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British activist
the evangelist

Elizabeth Reid Cotton, (9 December 1842 – 8 March 1922) who became Lady Hope when she married Sir James Hope in 1877, was a British evangelist active in the Temperance movement. In 1915, she claimed to have visited the British naturalist Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882, during which interview Hope said Darwin spoke of second thoughts about publicising his theory of natural selection. That Hope visited Darwin cannot be excluded, though denied by Darwin's family, but her interpretation of what Darwin said at the putative interview is much less likely.

Elizabeth Cotton was born on 9 December 1842 in Tasmania, Australia. She was the daughter of British irrigation engineer, General Sir Arthur Cotton, and spent her childhood in Madras, India, while her father supervised water management and canal projects in Andhra Pradesh. Returning to England after her father's retirement in 1861, the family resided in Hadley Green and came under the influence of the Rev. William Pennefather, an evangelical Anglican clergyman. Cotton also met many contemporary evangelicals during a three year stay in Ireland. In 1869 the family settled in Dorking, Surrey, about 30 miles from Downe, home of Charles Darwin—where Elizabeth began evangelistic and philanthropic work, first organising a Sunday school and then a "Coffee Room" where food and non alcoholic drinks were served. (Florence Nightingale distributed copies of Cotton's book Our Coffee Room and established her own coffee room in her village of Whatstandwell in Derbyshire.) Cotton held Bible classes and prayer meetings in the hall, and spoke at a Sunday evening service. A contemporary reported that she had "a pleasing, engaging manner and silvery voice, and her message was simple." In 1874–75, Cotton assisted in the evangelistic meetings held by American evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey, counseling women converts. In 1877, at the age of 35, Cotton married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, an evangelical and a temperance advocate who was 34 years her senior. Cotton therefore became Lady Hope of Carriden. Sir James died four years later. Thereafter Lady Hope opened several additional coffee houses and settled in London where she became involved in the work of the Golden Bells Mission in Notting Hill Gate. She was a prolific author of more than thirty books that "dealt with evangelistic and temperance themes," many containing "personal anecdotes reminiscent of the Darwin story." In 1893, she married T. A. Denny, an evangelical Irish businessman, 24 years her senior—though she continued to use the name "Lady Hope." She and Denny opened hostels for working men and provided accommodation for soldiers returned from the Boer War. She published a biography of her father after he died in 1899. In 1903, she opened her largest temperance hostel, the Connaught Club in Marble Arch, which offered accommodation for several hundred men. Cotton also patented a headband, which she called the "Hope Bandeau", designed to secure a women's hat without the use of a hatpin. After Denny died in 1909, Hope befriended an ex convict, and after she entrusted her finances to him, he betrayed her trust. In 1911 she was declared bankrupt. In 1913, she came to the United States as a delegate to a convention of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union being held in Brooklyn, and afterwards she decided to remain in the United States. On 4 August 1915, 33 years after Darwin's death and shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Hope led a devotional service at a Bible conference in Northfield, Massachusetts, received a letter about her story from an acquaintance in Toronto who claimed to have known her back in London and had little confidence in "her judgement or her imagination". Everyone in Darwin's family denied the validity of the story. In 1917, Darwin's son Francis wrote that "Lady Hope's account of my father's views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father's agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so." In 1922, Darwin's daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, said she did not believe Lady Hope had ever seen her father and that "he never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U. S. A." Leonard, Darwin's last surviving child, dismissed Lady Hope's account as a "hallucination" (1930) and "purely fictitious" (1934).

Lady Hope gave the fullest account of her story in a letter written (circa 1919–20) to S. James Bole, who first published it in 1940. The story became a popular legend, and Hope's claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the Reformation Review and in the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland in February 1957. In 1925, J. W. C. Fegan, an evangelist and sometime associate of Lady Hope, commented on her character to one S. J. Pratt, who was investigating the story. Fegan said that although Darwin had certainly been an agnostic, he was also "an honourable, courteous, benevolent gentleman." In contrast, Fegan noted that after Hope had been "adjudicated bankrupt," she had asked him for "a commendatory letter to take with her to America, and it was my painful duty to tell her that I did not feel I could do so." In 1994 Open University lecturer and biographer James Moore published The Darwin Legend, in which he suggested that Hope had visited Darwin sometime between 28 September and 2 October 1881, when Francis and Henrietta were absent and Charles' wife Emma was present, but that Hope had subsequently embellished the story. Moore argued that the Lady Hope story bore "all the hallmarks of Lady Hope's anecdotal imagination. Years of tract and novel writing had made her a skilled raconteur, able to summon up poignant scenes and conversations, and embroider them with sentimental spirituality. The distinction between fact and fancy in her writings was never well defined. In her dotage now, she was even less likely to be hard headed about history. Disgraced in England, displaced in America, she had only a short time before her cancer proved fatal. With everything to gain, what better than to trade off her title, ingratiate herself with 'impressionable' Americans, and launch an edifying myth?" The Lady Hope story has been promoted by a few modern creationists, including Kenyan Boniface Adoyo, but one of the most influential creationist organisations, Answers in Genesis, has disputed the legend.

When, in 1920, Lady Hope's illness had progressed to the extent she could no longer continue her ministry, she settled in Los Angeles and took up painting. She later travelled to Sydney, Australia, for medical treatment and died there on 9 March 1922.