Soon after the doctor's arrival, Lady Hester had dictated a letter to Sir Francis Burdett, in whom she placed great confidence, informing him of the property that she believed was being withheld from her, and requesting him to make inquiries into the matter. When not engaged in correspondence, discussing her debts, and scolding her servants, she was pouring out floods of conversation, chiefly reminiscences of her youth and diatribes against the men and manners of the present day, into the ears of the long-suffering doctor. 'From her manner towards other people,' he observes, 'it would have seemed that she was the only person in creation privileged to abuse and to command; others had nothing to do but to obey. She was haughty and overbearing, born to rule, impatient of control, and more at her ease when she had a hundred persons to govern than when she had only ten. Had she been a man and a soldier, she would have been what the French call a beau sabreur, for never was any one so fond of wielding weapons, and boasting of her capacity for using them, as she was. In her bedroom she always had a mace, which was spiked round the head, a steel battle-axe, and a dagger, but her favourite weapon was the mace.' Absurd as it may sound, it was probably her military vanity that led her to belittle the Duke of Wellington, of whose reputation she seems to have felt some personal jealousy. Yet she bears testimony to the esteem in which 'Arthur Wellesley' was held by William Pitt.
'I recollect, one day,' she told the doctor, 'Mr. Pitt came into the drawing-room to me, and said, "Oh, how I have been bored by Sir Sydney Smith coming with his box full of papers, and keeping me for a couple of hours, when I had so much to do." I observed to him that heroes were generally vain, and that Lord Nelson was so. "So he is," replied Mr. Pitt, "but not like Sir Sydney. And how different is Arthur Wellesley, who has just quitted me! He has given me such clear details upon affairs in India; and he talked of them, too, as if he had been a surgeon of a regiment, and had nothing to do with them; so that I know not which to admire most, his modesty or his talents, and yet the fate of India depends upon them." Then, doctor, when I recollect the letter he wrote to Edward Bouverie, in which he said he could not come down to a ball because his only corbeau coat was so bad he was ashamed to appear in it, I reflect what a rise he has had in the world. He was at first nothing but what hundreds of others are in a country town--he danced hard and drank hard. His star has done everything for him, for he is not a great general. He is no tactician, nor has he any of those great qualities that make a Caesar, a Pompey, or even a Bonaparte. As for the battle of Waterloo, both French and English have told me that it was a lucky battle for him, but nothing more. I don't think he acted well at Paris, nor did the soldiers like him.'
About the end of October Lady Hester took to her bed, and did not leave it till the following March. She had suffered from pulmonary catarrh for several years, which disappeared in the summer, but returned every winter with increased violence. Her practice of frequent bleeding had brought on a state of complete emaciation, and left very little blood in her body. If she had lived like other people, and trusted to the balmy air of Syria, Dr. Meryon was of opinion that nothing serious need have been apprehended from her illness. But she seldom breathed the outer air, and took no exercise except an occasional turn in the garden. She was always complaining that she could get nothing to eat; yet, in spite of her profession (to Kinglake) that she lived entirely on milk, we are told that her diet consisted of forcemeat balls, meat-pies, and other heavy viands, and that she seldom remained half an hour without taking nourishment of some kind. 'I never knew a human being who took nourishment so frequently,' writes Dr. Meryon, 'and may not this in some measure account for her frequent ill-humour?'
During her illness the doctor read aloud Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's Memoirs and the Memoirs of a Peeress, edited by Lady Charlotte Bury, both of which books dealt with persons whom Lady Hester had known in her youth. In return she regaled him with stories of her own glory, of Mr. Pitt's virtues, of the objectionable habits of the Princess of Wales, and of the meanness of the Regent in inviting himself to dinner with gentlemen who could not afford to entertain him, the whole pleasantly flavoured by animadversions on the social presumption of medical men, and descriptions of the methods by which formerly they were kept in their proper place by aristocratic patients. At this time, the beginning of 1838, Lady Hester was anxiously expecting an answer from Sir Francis Burdett about her property, and, hearing from the English consul at Sayda that a packet had arrived for her from Beyrout, which was to be delivered into her own hands, her sanguine mind was filled with the hope of coming prosperity. But when the packet was opened, instead of the long-expected missive from Sir Francis, it proved to be an official statement from Colonel Campbell, Consul-General for Egypt, that in consequence of an application made to the British Government by one of Lady Hester's chief creditors, an order had come from Lord Palmerston that her pension was to be stopped unless the debt was paid. When she read the letter Dr. Meryon feared an outburst of fury, but Lady Hester, who, for once, was beyond violence, began calmly to discuss the enormity of the conduct both of Queen and Minister.
'My grandfather and Mr. Pitt,' she said, 'did something to keep the Brunswick family on the throne, and yet the granddaughter of the old king, without hearing the circumstances of my getting into debt, or whether the story is true, sends to deprive me of my pension in a strange land, where I may remain and starve.... I should like to ask for a public inquiry into my debts, and for what I have contracted them. Let them compare the good I have done in the cause of humanity and science with the Duke of Kent's debts. I wonder if Lord Palmerston is the man I recollect--a young man from college, who was always hanging about waiting to be introduced to Mr. Pitt. Mr. Pitt used to say, "Ah, very well; we will ask him to dinner some day." Perhaps it is an old grudge that makes him vent his spite.' Colonel Campbell's letter had given the poor lady's heart, or rather her pride, a fatal stab, and the indignity with which she had been treated preyed upon her health and spirits. She now determined to send an ultimatum to the Queen, which was to be published in the newspapers if ministers refused to lay it before her Majesty. This document, which was dated February 12, 1838, ran as follows:--
'Your Majesty will allow me to say that few things are more disgraceful and inimical to royalty than giving commands without examining all their different bearings, and casting, without reason, an aspersion upon the integrity of any branch of a family that had faithfully served their country and the House of Hanover. As no inquiries have been made of me of what circumstances induced me to incur the debts alluded to, I deem it unnecessary to enter into any details on the subject. I shall not allow the pension given by your royal grandfather to be stopped by force; but I shall resign it for the payment of my debts, and with it the name of British subject, and the slavery that is at present annexed to it; and as your Majesty has given publicity to the business by your orders to your consular agents, I surely cannot be blamed for following your royal example.
'HESTER LUCY STANHOPE.'
This was accompanied by a long letter to the Duke of Wellington, in which Lady Hester detailed her services in the East, and expressed her indignation at the treatment she had received. She was now left with only a few pounds upon which to maintain her house-hold until March, when she could draw for £300, apparently the quarter's income from a legacy left her by her brother, but of this sum £200 was due to a Greek merchant at Beyrout. The faithful doctor collected all the money he had in his house, about eleven pounds, and brought it to her for her current expenses, but with her usual impracticability she gave most of it away in charity. Still no letter came from Sir Francis Burdett, and the unfortunate lady, old, sick, and wasted to a skeleton, lay on her sofa and lamented over her troubles in a fierce, inhuman fashion, like a wounded animal at bay. In the course of time a reply came from Lord Palmerston, in which he stated that he had laid Lady Hester's letter before the Queen, and explained to her Majesty the circumstances that might be supposed to have led to her writing it. The communications to which she referred were, he continued, suggested by nothing but a desire to save her from the embarrassments that might arise if her creditors were to call upon the Consul-General to act according to the strict line of his duty. This letter did nothing towards assuaging Lady Hester's wrath. In her reply she sarcastically observed:--
'If your diplomatic despatches are all as obscure as the one that now lies before me, it is no wonder that England should cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign relations which she once could boast of.... It is but fair to make your lordship aware that, if by the next packet there is nothing definitely settled respecting my affairs, and I am not cleared in the eyes of the world of aspersions, intentionally or unintentionally thrown upon me, I shall break up my household, and build up the entrance-gate to my premises; there remaining as if I was in a tomb till my character has been done justice to, and a public acknowledgment put in the papers, signed and sealed by those who have aspersed me. There is no trifling with those who have Pitt blood in their veins upon the subject of integrity, nor expecting that their spirit would ever yield to the impertinent interference of consular authority, etc., etc.' It must be owned that there is a touch of unconscious humour in Lady Hester's terrible threat of walling herself up, a proceeding which would only make herself uncomfortable and leave her enemies at peace. For the present matters went on much as usual at Dar Jôon. No household expenses were curtailed, and thirty native servants continued to cheat their mistress and idle over their work. In March, that perambulating princeling, his Highness of Pückler-Muskau, arrived at Sayda, whence he wrote a letter to Lady Hester, begging to be allowed to pay his homage to the Queen of Palmyra and the niece of the great Pitt. 'I have the presumption to believe, madam,' he continued, 'that there must be some affinity of character between us. For, like you, my lady, I look for our future salvation from the East, where nations still nearer to God and to nature can alone, some day, purify the rotten civilisation of decrepid Europe, in which everything is artificial, and where we are menaced with a new kind of barbarism--not that with which states begin, but with which they end. Like you, madam, I believe that astrology is not an empty science, but a lost one. Like you, I am an aristocrat by birth and by principle; because I find a marked aristocracy in nature. In a word, madam, like you, I love to sleep by day and be stirring by night. There I stop; for in mind, energy of character, and in the mode of life, so singular and so dignified, which you lead, not every one who would can resemble Lady Hester Stanhope.'
Lady Hester was flattered by this letter, and told the doctor that he must ride into Sayda to see the prince, and tell him that she was too ill to receive him at present, but would endeavour to do so a few weeks later. The prince was established with his numerous suite in the house of a merchant of Sayda. Mehemet Ali had given him a special firman, requiring all official persons to treat him in a manner suitable to his rank, his whole expenditure being defrayed by cheques on the Viceroy's treasury. The prince, unlike most other distinguished travellers who were treated with the same honour, took the firman strictly according to the letter, and could boast of having traversed the whole of Egypt and Syria with all the pomp of royalty, and without having expended a single farthing. Dr. Meryon describes his Highness as a tall man of about fifty years of age, distinguished by an unmistakable air of birth and breeding. He wore a curious mixture of Eastern and Western costume, and had a tame chameleon crawling about his pipe, with which he was almost as much occupied as M. Lamartine with his lapdog. The prince stated that he had almost made up his mind to settle in the East, since Europe was no longer the land of liberty. 'I will build myself a house,' he said, 'get what I want from Europe, make arrangements for newspapers, books, etc., and choose some delightful situation; but I think it will be on Mount Lebanon.'