Revolted Woman: Past, present, and to come

by Charles G. Harper

‘And what ails thee, then, or troubles thee?’ asks the good son. ‘Hast thou not men and women and attendants sufficient?’

‘Yea,’ quoth she, ‘and more than enough. I say to one, “Go,” and he runs; to another, “Come hither, fellow,” and the varlet falls down on his knee; and, in short, all things go on so abominably smooth that my heart is bursting for something to spite me, and pick a quarrel withal.’ And with that she fell a-weeping.

Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Charles, third Earl Stanhope, granddaughter of the great Earl of Chatham, and niece of William Pitt, was a woman of unbounded vanity, arrogance, and ill-temper. A technical termagant she could not be, for she was never married, and that was perhaps a better fate which met General Sir John Moore at Corunna than would have been his had he survived his disastrous retreat, and returned to England. For Hester Stanhope was his fiancée; and if he had married her, she could not have failed of keeping him in a life-long subjection.

She was undoubtedly a clever woman, witty, and with some learning; but all her doings were eccentric and fantastical beyond measure, and tinctured strongly with hereditary madness. For her father was something more than strange in his doings. He, too, had gifts, but they were overlaid by a singular species of mental alienation. He was a furious Republican, and it is related of him that, in accordance with those principles, he caused his armorial bearings to be obliterated from his plate, his carriages, and from everything he possessed. He halted only before the destruction of the iron gates of his house at Chevening: having removed even the magnificent tapestry given to his ancestor, the great Stanhope, by the King of Spain, for the reason that it was (to quote himself) ‘damned aristocratical.’ He sold all his Spanish plate, weighing six hundredweight, for the same whim, and was used to sleep at once with twelve blankets over him and his bedroom window wide open.

Lady Hester
Stanhope.

Two of a kind rarely agree together, and so it is not surprising to find that Lady Hester Stanhope felt her father’s society insupportable. She left home and went to reside with her grandmother, the dowager Lady Chatham, in Somersetshire; afterwards going to keep house for her uncle, William Pitt, in his retirement at Walmer. A year later, he became again Prime Minister, and she, acting as one of his assistant private secretaries, moved for a time in the centre of political and social turmoil. But when Pitt died, broken-hearted at the news of Napoleon’s victory of Austerlitz, his niece suddenly lost the prestige that had given her a factitious importance, and was fain to retire to the obscurity of Montagu Square, where for a time she kept house for her two half-brothers who both held commissions in the army. War breaking out, her occupation was gone, and, after a short retirement to Builth, she set out upon some extraordinary escapades in travelling which finally landed her in Syria, where she lived until 1839 in a rambling house—half monastery, half palace—on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, intriguing with or against the Porte, and the petty Sheiks and Emirs of the surrounding country. She was in receipt of a Government pension of 1200l. a year for a very long period, and had considerable wealth besides, until her reckless extravagance dissipated all and brought her not only to poverty, but in debt to the amount of 40,000l. She kept up a considerable household in her seclusion upon Mount Lebanon, and retained a physician all to herself. Certainly she never paid him anything, but he seems to have taken it out in a kind of posthumous vilification, acting as the Boswell to her Johnson, and publishing, some years after her death, three volumes of memoirs, correspondence, and conversations. He was a poor, invertebrate sort of a creature, this physician, who was content to stay beside a patient—or rather an employer—who not only paid him nothing, but consistently refused to follow his advice, and medicined herself with nostrums. It was sufficient for him to sit by her, to listen to her harangues—she made nothing of talking incessantly for twelve hours at one sitting—and to endure the plentiful abuse of doctors in general, and himself in particular, which was the staple of her conversation: to have been at length sent away with the curt intimation that he ‘had better take himself off,’ seems to have aroused no resentment in this much-enduring man. Certainly, he mentions that he was, personally and professionally, subjected constantly to stinging insults, and that he suffered from her tyranny; but it would not appear that he ever grew restive under these repeated indignities.

Lady Hester was, indeed, no mealy-mouthed blue-stocking. She had a rasping tongue, used on occasion language rather more free than welcome, and had the voice of a drill-sergeant. Added to these qualifications, she possessed biceps of unusual development, and used her muscles with effect on the miserable men and women Arabs over whom she ruled with the rigour of a Draco or a military martinet. She rather prided herself on the straight and forcible blows she could deliver, and lost no opportunity of demonstrating her prowess upon her trembling slaves. Her ‘physician’ remarks that ‘from her manner towards people it would have seemed that she was the only person in creation privileged to abuse and to command; others had nothing else to do but to obey and not to think. She was haughty and overbearing, impatient of control, born to rule, and more at her ease when she had a hundred persons to govern than when she had only ten.... Never was any one so fond of wielding weapons, and of boasting of her capability of using them upon a fit occasion, as she was.’ She kept a kind of armoury in her bedroom, and slept with a steel mace beside her, a battle-axe and an assortment of daggers, poniards, and other murderous cutlery of that description lying within easy reach; and, if she did not actually use them upon the cowering wretches with whom she was surrounded, was probably owing rather to their care in not giving offence to this terrible she-devil than to any forbearance on her part. She stunned her entourage by her unusual combination of masculine and feminine powers of offence and defence. She could storm and rage, could nag and scold with the most proficient virago, and fists or mace were ready when those more womanlike resources were exhausted.

She had the most excruciatingly ridiculous pride of birth and rank, and was vain of her personal appearance long after any such beauty as she ever possessed had fled. That beauty could only have been of complexion; for if her resemblance to her uncle, William Pitt, upon which she always insisted, was more than a fancy, her features must have been mean and insignificant. Pitt was the object of her whole-souled admiration, and the Pitt family—she was a Pitt on her mother’s side—she apparently considered to be above all the ordinary rules and restrictions of honour and probity which bind, or are supposed to bind, meaner mortals. Her physician tells us that she had on an occasion asked him if such an one ought not to act in a certain way. ‘Undoubtedly,’ said he; ‘a person of principle would not act otherwise.’ ‘Principle!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you mean by principle? I am a Pitt!’ Nothing was impossible after this.

But it seems likely that this, like most of her sayings and doings, was merely a pose, meant to attract attention and make her notorious. It was doubtless to the same end that she professed to dabble in magic and astrology, and that she affected a belief in the proximate coming of the Messiah. Awaiting His arrival, she kept two Arabian mares constantly saddled which had never been ridden, and these mares had each a special attendant whose business was to keep everything ready for the celestial visitor, who should ride thence in triumph to Jerusalem with Lady Hester Stanhope as a kind of lady-guide!