The Ministerial majority became almost minimal, while troubles from all quarters seemed to press simultaneously upon them . . . The extreme popularity of the Sovereign, reflecting some lustre on her Ministers, had enabled them, though not without difficulty, to tide through the session of 1838; but when Parliament met in 1839 their prospects were dark, and it was known that there was a section of the extreme Liberals who would not be deeply mortified if the Government were overthrown.19
At this point the Tories’ impatience and frustration found a new target – the Queen herself. It is a measure of the abrupt fall in her popularity that they felt they could exploit this issue so bluntly and effectively.
The Lady Flora Hastings affair has been often related, but it has a supreme importance not only in British political history but in the life of Prince Albert, at this stage virtually forgotten by Queen Victoria but not at all unhappy in his scholarship and companions.
Lady Flora was thirty-two years of age, a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Kent, a Tory, and a vehement, astringent, and unwise ally of Conroy in the interminable and ferocious battles that had now moved from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace. Victoria regarded her as a Conroy spy and disliked her intensely, thereby causing another abrupt decline in her relationship with her mother, which subsequently gave her so much anguish. ‘Oh! I am so wretched to think how, for a time, two people most wickedly estranged us’, she wrote on her mother’s death in 1861; ‘. . . it drives me wild now’. At the time, her feelings were very different, and very antagonistic.
In the autumn of 1838 Lady Flora and Conroy travelled together to Scotland, and on her return to Court in November both the Queen and Lehzen noted that her figure had suspiciously enlarged, and drew the obvious conclusion; ‘we have no doubt’, Victoria wrote, ‘that she is – to use the plain words – with child!!’ Also, she had no doubt that the cause was ‘the Monster and Devil Incarnate, whose name I forbear to mention’. When Lady Flora indignantly refused to submit to a full medical examination by the Queen’s physician (and that of the Duchess), Sir James Clark, the Queen’s conviction seemed, not surprisingly, to have been confirmed, to her great pleasure. By this stage the matter was being discussed freely in Court and political circles, and Lady Flora did eventually submit to an examination which revealed that she was not, and never had been, pregnant. A public certificate to that effect was published, and Greville wrote that ‘The Court is plunged in shame and mortification at the exposure . . . The Palace is full of bickerings and heart-burnings, while the whole proceeding is looked upon by society at large as to the last degree disgusting and disgraceful’. Queen Victoria was appalled, and endeavoured to make amends to her mother and Lady Flora, but any hope of a reasonable conclusion to the episode was destroyed by Conroy, the Hastings family, and the Tories.
At the centre of the attack was the persistent demand as to who had initiated and circulated the calumnies against Lady Flora. Suspicion was levelled against Lehzen personally and the Whig ladies of the Court, and specifically, those ‘of the bedchamber’. Lady Flora herself ominously blamed ‘a certain foreign lady’ but also the conspiratorial machinations of the Whig ladies in a letter to her uncle, Hamilton Fitzgerald, which was published in The Examiner, the Dowager Marchioness Hastings sent her correspondence with Melbourne to The Morning Post. The Tories were in tumult, the newspapers were in full cry, and there was a call for a special committee of enquiry into the alleged diabolical activities of the Whig ladies.
The public hubbub was immense, and deeply unnerving for the young Queen. No one in public life enjoys criticism, and particularly the first experiences are deeply discomfiting and hurtful. The Queen had got used to ecstatic huzzahs from Parliament and the newspapers, and reacted violently against the unexpected hostility, derision, and harsh innuendo to which she was now subjected. Melbourne wisely ignored her imperious demands that criticism of the Sovereign should be legally prohibited, and – although vainly – urged a philosophical acceptance of the disagreeable aspects of public service. Melbourne’s advice on the handling of the Hastings affair had been lamentable, but the Queen did not blame him for his ineptitude and poor advice – as she could very reasonably have done – but clung to him all the more strongly. ‘I am but a poor helpless girl, who clings to him for support and protection – and the thought of ALL ALL my happiness being possibly at stake, so completely overcame me that I burst into tears and remained crying for some time’. Unhappiness and loneliness were also accompanied with anger against her mother, Conroy, the Hastings family, and the unspeakable Tories with their vicious newspapers and scurrilous allegations. In these bleak and unhappy circumstances the slender Parliamentary majority of the Government eroded to only five on the proposal to suspend the Constitution of Jamaica. This was on May 7th, and Melbourne informed the Queen that the Cabinet considered that the vote ‘leave your Majesty’s confidential servants no alternative but to resign their offices into your Majesty’s hands’.
This event, coming at the height of the tumult over the treatment of Lady Flora Hastings, was a shattering blow to the Queen. The loss of ‘Lord M.’ would have been difficult to bear under any circumstances, but under these they were seen by her to be catastrophic. Her reactions were emotional and personal, but the political – and personal – consequences were to be momentous.
Most historians have been highly censorious of what then ensued; a few have taken Queen Victoria’s side, but the key factor is the context in which the crisis took place. The Queen’s hostility towards the Tories was now intensely augmented by the furore over Hastings. She felt herself to be virtually alone and was deeply estranged from her mother. The Tories were her bitter enemies, Melbourne and Lehzen and the Whig ladies at Court her only allies. ‘I clung to someone and having very warm feelings,’ she described her relationship with Melbourne in later years; ‘Albert thinks I worked myself up to what really became quite foolish’. He was right, but the political fact in the summer of 1839 was she was indeed ‘worked up’.
The Queen was not in an emotional condition to see the situation calmly, nor did she. She was distraught, and particularly responded to Melbourne’s advice, which developed from ‘Your Majesty had better express your hope that none of your Majesty’s Household, except those who are engaged in politics may be removed’, to the much stronger statement that ‘they’ll not touch your ladies’, to which the Queen replied that ‘I said they dared not and I never would allow it’. Thus was the scene set for the next stage of the crisis.
The Duke of Wellington, when summoned, declined the offer of the Premiership and advised the Queen to send for Peel. The Duke had no enthusiasm whatever for the Tories, and doubted whether he would serve in the new Ministry unless it were absolutely necessary. Under such forbidding circumstances did the Queen reluctantly summon Sir Robert Peel. This meeting was hardly a notable success. Victoria thought him ‘embarrassed and put out’, which was hardly surprising, considering that she subjected him to a eulogy on the virtues of Melbourne; she considered him a ‘cold, unfeeling, disagreeable man’, and was infinitely depressed by ‘the awful incomprehensible change’. ‘Oh! how different, how dreadfully different to that frank, open, natural and most kind warm manner of Lord Melbourne!’
Melbourne had warned her not ‘to be affected by any faultiness of manner which you may observe. Depend upon it, there is no personal hostility to Lord Melbourne nor any bitter feelings against him. Sir Robert is the most cautious and reserved of mankind. Nobody seems to Lord Melbourne to know him, but he is not therefore deceitful or dishonest. Many a very false man has a very open sincere manner, and vice versa’. But even if Peel had possessed formidable resources of personal warmth and charm, nothing could have availed him at this moment with the Queen. He was a Tory; therefore he was her enemy. Peel’s natural reserve, and the uncomfortable nature of the audience and its attendant circumstances, clearly did not assist matters, but it was not really important. When she mad
e the point about the Household Ladies, he was noncommittal. Melbourne, with whom she was in close, and doubtfully proper, correspondence, advised her ‘to use this question of the Household strongly as a matter due to yourself and your own wishes; but if Sir Robert is unable to concede it, it will not do to refuse and put off the negotiations upon it’.
The fact was that the Ladies of the Household were totally partisan, and several were closely related to leading Whig families, and this point had been made several times during the Flora Hastings controversy, which was still raging. Lady Lansdowne, wife of the Lord President of the Council, was First Lady of the Bedchamber; one sister of the Irish Secretary was Mistress of the Robes and another was a Lady of the Bedchamber, as was Lady Normanby, the wife of the highly controversial former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Queen Victoria’s own experiences led her to the very real – and by no means unwarranted – fear that the new Government would remove Lehzen as well as her Whig allies, and give Conroy his final and complete triumph. Thus, her passionate personal desire to see Melbourne return as her chief adviser had another aspect – the need to defeat Conroy and retain the limited independence and authority for which she had had to fight so hard. If there had been no Flora Hastings scandal and no Conroy-encouraged Tory demands for the wholesale removal of the Whig ladies there well might not have been any crisis over the position of the Ladies of the Bedchamber.
The Queen now took this up as the issue with Peel. It was her first experience of dealing with this remarkable man, and she was fortunate that he was to prove himself a man of honour and discretion, with complete loyalty to the Throne. ‘Sir Robert Peel’, Disraeli was to write of him in a celebrated passage, ‘had a bad manner of which he was sensible; he was by nature very shy, but forced early in life into eminent positions, he had formed an artificial manner, haughtily stiff or exuberantly bland, of which, generally speaking, he could not divest himself’. The Queen’s intransigence, now proof against even the pleadings of Wellington and the warnings of Melbourne, completely disconcerted him. She informed him that she intended to keep all the Laidies, and would not budge from this position. Even Melbourne was doubtful about the propriety of taking so intransigent an attitude, particularly as Peel himself never proposed the kind of sweeping changes that the Queen feared – or claimed to fear. Melbourne’s colleagues, however, took a more robust view, and Melbourne himself swiftly saw the personal and political advantages. The Queen stood her ground, and Peel considered that his position was hopeless. In reality, he was not deeply disappointed politically, although wounded personally by the Queen’s attitude to him. He was very well aware of his own difficulties within his Party, and was perhaps over-conscious of national problems, particularly with regard to Ireland. Wellington could not conceal his relief that a serious obstacle to a Tory Government had been discovered. The Tories panted for Office, their leaders were more wary, but even if they had shared their followers’ hunger the Queen’s attitude would not have been much different. ‘Do not fear that I was not calm and composed’, she wrote to Melbourne. ‘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’. To Melbourne she also wrote that ‘The Queen of England will not submit to such treachery’. On May 10th Peel gave up, and Melbourne and the Whigs were back.
The Tories were outraged, but were so astounded by the turn of events and the collapse of their own leader that the gunfire of their fury ranged on a considerable number of targets. Brougham launched a three-hour philippic in the Lords against Melbourne and the Queen which was, as Greville wrote, ‘received by the Tory Lords with enthusiastic applause, vociferous cheering throughout, and two or three rounds at the conclusion’, but Brougham characteristically went too far, and Wellington pointedly would not support him. Greville considered that ‘He looks to the Crown of England, and not to the misguided little person who wears it’, but Wellington’s game was deeper than this. For the moment the Tories were utterly discomfited and felt outmanoeuvred by a subtler foe rather than simply by the implacable partisanship of the Queen. It was fortunate that they did not know the whole truth, or realise how deeply their own abuse of her over the Hastings affair had alienated her. They were also not to know that this was the last occasion on which a British Sovereign was able to prevent the formation of a Ministry which was politically uncongenial to the Monarch.
Such was the famous Bedchamber Crisis – or, as Disraeli called it, the Bedchamber Plot. Although it was a major victory for the Queen, it was very dearly bought. Disraeli, writing – very fortunately for his future relations with the Queen – under a pseudonym in The Times denounced her attitude and actions in an open letter to her: ‘You will find yourself with the rapidity of enchantment the centre and puppet of a camarilla, and Victoria, in the eyes of that Europe which once bowed to her, and in the hearts of those Englishmen who once yielded to her their devotions, will be reduced to the level of Madrid and Lisbon’. Stockmar was appalled: ‘The late events in England distress me’, he wrote. ‘How could they let the Queen make such mistakes, to the injury of the monarchy?’
‘It is a high trial of our institutions when the caprice of a girl of nineteen can overturn a great Ministerial combination’, wrote Greville, ‘and when the most momentous matters of Government and legislation are influenced by her pleasure about her Ladies of the Bedchamber . . . This making the private gratification of the Queen paramount to the highest public considerations: somewhat strange Whig doctrines and practice!’ But Greville also saw – as did many others – the real impropriety of Victoria’s conduct, dealing simultaneously with a resigned Ministry as though it had not resigned and with marked hostility to the incoming one as though it were not the constitutional alternative to the former one.
The crisis only lasted for four days, but the blatantly partisan conduct of the Queen was not forgotten or forgiven by the bitterly disappointed Tories. When Lady Flora Hastings died in July from a tumour on her liver, their fury and scorn reached new levels of virulence. Queen Victoria was hissed at Ascot, was derided as ‘Mrs. Melbourne’, and the feelings were so intense that she told Melbourne that ‘if I were a private individual I should leave the country immediately, as I was so disgusted at the perpetual opposition’. Greville wrote that ‘The Libels in the Morning Post, so far from being stopped, have only been more venomous since her [Lady Flora Hastings’] death and this soi-disant conservative paper daily writes against the Queen with the most revolting virulence and indecency’. Melbourne publicly denied that he had given the Queen any advice ‘whatever’ on the matter of the ladies, and that he had resumed office ‘solely because I will not abandon my sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress’, and Peel behaved with great dignity and loyalty. Under such lowering circumstances the Whig-Irish-Radical combination renewed its very precarious and highly unpopular existence.
After the crisis had subsided, more sensible counsels prevailed. There could be no early reconciliation between Victoria and her mother, but the Court could and should include Ladies of Tory family; this was done gradually. (‘Flies are caught with honey, not with vinegar’, as Melbourne sagely told her, as he, somewhat belatedly, tried to cool her partisan passion against all Tories). Melbourne remained disturbed about the circumstances in which he had returned to Office, and from this moment whatever zest he had for politics noticeably declined. Lassitude fell upon him, and even the pleasure of the Queen’s company was inadequate compensation for the weariness of continuing an unpopular minority confederation in office. His health began to deteriorate, he tired quickly, and his weary cynicism became increasingly evident. ‘I do not dislike the Tories’, he told the Queen, ‘I think they are very much like the others: I do not care by whom I am supported; I consider them all as one: I do not care by whom I am helped as long as I am helped’. He no longer seriously feared Revolution. And thus, very slowly, his influence upo
n the Queen began to fade.
Although she had triumphed in retaining the Whigs, Queen Victoria’s self-confidence had been seriously shaken by the combination of the Hastings affair, the continuing troubles over her mother and Conroy, and the Bedchamber Crisis. In April, for the first time, she spoke to Melbourne seriously about the possibility of marriage – emphasising that ‘my feeling is quite against ever marrying’ and describing it to him as ‘the shocking alternative’ to dependence upon her mother – and mentioned Leopold’s ‘great wish’ that she should marry Albert. Melbourne at once tackled the political point – would he take the side of the Duchess? The Queen ‘answered him he need have no fear whatever on that score’. Melbourne was not enthusiastic about first cousins marrying, and they spoke of other possible alternatives to the Coburg connection which Melbourne, like his former master, King William, so detested. But Melbourne’s lack of enthusiasm was easily matched by Queen Victoria’s: ‘I said I dreaded the thought of marrying; that I was so accustomed to have my own way, that I thought it was 10 to 1 I shouldn’t agree with anybody’. The only definite decision was that a proposed visit to England by Duke Ernest and his sons in October would still take place. When Victoria asked Melbourne whether he had heard of Albert’s habit of falling asleep after dinner he replied that ‘he was very glad to hear of it’.
It was at this time that she sent to Leopold the bleak warning to which reference has already been made on page 52, but her situation and attitude were both changing. By August Melbourne’s lack of enthusiasm was still very marked, but while Queen Victoria’s distaste for two of her Saxe-Coburg uncles remained – she described Duke Ferdinand as the ‘stingy one’, and Duke Ernest as ‘the difficult one’, and resented their constant applications to her for money – she reacted with some imitation of Melbourne’s coolness, remarking that she ‘heard Albert’s praises on all sides, and that he was very handsome’. But there were other factors, which at the time she perceived, as her discussions with Melbourne demonstrate. Her initial popularity had virtually disappeared; the political situation was very ugly; she was utterly estranged from her mother; and she was surrounded by considerably older people, in few of whom she reposed any confidence or affection. She was suddenly desperately lonely, and subsequently wrote: ‘A worse school for a young girl, or one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections, cannot well be imagined, than the position of a Queen at eighteen, without experience and without a husband to guide and support her’.
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