"4th Earl Stanhope" Philip Henry Stanhope Signed Free Frank For Sale

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"4th Earl Stanhope" Philip Henry Stanhope Signed Free Frank:
$399.99

Up for sale a RARE! "4th Earl Stanhope" Philip Henry Stanhope Hand Signed Free Frank. 

ES-6344E

Philip

Henry Stanhope, 4th Earl Stanhope FRS (7 December 1781 – 2 March 1855), was an

English aristocrat, chiefly remembered for his role in the Kaspar Hauser case during the 1830s. He was the eldest son

and heir of Charles

Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope (1753–1816), by his second wife Louisa Grenville (1758–1829), daughter and sole heiress of the

Hon. Henry Grenville, Governor of Barbados in 1746 and

ambassador to the Ottoman Porte in 1762, a younger brother

of Richard 1st Duke of Buckingham

and Chandos. Using his father's courtesy title Viscount Mahon, he

served as a Whig Member 1806 to 1807, for Kingston

upon Hull from 1807 to 1812, and for Midhurst from 1812 until

his succession to the peerage on 15 December 1816, when he took his seat in

the House of Lords. He shared his father's scientific interests and was

elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 8 January 1807 and was a

president of the Medico-Botanical Society. He was a vice-president of the

Society of Arts. Like other members of his gifted family, notably his

half-sister Lady Hester Stanhope, he is usually portrayed as a somewhat

eccentric character. Having studied in Germany, he travelled extensively in

Europe (mostly alone, though he was married and had a son and a daughter),

which brought him into contact with various princely courts and which caused

him great expenditure. In contrast to some accounts, which suggest that he

lived beyond his means, it appears that he remained wealthy, certainly after he

had succeeded to his father's estates in 1816. His eccentricity may be understandable since, as his daughter

the Duchess of Cleveland wrote in her Life and Letters of Lady Hester

Stanhope, his own father refused to send him to school but kept him at the

family home of Chevening. The plan was that Philip would agree to his father's

terminating the entail on the estates. The biography implies that the

Earl would then have sold the estates and sent the money overseas,

impoverishing his family. Hester helped her brother escape and her letters,

quoted in the Life, record that William Pitt the

Younger and others rejoiced over what she had done. Stanhope became

interested in the story of the "foundling" (aka a "feral

child") Kaspar Hauser, a youth who had appeared

in Nuremberg in 1828 and had become famous through his claim that he

had been raised in total isolation in a dark room and could tell

nothing about his identity. Furthermore, Hauser was found with a cut wound in

1829 and claimed to have been attacked by a hooded man. This led to various

rumours that he might be of princely parentage but also suspicions that he was

an impostor. Stanhope first met Hauser in 1831 and soon felt a strong affection

for the young man: indeed, their relationship could as contemporary rumours suggested. He

endowed him generously and paid for (unavailing) inquiries

in Hungary to clarify the young man's origin, as the latter, in 1830,

had claimed to remember had led to speculations that he might originate from there. Hauser's

custodian, Baron von Tucher, criticised Stanhope's pedagogically wrong

behaviour towards Hauser and retired from his custodianship. Now Stanhope, in December 1831, became Hauser's foster-father and

transferred him to the care of a schoolmaster. In January 1832, he returned to

England from where he continued to communicate by letter with his fosterling

and also with officials examining the case. Stanhope had favoured the theory

that Hauser stemmed from Hungarian magnates but had to give up this idea when

he was informed that further inquiries in Hungary had, once more, failed

completely. In a letter to the Bavarian court president Anselm von

Feuerbach (dated 5 October 1832), Stanhope now clearly uttered his doubts

in Hauser's credibility. While he continued to pay for his fosterling's living

expenses, he never made good on his promise that he would take him to England

and his letters to Hauser became less affectionate. Hauser did realise this

change of mood. On 14 December 1833, Hauser came home with a deep wound in

his chest and claimed to have been stabbed by a stranger. He died three days

later. Although Stanhope had long stopped believing in Hauser's tales, he at

first was of opinion that Hauser had indeed been murdered, a view he uttered in

one of his letters (dated 28 December). In another letter from 7 January 1834, when he had

received more information on what had happened, a change of mind announces

itself: he would later advocate the position that Hauser

himself had inflicted the wound by pressure, and that, after he had squeezed

the point of the knife through his wadded coat, it had penetrated much deeper

than he had intended. In his Tracts Relating to Caspar Hauser (1836,

German original: 1835) Stanhope published all known evidence against Hauser:

The more I was deceived in this affair, and the more erroneous were my views,

the more is it now my duty to act with zeal, and, if it were in my power, with

ability, to preserve others as far as possible from similar errors. Though I

have on that account appeared in an unfavourable light to some of those who are

known or unknown to me, though I have been abused and even calumniated, I find

a sufficient consolation in my own conscience. Stanhope, indeed, was attacked by followers of Hauser, and

even accused of contriving his death. They suggested that Hauser was a

hereditary prince of Baden and was murdered for political reasons. Some

professional historians (such as Ivo Striedinger) defended Lord Stanhope as a

"seeker of truth" and as a deceived philanthropist who had realised

his delusion. Anthroposophist author Johannes Mayer, however,

substantiated the accusations against Stanhope in a major biographical study of

him and showed that he was in fact a British political agent working for the

House of Baden against Kaspar Hauser.

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