by Julia Baird
Several factors ensured that this insult ballooned into a full-blown scandal that occupied London for months: Melbourne’s refusal to quash the rumor or punish Dr. Clark (doubtless fueled by his lingering suspicion, fostered by Dr. Clark, that Lady Flora might still be pregnant); the fascination of the press with the tale; the ongoing acrimony between Victoria and her mother that warped all communication; the desire of Tories to discredit the Melbourne government; and the wounded rage of the Hastings family, who were bent on restoring the honor of Lady Flora and discovering who had started the rumor. The duchess, who was intensely loyal to Lady Flora, sacked Dr. Clark. Victoria refused to do the same.
This was an extremely embarrassing affair, and Melbourne was culpable. He continued to irresponsibly fan the gossip, pandering to the queen’s dislike of anything to do with her mother’s household. Greville was disgusted: “It is inconceivable how Melbourne can have permitted this disgraceful and mischievous scandal, which cannot fail to lower the Court in the eyes of the world, and from a participation in which discredit the Queen’s youth and inexperience can alone exempt her.”
He was right. The entire episode underlined Victoria’s immaturity. At one stage, Melbourne suggested Lady Flora should be married off to stop the gossip: the queen wrote cattily, “This made me laugh excessively, for I said Lady F. had neither riches nor beauty nor anything!” Melbourne laughed too, she wrote, for he thought Lady Flora the ugliest woman he had ever seen. In portraits, Flora is not even remotely ugly. She was a slight, clever-looking woman, with thoughtful eyes, a small round mouth, and dark brown hair. Their shared bias made this pair spiteful and unpleasant.
Lady Flora’s mother decided to appeal to the queen. On March 7, the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings wrote a strong letter to Victoria—through the Duchess of Kent—seeking her help. She asked her to refute “the slanders” with an act designed to show her indignation, and ended: “To a female sovereign especially, women of all ranks in Britain look with confidence for protection and (notwithstanding the difference of their rank) for sympathy.” But Victoria had no sympathy; she decided the letter was foolish and, provocatively, sent it back to her mother without a word. This error of judgment would incite the beginning of a relentless, vitriolic, and public campaign by the Hastings family to expose the royal court and demand accountability. The dowager, who was unwell and mortified by what had happened to her daughter, then wrote to Lord Melbourne, asking for the removal of Dr. Clark. Melbourne responded that her demand was “so unprecedented and objectionable” that he would not reply to it, only deigning to confirm receipt of her letter.
Next the Hastings family went to the press. On March 24, Lady Flora’s uncle sent the Examiner an account of the affair based on a letter his niece had sent him; it was published in full. Lady Flora blamed the Whig ladies-in-waiting, as well as “a certain foreign lady, whose hatred to the Duchess is no secret.” The letter to her uncle is dated March 8, 1839, and in it Lady Flora pointedly praised the Duchess of Kent:
I am quite sure the Queen does not understand what they betrayed her into. She has endeavored to show her regret by her civility to me, and expressed it handsomely with tears in her eyes. The Duchess was perfect. A mother would not have been kinder, and she took 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 nor suffer me to reappear at the Queen’s table for many days.
She ended by saying, “I blush to send you so revolting a letter, but I wish you to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—and you are welcome to tell it right and left.” The press erupted. The problem was also political: the queen and her prime minister were Whigs and Lady Flora was a Tory. The paranoia of the Tories was fueled, and many Whigs believed this scandal was used as political leverage to cast aspersions on an unmarried queen and her ladies, as well as on the prime minister. Meanwhile, Lady Flora was now emaciated.
Victoria was too instinctively tribal to extend grace to the Hastings family. When the old dowager marchioness handed all her correspondence with Lord Melbourne to the Morning Post, Victoria called her a “wicked foolish old woman.” She had stopped reading newspapers and said the editors should be hanged, along with the Hastings family. She did not understand the gravity of her mistake nor how compromised she had become by her closeness to Melbourne. The Tories, in the wake of the Hastings affair, mustered strength, and Melbourne was losing his grip on power.
—
Victoria shook her head. In front of her sat the Tory MP Robert Peel, a man she had always found cold and unpleasant. Three days earlier, on May 6, Lord Melbourne’s political career had been dealt a fatal blow; his government won by only five votes a vote on a bill that would have enforced antislavery legislation in the Jamaican sugar trade. (The slenderness of the majority was enough to undermine his leadership.) Since then, it had been clear that Peel was the obvious choice for PM—and that he did not have the full support of his queen. No, she said to him, she would not remove any of the Whig ladies in her bedchamber simply because he was now prime minister.
Victoria, devastated by the loss of Melbourne, spent days crying uncontrollably. “The state of agony, grief and despair into which this placed me may be easier imagined than described! All all my happiness gone! That happy peaceful life destroyed, that dearest kind Lord Melbourne no more my minister….I sobbed and cried much; could only put on my dressing gown.” On May 7, she stood outside the Blue Room, where Melbourne was waiting to tell her he had to resign, trying to compose herself:
It was some minutes before I could muster up courage to go in,—and when I did, I really thought my heart would break; he was standing near the window; I took that kind, dear hand of his, and sobbed, and grasped his hand in both of mine and looked at him and sobbed out, “You will not forsake me”…he gave me such a look of kindness, pity and affection, and could hardly utter for tears, “Oh! no,” in such a touching voice.
That afternoon, Melbourne suggested she call on Wellington and Peel, adding that she should trust them but be cautious. He ended his memo, crucially, with “Your Majesty had better express your hope, that none of your Majesty’s Household, except those who are engaged in Politics, may be removed. I think you might ask him for that.” Victoria took the document from him and began crying again, in huge wrenching gasps. She held his hand for a long time, “as I felt in doing so he could not leave me.” Melbourne was aware of the difficulty of Victoria’s position. He had declined three dinner invitations from her that day, saying it would be inappropriate to meet during such delicate negotiations with his political opponent.
Victoria was heartbroken. Her desperate words revealed the raw wound of a teenager separated from the man she loved. When he left, Victoria sat down to write to him, tears blurring her vision:
The Queen ventures to maintain one thing, wh. she thinks is possible; wh: is, that if she rode out tomorrow afternoon, she might just get a glimpse of Lord Melbourne in the Park; if he knew where she rode, she wld meet him, as she did Lord Anglesey, & various others,—& it wld be such a comfort; there surely cld be no earthly harm in this; for I may meet anyone; Ld Melbourne may think this childish but the Queen really is so anxious it might be; & she wld bear thro’ all her trials so much better if she cld just see a friend’s face sometimes.
That night she was unable to eat, and cried convulsively until nine. Victoria had lost a father at eight months, and now, at nineteen, had lost the central father figure in her life, the man who had backed her against Conroy and her mother and made her feel loved and charming for the first time. Her brother and sister were in Europe, and she had no peers. It was a searing loss.
When Victoria woke, she wept again. Melbourne warned her not to show disdain for Tories, particularly Peel, who was aloof and shy but a fine politician, but their meetings did not go well. She moaned: “The Queen didn’t like his manner after—oh! how dif
ferent, how dreadfully different, to that frank, open, natural and most kind, warm manner of Lord Melbourne.” When Peel first asked that she remove some of her ladies-in-waiting who were aligned with the Whigs, she said she would only change male members of Parliament who were part of her household. She then shut the door and cried. Lehzen came to comfort her.
In her second interview with Peel, on May 9, Victoria was stronger, and unyielding. She had convinced herself that Peel’s claim was outrageous, and decided that she should be loyal to her ladies, as they had been to her during the Lady Flora Hastings affair. Victoria spoke calmly:
I said I could not give up any of my Ladies, and never had imagined such a thing. He asked if I meant to retain all.
“All,” I said.
“The Mistress of the Robes and the Ladies of the Bedchamber?”
I replied, “All.”
Victoria never spoke about politics with her ladies, she said, and, besides, they had plenty of Tory relatives. She refused Peel’s suggestion of changing only the senior ladies—the Mistress of the Robes had precedence over the other ladies—arguing that this had never been done before. Could it be right that her household attendants be plucked from her grasp simply because the government had changed? Her ladies were hardly politicians. (She repeatedly said that this had not happened to a queen before; Peel insisted it was different because she was queen regnant. He was right—there had been no woman as sovereign since 1714—but no queen has been asked to do the same since.)
After Peel left, pale and downcast, the Queen wrote triumphantly to Lord Melbourne:
[Peel had] behaved very ill, and has insisted on my giving up my Ladies, to which I replied that I never would consent, and I never saw a man so frightened….I was calm but very decided and I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness. The Queen of England will not submit to such trickery. Keep yourself in readiness for you may soon be wanted.
Peel then bluntly told Victoria that if she did not agree to remove some of her ladies, who were married to some of his most vehement enemies, he could not form a government. Victoria, pleased by the prospect of Lord Melbourne returning, told Peel her mind was made up and she would write to him in a few hours or in the morning to give him her final decision. She scrawled excitedly that Peel had admitted weakness, and begged Melbourne to come immediately.
Melbourne’s Cabinet argued for several hours about what to do. It was Victoria’s letters that swayed them to return to government to protect the honor of the queen: “Do not fear that I was calm and composed,” she wrote. “They wanted to deprive me of my ladies, and I suppose they would deprive me next of my dressers and my housemaids; they wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England.” Chivalry aside, her behavior was inappropriate; an opposition should not have been advising a queen on how best to defy the new prime minister.
On May 10, Peel resigned. In a chilly letter, he assured Her Majesty that he was thrilled that she had even considered him for the position of prime minister. The public was outraged. Victoria, however, was ecstatic. That night, she danced until 3:15 A.M. at a state ball she hosted for Czarevitch Alexander, son of Czar Nicholas I, whom she described as “a dear delightful young man.” After he spun her around the dance floor, she pronounced, “I really am quite in love with the Grand Duke. I never enjoyed myself more.” He squeezed her hand when he left, and kissed her cheek “in a very warm and affectionate manner.” She told Melbourne, “A young person like me must sometimes have young people to laugh with.” The Tory Duke of Wellington and Peel, however, were “very much put out.”
With Melbourne back at the helm, all was in order once again in Victoria’s world. But a pall had been cast over the court, and she was unable to shake feelings of despondency. Melbourne should have helped her understand that Peel only wanted those of her ladies who were married to Tory MPs gone. She soon asked Melbourne to help her find a Tory lady who could be quietly introduced into her household.* During the rest of her reign, Victoria was only ever asked to change the Mistress of the Robes, her highest-ranking lady. Her bias remained blatant, though. She was a Whig, like her parents, and she wanted a Whig to always remain prime minister. When crowds outside the palace hissed at Melbourne, the queen was furious: “Tories are capable of every villainy.”
In the final years of her life, Victoria confessed she had blundered during what was called the Bedchamber Crisis: “Yes, I was very hot about it and so were my ladies, as I had been so brought up under Lord Melbourne; but I was very young, only 20, and never should have acted so again—Yes! it was a mistake.” It was astonishing to think a queen had effectively dismissed a prime minister.
—
By April, Lady Flora Hastings had grown very weak. The campaign by the Hastings family had been successful; public sympathy was clearly with Lady Flora, who kept appearing in public so that people would not think she was pregnant. The distressed Duchess of Kent was convinced that Lady Flora was going to die, but even in June, Victoria was still dismissing Lady Flora’s condition as a “bilious attack.” The ongoing attacks had hardened her attitude to Lady Flora, and she resented, she said, having “to bear so much for such a woman.” Lord Melbourne’s advice continued to be immature and graceless. In early April, when Victoria decided Flora had been “exceedingly rude,” Melbourne just advised her to be more distant. The next day, they shared gossip they had both heard: that Lady Flora had already given birth to a child. Her mother, Lady Hastings, was blamed for not detecting the bump and insisting she stay in Scotland. She told Lord Melbourne that if Lady Flora were to go away, it would be best if she stayed away. Lord Melbourne advised her that this would not put the queen in a good light. Victoria showed no signs of self-doubt in her journal, where she wrote of Lady Flora’s impertinence, insolence, and still-rounded torso. Her entries reveal an alarming lack of remorse toward Lady Flora, and not the slightest sense of the continuing ordeal the sick woman was enduring. The Duchess of Kent repeatedly tried to make her daughter speak or at least write to Lady Flora, but Victoria would not shift an inch. She cited the impudence of the Hastings family and the affront of their decision to air the dispute in public. Lord Melbourne, as usual, told the queen that the Hastings family was in the wrong and encouraged her to remind them not to be rude. Victoria did not understand what she had done, nor what she had failed to stop. Lady Flora thought she lacked empathy: “It does not occur to her to feel for another.”
But when Victoria finally went to see Lady Flora again at the end of June, alone, she was mortified:
I found poor Ly. Flora stretched on a couch looking as thin as anybody can be who is still alive; literally a skeleton, but the body very much swollen like a person who is with child; a searching look in her eyes, a look rather like a person who is dying; her voice like usual, and a good deal of strength in her hands; she was friendly, said she was very comfortable, & was very grateful for all I had done for her; & that she was glad to see me look well. I said to her, I hoped to see her again when she was better—upon which she grasped my hand as if to say “I shall not see you again.”
Victoria left quickly. She started to pray that Lady Flora might suddenly revive, and soon it was all she could think and talk about. She began to have nightmares about the fine-featured aristocrat with the wandering eyes.
—
Flora Hastings died before sunrise on July 5, 1839. Lehzen told Victoria shortly after she woke up. She had died quietly, “& only just raised her hands & gave one gasp.” Lady Flora made her last wish as her weeping family surrounded her: that a postmortem be conducted on her body that would finally, thoroughly prove her innocence. There were still rumblings in the court about a stillborn child. Even on the morning of her death, a protester wrote on a placard that Lady Flora died of a botched abortion. But the autopsy report, which Victoria waited anxiously for all day, showed Lady Flora had a grossly enlarged liver, which was pressing on her stomach. It also reported that “the uterus an
d its appendages presented the usual appearances of the healthy virgin state.” Even in death, her chastity was probed.
Public fury was revived by the news; Victoria and Melbourne were hissed at in public, hats stayed on when the queen’s carriage wheeled past in a gesture of disrespect, and voices stayed quiet when the royal toast was given amid whispers of murder. Victoria’s mother told her she did not know “her own country,” and on this occasion she was right. The queen had not been thinking of her subjects. For the first time in her life, she had been part of a clique, and it was a powerful one; and the pull of scandal, revenge, and bitchy gossip had been too great. Especially when it came to the sexuality of another woman, one she saw as an enemy due to her friendship with Conroy. (It was an example of what today we might call slut-shaming.) And not only did she have a crush on her enabler, he was the prime minister. It was intoxicating, and Victoria was too young to understand the consequences. This episode would long be considered an embarrassment: there is now no reference to Lady Flora’s being ill or dying in Victoria’s diary (a volume edited by her daughter Princess Beatrice), and most of Victoria’s many letters about Lady Flora Hastings were later destroyed under the orders of her eldest son, King Edward VII. He and the editor had been shocked to discover Victoria’s “precocious knowledge.”
Flora Hastings’s coffin was drawn out of the palace by carriage in the thick of night, in the hope of avoiding protests. The somber cavalcade rolled slowly to the East End of London, before finally landing at Brunswick wharf, Blackwall, at dawn. The body would be placed on the Royal William steamship, which would take her back to Scotland, the land of her ancestors. Crowds gathered to pay respects to the casket of the woman wronged by the royal court. One man shouted, “Ah, there’s the victim, but where’s the murderer?” and another shook his stick at the queen’s carriage, crying, “What is the good of [Victoria’s] gilded trumpery after she had killed her?” A few rocks were thrown at the royal carriage, despite the strong police presence lining the way from the palace to the docks.
