JOUN, Lebanon, 1 July 2004 — She was known as the Queen of the East, cast as both tyrant and heroine, an English adventurer lured by the Orient who ultimately died an eccentric recluse in the remote hills of Lebanon.
Lady Hester Stanhope was a legend in her own lifetime, a 19th century femme fatale whose name conjured images of intrigue, decadence and romance.
Unconfinable in death as in life, after two burials and 165 years her ashes were finally scattered this month on the lonely hillside which she dominated until her death in 1839.
Stanhope was born on March 12, 1776 in the southern English county of Kent. Her uncle was Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, and in 1803 she moved to London, holding court at Downing Street as his social and political hostess.
Known for her stately beauty and lively conversation, she stayed with Pitt until he died in 1806. In 1810, with her personal life crumbling around her, she decided to travel and set sail in search of adventure.
It was not long in coming. In Athens, Lord Byron swam out to greet her; she was shipwrecked off Rhodes. She borrowed Turkish costume and dressed as a man.
In Cairo, she met the Pasha, in Damascus she refused to wear the veil, in Jerusalem the doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were closed and reopened in her honor.
She traveled to Syria, visited Palmyra dressed as a Bedouin and was crowned Queen of the Desert. She fell ill in an outbreak of plague, traveled to Acre and Nazareth.
In 1814, tired of wandering, she settled in a ruined monastery in south Lebanon, moving three years later to an even more remote property where she stayed until she died.
Standing at the site on the anniversary of her death on June 23, beside olive trees and the scattered archways of what was once a magnificent home, three dozen guests and journalists waited for her ashes to be scattered.
“Do you want me to put her down somewhere?” asked a woman from the British Embassy holding the turquoise urn holding her remains.
Stanhope was a woman who could not be put down. In Lebanon, defying conventions with her shaved head and male dress, she played politics, forming her own militia and wielding great power from her hilltop.
She gave sanctuary to hundreds of refugees from Druze inter-clan fighting, controlled local chiefs and ruled over some 30 servants with a bad temper and an iron fist.
Author Lorna Gibb spent four years writing a book about Stanhope and said she was attracted by her strength and defiance.
“The image of her is of an aged eccentric and I thought there must be more to her than that,” she said. “She was eccentric, no doubt, but she was always important. Here in Lebanon she became so many things. She was the tyrant who was terrible to work for, but also the heroine who saved Druze.
“She was passionate, eloquent, intense, exuberant, incredibly powerful, alive. Someone you can’t ignore.”
Stanhope’s beliefs and behavior fueled the folklore. She claimed to have heard omens from fortune tellers that her destiny was to become the bride of a new Messiah.
She took younger lovers, spent money decadently, granted audiences to the French poet Lamartine and a Bavarian prince.
“A stream of visitors besieged her at Joun, many motivated by an unsympathetic curiosity and a desire to gather colorful anecdotes for their own writings or dinner conversations,” James Watt, the British ambassador to Lebanon told a dinner to mark the scattering of Stanhope’s ashes.
“Her eccentricities, her faded beauty, the titillating suggestions of a decadent oriental lifestyle — so dear to the heated imaginations of repressed Europeans — provided rich material.”
Today, trees sprout from between the ruins of the sprawling property she leased from a nearby convent. “We are pretty proud of what she achieved, that she’s still admired,” he told Reuters after the ceremony. “More than anything else she inspired others, motivated travelers, opened doors,” said distant relative William Stanhope
