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Her name was Lady Hester Stanhope.

In her lifetime, she was one of the most famous English women in the world, admired by Byron, corresponded with by prime ministers, feared by Ottoman warlords, hailed as a queen in the Syrian desert, and finally left to die alone in a Lebanese monastery she had walled herself into.

And this is her story.

She was born in 1776 at Chevening, Kent, the eldest daughter of a mathematician earl and the granddaughter of William Pitt the Elder, who had been Prime Minister of England. She was six feet tall, which was extraordinary for a woman of the period. She was fierce, brilliant, and completely unmanageable from childhood on.

When she was 24, her uncle William Pitt the Younger, who was also Prime Minister of England, invited her to move in with him.

For the next three years, from 1803 to 1806, Lady Hester Stanhope effectively ran the household of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. She served as his hostess, his private secretary, and corresponded with cabinet ministers on his behalf. She oversaw the planting of the famous gardens at Walmer Castle and sat at the head of his table when he entertained heads of state. Hester was, the contemporary writers wrote, the sharpest political mind at every dinner she attended.

Pitt, who was unmarried and awkward around most people, adored her. When friends asked him why he let his niece behave with such shocking political independence, he reportedly said: “I let her do as she pleases. If she were resolved to cheat the devil, she could do it.”

Hester once replied to a cabinet minister who had made a joke about a broken spoon at Pitt’s table: “Have you not yet discovered that Mr. Pitt sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments to effect his ends?”

She was 27 years old.

Then in January of 1806, William Pitt the Younger died suddenly at the age of 46. The Prime Minister’s household was disbanded. His niece was given a Parliamentary pension of £1,200 a year, a considerable sum, and told to go back to being a well-bred aristocrat. She moved to London, then to Wales. Her fiancé, Lord Granville, married someone else. The man she had loved after him, General Sir John Moore, died at the Battle of Corunna in 1809, reportedly with her name on his lips. Her brother, the one she was closest to, perished in the same battle.

At this point, she was 33 years old, unmarried, brilliant, and no longer at the center of British politics. She was expected to accept a quiet life in the country.

A quiet life was not what Hester wanted. And so, in February of 1810, she left England.

She did not tell anyone she was leaving forever; she may not have even known it herself at the time. But she boarded a ship for Gibraltar with her physician Dr. Charles Meryon and a small retinue, and she never came back.

The next 29 years of her life do not fit inside the rigid blueprint of what an Englishwoman was expected to do in the Regency period.

She traveled. Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, Athens (where she met a young Lord Byron, who reportedly dove into the sea at the sight of her ship approaching Piraeus, either as a display of homage or as an escape attempt, the sources are unclear), Constantinople, Rhodes, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. She corresponded with the Ottoman Sultan. She was received by the Pasha of Egypt in male dress: purple velvet robe, embroidered trousers, waistcoat, jacket, saddle, and sabre. She had bought the outfit specifically to visit him and refused to change into anything more feminine.

In 1811 her ship was wrecked off the coast of Rhodes. Hester lost all her English clothes to the sea. She never replaced them. From that point forward, for the remaining 28 years of her life, she wore only male Ottoman dress. She smoked a hookah. She rode horses astride, in an era when Englishwomen were required to ride sidesaddle. She learned to swear at her mule drivers in a dozen languages.

In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was cleared of visitors and reopened after hours for her private audience. She refused to enter the Great Pyramid at Giza, complaining of “an inconceivable number of fleas.” She refused to wear the veil in Damascus, which by every convention should have gotten her killed. Instead, the local population received her with awe. She entered the city on horseback, a foreign woman in a man’s coat with a sword at her waist, and by evening the market stalls were selling her portrait.

And Hester was not done.

In 1813, at 37, she announced she was going to Palmyra.

Palmyra was, at that moment, one of the most inaccessible ancient sites in the world. It sat deep in the Syrian desert, the route to it running through territory controlled by Bedouin tribes who charged tolls, took hostages, and occasionally massacred travelers. No European woman had ever been there. Very few European men had managed. Repeatedly, Hester was warned not to go.

She went anyway.

Traveling with a caravan of 22 camels, an escort of Bedouin horsemen provided by the local sheikh she had befriended, and a wardrobe of male Bedouin dress, she rode through the desert for six days. When she arrived at the ruins of Palmyra, the assembled Bedouin tribes performed a ceremony in her honor. The exact form of the ceremony is described differently by different sources. What is documented is that she was hailed by the Bedouin tribes as a queen.

The name they called Hester varies, but what contemporary and modern sources agree on is that the ceremony happened, that she believed it made her a queen of the desert, and that she carried herself that way for the rest of her life.

She was 37 years old, and had, in the space of three years, walked out of English aristocratic society, adopted male dress permanently, entered forbidden cities, refused to veil herself in front of pashas, and been crowned queen by Bedouin tribes in the desert.

She wasn’t even close to done.

Hester, at long last, settled in Lebanon. First at a former monastery near Sidon, then at another, and finally at Djoun, a hilltop compound eight miles from Sidon, in what is now central Lebanon. Converting the old monastery into a fortress, she dug wells, planted gardens, and kept horses that she believed were prophesied to carry a new messiah when he came – and she planned to be his bride based on prophecies she had gotten from a fortune-teller.

Just your average life goals, nothing odd here in the least.

Hester made a marital overture to Ibn Saud, the founder of the First Saudi State, based on this belief. He declined.

She stayed in Djoun for 18 years, and never saw England again.

What she did during those 18 years, in a compound she had built herself in the mountains of the Ottoman Empire, is one of the strangest chapters in the entire history of European women in the Middle East.

During the Egyptian invasion of Syria in the 1830s under Mehmet Ali, she assisted refugees, opening her walls to hundreds of Druze, Christian, and Muslim refugees fleeing the fighting. Feeding and sheltering them, she even sent for medical supplies with her own money. During the Battle of Navarino in 1827, when European forces destroyed the Ottoman fleet, she gave sanctuary to Europeans in the area who were being blamed for the destruction. She almost died of yellow fever during that particular relief effort.

And then, as one does, Hester became a political power in her own right. 

Emir Bashir II of Lebanon, who ruled the Chouf mountains and was one of the great political figures of 19th-century Ottoman Syria, corresponded with her for 25 years. They fought, they reconciled, they negotiated deals with each other over local water rights and refugee movements and taxation of the villages around Djoun. He respected her because she had made herself impossible to ignore. Hester was a wealthy foreign woman with a fortified compound, deep local knowledge, and a network of connections that ran from London to Cairo to Constantinople. He treated her like a fellow head of state, because in practical terms she was one.

Distinguished European travelers came to Djoun to seek an audience with her. The French poet Alphonse de Lamartine visited her in 1832 and left describing her religious beliefs as “a clever though confused mixture of all the religions she had condemned herself to live among.” Alexander Kinglake wrote a whole chapter about his 1835 visit to her in his travel book Eothen. He described her extraordinary presence, her penetrating intelligence, her power of “downright expression,” and the way her talk was full of sparkling anecdotes about William Pitt and his political circle, delivered as if she were still 28 years old and still running his household.

Hester had, by then, been living in the mountains of Lebanon for over a decade.

She wore a turban over her shaven head, smoked constantly, and kept a menagerie of animals. She dispensed opinions on international politics to visitors who traveled thousands of miles to hear them. Still corresponding with British diplomats, she still followed the news of European politics. The fact of the matter was that she had gotten there before anyone. She was doing what would later be called “Orientalism” decades before those categories existed as such. She was inventing a new way for a European woman to exist in the world, without a model to follow, without permission, without a return ticket.

Unfortunately, Hester’s final years were not kind.

She had never been careful with money. Her hospitality to refugees, her horses, her retainers, her patronage of local scholars, all of it had drained her income for years. By the mid-1830s she was in serious debt to Levantine moneylenders. In February 1838, Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, made the decision to suspend her Parliamentary pension in order to pay her creditors.

Lady Hester wrote a series of increasingly furious letters to the British government. In one, she wrote directly to Queen Victoria, informing the young queen that if her pension was not restored, she would renounce her British citizenship entirely and consider herself no longer subject to the British crown. Her letter was ignored and the pension was never restored.

She then had the gates of Djoun walled up.

For the last ten months of her life, from August 1838 to June 1839, she sat inside her fortress, refusing to see almost anyone, refusing to leave, refusing to communicate with the British consul who tried repeatedly to reach her. Still wearing a turban over her shaved head, she would receive occasional visitors after dark, and she would let them see only her face and her hands. Her servants, unpaid, began to leave. Those who stayed reportedly began to steal from her, since there was no one to stop them.

Hester died at Djoun on June 23, 1839, at 63, penniless. She was, according to some accounts, alone, though other accounts say a small handful of retainers were still with her. The British consul from Beirut arrived several days later to inventory what remained of her property and found, according to his report, a compound full of junk, and one gaunt woman lying in bed with her turban still on her head. He gave her a Christian burial in her garden.

She left no direct heirs. Her physician, Dr. Meryon, published her memoirs in 1845 and 1846, based on his years of conversations with her, and they became bestsellers in Victorian England, where they created the popular image of her that has largely defined her ever since: the crazy Queen of Lebanon, the eccentric Englishwoman, the tragic figure who fell from grace and died in exile.

The romantic Victorian version is not exactly wrong. She was eccentric. She did believe she was going to be the bride of the messiah. She did wear a turban and smoke a hookah and dispense oracles to visitors. She did die penniless.

But it’s not three dimensional, it’s a caricature, it’s the old trick of describing women in the most rudimentary of terms.

The version of Hester that gets told is the version that lets the men feel sorry for her. Poor Lady Hester, the eccentric who lost her mind in the desert. Poor Lady Hester, the Regency woman who couldn’t handle the real world. Poor Lady Hester, the crazy queen who ended up alone.

But look at what she actually did.

She walked out of British aristocratic society at 33 and never went back. She adopted male dress and never took it off. She refused the veil in every country where she was supposed to wear it. She rode into forbidden cities on horseback in front of pashas who could have had her killed on sight. She traveled through territory that had killed European men. She was crowned by Bedouin tribes as a queen of the desert. She built a fortress in the mountains of the Ottoman Empire and ran it as her own small principality for 18 years. She gave refuge to hundreds of people during regional wars. She corresponded with Emir Bashir II as a political equal. She wrote to Queen Victoria renouncing her citizenship rather than accept British interference in her financial affairs.

She was, from 33 to 63, one of the freest women in the world. We are, of course, not arguing that it was her privilege that allowed her be as such, but her rejection of British society and norms is pretty rad. Even if she was “free” on a government pension.

Nobody in England knew what to make of her while she was alive. She fit no category, belonged to no nation, had no husband, no children, no lineage, no institutional attachment except the pension. She was a category of one.

The men who wrote about her afterward, including Meryon, wrote her as tragic because the shape of her life is illegible without that frame. If she was tragic, then she was defeated. If she was defeated, then the world she had walked out of was validated. If the world was validated, then her walking out had been a mistake.

But if you look at what she actually did, day to day, for 29 years, she was not defeated. She was living exactly the life she wanted to live, riding her horses and smoking her hookah and quoting William Pitt to travelers who had come thousands of miles to hear her. She answered to no man for anything and was, in every sense that mattered, its queen.

She died on her own terms, in her own compound, walled off from a country that had tried to control her from three thousand miles away. The last political act of her life was writing to Queen Victoria and telling the young queen that she was done being British.

She has been called the Crazy Queen of Lebanon for two hundred years. But I don’t think she was crazy. I think she was one of the small handful of women in the early 19th century who worked out that European aristocratic life was a trap and just walked out of it into a bigger world before anyone could tell her she wasn’t allowed.

And she died with her turban still on her head.

Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope. Queen of the Desert. Renegade of Djoun. The woman who walked out of Downing Street and never came back.

Punk AF.

Thanks for reading!