Nesta Helen Webster

Nesta Helen Webster (née Bevan, 24 August 1876 – 16 May 1960) was an English author who revived conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. She claimed that the secret society's members were occultists, plotting communist world domination, through a Jewish cabal, the Masons and Jesuits. She blamed the group for events including the French Revolution, 1848 Revolution, the First World War, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Her writing influenced later conspiracy theories and ideologies, including American anti-communism (particularly the John Birch Society) and the militia movement. In 1920, Webster became a contributor to The Jewish Peril, a series of articles in the London Morning Post centered on the forged document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These articles were compiled and published in the same year in book form under the title of The Cause of World Unrest. Webster claimed that the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an "open question". Prior to World War II, Webster was involved in Fascist political groups in the United Kingdom. Early years Born in 1876, in the North London stately home Trent Park, Webster was the youngest daughter of Robert Cooper Lee Bevan and Emma Frances Shuttleworth. She was educated at Westfield College, now part of Queen Mary, University of London. When she became an adult, she travelled around the world, visiting India, Burma, Singapore, and Japan. In 1904, she married Arthur Templer Webster, Superintendent of the British Police in India. Writing Reading the letters of the Countess of Sabran, Webster believed herself to be a reincarnation of someone from the time of the French Revolution. Her first book on the subject of the French Revolution was The Chevalier de Boufflers, followed by The French Revolution: A study in democracy, in which she credited a conspiracy based around Freemasonry as responsible for the French Revolution. She wrote that "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."