ASTONISHING PEOPLE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXIX, Issue 13239, 15 January 1941, Page 2

ASTONISHING PEOPLE

LADY HESTER STANHOPE Let us look for a moment at one of the strangest ladies who ever entered English society. She was a granddaughter of William Pitt, the great Earl of Chatham; and was a brilliant beauty. Her father, the third Earl of Stanhope, had little time for domestic affairs, and her mother had less.

Hester was early distinguished by invincible cheerfulness and force of character. After the death of her uncle and of her brother and his friend, Sir John Moore, for whom she had had much affection, she retired to Wales. But, restless as ever, she departed for the Levant in 1810, and never saw England again. Taking with her a small suite which gradually grew in numbers as she progressed eastwards, she set sail in the Jason frigate. After suffering shipwreck off Rhodes, she made a stately pilgrimage to Jerusalem, traversed the desert, and presided over a vast Bedouin encampment amid the ruins of Palmyra. Settling doAvn among the half-sav-age tribes on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, she there built a group of houses surrounded by a garden and an outer wall, for all the world like a medieval fortress. It was from this stronghold that she exercised for many years a despotic power over the people, and after the battle of Navarino Europeans fled to her from all sides for protection. Her fearlessness and her remarkable insight into character, combined with her openhanded charity, caused her to be regarded as a kind of prophetess, and if she did not share the idea, she certainly encouraged it. As time went on she adopted Eastern clothes and customs. A believer in the transmigration of souls and in judicial astrology which she practised upon the least provocation, she gradually accumulated many debts by her mode of living and generosity. In August 183 8 she shut herself up in her castle with five retainers, walled up the gate, and refused to see any visitors. - Untamed by the miseries of her later years, she died as she had lived, in splendid isolation, in June, 1839, with no European near her.