Lady Hester Stanhope

Hester Lucy Stanhope ( born March 12, 1776 in Kent, † June 23, 1839 ) was an adventuress. Fabled and eccentric she ruled over a local "empire" in the Druze mountains of Lebanon.

Hester Stanhope was the daughter of the liberal politician and inventor Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope. Her grandfather was the Earl of Chatham, her uncle, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, in which she was housekeeper later. From his father, it is said, had met her sharp intellect and her taste for eccentricity, in Downing Street, she learned power and intrigue.

When they lost their prominent position in 1806 after the untimely death of Pitt, she liked all this not to miss, and moved as one of the adventurers of the early modern period to the East. In Lebanon, where from 1810 in an abandoned mountain monastery until her death, so for nearly three decades, ruled and lived, it was Europe's " Queen of the Desert " and "Mystery Lady of the Orient ".

She was the first Western woman who walked into Palmyra and was celebrated by the Bedouin tribes as new Zenobia. On their fortified headquarters in Joun near Sidon, today " Deir it Sitt " ( Fountain of the mistress ) are called the remains, they schemed against Emir Bashir II, the Sublime Porte in Constantinople Opel, the Governor of Tripoli Mustafa Agha Babar, and a variety of Druze factions.

Gradually they built the old monastery of Joun to, fastened it again, planted an exotic garden and the rarest trees. The water it had to be dragged up hour's walk the mountain. Surrounded by pseudoorientalischem pageantry and 24 cats from which they each then assigned a two zodiac signs that she received from time to time European Globetrotter, including Alphonse de Lamartine and Hermann von Pueckler. A Napoleonic officer was her favorite. In her stall thoroughbred horses, including a white foal on which they thought einzureiten in Jerusalem stood. Robber chieftains entered at night and through the escape door to her property with secret messages, whole mountain tribes sought protection behind their walls. Once set fire to a village, while dozens of residents should be killed. The English company press pursued and printed their escapades. But it was not only increasingly aloof, but also sick and weak. In addition, she had hopelessly over-indebted. Gradually, they sold their inventory and had to lay off their staff. She died lonely. The British Consul, who came hergereist upon the message of Beirut found, leave the place and Lady Hester with nothing but her jewelry on the body. He had them buried nearby under mulberry - figs.

Bibliography

• Your personal physician Charles Meryon 1845, wrote her " memoirs " ( Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, London, H.Colburn 1845).
• Neapolitan describes in his writings a visit to the Deir it Sitt.
• In André Maurois ' Byron biography it appears.
• Colin Thubron writes of her in a Lebanon Guide.