Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  Lasting forty-five minutes, reluctantly undergone, this examination was nothing less than an assault upon Flora’s body. The latest writer on the subject, Kathryn Hughes, has discovered that Sir Charles, a doctor specialising in women’s medicine, once lectured his students on how such an assessment should be performed. The patient – or victim – should be under the covers of a bed, ‘knees drawn towards the belly’. The doctor should ‘cover the two fore fingers of the right hand with pomatum or cold cream’, and then ‘that finger is to be introduced into the vagina’.57

  Flora’s maid found all this horrifying. She described how her mistress ‘nearly fainted’ when the doctors uncovered her, and she thought Sir Charles Clarke ‘rough & coarse & indecent in the way he moved her clothes.’58 Clarke may have been hoping to feel if the uterus was enlarged. If Flora really was four months pregnant, he might have been able to do so. But – as was forcefully pointed out in the following furore – he might also, through his examination, have ‘taken’ Flora’s ‘virginity’ himself, breaking her hymen with his cold-creamed finger. This had terrible implications for Flora’s future, as it would leave her unmarriageable. It was grave violence upon Flora’s person, a sort of rape, and it happened under Victoria’s roof at Buckingham Palace with Victoria’s own connivance.

  The two doctors agreed that they hadn’t found any conclusive evidence of pregnancy. But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. Sir Charles Clarke reported back to the queen that he’d definitely felt ‘an enlargement in the womb like a child’. Flora might be pregnant despite her virginity: ‘one could not tell if such things could not happen.’59 Indeed, the London Medical and Physical Journal had recently reported on the curious case of a pregnant woman who had not experienced penetrative sex.60 After all, there were other forms of sexual intimacy.

  And there, unsatisfactorily, matters had to rest. ‘D—it,’ cursed Melbourne. He couldn’t even dismiss anyone from the household for spreading false rumours. After all, the gossip had been begun by the queen herself.61

  In March, then, Buckingham Palace was ‘full of bickerings and heart-burnings’.62 And as spring turned into summer, the scandal seeped out from the palace walls and began to appear in London tittle-tattle and in the newspapers too.

  Some people thought that Conroy was behind the leaks, with the aim of damaging Victoria. Yet this is unlikely, because he had much to lose. The very darkest rumours named him as the father.

  Conroy and Flora certainly shared a sturdy personal bond, strong enough to appear sexual even if it wasn’t. She once wrote to him naming him as her ‘dearest Friend’, and thanking him for allowing her ‘to enter into [his] feelings’.63 Victoria herself was only too eager to believe that Conroy, a ‘monster and demon incarnate’, had committed adultery with Flora Hastings.64 It was noted that at the end of her period of waiting the previous October, Conroy had escorted Flora by carriage to the docks to catch a steamboat to Edinburgh.65 No one else had been present in the vehicle. Probably the baby had been conceived then.

  These flames of rumour took on political significance. They were vigorously fanned by the Tories, who suggested that Melbourne was the lazy, immoral guardian of the young queen’s virtue, failing in his responsibility to keep her household in order. The position of Melbourne and the Whigs, their enemies said, was ‘most dictatorial, most despotic’.66 ‘The Gruncher’ thought Melbourne’s government ‘miserably weak, dragging on a sickly existence’ supported only by the favouritism of the queen.67

  Others, though, considered the business more damaging to Victoria, because it brought her grievance against her mother out into the public sphere. Flora was technically part of the household of the duchess. Dr James Clark had served both mother and daughter, but the duchess had dismissed him at once after the horrible examination, while Victoria had kept him on. This had been observed. Melbourne was warned that the rift was becoming ‘the great topic of conversation all over London’, and that Victoria was being painted as that worst of all possible things, an ungrateful daughter.68 ‘It would augur unfavourably for her character and the prospects of her reign,’ ran one newspaper comment, ‘were she not submissive of the guidance of her mother.’69 If Victoria threw off such a powerful bond, surely she must be dangerously out of control?

  Three months after Flora’s waist first drew attention, this scandal born in a bedchamber came to have serious political consequences. In May, Melbourne’s government had fallen. By tradition, the monarch’s inner circle and closest servants would stand down at a change of government, to be replaced by others politically affiliated with the new regime. The incoming Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, requested that Victoria dismiss her women-of-the-bedchamber as tradition dictated. She stubbornly refused. She argued that the custom must change for a female ruler, whose private life should remain more private than a male’s, and whose intimate staff should therefore stay in post.

  Intellectually, Victoria had a good point. Emotionally, though, she was also revealing that she was still in the grip of the ‘System’. She had grown over-reliant on her Whig courtiers like Lady Portman because they were her allies against her mother.

  But Victoria now defied the whole constitutional apparatus of the country in the way that she had once defied Conroy. When she was angry, her complexion would turn ‘slightly purple … the contrast of the darkening countenance and the light rapid movements of her blue large eyes suggests the aspect of a stormy sky’. As the unfortunate Robert Peel now discovered when he asked her to dismiss her staff, ‘there is force … in her face’.70 She looked imperious. She was imperious. ‘They wanted to deprive me of my Ladies,’ she wrote, furiously, to Melbourne, in a letter that was laid before the Cabinet. ‘They wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England.’71

  In consequence of her wrath, Peel felt he had no choice but to step down, therefore returning Melbourne to power once again. To Victoria, it seemed like victory: she still had ‘Lord M.’ coming to visit her each day. But she’d damaged her authority. An anonymous open letter addressed to the queen appeared in The Times; it was in fact written by her future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. With ‘the rapidity of enchantment’, he warned her, she would find herself the mere puppet of a clique.72

  The issue may seem trivial. Yet pulling back to see the bigger picture reveals that Victoria and her ministers were really in the process of thrashing out how politics was going to work following the Great Reform Act. The convention had long been that a monarch invited a Prime Minister to form a government. Only then did the Prime Minister go to the voters to ask for support. Elections had traditionally been just a final rubber stamp of approval upon the monarch’s choice.

  But there was now a larger, more confident electorate, harder for a monarch to ignore. And in any case a wise monarch had always chosen a Prime Minister with great care, taking the trouble to discover which candidate would be able to win the support of his colleagues in Parliament, and placing good government above personal gratification or pique. Following Victoria’s tantrum of 1839, and her rejection of Peel, Melbourne did indeed continue to serve for a couple of years. In 1841, though, for the very first time, the opposition would win a general election, and Melbourne would be gone for good.73 When she stamped her foot at Peel in the summer of 1839, Victoria was in fact blithely squandering some of the influence her predecessors had possessed.74

  Victoria, then, was perilously overconfident in the last week of June. After her visit to Flora’s sickroom, she told Melbourne that the latest doctor on the case was a worrier, and ‘overrated danger’. Melbourne disagreed, but rather than argue, he went off to the Houses of Parliament to help pass a Beer Bill. Victoria rode out in the park, had twenty-two people to a dinner of turbot and ‘Sir Loin of Roast Beef’ and spent the evening (‘Alas!’) with ‘no Lord Melbourne at all’.75

  And unfortunately for Victoria, the pessimistic doctor was proved right. In the days that followed, Flora grew ever worse, constantl
y vomiting, swollen in the belly and experiencing something the Court Circular called ‘black jaundice’.76 She remained heroically dignified to the last. ‘Is it not well,’ she wrote in a poem addressed to her sisters called ‘The Swan Song’, ‘to pass away ere life hath lost its brightness?’77 She was also kind and wise enough to give the young queen the benefit of the doubt. ‘I do not believe,’ she wrote, that Victoria even ‘understands that I can have been injured by a rumour.’78

  On Friday 5 July, at two o’clock in the morning, Flora did finally die, ‘without a struggle’, just raising her hands into the air, and giving one single gasp.79 And then, at long last, the truth was revealed. A post-mortem showed that she’d been suffering from highly advanced liver disease. The ‘enlargement of the person’ had been caused by a swollen liver, not by pregnancy after all.80

  Victoria was determined to show ‘no remorse’ and felt ‘I had done nothing to kill her.’81 But many of her subjects disagreed. ‘The public, the women particularly, have taken up the Cause of Lady Flora,’ it was said.82 When Victoria rode out, she found ‘the people in the Park cold, & not taking off their hats’. Even within doors, at her regular Buckingham Palace receptions, ‘she was slightly hissed’.83 In later life, when she’d developed more self-awareness, Victoria admitted that she’d made a costly mistake. ‘Yes! I was very hot about it,’ she recalled, many years later, ‘but I was very young, only 20 & never should have acted so again.’84 Melbourne, she came to realise, ‘was too much a party man’, and had made her ‘a party Queen’.85

  But the personal results of the Lady Flora affair were even more far-reaching than the political. The people who mattered in the political establishment concluded that Victoria could not go on as she was, making misjudgements like this. She picked this up, and gradually began, in turn, to lose confidence in herself. Her letters of later 1839 reveal growing anxiety, fears for her health and fatigue. Not even Uncle Leopold’s good advice could help. ‘I have had so much to do and so many people to see,’ she told him, ‘that I feel quite confused, and have written shockingly.’86

  Victoria may have been brought up by Lehzen to admire Elizabeth I, but she wasn’t capable of emulating her. She didn’t have the brains, the background or the dedication to remain on the throne alone. She also had the misfortune to live in an age that was beginning to expect less of women. The family had previously been an economic unit, with all its members working and contributing. But the Industrial Revolution had begun to provide working men with large enough wages to aspire to keep their wives at home. These changing expectations applied even to the queen. ‘You lead rather an unnatural life for a young person,’ Melbourne told her. ‘It’s the life of a man.’87

  And it was Melbourne who presented the possible solution. Victoria complained what a ‘torment’ it would be to have her mother living with her as a chaperone for as long as she remained unmarried. ‘Well then,’ Melbourne said. ‘There’s that way of settling it.’88

  Oh, but she ‘dreaded the thought of marrying’, Victoria said at once. She was ‘so accustomed’ to having her own way.89 But Melbourne did not give the customary light and jokey reply she might have expected. Instead he asked whether Prince Albert wasn’t coming over to England again soon.

  And so, out of Flora’s stuffy sickroom, and Victoria’s failure to grasp its significance, the process of taming the nation’s naughty daughter finally began.

  PART TWO

  The Good Wife

  10

  The Proposal: Windsor Castle, 10–15 October 1839

  Not just Melbourne, but the whole nation of Britain had come to believe that Victoria needed a man about the house.

  Waking up at Windsor Castle on the morning of Thursday 10 October 1839, she was shocked to find the glass of her dressing-room window shattered and her two looking glasses broken. It was the work of a stranger throwing stones over the castle wall while an inattentive guard was on duty. The next month, a lunatic was apprehended actually inside the castle grounds. He explained that he’d climbed over the gate because ‘like all other men who wanted wives’, he was looking out for one, and he thought Her Majesty would do for him. The following intruder, in December, was a ‘personage attired like a foreigner of distinction’ with ‘a boa round his neck, and furred gloves’.1 He had dispatches that, he insisted, he must personally deliver into the hands of the queen.

  Even the lunatics of Britain believed that their queen was all too single. And the German side of Victoria’s family believed it most strongly of all. ‘It is carried nem. com. by the Coburgs,’ the satirical papers said, ‘that she ought to be in the family way, and forthwith someone is sent over for the purpose … just like a parish bull.’2

  The ship bringing the Coburgs’ chosen ‘parish bull’ to Britain moored at the quay by the Tower of London at 4 p.m. of the very same day of the window-breaking incident, ‘after a very bad and almost dangerous passage’.3 Albert, always a poor traveller, must have been very green. Two of the queen’s carriages, each drawn by four horses, were waiting on the quayside to convey him and his brother Ernest to Windsor.

  The journey through London and out to the west was made through falling autumn rain. ‘Never was such weather known,’ the papers complained, ‘and all the crops are injured.’4 It was evening before Albert and Ernest began the steep ascent towards Windsor Castle. Its many windows glowed, for the lamps were lit throughout the whole building at four. As it hugged the skyline, the castle’s ‘thick walls and numerous towers’ gave ‘the impression of a small citadel’.5 It was an impressive, but not a welcoming sight.

  When the cavalcade finally drew to a halt before St George’s Tower in the castle at 7.30 p.m., Albert was ready to give up on the suggestion that he might become the husband of this cold country’s queen.

  Despite the long-standing agreement between their families, Albert felt he had been kept waiting for an intolerably long time. He’d only agreed to come to England now with the intention of putting an end to all the speculation. He climbed out of the carriage ‘with the quiet but firm resolution to declare’ that, exhausted by delay and hesitation, he was going to withdraw ‘entirely from the affair’.6

  A proud man, Albert felt that he was becoming a laughing stock. Never mind that, as the second son, he wasn’t the heir to his father Ernest, Duke of Coburg-Gotha. Never mind that Coburg – at 201 square miles – was merely half the size of the Isle of Wight. Never mind that its 40,000 inhabitants gave it a population comparable only to the town of Leicester. Albert still had a decent sense of his own worth.

  The biographer A. N. Wilson points out that British historians writing about the nineteenth century ritually compare the small geographical size of German states like Coburg to English counties with the purpose of belittling them. And what Albert had to offer wasn’t really his background in Coburg, even though his home state had an impressive reputation among its peers for being forward-thinking. Instead, Albert’s qualifications as a queen’s husband were his pure, ancient blood and his beautiful face and body. In this he was fulfilling the conventional role of a princess in a royal marriage. At 5 feet 7, he was just the right amount taller than Victoria. In modern times people might worry about the genetic consequences of first cousins mating, but in a century when people believed that they could only marry within their social class, the pool of potential spouses was smaller – for royalty, the pool was a puddle – and needs must. It would be impossible for Victoria to find a socially acceptable suitor to whom she wasn’t in some way related.

  And, perhaps most importantly, Albert had the innate confidence, almost the arrogance, of the Coburgs. Under the leadership of his and Victoria’s common grandmother, the old Duchess Augusta, the sons and daughters of Coburg had not only survived, but thrived, upon the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars. They’d made a string of dazzling marriages into the royal families of Europe. One of Albert’s aunts had married the Russian Tsar’s brother. An uncle would sire the Portuguese royal dynasty. And Albe
rt was retracing the footsteps of his Uncle Leopold, husband to Victoria’s cousin Charlotte, whose tragic early death had deprived Leopold of the chance of becoming Prince Consort of Great Britain.

  Although he suffered so terribly from motion sickness, Albert had travelled far and wide since his ungracious visit to Kensington Palace for Victoria’s seventeenth birthday. Now twenty years old, he’d been on the traditional educational Grand Tour, spending eighteen months at the University of Bonn, studying languages in Florence and then going on to Rome, where he’d met a serious German circle of antiquaries, archaeologists and artists who would become his taste-makers.7 He’d been accompanied on his travels by his Uncle Leopold’s sidekick Baron Stockmar, and by a young British army officer whose job (at which he had not been entirely successful) was to get Albert to speak English like a native.8 Albert was a hard worker. ‘Every morning by five o’clock,’ he told his tutor, ‘I sit down by my little student’s lamp.’9 He felt that his ‘power of forming a right judgement’ had been much increased by his travels.10 He liked nothing better than to complete an essay on an abstract topic such as ‘The Mode of Thought of the Germans’, and he would stick at such projects ‘despite all the distractions of our life’.11

  It was clearly a serious young man, ‘prudent, cautious and already very well informed’, as Stockmar put it, who stalked stiffly towards the entrance to the castle’s state apartments. There was a certain stiffness to his character, too, ‘a thoughtfulness, quite unusual at so young age’, which made him seem ‘older than he is’.12 But his precise, proud nature was countered by his wonderful body. ‘Externally,’ Stockmar explained, ‘he has everything attractive to women.’13 The many close descriptions of Victoria, treating her purely as a physical specimen, make her sound like an animal, but Albert comes in for the same treatment. Specifically, he was ‘wide shouldered, rather too short in the neck – well proportioned as to the length of his limbs, though the knees are not quite cleanly knit’. His handsome face was pretty much ‘impossible to resist’.14 What a shame, then, that he’d come to Windsor to break his unspoken engagement.