Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl Stanhope

[1] Using his father's courtesy title Viscount Mahon, he served as a Whig Member of Parliament for Wendover from 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.

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.

[4] 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.

"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.

Stanhope first met Hauser in 1831 and soon felt a strong affection for the young man; indeed, their relationship could have had homoerotic undertones, as contemporary rumours suggested.

[4] In another letter from 7 January 1834, when he had received more information on what had happened, a change of mind announced itself;[6] 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.

[6] 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.