I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  It presented a strange appearance, for the altar had been turned into a buffet, and was covered in bottles and plates of sandwiches and cakes. Lord Melbourne came to me to say, ‘I believe you may take off the Crown now for a little, Your Majesty, if you wish.’

  ‘Thank you, I will. It hurts a good deal,’ I said. The pressure even of two and three-quarter pounds across my brows was making my head ache. I placed it carefully on the chair beside me. It was good to be out of the public eye for a few moments.

  ‘Will you take a glass of wine?’ he suggested, but I did not think I should have wine on my breath on such a solemn day, and I refused.

  ‘But perhaps you should, my lord,’ I said, for I noticed he was looking very tired – quite grey in the face, poor man.

  ‘The sword is heavy,’ he said with a wry smile. He had been carrying it all through the ceremony, and in the upright position, which required a considerable effort of the muscles of the arms and shoulders; and after all, he was almost sixty, though one tended to forget it. He bowed and went off to refresh himself at the altar, and the Archbishop approached me looking worried.

  ‘According to Sir John, Your Majesty, I am to give Your Majesty the Orb at this moment, to carry in the procession, but I fear I cannot find it.’

  ‘The Orb? I have it already,’ I said, indicating where I had placed it on a chair beside me. ‘The Bishop of Durham gave it to me some time since.’

  ‘Oh!’ said the Archbishop looking rather blank, and then, ‘Ah!’ He looked around. ‘Where is Durham?’ he muttered; but Durham had disappeared. Still looking perplexed, he bowed and wandered away. I think he hardly knew where he was any more; Durham and the Orb were quite beyond him.

  It was time now to change my robes again. I put on the royal robe of purple velvet lined with ermine; and then I resumed the Crown, took up the Orb and Sceptre, and thus loaded went out into the Abbey for the last procession, down the aisle and out to my carriage for the drive back to the Palace. We returned by the same route, and the cheers were if anything greater than before. My tiredness disappeared like magic before this enthusiastic demonstration of the great love and loyalty of my people, and by the time we reached the Palace I had revived enough to run up the stairs to my suite, where I made up to Dash for having missed everything by giving him a bath. My headache had quite gone, and I felt fresh as a daisy. Daisy, who had wanted to pet me and bathe my forehead in lavender-water, was quite put out!

  In the evening I presided at a State Banquet. Afterwards, amongst the many compliments, I was particularly pleased to receive those of Count Sebastiani, who was the French Ambassador and whose opinion must therefore have been impartial. He said that he had been at the Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon, who had had the Pope to officiate (though when the moment came he ignored the Pope and put the crown on his own head!). The Count said that though he had been impressed by that ceremony, it was not nearly so imposing as the one he had just witnessed.

  A little later I received the praise and assurance I wanted above all others. My dear Lord M. came up to me, and when I gave him my hand, he held it a moment to smile and congratulate me on this most brilliant day. ‘It all went off so well!’ he said.

  ‘And I – was I satisfactory?’ I asked shyly, my hand safe and warm in his.

  ‘Oh more, so much more!’ he said. ‘You did it beautifully, every part of it – and with so much taste! That is a thing you can’t give a person advice on; it must be left to a person.’

  I was too pleased to reply. Instead I said, ‘I think you are tired, my lord.’

  He admitted that he was feeling very tired. He confessed that because of the strain and nervous anxiety he had been suffering from diarrhoea for several days, and he had had to take a dose of laudanum that morning to get him through the ceremony. No wonder he looked so worn! I seemed to feel a chill, as though cold air had touched my bare neck. I did not know it then, but I have felt it often since, and recognise it now – the breath of mortality. ‘But you must be exhausted too, ma’am,’ he said, turning the attention from himself. ‘You will not wait for the fireworks afterwards?’

  ‘But I must,’ I cried, ‘I cannot miss the fun! I am not so very tired after all.’

  ‘Depend upon it,’ he said kindly, ‘you are more tired than you think you are.’

  But I stayed up and watched them from the balcony rail, and they were very good fireworks indeed – like Sodom and Gomorrah, as one of my maids said afterwards, when she thought I was not listening.

  Seven

  28th April 1900, at Windsor

  I AM back from Ireland. My visit was a triumph, and the Irish people showed themselves wonderfully kind, loyal and affectionate – indeed, Ponsonby (who has accompanied me often enough to know) declared he had never seen anything to approach the ‘frenzy’ with which I was greeted whenever I went out in my carriage. Such real affection as I was shown by these warm-hearted people amply repaid me for the considerable but unavoidable fatigue of being so often in public. I arrived at Kingstown on the 4th of April and left on the 26th, a visit of three weeks, but really I feel quite sorry now that it is all over. I have decreed that from now onwards there is to be a gift of shamrock in my name to all Irish soldiers every St Patrick’s Day, and there is to be a new regiment of Irish Guards to commemorate my visit and their gallantry in South Africa.

  I find the season really well advanced here, and the primroses are all finished, which is a pity. I love to see them each spring – they were a special thing to Albert and me, and he was always able to find the very first of them for me every year, knowing the places where they nestle. I used to send a box of them from Windsor every year to dear Disraeli, who liked them best of all flowers. He said they had a sweet perfume, though I could never detect it. He was altogether a most refined creature!

  I have got over the fatigue of the journey very well, and really am quite looking forward to going on with my Life. I really don’t want to write about Lady Flora Hastings, but I suppose that if I am to be honest, the honesty must extend to the bad things as well as the good, and it was, after all, rather a crucial incident in the first part of my reign.

  When I look back on it now, it seems as though a kind of madness seized me. Perhaps I was a little mad: when a girl of eighteen is pitchforked from the deepest obscurity of semi-imprisonment into the hot-house situation of Queen of England, she might well lose her head a little. If you add to that my deep hatred of Sir John Conroy, the existence of two mutually hostile Courts under one roof, and the probability that Sir John himself kept stirring the brew for his own purposes, it is hardly to be expected that we would have got by without trouble. What happened was unfortunate and unpleasant, and I felt very bad about it for a long time afterwards. How many of my subsequent actions were affected by my feelings of guilt and anger I cannot say, but I was certainly very much disturbed by the whole thing.

  I hated Lady Flora with the violence I reserved for Conroy’s creatures. She, like Conroy, had remained in Mamma’s Household, and that in itself was offence, for from the moment she had come to Mamma she had joined with Conroy in persecuting me. She had spied on me, tried to come between me and Lehzen, plotted with him to get rid of my faithful friend. Lady Flora was a clever, educated and not unattractive woman, but she combined a spiteful wit and a sharp tongue with an extreme of piety which I regarded as blatant hypocrisy. I always had a very English dislike of Enthusiasm, in which Lord M. agreed with me. He warned me equally against bigotry and any excessive display of religious fervour. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘it does not much matter which church one belongs to. The Anglican church is the best, because it is the least interfering.’ Though my faith is deep and strong, and nothing can shake it, I do not see any reason to thrust it on other people against their will, and I have always hated intolerance. Quakers, Jews, Roman Catholics (‘Nasty Beggars’, poor Brown used to call them!), even Hindus and Moslems can all be just as good people as us, in their own way. Equally, I do not believe that att
ending punctiliously to the forms of religion necessarily makes one a more worthy person. It is the heart, after all, into which God looks.

  The atmosphere at Court was not happy from the beginning, and after the Coronation it deteriorated into a brooding tension interrupted by sharp squabbles. My ladies did not consort with Mamma’s. They told Lehzen that they went in fear of ‘Scotty’ (as they called Lady Flora) because of her sharp eyes and censorious tongue. Other members of the royal family joined the hostilities, and lines of battle were drawn. My brother Charles changed over to my side after my Accession (though I fear it was only because I had more to offer than Conroy) while the Cambridges changed to Mamma’s. My cousin Augusta Cambridge, three years younger than me, with whom I had been quite friendly, was now forbidden to drop in on me alone, as she had been used to do, for a chat. Mamma bombarded me with demands that I invite George Cambridge to Court, which, believing she wanted me to marry him, I refused, thus setting up my aunt Cambridge’s back. Meanwhile Lady Flora, who always attended Mamma when she came to my drawing-room of an evening, spied on me and reported everything back to Conroy, who made what he could of it and circulated his rumours through my uncle Sussex.

  I had other troubles too. I was receiving hurt letters from Uncle Leopold (whose advice I had begun to rely on less since my closeness with Lord M. began), reproaching me for disloyalty and ingratitude. There was a growing hostility in Court to Stockmar, who was seen as an undesirable foreign influence (that idea, I’m sure, was Conroy’s doing!) and eventually I was obliged to send him back to Brussels for the sake of peace, which upset Uncle Leopold. And I went constantly in fear of losing Lord M., for his government was shaky, and he often dropped hints about preparing myself for his eventual departure, which only made me mad.

  In all this unpleasant ferment it is not surprising that I began to feel unwell and out of sorts. My temper suffered, I was often cross and low, I had bursts of irrational tears. I suffered from fatigue, backache and sick headaches – the latter particularly alarming, for I had understood that it was how my grandfather’s madness had begun, and I had a deep, unspoken dread of inheriting his madness along with my other Hanoverian traits. Another trouble was that I was putting on weight – which I suppose was not surprising since I have always tended to turn to food for consolation, and it was now available to me in limitless quantities. I even became irritable with my dear Lord M. I had become so nervous that I could not bear the slightest criticism – it made me feel as though I was being attacked, and he attacked me on my most sensitive point.

  ‘I heard in Paris that Your Majesty’s dresses are being made larger this year,’ he said to me one day.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said quickly, ‘but only because I can’t bear anything tight around me.’

  He looked doubtful. ‘You do seem to be more robust than a year ago, ma’am,’ he said. ‘A fine, full habit of body is what I like to see in a woman, but those who hold your health dear cannot wish it any fuller, and it seems to me—’

  ‘Well, well, perhaps I am a little fatter,’ I snapped, ‘but there is nothing to be done about it after all.’

  ‘I’m afraid you eat too much,’ he said frankly. ‘It is a failing of all the Hanoverians.’ This was sugaring the pill. He knew I liked to be told I resembled Papa’s side of the family. ‘But it is not good for you. These sick headaches and fits of irritation you have been suffering from recently – I am sure they would be cured by a strict attention to diet. And your complexion seems yellower, too. Your liking for sweet ale and negus, for instance, is very ill-advised. You should never drink beer, ma’am. I have told you so before.’

  ‘Well, but I cannot drink tea. It does not agree with me,’ I said crossly. ‘What am I to do?’

  ‘Take a little wine instead,’ he said. ‘A little sound wine every day is essential to good health. It was too little wine that destroyed Princess Charlotte’s health: a Hanoverian cannot thrive on a low diet. But you must eat less, or you have a good chance of getting very fat. It is not good to eat just because food is there. One should only eat when one is hungry.’

  ‘Then I should be eating all day long,’ I retorted, ‘for I am always hungry.’

  He was not deflected. ‘If you ate more slowly, you would not feel hungry when you rose from the table. Your Majesty does tend to gobble, you know. I have often noted it with sadness.’

  I felt myself blushing. I knew it was a failing of mine (and indeed, to this day I still tend to eat very fast. I certainly do not mean to correct myself now, however, for it affords me a great deal of amusement when there are guests to dinner. The rule of etiquette is that as soon as I lay down my fork to signify I have finished a course, the plates are cleared away, whether everyone else has finished or not. It is great fun to see the expression of dismay on their faces as the food is whipped away from them before they have had more than a mouthful or two – especially as they are obliged to talk politely to one another, which slows them down. It is amusing, too, to see the ‘old hands’ at the game, who know better than to converse, and concentrate on rapid fork-work, keeping one eye on me and trying to match me for speed!).

  Lord Melbourne went on. ‘And you must take exercise – you must walk more,’ he said. ‘You walk so little, I fear you will soon lose the use of your legs.’

  I was not to be bought off by pleasantries. ‘I hate to walk,’ I said. ‘Walking for the sake of walking makes me sick!’

  ‘Nevertheless, the only way to prevent getting fat is to eat less and walk more.’

  ‘When I walk I always get stones in my shoes,’ I complained.

  ‘Then you must have them made tighter.’

  ‘My feet swell. You have seen how swollen they get.’

  ‘That is because you don’t walk enough. You have poor circulation. If you walk more they will not do so.’

  ‘I hate walking!’ I snapped. ‘I won’t do it.’

  ‘You must!’ he snapped back.

  ‘I won’t!’ He opened his mouth to reply and I got in first. ‘The Queen of Portugal is hugely fat, and yet she does so much exercise! What have you to say to that?’ I said triumphantly. For the moment my kind friend was silenced, and then he changed the subject. But these arguments did neither of us good, and I always felt bad afterwards.

  To this burden of tension the Lady Flora affair added the final straw. She had spent Christmas with her family, and came back into waiting in January 1839, and straight away Lehzen and I noticed that she was decidedly plump in the stomach – without having put on weight elsewhere on her body. Indeed, her face was thinner, while her front protruded noticeably under her gowns. Lehzen and I concluded at once that she must be pregnant, and I was delighted at this downfall of my enemy who had always made such a parade of her piety and virtue. Unmarried, and pregnant! Moreover, I knew exactly who had put her in this condition. A few months earlier she had travelled down from Scotland in a post-chaise – alone with Sir John Conroy for the whole journey! My two enemies shot with a single arrow: it could hardly have been better!

  It could hardly have been worse. Gossip of that kind can never be kept down. By the end of the month the whole Palace was buzzing with it, and it could only be a matter of time before it jumped the wall to the world at large. Some of my ladies, worried that their own reputations would suffer by contamination, appealed to Lady Tavistock, the senior Lady of the Bedchamber, to do something, and she in turn appealed to Lord Melbourne, who consulted Sir James Clark. (He was my Court Physician, but he was also still Mamma’s.) Clark told Lord M. that Lady Flora had consulted him about her health several times, complaining of pains in her side, nausea and a derangement of the bowels. Clark had prescribed rhubarb and ipecac and such homely remedies; but he said that in his own opinion, Lady Flora was probably pregnant. The best thing was to wait and see, he said, which Lord M. agreed with, and so advised me. ‘If you remain quite quiet,’ he told me, ‘you will get through it very well.’

  But the gossip went on fizzing and splutter
ing like slow-match, my ladies feared for their virtue, and Mamma’s ladies accused Lehzen of starting the rumours to discredit Mamma. The situation ought to have been sorted out quite simply by a consultation between Mamma and me, but of course we were barely on speaking terms, certainly not intimate enough to discuss anything so delicate; so when the rumours refused to go away, another of my senior ladies, Lady Portman, went to Mamma, told her what was being said (apparently she had not heard it yet) and said that Lady Flora must either submit to a medical examination to clear her name, or leave the Palace.

  Mamma, it seems, was horrified; and Lady Flora indignantly refused to submit to the humiliation. But at last she saw there was nothing for it; so on February 17th she allowed herself to be examined in the presence of Lady Portman (who kept her hands over her face the whole time) and her maid, by Sir James Clark, assisted by a specialist in women’s diseases, Sir Charles Clarke. It must have been a frightful ordeal for her; I hate to think about it; but when it was over, both doctors signed a certificate to say that she was still virgo intacta, and that though there was considerable enlargement of the stomach, there was no reason to suppose that a pregnancy existed or had ever existed.

  On hearing the verdict Mamma dismissed Sir James from her service for having encouraged the false rumours; and, considerably chagrined, I sent my regrets to Lady Flora, and offered to see her as soon as she liked. She replied that she was too unwell and upset to avail herself immediately of my offer, and it was not until a week later that I did see her. Then I was struck with pity at how very ill she looked, so wretched and yellow and trembling with nervousness. With tears in my eyes I took her hand and kissed her and said I was very sorry for what had happened. She thanked me, and agreed at least to forgive, if she could not forget, for her mistress’s sake.

  That ought to have been the end of it; but a few days later Sir James Clark, perhaps annoyed at having been dismissed by Mamma, told Lord Melbourne that his certificate might prove to have been misleading. He and Sir Charles agreed that there was an enlargement of the womb very like a child, and that though Lady Flora was a virgin, strange things had been known to happen, and it might still prove to be a pregnancy. Lord Melbourne of course passed this on to me, and we both reverted to our former, more comfortable belief that Lady Flora was guilty. I am ashamed to think now that I had learned nothing from what had passed; but I had had so little experience in loving, and so much in hating, that forgiveness did not come easy to me.