This is a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope. Not only was she an amazing woman but also she knew everybody there was to know in the Regency worlds of England and Lebanon. She was born into power and privilege, her father being an Earl and her grandfather being Pitt the Elder; after her uncle Pitt the Younger died she was granted a government pension of £1,200 (worth over £120,000 today). But she was also born a woman in a patriarchy where she couldn't even vote (although having lovers was very much less of a problem than it became in the more puritanical Victorian days; Hester had a number). She must have been very intrepid to travel abroad as she did into the Ottoman Empire which, despite its nominal unity, seemed to be composed of endlessly conflicting warlords and bandits. She suffered shipwreck and plague and was regularly exposed to risk (although we should realise that England pre-sanitation wasn't a very healthy place and life, especially for child-bearing women, was frequently cut short; furthermore, Hester didn't exactly travel solo but with guns and a retinue of servants including her own private doctor and she always ensured she had a male companion).
The book is brilliantly paced. Her early life in England fills the first quarter of the book, Egypt the second and Lebanon the third and fourth which are divided almost equally between her political machinations in the third quarter and her decline into religious madness in the fourth.
She went on a treasure hunt after finding a "curious manuscript" (the treasure chest turned out to be empty but she found a wonderful statue ... which she had smashed to pieces so she would leave no trace of her excavations). She was party to a plot to liberate Napoleon from exile in St Helena using a submarine. She described using a bezoar (a 'serpent stone') in an attempt to cure the plague and preparing Mandragora to be used as an aphrodisiac. She visited the city of Palmyra, the desert city of Queen Zenobia, later immortalised as Semiramis. She joined in with mystic rites in some of the sects whose beliefs fused Christianity, Judaism, Islam and more ancient tribal religions. She could have inspired the plot for a whole series of novels.
The only problem with this book was that I kept wanting to find out more about the other characters in the stellar cast list:
- She acted as hostess for the unmarried Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, living with him in 10 Downing Street when he was PM and Walmer Castle when he wasn't.
- Her father was an Earl, notorious for siding with the French revolutionaries. He became an eccentric inventor. Family life must have been difficult and all the kids had to escape when they got older (on one occasion using knotted sheets from their bedroom window), Hester's sister by eloping with the local apothecary.
- Her brother, who became an heir, tried to adopt (perhaps because he fancied him) Kaspar Hauser, the 'wild boy' who may have been the heir to the Duke of Baden; he was granted guardianship; there are suggestions that he might have sought to send the boy abroad into Hester's custody and he was later accused of involvement in Kaspar's assassination./
- Horne Tooke, a radical politician who spent time in the Tower accused of seditious treason
- Richard Brothers, a crazed millennial prophet, who predicted that Hester would ride into Jerusalem as 'Queen of the Jews' in a sort of apocalyptic end-of-days scenario
- Lord Byron, the poet, whom she met (with his Greek boyfriend) in Greece which he was trying to liberate
Among the men who were or might have been her lovers were
- Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular campaign and is nowadays best remembered for a poem about his funeral
- The Earl of Camelford, whose Scarlet Pimpernel type activities included an attempt to assassinate Napoleon
- General Miranda, a South American revolutionary who liberated Venezuela with Bolivar
- Michael Bruce, grandson of an explorer, who, after Hester, went on to smuggle a Bonapartist out of a France ruled by a restored (and vindictive) Bourbon government and spent time in a French jail for this
- John Lewis Burckhardt, the man who rediscovered Petra
- Vincent Boutin, archaologist and probably Napoleonic spy
- Almaz, her Arab gardener
This is a well-written biography about an amazing woman. Why is it out of print?????
April 2023; 394 pages
No comments:
Post a Comment