first arrived.

By 1834,

Lady Hester’s debts were such that the Egyptian authorities got in touch with the British representative in Cairo, Colonel Campbell, ‘to obtain justice for the creditors’.

The colonel got in touch with London, but

The government, he was told, had ‘no control over Lady Hester Stanhope’ and could therefore not interfere.

The idea that anyone had any control over Hester is an interesting one, but anyway: debts kept mounting, and Egyptian requests to London kept coming, so in 1838, her brother(!) Lord Stanhope

suggested she might pay her debt if she was told the British consul wouldn’t sign the certificate she needed to receive her pension until she had done so

Hester first wrote to Colonel Campbell, to say

I shall give no sort of answer to your letter

although, strictly speaking, this was an answer to his letter. Then it was Queen Victoria’s turn:

Few things are more disgraceful and inimical to Royalty than giving commands without examining all their different bearings (…). I shall not allow the Pension, given by your Royal grandfather, to be stopt by force. I shall resign it for the payment of my debts, and with it the name of an English subject, and the slavery at present annext to it.

Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary, wrote to assure Hester that they were doing everything they could to stop her being forced to appear in an Ottoman courtroom. This also failed to impress her

If your diplomatic despatches are as obscure as the one which now lies before me, it is no wonder that England should cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign relations which she once could boast of (…) I shall go on fighting my battles, campaign after campaign.

She then got The Times to print all her correspondence, but this prompted a missionary to respond saying she’d

flogged 15 years ago my poor Arab servant … the truth ought to be known

Finally, Mehmet Ali got his way. Her pension was diverted, her support, and staff, dwindled, and she died penniless the following year, leaving behind only her reputation as — in the words of Marcel Theroux — an

endlessly remarkable fusion of Lawrence of Arabia and Germaine Greer.

--

--

Coates
Coates

Written by Coates

Purveyor of niche drivel; marker of odd anniversaries

No responses yet