The Outstanding Queen of the Desert: Lady Hester Stanhope

She gave up a privileged socialite lifestyle to forge an empire in the Middle East. She defied all conventions. Ambitious, empathetic, kooky, opinionated and uncompromising, you could not ignore her. She was the headstrong beauty turned bohemian adventurer who left England for a life of adventure and sex in paradise. She was never one for a traditional existence. No woman, or anyone for that matter, was better prepared for such a journey than Lady Hester Stanhope.

Lady Hester Stanhope was born into aristocracy in 1776 and descended from a long line of politicians, distinguished military leaders, and talented scientists. Her father, Charles Stanhope, 3^rd Earl Stanhope, was a prominent Whig and an accomplished mathematician and inventor. He invented the first iron printing press, don’t you know.

She was well-known as the niece of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. Lady Hester’s upbringing as an aristocratic woman made her valuable to Pitt, who was a bit awkward around people. Lady Hester went to live with him. In exchange, she served as a hostess in his house. She entertained his guests and charmed everyone around her. She loved the company of men, earning the nickname ‘Amazon’. She was almost six feet tall, after all.

Her success in maintaining Pitt’s ties led to her appointment to private secretary. She remained with him for over two years.

She appeared content as a successful society woman. But in private, she struggled. Her romantic life was a complete chaos. She never married, while her intense and passionate romances with officers and politicians usually ended in heartbreak. These and other personal misfortunes drove her to make a drastic choice.

To leave England. For good. And she chose the most unlikely destination possible.

Lady Hester’s influence as the Prime Minister’s hostess faded away after he died in 1806. He arranged for Parliament to provide her with an annual pension, as she wasn’t married and had no other source of income. But now she was cut off from the company that had once enthralled her, as well as stripped of her power and influence.

A Life on the Whim of the Wind

Perhaps Lady Hester thought her annual pension of £1,200 wasn’t quite enough to live the life she wanted. We don’t know. To put that in comparison, a horse in those days cost you about £100 a year. So it was quite a lot.

A lot happened to Lady Hester in a short space of time. In 1807, she formed a friendship with General Sir John Moore, a prominent soldier in the British Army. But Moore in January 1809 at the Battle of Corunna in Spain, alongside Lady Hester’s half-brother, Charles.

Their deaths were a devastating blow for Lady Hester. She kept Moore’s blood-stained glove, which she had brought back from Corunna, for the rest of her life. Heartbroken by these deaths, she sailed off for Gibraltar with a small entourage.

Lady Hester’s position in society gave her the funds to travel to far-flung regions, including Constantinople, Egypt, Greece, and the Levant. She was the first English woman to enter the Great Pyramid and the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. In Greece, she met the great poet Lord Byron, who described her as a ‘dangerous thing full of wit and sharpness.’

She was quite the site. She stood at almost six feet tall. She rode her horse astride and swung a sword with lethal accuracy. Although her preferred weapon was the mace. But she was not bad-tempered, uncouth or violent. Men found themselves drawn to her.

Lord Byron, known for his theatrical gestures, greeted Lady Hester’s approach to Piraeus by diving into the sea. She once described herself as gorgeous, so pale that her ‘pearls could not be distinguished from her skin’. But later, she criticises her looks as ‘hideous’. In any case, she drew attention wherever she went.

This should have been difficult in those days in that part of the world, where you had to wear a veil…

The Self-Appointed Ruler of All

When she was shipwrecked on Rhodes, Lady Hester dressed as a male Ottoman. When she arrived in Damascus in a tremendous state, the bemused onlookers were well aware that she was a woman and that something had gone wrong.

But the Syrians greeted her warmly, screaming her accolades on the street. The piastres (the local currency) that Lady Hester distributed were always appreciated.

Gee, I wonder why.

It needn’t matter how Lady Hester ended up shipwrecked on Rhodes. It was Lady Hester, of course she did. Like that time she discovered an antique treasure map in an Italian monastery she shouldn’t have been inside. But she was. And she saw that map. And she thought, ‘Ooh, I’ll take that!’

She used the treasure map to search a spot in Ascalon for riches. Despite this, she was able to establish archaeological concepts that were not widely followed until much later. She was arrogant, shattering an ancient statue to avoid association with the likes of Lord Elgin.

As a result, the region’s virtual, one-woman matriarchy was established. She lived in a derelict convent in Saïde before moving to a fortress high in Djoun. She offered refuge to the area’s exiled Druze, guarded by a company of Albanians. Her control over the neighbouring peoples was a consideration for any marauding warlord.

She was like the ancient Queen of Palmyra, whose descendants gave Lady Hester a crown when she visited them. Lady Hester loved the crown, but she had loftier dreams, including the title of Queen of Jerusalem.

I promise all this actually happened.

The Downfall of the Sorceress of the Middle East

So let’s get this straight. A pansexual British aristocrat left everything behind to travel the world, ending with virtual control over a region of the Middle East. Lord Byron was not wrong about her. She was eccentric.

We know this not only because of what she did but because she branded herself a seer and then a sorceress. No, really.

She eventually had an extended stretch of terrible luck. She incurred significant debt to the Ottomans, prompting the British authorities to intercede. Officials decided to garnish her pension. Angry, she penned a series of letters to officials, including Queen Victoria herself. Unfortunately, these financial problems lasted until her death.

She went from a bright, sophisticated woman to a shell of her former self as a result of despair and early-onset Alzheimer’s. She shaved her head, wore a turban, and became increasingly reclusive. Her servants also betrayed her by stealing from her.

Finally, the money ran out, and she died in poverty, weakened by yellow fever and suffering as, around her, her servants and those whom she owed debts to ransacked her house. They cared little for a woman too sick to move.

Even as she suffered, she regarded her fate as predetermined, etched in the indelible pages of history.

In 1839, penniless, Lady Hester died alone in her now empty home on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. She was 63. She requested to be buried in a tomb because… it’s Lady Hester, of course she did. But it suffered from earthquakes and yet more vandalism.

The Outstanding Queen of the Desert

Despite her tragic death, Lady Hester’s status as Victorian England’s ‘Queen of the Desert’ endures.

Devoid of aristocratic influence and dissatisfied with the constraints of English society, Lady Hester left England behind for a new life of adventure and travel. Eventually ending up in the Middle East. She stayed in Lebanon and rose to prominence in the region, disregarding social standards as she had done in England.

Queen Hester, as she liked to be known, was an adventurer, archaeologist, aristocrat, explorer, humanitarian, traveller, and pioneer of Western travel to isolated parts of the Middle East. They were delighted to see a Westerner. How quickly that changed.

She led the first archaeological excavation in Palestine. She was the first English woman to enter the Great Pyramid. And she was among the first to use a textual source to plan her excavation. We remember her for her memoirs and letters made while on her trips.

She was always headstrong. She wanted to manage her own life as well as the lives of others, believing it was her right to do so. She could be arrogant and unpleasant at times. But she was also benevolent, bold, charismatic, sharp-witted, vibrant and courageous to the point of recklessness.

Above all, she resisted societal norms and the limitations of a woman in Europe, seizing the unexpected opportunity to be her own person and pursue the life she wanted. All in an Eastern society in which women were often barred from such freedoms. This alone distinguishes her as a pioneer and a remarkable person.

Her life was full of adventure and intrigue, of wealth and thousands of lovers, many women. But in the years following her death, her story was forgotten. Perhaps she was too eccentric for the Victorians who twisted her life into a cautionary tale for young women with impulses that went against the grain.

Instead, we should remember her as the fearless woman she was. She was more than an ordinary tourist. She was a woman whose ambitions took her into the heart of a world so few Europeans ever saw.

Lady Hester was a British queen in a foreign land. Her story is the life of someone who bucked the trend. Above all, she was a woman driven by the desire to see and make a difference in the world, her search for spiritual significance in the war-torn Middle East remaining an illuminating and moving parallel for us today.

“I have no reproaches to make of myself but that I went rather too far.”
– Lady Hester Stanhope.

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