by Emily Hahn
One wonders if, when she looked back at her life, she ever thought of Marian Hastings, who had been great in the days of her own littleness, who had queened it in India while she trembled in her obscurity, who had sailed serenely through the dangers of scandal, though she herself was caught in the mire. In those days Philip Francis must have filled her pretty ears with poison against the Hastings. But Catherine was invincibly good-natured, quite capable of remembering Marian without spite.
Would Marian have been as good-natured as Catherine? It seems doubtful. They were women of very different temperaments; it is odd that they should have been linked as closely as they were in Calcutta through circumstance and Junius.
Take it all in all, Catherine came out ahead. I confess I feel a little pang of pity for Marian when I think of the way she was tamed by life. She did love her jewels so much. And the Princess Talleyrand, who had no great overpowering love for baubles, possessed among her other valuables when she died a casket of jewels worth forty thousand pounds. When I think of that I have a vision of her as a kitten, dancing on pearls.
Marian gave up her treasures and made atonement for all her sins, because although she was shrewd and grasping in youth, she became a good woman. Catherine, who was never really very bad, became a good woman in a much more roundabout way, by virtue of the Concordat, and Napoleon’s twisted humor, and the obliging complacency of the Batavian Government. Catherine kept her jewels.…
Sometimes it must be very difficult, if one is a strict moralist, to regard history without feeling discouraged.
The Business
Lady Flora Hastings
This, our last case, is a paradoxical choice, for it is about sexual misdemeanors which had important consequences yet which never took place at all. It was an affair (not an affaire) which was mixed up with the Bedchamber Plot, during Victoria’s first year as Queen.
Not often in the history of kings do we come across an anecdote which depends for its point upon negative rather than positive sinning, but the pathetic story of Lady Flora Hastings does just that. She was a genuinely virtuous lady. One would have thought her safer in Buckingham Palace than she could have been anywhere else in England, at a court noted throughout Europe for its innocent bread-and-butter atmosphere. Courtiers, still breathless after the vicissitudes of life with Victoria’s various wicked uncles, were having to learn all over again the simple childhood lessons of propriety.
This must have gone hard with some of the gentlemen, but they comforted themselves, no doubt, by reflecting that nothing is altogether new and that Britain had lived through earlier phases of prudery and recovered. There had been Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans. George III was no libertine; libertines yawned in his service. Yet after Cromwell there had been Charles II; after George III came George IV. Now they had Victoria, the girl Queen. Chafing under the bonds of her gentle influence (which I imagine as resembling pink or blue baby ribbon) they reflected that even Victoria, sooner or later, would have to marry and relax.
Their trials were to get a good deal worse, however, before they got better. In fact, they got so bad that Victoria, when her popularity was threatened, married rather more precipitately than she would otherwise have done. It was not the least like most hasty marriages, brought on by straightforward scandal. Nobody’s chastity was involved. On the contrary, it was a case of too much virtue, all around, which led to trouble for the Crown.
On March 14, 1839, a British gentleman named Hamilton Fitzgerald, who was living in Brussels, opened a letter from his niece Lady Flora Hastings at Buckingham Palace, noting with surprise that it was a long one. This meant it was a very long letter indeed, for it was a period when correspondence in general was far from terse.
Whatever, he wondered briefly before reading it, could Flora have to say that called for so much space? Though she was a nice enough girl, if “girl” be a proper word of those days for a respectable spinster of thirty-three, her position as lady of the bedchamber to the Duchess of Kent could not by any stretch of the imagination be called exciting. At least that is what Mr. Fitzgerald mistakenly thought.
Under young Victoria, Buckingham Palace housed a very quiet court. The atmosphere, if not quite that of a nursery, yet resembled a schoolroom’s more than an ordinary royal household’s. The Queen was only eighteen and was still assiduously learning her task under the careful tutelage of her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. As for Lady Flora’s mistress, the Queen’s mother, her relations with her daughter were rather strained. Everyone knew how eagerly Victoria had seized on the chance, the minute she learned she was Queen, to shake off the duchess’s influence and show her independence. It was not surprising that she should have done so, perhaps, the duchess, a true German, having rather overdone her duty as disciplinarian. Not that Victoria ran wild; she was always much too steady a little person for that. But she quietly and firmly removed herself from beneath her mother’s wing, and rather pointedly retained Baroness Lehzen, her old governess and her mother’s avowed foe, as best friend and confidante.
There was one other manifestation of power at her mother’s expense. The Duchess of Kent’s adviser and good friend Sir John Conroy was sent away from the palace and pensioned off. Further than that, however, Victoria did not go in curtailing the duchess’s privileges. The mother of the Queen had a free choice of attendants, one of whom was Lady Flora, daughter of the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings and Countess of Loudoun, who was an old friend of the duchess’s. The Hastings family was a proud one, and Lady Flora had her share of that pride. Like all the other women in waiting at Buckingham Palace, she was aware of the struggle for power that prevailed between her mistress and Lehzen, and the fact that the duchess’s star was in eclipse did not affect her ardent loyalty. All the ladies who took their meals together, who treated each other as courteously as if they never disagreed in any way at all, were lined up on one side or the other in this struggle. It was a state of affairs not uncommon in palaces.
Mr. Fitzgerald was a man’s man. He had never troubled his head with domestic chitchat from the bedchambers of Buckingham Palace. Presumably his niece talked these matters over in confidence with her mother and sisters when she came home on visits—she had just been home, as a matter of fact, now that he thought of it—but trifling scandals about Lehzen’s tricks, or precedence at court meals, could not be expected to hold the attention of a serious gentleman like himself. Mr. Fitzgerald sighed patiently and set himself to read his niece’s letter.
His superior calm did not endure beyond the first page.
My dear Uncle [Lady Flora had written], Knowing what a very good-natured place Brussels is, I have not a hope that you have not already heard a story with which I am told London is ringing; but you shall at all events have from my own pen the account of the diabolical conspiracy from which it has pleased God to preserve the Duchess of Kent and myself; for that it was intended to ruin the whole concern, though I was to be the first victim, I have no more doubt than that a certain foreign lady, whose hatred to the Duchess is no secret, pulled the wires, though it has not been brought home to her yet. I told you I was ill when I came to town, having been suffering for some weeks from bilious derangement, with its agreeable accompaniments, pain in the side, and swelling of the stomach. I placed myself immediately under the care of Sir James Clark, who, being physician to the Duchess as well as to the Queen, was the natural person to consult. Unfortunately he either did not pay much attention to my ailments, or did not quite understand them, for in spite of his medicines the bile did not take its departure. However, by dint of walking and porter I gained a little strength; and, as I did so, the swelling subsided to a very remarkable degree. You may, therefore, guess my indignant surprise when, about a fortnight since, Sir James Clark came to my room, and announced the conviction of the ladies of the palace that I must be privately married, or at least ought to be so—a conviction into which I found him completely talked over. In answer to all his exhortations to confession, “as the only mea
ns of saving my character,” I returned, as you may believe, an indignant but steady denial that there was anything to confess. Upon which he told me that nothing but my submitting to a medical examination would ever satisfy them, and remove the stigma from my name. I found the subject had been brought before the Queen’s notice, and all this had been discussed, and arranged, and denounced to me, without one word having been said to my own mistress, one suspicion hinted, or her sanction obtained for their proposing such a thing to me. From me Sir James went to the Duchess, and announced his conviction that I was in the family way, and was followed by Lady Portman, who conveyed a message from her Majesty to her mother, to say that the Queen would not permit me to appear till the examination had decided matters. Lady Portman (who with, you will grieve to hear, Lady Tavistock, are those whose names are mentioned as most active against me) took the opportunity of distinctly expressing her opinion of my guilt. My beloved mistress, who never for one moment doubted me, told them she knew me and my principles, and my family, too well to listen to such a charge. However, the edict was given. The next day, having obtained the Duchess’s very reluctant consent, for she could not bear the idea of my being exposed to such an humiliation (but I felt it right to her, and to my family, and to myself, that a point blank refutation should be instantly given to the lie), I submitted myself to the most rigid examination, and I have the satisfaction of possessing a certificate, signed by my accuser, Sir James Clark, and also by Sir Charles Clarke, stating, as strongly as language can state it, that “there are no grounds for believing that pregnancy does exist, or has ever existed.” I wrote to my brother, who, though suffering from influenza, came up instantly.
It would be too long to detail all his proceeding, but nothing could be more manly, spirited, and judicious than his conduct. He exacted and obtained from Lord Melbourne a distinct disavowal of his participation in the plot, and would not leave town till he had obtained an audience of the Queen, and which, while distinctly disclaiming his belief of any wish in the part of her Majesty to injure me, he very plainly, but respectfully, stated his opinions of those who had counselled her, and his resolution to find out the originator of the slander, and bring him or her to punishment. I am quite sure the Queen does not understand what they betrayed her into. She has endeavoured to show her regret by her civility to me, and expressed it handsomely with tears in her eyes. The Duchess was perfect. A mother could not have been kinder, and she took up the insult as a personal one, directed as it was at a person attached to her service, and devoted to her. She immediately dismissed Sir James Clark and refused to see Lady Portman, and would neither reappear or suffer me to reappear at the Queen’s table for many days. She has crowned her goodness by a most beautiful letter she has written to poor mamma, whom the accounts, kept from her while there was a hope that matters might not become public, would reach today. I am told there is but one feeling as respects me—sympathy for the insult offered to one whose name should have been a protection to her, and that in many places the feeling is loudly expressed that a public reparation should have been offered me by the dismissal of the slanderers. This does not, however, appear to be the view of the Ministers; and as, personally, I wish for no revenge on them who have insulted me, I cannot say I much regret it, though I doubt whether they are quite judicious as respects the general feeling. As respects Parliamentary majorities, they are with regard to the ladies. And poor Clark, who has been the woman’s tool, could hardly be sacrificed alone. The Duchess has stood by me gallantly, and I love her better than ever. She is the most generous-souled woman possible, and such a heart! This business made her very ill. It shattered me, too, very much, and I am wretchedly thin; but under Doctor Chamber’s good management, I am getting round and hope soon to be well. Hastings says he has not yet done with the business, nor never will while there is any thing left to sift.
Good bye, my dear uncle. I blush to send you so revolting a tale, but I wished you to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—and you are welcome to tell it right and left.
Your affectionate niece,
Flora Eliz. Hastings
Surely never before had such an affront been offered a lady of the bedchamber. Lady Flora knew something about the subject, for her grandmother also had been a lady of the bedchamber, if briefly, to the sisters of George III. Like her grandmother, she herself had borne the train of a queen at her coronation. The Hastings family was ancient and proud, and Lady Flora’s brother the marquis naturally felt the insult even more strongly than did his sister.
No, the insult was unprecedented in the annals of British court history. Once during the reign of Charles II, at a very different sort of court, a newborn baby was found on the ballroom floor after a minuet, and actually all the attendants had gone through some form of showing perplexity as to where in the world it came from, before its Spartan mother, a maid of honor, was apprehended. (When questioned she always maintained stoutly that the father was another maid of honor, this being perhaps the first mention made of Lesbianism in official English history.) Grotesque as the incident may seem, it is evident that the courtiers of the Restoration must for once be given credit for courtesy and delicacy where Victoria’s attendants lamentably failed.
Lord Hastings, then, was livid with rage about “the business,” as he always referred to it, and rushed to London as soon as Lady Flora’s distressed report reached him in the north. The letter she wrote to Brussels, which I have just quoted, was a considerably softened and shortened version of what actually occurred. She may have regretted the explosive effect the business had on her male relatives and so deliberately toned down the account after her earlier experiences with an angry brother; for the same reason she gave Mr. Fitzgerald too optimistic a picture of what the public was saying and thinking of her. She was a dying woman, though an indignant one. Doubtless she felt too tired to fight it through.
Not so Hastings. He came raging into London, determined to have satisfaction of somebody, preferably a man he could call out and fight a duel with, but he could not find an adversary. Everywhere he turned he met the same bland smooth surface—professed ignorance, haughty secrecy, flat refusals to incriminate people whose rank, it was implied, should protect them from irritating people like himself. Lord Hastings must have felt as frustrated as a sparrow trying to fly through a plate-glass window. Let us leave him struggling with the maddeningly suave Melbourne while we trace out, through Lady Flora’s and Sir James Clark’s statements and depositions, what actually took place.
Lady Flora returned from Loudoun Castle in January. On the same day she arrived she hurried to consult Sir James Clark, who was physician to the duchess as well as the Queen. Lady Flora was not feeling well. For nearly two months she had been suffering from bilious attacks, and was worried by the fact that her abdomen was swollen. In addition to this, she occasionally felt severe pain in her side, which the fashion of the day must have aggravated through the tight lacing which was customary. It must also have emphasized the swollen appearance of her stomach. The easy Empire style of dress, with high waistline and flowing skirt, had gone out. Dresses were now designed to show off a supple waist. To emphasize this slenderness the rest of the figure was exaggerated. Ladies wore off-the-shoulder necklines and enormous puffed sleeves, as well as large deep bonnets. Everything was planned to look somewhat larger than life except the waist, which was compressed by tight stays. Unlike the Restoration maid of honor who was able without giving alarm to take her place in a minuet at the last moment of pregnancy, an early Victorian lady had very little chance to conceal her interesting condition, if such condition prevailed. Lady Flora, had she wanted to disguise her swollen stomach, could not have done so, but it does not seem to have occurred to her that such concealment should have been necessary. She was a modest maiden lady with a clear conscience.
That is what made the shock all the worse when it happened. Sir James may have leaped to conclusions as soon as Lady Flora first consulted him, physicians b
eing notoriously evil-minded, but for a little while he kept his thoughts to himself. Instead of talking, he gave the patient various medicines for her bilious attacks and some liniment for the swelling. Lady Flora averred that the medicines didn’t help very much, but that exercise did. She took long walks, she began to feel better, and she thought the swelling subsided to some extent. She stopped worrying.
In the meantime the season was approaching when Parliament was to meet, and there were several routine changes in the royal household. Lady Tavistock came into waiting on the Queen for a week or so, and when she departed Lady Portman took her place. These two ladies, looking at Lady Flora with unaccustomed eyes, leaped to the same conclusions that Sir James had already reached. Perhaps they put their heads together and talked it over. Perhaps it was the doctor who first stirred them up. Or perhaps, as Lady Flora and her rather silly mistress the duchess always firmly believed, it was all a plot engineered by Baroness Lehzen to discredit the duchess in the sight of the Queen and get her thrown out, like Sir John Conroy. Today, far from the battlefield, this last interpretation seems rather too elaborate for credence. It is more likely that Lady Flora simply looked pregnant, and that the Queen’s ladies went on the warpath about it, as other ladies have been known to do under similar circumstances.
Sir James seems to have had a lot to learn about diplomacy. After a good deal of whispering with ladies in corners, and indignant statements by all and sundry that something should be done about it, and asking of advice, and letting more people in on the talk, he made up his mind at last to speak plainly to Lady Flora. (In the defense he later published, he said that Lord Melbourne had spoken of the business to him, in confidence, as early as the first of January, but this statement is difficult to reconcile with the other dates mentioned.) One Sunday, accordingly, on the sixteenth of February, he talked to Lady Flora.
