Nesta Helen Webster

Early years

She was born Nesta Helen Bevan in the stately home Trent Park. She was the youngest daughter of Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, a close friend of Cardinal Manning. Her mother, Emma Frances Shuttleworth, was Robert Bevan's second wife. Emma was a daughter of Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth, Anglican bishop of Chichester. Nesta was educated at Westfield College (now part of Queen Mary, University of London). On coming of age, she travelled around the world, visiting India, Burma, Singapore, and Japan. In India, on 14 May 1904, Nesta married Captain Arthur Templer Webster, Superintendent of the British Police in India.

Fascination with the French Revolution

Returning to England she began her historical studies and literary career with a critical re-assessment of the French Revolution, especially exploring the theory of the monarchy's subversion by a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. For more than three years she immersed herself in historical research, primarily in the archives of the British Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Her first serious book on this subject was The Chevalier de Boufflers. While doing research for the book, she experienced deja vu which led her to believe she might have been reincarnated.

Political views

Following the First World War she gave a lecture on the Origin and Progress of World Revolution to the officers of the Royal Artillery at Woolwich. By special request she repeated the lecture to the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Brigade of Guards in Whitehall, and then she was asked to repeat it a third time to the officers of the Secret Service. It was at their special request that she wrote the World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilisation, based on these lectures. Her charisma helped her to captivate some the leading literary, political and military minds of her day. Lord Kitchener in India described her as the "foremost opponent of subversion".

In 1919, Webster published The French Revolution: a Study in Democracy in which she claimed that a secret conspiracy had prepared and carried out the French Revolution. As she said in her book, "The lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati were thus the source whence emanated all those anarchic schemes which culminated in the Terror, and it was at a great meeting of the Freemasons in Frankfurt-am-Main, three years before the French Revolution began, that the deaths of Louis XVI and Gustavus III of Sweden were first planned."

She had a wide readership. Winston Churchill praised her in a 1920 article entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” in which he asserted, "This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution."

Webster also published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, the Menace of Communism (with Mrs. Katherine Atkinson) and The Origin and Progress of the World Revolution. In the latter book, published in 1921, she wrote: "What mysteries of iniquity would be revealed if the Jew, like the mole, did not make a point of working in the dark! Jews have never been more Jews than when we tried to make them men and citizens." In her books, Webster argued that Bolshevism was part of a much older and more secret, self-perpetuating conspiracy. She described three possible sources for this conspiracy: Zionism, Pan-Germanism, or "the occult power." She stated that she leaned towards Zionism as the most likely culprit of the three. She also claimed that even if the Protocols were fake, they still describe how Jews behave."

Webster became involved in several right-wing groups including the British Fascists, the Anti-Socialist Union, The Link, and the British Union of Fascists. She was also the leading writer of "The Patriot", an anti-Semitic paper, Webster dismissed much of the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany as exaggeration and propaganda.

Feminism

She favoured "traditional roles for women and believed women should primarily influence men to be better men", but was frustrated by limits on the careers open to women, because she believed jobs should not just be for the money but should be purposeful professions. She saw marriage as limiting her choices, although her wedding financially allowed her to be a writer. She believed in raising women's education, and that the education they had been receiving was inferior to men's, making women less capable than they could be. She believed that, with better education, women would have substantial political capabilities to a degree considered "non-traditional", but without that education they'd be only as men imagined all women to be, the suppliers of men's and children's "material needs". "[S]he implied ... [that] women and men might well be true equals." She believed there had been "women's supremacy ... [in] pre-revolutionary France, when powerful women never attempted to compete directly with men, but instead drew strength from other areas where they excelled, in particular, 'the power of organisation and the power of inspiration. She favored women being allowed to vote and favored keeping the British Parliamentary system for the benefit of both women and men, although doubted that voting would provide everything women needed, and thus did not join the suffrage movement. In the 1920s, "her views on women had become more conservative", and she made them secondary to her work on threats to British civilisation.

Criticism

In February 1924, Hilaire Belloc wrote to an American Jewish friend regarding one of Webster's publications which purported to expose evidence of Jewish conspiracy. Though Belloc's record of writing about Jews has itself attracted accusations of antisemitism, his contempt for Webster's own efforts was evident:

In my opinion it is a lunatic book. She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain. It is the good old 'Jewish revolutionary' bogey. But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews, with some people it is the Jesuits, with others Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that.

Umberto Eco, whose novel The Prague Cemetery recounts the development of the Protocols, has characterised Webster's propagation of the document as evidence of a delusional tendency:

In 1921... the Times of London discovered the old pamphlet by Joly and realized that it was the source for the Protocols. But evidence is not enough for those who want to live in a horror novel... [Webster's] syllogism is impeccable: since the Protocols resemble the story I have told, they confirm it. Or: the Protocols confirm the story I have concocted from them; therefore they are true.

Works

Selected articles