HESTER STANHOPE paid dearly for her satirical talent, although one might also say that she owed both her legend and her reputation to it. The most satisfying period of her life were the years when she lived in and managed the house owned by her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister under George III. Apparently, she proved indispensable, with her arguable beauty, her brilliant, albeit exhausting conversation, and her ability to organise important political supper parties and make them enjoyable. However, her penchant for satire made her so many enemies that when Pitt died in 1806, she found herself surrounded by a great void, though with a full purse: the State gave her a generous life pension, presumably to reward the niece for her extremely loyal uncle’s patriotic efforts.
William Pitt wasn’t the only man, whether related by blood or not, to have been subjugated by Lady Hester. Although, for her time, she was a giant (she was nearly five foot nine tall), her vitality and talent made her irresistible in her young and not-so-young years, to the extent that it allowed her not to get married. She denied that she was beautiful and claimed that she was possessed, rather, of “a homogeneous ugliness”, She was unfortunate in the love of her life, for the famous general, John Moore—upon whom, on the death of her benefactor, her nights and days came to depend—perished in La Coruña during the Peninsular War, or what we Spaniards call the War of Independence.
It was partly this and partly the unbearable loss of power and politicking that drove her to leave England when she was thirty-three, an age which, for a single woman two centuries ago, meant resignation and withdrawal. From that moment on, however, she began to forge the legend of an extremely wealthy woman who travelled incessantly throughout the Middle East with an extravagant and ever-growing entourage—a genuine caravan at certain particularly fruitful periods of her life—with no set goal or aim. Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria saw her pass or stay, dressed in Eastern fashion and as a man, surrounded by servants, secretaries, lady companions, hangers-on, French generals fascinated by her personality, or by Dr Meryon who recorded her escapades, and by her various lovers who were almost always younger and better-looking. Her prestige among the sheikhs and emirs allowed her to travel as far as Palmyra, a place entirely inaccessible to Westerners at the time. She settled down among the Druses in Mount Lebanon and there, by her own means, exercised the kind of influence which, in her own country, she had failed to inherit from her relations.
It is true that in her witty letters—the main record of her adventures, along with the biographical volumes written by the devoted Meryon—Lady Stanhope was not at all modest or, perhaps, reliable. In one letter, she proclaimed: “I am the oracle of the Arabs and the darling of all the troops who seem to think I am a deity because I can ride.” And she rode ceaselessly, travelling non-stop and without any apparent objective, plus she sat astride, a style not normally permitted for women in those lands. Lady Hester, however, was a special case, and, in time, she became in part what she claimed to be, for there is nothing like being convinced of something to persuade other people of it too. In her latter years, she was considered to be a fortune-teller or a soothsayer, and her neutrality was immediately sought in any conflict, the adversaries knowing that if she took sides, she could easily take with her many as yet undecided tribes.
In Djoun she had a kind of labyrinthine fortress built, full of pavilions and rooms intended to shelter the illustrious fugitives who would, sooner or later, come asking for asylum, fleeing from the numerous revolutions which she believed were taking place in Europe. She did, in fact, receive a lot of refugees, but none was particularly illustrious or even European: the place became a protective roof for the disinherited and the persecuted of the region.
Lady Hester Stanhope could be charming, but, more often than not, she was quick-tempered and tyrannical, even when being solicitous: she would oblige her visitors to take strange potions and salts to protect them from disease and fever, and sometimes she handed these doses out seven at a time. She smoked a pipe constantly and, during the final months of her life, when she barely left her rooms, it is said that a permanent cloud of smoke emanated from them and that there was not a single object or item of furniture that had not been singed by sparks and cinders. She did not get on well with other women; she boasted that she could tell the character of a man at a single glance; and her indefatigable talk touched on every subject: astrology, the zodiac, philosophy, politics, morality, religion or literature. She was feared for her mocking burlesques, in particular her imitation of the terrible lisp that afflicted Lord Byron, whom she had met in Athens.
In the final days of her existence, as she lay helpless on her deathbed, she watched as her servants filched everything they could, waiting only for her finally to expire in order to make off with the rest. This was in 1839 when she was sixty-three years old. When her body was found by two Westerners who had come to visit her, they discovered the corpse alone in the fortress: her thirty-seven servants had disappeared and there was nothing left, not even in her bedroom, only the things she was wearing, for no one had dared to touch her. So perhaps she was not lying when she said in another letter: “I am not joking: beneath the triumphal arch of Palmyra, I have been crowned Queen of the Desert.”
Javier Marias
Written Lives
No comments:
Post a Comment