by Julia Baird
The rush of tenderness Melbourne felt for Victoria surprised and pleased him. The year before she became queen, his only child, Augustus, had died at the age of nineteen. Doctors said he had the mind of an eight-year-old. Nothing worked: the leeches regularly attached to his skull, the starvation, the magnetizing of his head, or the scorching of his skull with caustic acid. He had lived with Lord Melbourne after Caroline died, often spending hours staring into space. Melbourne had struggled to love him, but when he lost his only child, he was reminded of the woman he once loved, of the loss of his small, fractured family, and that he was again alone.
In Victoria, Melbourne suddenly had the child, the companion, and the affection he had long craved. She told him everything. By July, they were talking about, as she wrote in her journal, “very important & even to me painful things.” He responded kindly to her naked bids for reassurance. When she complained, “Everyone grows but me,” he replied, “I think you are grown.” She was not bashful or shy, he said, she just had a “sensitive and susceptible temperament.” Knowing how much Victoria disliked her mother, he also harshly criticized the Duchess of Kent. One diary entry of Victoria’s detailed how Victoria and Melbourne spoke about her mother “for a long time.” He said: “I never saw so foolish a woman.” Victoria added, “Which is very true; and we laughed at Stockmar’s calling her ‘such a stupid woman,’ which I’m sorry to say is also true.” Their familiarity was striking.
Victoria and Lord Melbourne saw each other every day for about five hours. It was a cozy, domesticated relationship spent talking, eating large meals, playing chess, and riding across the parks. When Melbourne was near her, the shrewd Princess Lieven wrote, “he looks loving, contented, a little pleased with himself; respectful, at his ease…and dreamy and gay—all mixed up together.” They teased each other affectionately: Victoria poked fun at his accent—he pronounced gold as “goold” and Rome as “Room”—and his tendency to nod off in the middle of functions.
The little queen, who was the happiest she had ever been, listed Melbourne’s witty epigrams and aphorisms carefully in her journal. She thought him and his irreverence hilarious: On reform: “You had better try to do no good, and then you’ll get into no scrapes.” On doctors: “English physicians kill you, the French let you die.” On women: “It is very rare that women are kind to one another.” On horticulture: “All gardens are dull, a garden is a dull thing.” When the Duke of Richmond said it was shocking that people came out of prisons worse than when they went in, Melbourne responded, “I’m afraid there are many places one comes out of worse than one went in; one often comes out worse of a ballroom than one went in.” He made Victoria “die with laughing.”
Best of all, Melbourne made her feel safe. And yet he was far from the ideal partner for her. There were three things he failed to do: first, to smooth tensions with her mother (despite telling her how important it was to be seen as a dutiful daughter); second, to convince her she was the queen of an entire country, not just of the Whigs. The third was a failure to stimulate her nascent social conscience: he strongly impressed upon her that any uprisings, protests, or demands for change were driven by a small group of disgruntled individuals. He kept her from the reality of explosive growth during the Industrial Revolution, which saw an entire group of people thrust into urban poverty as ugly, crowded shanties mushroomed around large towns, given no opportunity for escape and no voice in Parliament.
The most troubling failure, in the long term, was the third point. Melbourne thought that children should be able to work instead of starve and that education would make people unhappy. He said he “did not like any of the Poor, but those who are poor through their own fault, I quite detest.” He scoffed at Victoria’s interest in the world Charles Dickens wrote about. When she told him on New Year’s Day, 1839, about Oliver Twist’s story of “squalid vice” and “starvation in the Workhouses and Schools,” Melbourne replied, “I do not like those things: I wish to avoid them. I do not like them in reality and therefore I do not like to see them represented.” Victoria argued with him in vain. For the rest of her life, she would fail to concertedly champion attempts to alleviate poverty or improve basic living and working conditions. Victoria’s problem was not lack of concern about social ills but lack of exposure to them.
But in the short term, the greatest failing was the second: the failure to educate the queen on her constitutional duty of impartiality, as Leopold had done in the past and Albert would do in the future. Victoria was an unabashed Whig like her father and friends, and she used “we” in referring to herself and the Melbourne government. What she failed to realize was that Melbourne was naturally conservative and a Whig more by background than belief. He occasionally tried to convince her that Tories were not bad people and that she would need to work with them in the future, but she shrugged him off, calling opposition leader Robert Peel a “nasty wretch.” When the Whigs won the first general election of her reign by a large margin, Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory, wrote: “It is a fact that the little Queen clapped her hands.” The Tories watched the relationship between the queen and her chief minister bloom, annoyed. The prominent conservative Charles Arbuthnot said, “With the young foolish Queen against us we can have but little hope.” Victoria still refused to talk about politics with anyone but the prime minister.
—
By the end of 1838, after little more than a year as queen, Victoria had grown bored with her shiny new life. The work was relentless, she was tired of the banquets and balls, and most of her companions were several decades her senior. She started to wonder if she was as able as she had once thought. By December, she was irritable, depressed, and fretting: “I felt how unfit I was for my station.” People also wondered how Melbourne could stand it, the nights of “shilling whist with the Duchess of Kent [and] six hours a day of tête-à-tête with the Queen” and the need to put a “perpetual check on swearing and loose talk.” It was curious behavior from the man who was supposed to be running the country. Melbourne became defensive about whether his life as mentor, tutor, and paternal court jester was distracting him from matters of state. Yet, at a vulnerable moment, when Greville congratulated him for his care of Victoria, he cried, “By God, I am at it morning, noon and night!”
Victoria also felt physically run down. Melbourne thought she looked “yellow.” She overate out of boredom and opportunity. Melbourne told her that the simple solution was to walk, and to eat only when she was hungry; she responded that she should then be eating all day. Walking, she said, made her feel sick. Melbourne also told her to stop drinking beer, which she loved. By December, a “cross and low” Victoria found to her distress that she weighed 125 pounds—an “incredible weight for my size.” People were starting to whisper that her dresses were being made larger, and that she was already losing her looks, at eighteen. Melbourne assured Victoria that wine was good for her, and that anyway, the best figure for a woman was “full with a fine bust.” Lord Holland politely observed that she had “perhaps rather more appearance of a full habit of body than nice & nervous observers of health would quite approve.”
Victoria was growing cross at her reflection. Not only was she getting fat, she thought, but her hair was dark, and her eyebrows were too thin (she asked Melbourne if shaving them would make them thicker; he advised against it). Her face was still youthful, of course, with creamy skin, large, expressive, and intense eyes, a straight nose, and a small pink mouth. It was not her appearance, really, that was the problem. She was sluggish; the unusually energetic queen described some days simply as “Dawdled.” At the end of April she wrote, “This year I did not enjoy pleasure so much…quite changed from what I was last year.” Victoria sank deeper and deeper into a funk. She put off bathing and brushing her teeth and came up with a myriad of poor excuses to avoid exercise. Her maids bore the brunt of her temper, especially her dressers, who had a task she now hated—helping her squeeze into increasingly tight clothes.
Victoria’s temper flar
ed over any breaches of etiquette, and she often upbraided her mother, whose very presence irritated her. She wrote on one such occasion, “I told Lord Melbourne that I had carried my point with Mama about coming up to my room without asking. She was angry at first. I had to remind her who I was.” Melbourne did not escape her occasional outbursts either. One night in summer, she said his company bored her because he had been too ill to talk. She began to chastise him for snoring during sermons and overeating. She was jealous when other women commanded his attention at dinner, and when he spent nights at the popular salon at Holland House. She even once asked him if he thought Lady Holland prettier than her. No one, she scribbled in her journal, frowning, cared for him more than she did.
The stubborn will that had assisted Victoria so magnificently in her struggles against Conroy had now, with the heady indulgence of power, hardened into an imperious air. Stockmar compared her to her Hanoverian uncles, describing her as “passionate as a spoiled child.” If she was offended, she threw “everything overboard without exception.” She began to feel that a person in her position should not be told what to do or think—and Stockmar despaired that Lehzen was encouraging her in this, “just like the nurse who hits the stone that tripped the child up.”
Sycophants and indulgent confidants surrounded the young queen. Her uncle Leopold had always advised her to be unbending, to show that once she had made a decision, “no unearthly power will make her change.” An already stubborn young woman needed little encouragement to be more so, especially when so many were loath to contradict her. This would be painfully obvious in the twin calamities of the next few months, when her two great passions—her love for Lord Melbourne and her hatred of Conroy—would cause her to stumble spectacularly. She had learned how to love, and she had learned how to hate, but she had not yet learned how to rule. Victoria was woefully unprepared for what lay ahead.
* * *
* In a letter to her mother-in-law, his wife, Caroline, said Melbourne had called her prudish, and she implied that his bizarre practices had corrupted her morals: “[He] said I was straight laced amused himself with instructing me in things I need never have heard or known & the disgust I at first felt to the worlds wickedness I till then had never even heard of in a very short time gave way to a general laxity of principles which little by little unperceived by you all has been undermining the few virtues I ever possessed” (Lady Caroline to Lady Melbourne, April 1810, in Douglass, The Whole Disgraceful Truth, 53). In forty letters to Lady Branden, only four contain no mention of whipping (Ziegler, Melbourne, 106–7). Melbourne told her she should whip her children more often, and proffered it as a solution for a lazy maid: “A few twigs of a birch applied to the naked skin of a young lady produces with very little effort a very considerable sensation.”
CHAPTER 9
A Scandal in the Palace
[Melbourne] has a young and inexperienced infant in his hands, whose whole conduct and opinions must necessarily be in complete subservience to his views. I do him the justice to believe that he has some feeling for his situation.
—LORD ABERDEEN TO PRINCESS LIEVEN
They wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England.
—QUEEN VICTORIA
The skies yawned blue above Lord Melbourne and Queen Victoria as they rode up the fashionable racecourse of Ascot in an open carriage on May 30, 1839. When they appeared, the sound of hissing penetrated the low murmur of voices. Then, when the queen walked out onto the royal balcony, a shout came through: “Mrs. Melbourne!” The crowd sniggered and turned to stare as Victoria blushed darkly. Uncharacteristically, Lord Melbourne looked bothered. The hissing came from two Tory women, the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Sarah Ingestre. Victoria raged. “Those two abominable women ought to be flogged!” she said, unaware that Melbourne might have been perfectly happy to carry out her commands. She knew why they were hissing. It was on behalf of Lady Flora Hastings, a friend of her mother and John Conroy, who had grown terribly thin in recent months. When Lady Flora walked into Ascot, she was cheered loudly and repeatedly. Victoria was incensed.
The thirty-two-year-old Lady Flora, who was from a powerful aristocratic Tory family, had been one of the Duchess of Kent’s ladies-in-waiting for five years. Victoria decided that she was an “odious” spy, largely because she was close to Conroy, and told Lord Melbourne to be wary. But one night at dinner, Victoria and Lehzen noticed that Lady Flora’s stomach was swollen. Lady Flora had spent Christmas with her mother in Scotland and had traveled back in January 1839 with John Conroy in a post chaise—or closed carriage—without a chaperone. Immediately upon her return, she went to see Dr. James Clark, complaining of strange pains and a sore stomach. He gave her rhubarb pills and lotion to rub on her belly. This appeared to be mildly effective, but while Lady Flora’s abdomen did not grow larger, it did not diminish either. It was clearly rounded.
The imaginations of the royal court, particularly the ladies-in-waiting, began to stir. Was Conroy to blame? On February 2, Victoria spoke to Melbourne of the “awkward business.” He told her to keep quiet, adding that doctors often made mistakes and that his own view of English doctors was not particularly high. But after she left, Melbourne immediately called Dr. Clark, who said that while he could not be sure without a proper examination, there was reason to be suspicious.
This, Victoria decided, was confirmation that Lady Flora and Conroy were lovers. Melbourne had told her he believed Lady Flora’s closeness to Conroy made Victoria’s mother jealous. Were the two women rivals? Victoria finally wrote in her diary, on February 2: “We have no doubt that she is—to use plain words—with child!! Clark cannot deny the suspicion; the horrid cause of all this is the Monster & demon Incarnate, whose name I forbear to mention, but which is the 1st word of the 2nd line of this page.”
That word was “J.C.”—John Conroy, who was twenty years Lady Flora’s senior. Victoria was disgusted and quickly jumped from judging one woman to judging all women. It was enough, she wrote, to make one “loathe one’s own sex; when they are bad, how disgracefully and disgustingly servile and low women are!! I don’t wonder at men considering the sex despicable!”
The intrigue escalated with every foolish step Dr. Clark took. First, he spied on Lady Flora for a fortnight, sneaking glances at her stomach, puzzling over its shape from several angles. Dr. Clark, who had served as a naval surgeon in the Napoleonic Wars and was later called “perhaps the most incompetent royal doctor of all time,” appeared to be ignorant of any other conditions that could lead to a distended stomach. He was confused by her ability to continue working and walking and functioning normally, which he told himself she would not be able to do if she were ill. He tried to examine Lady Flora under her stays; she refused (a delicacy that other doctors later said only added to her trouble). He then asked if she was secretly married. She denied it indignantly—by that point, her swelling had already subsided to a “remarkable degree,” she wrote to her uncle later. But that did not stop a “coarse” Dr. Clark from telling her he had been persuaded by “the conviction of the ladies of the palace that I was privately married.” Lady Flora tried to show him how her stomach had grown smaller. He then insisted she confess to save her character, but she refused.
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 [the Duchess of Kent], one suspicion hinted, or her sanction obtained for their proposing such a thing to me….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.
Lady Flora consented the next day to a humiliating and “most rigid examination” by another doctor, Sir Charles Clark, as well as the man she called “my accuser,”
Dr. James Clark. Lady Portman was also present. It included a “full medical examination” that was, according to Lady Flora, rough, prolonged, and painful. They gave her what was, in essence, a certificate of virginity that stated that there were “no grounds for believing that pregnancy does exist, or ever has existed.”
The fact that it had been considered necessary to establish, crudely, that Lady Flora was still a virgin, in a virgin queen’s court, was a gross violation of her dignity and honor. When Lady Flora’s brother, the Marquess of Hastings, heard, he rushed to London to determine who was to blame, to insist on reparation, and to defend his family’s honor. He saw Lord Melbourne and baldly told Victoria she had received bad advice and needed to find out who the originator of the slander was so that they might be brought to punishment.
This forced examination had been a shocking error. Victoria sent a contrite note and visited an “extremely agitated” and ill Lady Flora. It was their first meeting since the intrigue had begun. The queen promised all could be put behind them for the sake of her mother. Flora accepted the apology, but told the queen, “I must respectfully observe, madam, I am the first, and I trust I shall be the last, Hastings ever so treated by their Sovereign. I was treated as if guilty without a trial.” Victoria prayed it would all end.