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

by Lucy Worsley

  9

  In Lady Flora’s Bedchamber: Buckingham Palace, 27 June 1839

  Victoria was on the move, swishing along the dim corridors of Buckingham Palace. Finding her way about her palace challenged both her eyesight and her sense of direction. Any newcomer to its ‘long passages and open courts’ would quickly get lost without a guide, and Victoria was now heading to an unfamiliar zone of the enormous building.1

  Her new home, with gardens behind but with a roaring thoroughfare in front, was much more prominent and public than Kensington Palace. When Victoria asked a footman to open the windows, she heard not birdsong, but ‘a constant dull roar from afar, the noise of carriages driving around the city’.2 Beyond the grimy glass, London’s polluted air was visibly grey. One new servant was ‘almost frightened’ when she ‘glimpsed through this mass a great round fiery ball, quite dark red in colour: that is what the sun looks like here!’3 Despite the work of Victoria’s First and Second Lamplighters, and their seven assistants, Buckingham Palace was always dark indoors.4 A visitor arriving even at midday was surprised to discover the staircase illuminated by ‘a candelabra with a Lamp burning … it was always lighted’.5 ‘It is cruelty,’ claimed one of the staff, ‘for human beings to have to live in this great prison all the time.’6

  This sprawling building, extended and made palatial by architect John Nash for George IV, had originally been a private house. Even after Nash had finished, it was nowhere near as well built as might have been expected for a project that had cost the government half a million pounds. The vast overspend on the initial estimate of £200,000 had resulted in the Treasury ‘making a hash of Nash’.7 Despite another round of improvements carried out for William IV by the architect Edward Blore, Buckingham Palace still possessed major flaws. When the Thames tide was high, the palace sewer would overflow and flood the underground kitchens.8 At Victoria’s accession, the suite made for her elderly predecessor had to be jigged about, with new walls and doorways hastily thrown up to make it more suitable for a young woman.9 The Inspector of Palaces, Mr Saunders, who was supposed to manage this work and keep the building in good condition, got sacked for leaking details of what was going on ‘to parties connected with the public press’.10

  The reception rooms, though, were marvellous. George IV, with his flair for interior decoration, had left his niece the magnificent state apartments that are still in use today. ‘His Majesty plans all the alterations himself,’ his courtiers noted, ‘it is his great amusement.’11 One of Victoria’s guests found these ‘rich and gorgeous apartments’ in red, white and gold reminded her of ‘the descriptions in the Arabian Nights’.12

  Victoria now had a lady-in-waiting with her to guide her on her unaccustomed route through this almost subterranean world. Two separate households coexisted under the one palace roof, her own and her mother the Duchess of Kent’s. The two were increasingly at odds, and it was highly unusual for Victoria to be crossing, as she now was, to the other side.

  Eventually they reached an ordinary bedroom door, and Victoria gestured that her companion should wait outside. The bedchamber beyond was the sickroom of the thirty-three-year-old Lady Flora Hastings, a lady-in-waiting employed by Victoria’s mother. ‘I went in alone,’ Victoria wrote in her journal for 27 June 1839, and ‘found poor Lady Flora stretched on a couch.’13

  Like all ladies-in-waiting, Flora Hastings served on a roster for a couple of months at a time. When she was in ‘waiting’ (or on duty) her duties included helping with correspondence, handing shawls, fastening bracelets, entertaining boring guests and generally providing the duchess with company. The ladies got no time off during their ‘waiting’ and had to be constantly on hand. Flora’s bedroom was therefore near to her mistress’s own rooms, which had been completed and occupied just a few months before. Situated at the eastern end of the palace’s north wing, the duchess’s suite was a long way from her daughter’s at its western tip.14 Propriety dictated that Victoria’s mother should live with her as a chaperone, even if in practice they remained as distant from each other as possible.

  Only extreme circumstances had forced Victoria to come so far out of her accustomed territory. As she now stepped forward into Flora’s bedroom, someone else quickly retreated through another door. This was the sick woman’s sister, Sophia, who very deliberately, and very disrespectfully, left without making a curtsey.15 The wider Hastings family had lost their loyalty to the Crown. They believed that Victoria had done something to Flora that had put her terribly in the wrong.

  Flora was a tall, thin woman, with a long body and long nose, and Victoria found her lying upon a sofa. The queen thought she could detect ‘a searching look’ in the eyes in Flora’s haggard face; indeed the patient had ‘a look rather like a person who is dying’. But as the visit unfolded Victoria convinced herself that Flora spoke in just her usual voice, managing a few moments of ‘friendly’ conversation in the faint Ayrshire accent she’d had since her Scottish childhood. The two women had known each other for many years. Recalling the visit in her journal that evening, Victoria quoted Flora as saying that she ‘was very comfortable, and was very grateful for all I had done for her’.16 The illness had created extra work for the palace staff, who had to send a separate dinner to Flora’s room each evening.17

  ‘I said to her,’ Victoria’s journal entry concluded, that ‘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”.’18

  Victoria’s visit to the sickroom of a suffering servant sounds like a generous action. But Flora’s sister Sophia had walked out because she believed the queen’s apparent concern was just a cynical gesture. Victoria, Sophia felt, was paying the visit reluctantly, and only because she’d been strongly advised that the lack of sympathy she’d shown thus far was damaging her public image. When Sophia asked Flora afterwards what had passed, she replied that it had only been empty talk, ‘nothing particular’.19 And some newspapers – for this palace scandal had become of great interest to the press – reported that all Victoria had said was ‘Lady Flora, I am sorry you are still ill’, and remained less than five minutes.20

  Whatever the truth, it was undeniably a short visit. And Victoria did heartily resent Flora, and her illness, thinking her a ‘detestable person’. This was not least because Flora was an old family friend of John Conroy’s. Victoria had only turned twenty a month previously, and could summon up no sympathy for a spinster thirteen years older than herself. Flora would never get a husband, the queen was heard to scoff, unpleasantly, for she ‘has neither riches nor beauty nor any thing!’21

  Victoria was also chagrined that this sickness had created a chilly atmosphere in the palace and put a damper on her social life. The summer of 1839 had been particularly wet, but the London Season was now reaching its June climax before high society would disperse to its country houses with the approaching end of the parliamentary term. The previous day, Victoria had been forced to cancel a ball. The night before that, though, she had gone merrily to the opera. Melbourne had been trying to talk her out of staging an upcoming ‘great dinner … for fear that the carriages might disturb Lady Flora’.22 ‘It would be very awkward,’ he’d muttered, ‘if that woman was to die.’

  Melbourne was quite right to be concerned that to those outside the palace Victoria’s actions did not read well. The Morning Post, for example, had criticised the queen for ‘the absence of every other thought than for the amusement and ill-timed enjoyment of the passing hour’. Its writer even thought her responsible for tarnishing ‘the cause of Royalty’.23 ‘Can’t you make a treaty of peace, and speak to Lady Flora?’ Melbourne had begged Victoria.24

  He saw what she could not: that the situation was becoming a stain upon the honour of Buckingham Palace. Victoria’s people were beginning to think that the girl who’d so recently been their Queen of Hearts was in fact revealing herself to be entirely heartless. Just one day short of a full year after her coronation, circumstances had
combined to discolour both Victoria’s reputation and her happiness.

  Back in Victoria’s private drawing room, with its round bay window overlooking the garden and lake behind the palace, Melbourne was pacing about and awaiting her return. Although he thought that this visit was part of the solution to the bad press Victoria had been getting, he did not realise that he was himself part of the problem.

  Melbourne had been one of the earliest people to meet Victoria as queen, at nine o’clock in the morning of the first day of her reign. Uncle Leopold had already told her that ‘Lord M.’ could be trusted. She thought him ‘straightforward’, but in reality he was anything but. With his black brows and commanding height, he was famously handsome, and the ‘quaint, queer, epigrammatic turn of his mind’ made Victoria laugh ‘excessively’.25 Although he was much sought after in fashionable Whig society, he had been cuckolded by his wife, and sought satisfaction instead in spanking his housemaids. He had a fetish for the ‘large and extensive field of the derrière, which is so well calculated’ to receive the birch.26 Melbourne made rather a surprising Prime Minister, for he had never shown much ambition in his youth, and his friends were astonished by just how hard he worked once he got into government. He wasn’t even wholeheartedly a Whig, and perhaps conservative or Tory values lay closer to his core. It’s important to realise, though, that the very words ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are difficult to define, and bear little resemblance to modern well-organised political parties. And although Britons followed elections with enthusiasm, still only one in seven of them – despite the Reform Act – had the vote.

  When William IV’s death gave Melbourne an unexpected opportunity ‘to educate, instruct and form the most interesting mind and character in the world’, he grasped it. Given the great responsibility – or gift, depending on which way you looked at it – of guiding this girl through the first few months of her reign, Melbourne had devoted himself to the task, often spending six hours a day with Victoria. This was not least because having lost his wayward wife, and two short-lived children, he was ‘a man with capacity for loving without anything to love’.27 He was indulging in an old man’s amitié amoureuse.

  It gradually became clear, though, that Victoria was making a strategic error in associating herself so closely with Melbourne and his friends. The convention was developing that a British monarch should remain ‘above’ party politics. However enjoyable his witty and worldly company might be, Victoria’s favouritism towards the Whigs was earning her the hostility of the Tories.

  Yet she still saw Melbourne nearly every morning in her closet ‘for Political Affairs’, rode out with him in the afternoon and would sit ‘near him constantly after dinner’.28 ‘I love him like a Father!’ she began to exclaim in her journal.29 In return, Melbourne gave her his undivided attention. ‘I have no doubt he is passionately fond of her,’ observed ‘The Gruncher’. He thought that she loved her Prime Minister right back again, with feelings that were ‘sexual though she does not know it’.30 Victoire advised her daughter in vain to keep a sense of proportion. ‘You do not know the world,’ she wrote to Victoria, scribbling crazily and passionately in pencil. ‘Take care Victoria,’ she went on, ‘take care that Lord Melbourne is not King.’31

  These warnings about Melbourne angered Victoria, and she’d also fallen out with her mother over the question of money. Having resolved to pay off the ancient debts of her father, Victoria found Victoire shifty on the subject of her own finances, unable, or at least unwilling, to say exactly where she stood. Melbourne’s opinion was that the duchess and Conroy had told ‘incalculable falsehoods’ on the subject, ‘which really is infamous.’32

  Conroy was still working for the duchess, and Uncle Leopold’s spies told him that he was ‘with her constantly, meditating vengeance on the Queen’,33 Conroy’s own financial affairs were also becoming a matter of public interest. He’d begun a case for libel against The Times when the newspaper wrote about ‘a certain estate’ he’d purchased in Wales. Where had Conroy got the money from, the article asked? Given that the rest of the paragraph was about the Duchess of Kent’s debts, the implication was clear: that he’d embezzled her money.34

  And it was Conroy, his hunger for money and power, his persistent malign influence, that lay behind the mysterious, troubling business of Lady Flora’s illness.

  On her return to her own sector of the palace and to Melbourne, Victoria described to him how she’d ‘found poor Lady Flora stretched on a couch looking as thin as anybody can be who is still alive; literally a skeleton’.35 Flora’s hair had fallen out, forcing her to wear ‘a little bonnet cap’.36 But Melbourne was more concerned about the look of the visit than the appearance of the patient, as the palace walls had eyes and ears. ‘You remained a very short time,’ he complained.37

  Victoria and Melbourne had become so intimate that he could speak astonishingly freely to her. Victoria had noticed immediately that Flora had grown thin as a living skeleton. This was partly because she herself, by contrast, had grown decidedly plump. She’d developed a fuller figure than of which ‘nice & nervous observers of health would quite approve’, and this formed one of the topics that queen and Prime Minister would frequently discuss.38 Melbourne set her a terrible example, with his love of ‘consommés, truffles, pears, ices, and anchovies, which he does his best to revolutionise his stomach with every day’.39

  ‘Oh’, but she had ‘such a horror of being fat,’ Victoria told him, and he advised her to eat only when she felt truly hungry.40 If she did that, Victoria responded, she’d be ‘eating all day’.41 After the restricted diet she’d been given under the ‘System’, Victoria was finding it almost impossible to exercise self-control. ‘A great deal of eating,’ wrote one of Flora’s fellow ladies-in-waiting, ‘always goes on at the Palace.’42 In the first ten days of her reign alone, Victoria’s household got through £33-worth of the fruit she loved: oranges, grapes, apples, gooseberries, currants, cherries and strawberries. This cost was the equivalent of a year’s wages for a bank clerk.43 Dr Clark was also worried about Victoria’s weight, and had ordered her ‘not to eat luncheon any more’.44 This must have been a severe test of willpower, for even the simplest ‘Ladies Luncheon’ served in the royal household consisted of ribs of lamb, roast chickens, mutton cutlets, croquettes, ham and fowl, jelly and pastry.45

  Despite these precautions, when Victoria was weighed at the end of her first year as queen, she found – to her ‘horror’ – that she weighed 8 stone 13 (56.6kg).46 Again Melbourne, in a surprisingly personal exchange, became her confidant. ‘Talked of my weight,’ her journal once again recorded, ‘my weighing near 9 stone, which I thought incredible for my size.’47 He soothed her by telling her that the ideal woman had a ‘full’ figure. Her reported weight would give Victoria, at 1.52 metres tall, a modern body mass index of 24.4. It is healthy, but only just. She was very close to being classed, in today’s terms, as obese. Her physicians also recommended more exercise, and advised her to stop sitting so often for the many artists who wanted to paint her portrait.48

  Victoria had also started to complain of cold hands and feet, and lethargy. Combined with some loss of hair, this might suggest that she had an endocrine malfunction, a hormonal disorder that can affect the body’s ability to turn food into energy.49 But she herself believed that her loss of vitality had a psychological element. It was the ‘worry and torment’ of the Kensington ‘System’, she claimed, that had prevented her from growing as tall as she might otherwise have done.50 Yet again, it was something that she perceived to be the fault of Conroy.

  It was Conroy who’d introduced Lady Flora, from a grand if impoverished family of Scottish aristocrats, into the service of the Duchess of Kent. And his name inevitably came up in connection to an aspect of the situation that Victoria and Melbourne now must have talked over once more. Although Flora had looked thinner than a rake as she lay upon her couch, her stomach appeared, as it had done for some months now, ‘very much swollen like a person
who is with child’.51

  Was Flora pregnant? The topic had occupied Victoria and Melbourne for the past few weeks. Four months previously, on 16 February 1839, Flora in her room had received a visit from Dr Clark. He’d come to see her, she recorded, to ask ‘if I were privately married, giving as his reason that my figure had excited the remarks of “the ladies of the palace”.’ When Flora denied this, Dr Clark grew ‘excited’ himself, urging that a ‘confession’ was ‘the only thing’ that could save her from ruin.52

  Flora’s waistline had for some time been the subject of suspicion and surveillance by the household’s other ladies. Indeed, it had been Victoria herself, in tandem with Lehzen, who’d first noticed a change in Flora’s shape. The queen believed that there was ‘no doubt that she is – to use the plain words – with child!!’53

  Among the other court ladies who agreed that there was something amiss with Flora’s middle was Emma, Lady Portman. She was incensed by Flora’s denial to Dr Clark of what was very obviously a pregnancy. Lady Portman had five children herself, and her husband was a noted breeder of cattle.54 She knew a big belly when she saw one. Lady Portman insisted on seeing the Duchess of Kent, as Flora’s direct employer, face-to-face. She told Victoire that if the suspicion of pregnancy was unfounded, ‘it should be removed as soon as possible’. Otherwise, Flora must ‘leave the Palace immediately’.55

  Flora reluctantly accepted that a medical examination might be the only means to dispel the rumours. It was to be performed by Dr James Clark, and by a doctor of Flora’s own choice, who was coincidentally and confusingly called Sir Charles Clarke. Lady Portman and Flora’s own maid were present. Those who afterwards heard what happened during this examination considered that it was highly intrusive, a ‘dreadful mortification’ and a most ‘indelicate enquiry’ into her person.56