The 'baneful influence' Lady Flora herself identified in her letter to Hamilton Fitzgerald as 'a certain foreign Lady', Baroness Lehzen, whose 'hatred of the Duchess of Kent [was] no secret'. Lady Flora also blamed Lady Portman, her 'accuser' in this 'diabolical conspiracy'. 'Good bye, my dear uncle,' her letter ended. 'I blush to send you so revolting a letter, but I wish you to know the truth, and nothing but the truth - and you are welcome to tell it right and left. '18
Excerpts from this letter were accordingly sent to the press;[xiv] so were letters written to both the Queen and Lord Melbourne by Lady Flora's mother, the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings, who praised the behaviour of the Queen's 'admirable mother', contended that Her Majesty's honour demanded that 'the criminal inventor' of the falsehoods spread about her daughter should not 'remain without discovery', and demanded as a 'mark of public justice' the removal of Sir James Clark from the Queen's Household. To this last request Melbourne replied, 'The demand which your Ladyship's letter makes upon me is so unprecedented and objectionable that even the respect due to your Ladyship's sex, rank, family and character would not justify me in more, if indeed it authorizes so much than acknowledging the letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your Ladyship that I have received it.' This letter, with the rest of the correspondence, was published in the Morning Post.19
By now Lady Flora's humiliation, the Queen's supposed failure to make a proper apology for it, as well as her failure to dismiss her Scottish doctor, Sir James Clark, from her Household as he had been dismissed from her mother's, were the subject of intriguing gossip in almost every drawing room in London.
Lord Melbourne characteristically advised the Queen to take no notice of such gossip, nor of the letters which were appearing in the newspapers. But the Queen could not bring herself to ignore them; and the more she fretted about them the more she worked herself up into a fury with Lady Hastings, that 'wicked, foolish old woman', and with 'that wretched Ly. Flo.'.20 She would like to see the whole Hastings family hanged alongside the editor of the Morning Post. As for her mother, who had taken Lady Flora's side and was reported to have looked after her when she was ill as though she had been her own child, her behaviour had been unforgivable. Indeed, it was her mother's behaviour which angered the Queen quite as much as that of the Hastings family. She confessed to Lord Melbourne that she felt 'a growing dislike for Mama', and that it was like 'having an enemy in the house'.
Day after day she spoke in these terms, week after week the atmosphere in the Palace became more charged, and the coolness between the rival households of the Queen and the Duchess became more marked. Lady Tavistock, fearful that Lord Hastings would challenge her husband to a duel, followed Lady Flora about in an effort to make amends. 'Won't you speak to me? Won't you shake hands?' she pleaded. 'That is quite impossible,' Lady Flora said.21
She became increasingly ill, while the Queen, dismissive as usual of other people's complaints and always most reluctant to change an opinion once formed, continued to deny the seriousness of Lady Flora's illness which she felt sure was just 'a billious attack'. Her mother insisted that, on the contrary, the poor woman was gravely ill; she was 'in a dreadful state' about her; indeed, she thought Lady Flora was dying. The thought that she might die greatly alarmed Lord Melbourne. That would certainly lay the Queen open to reproach; it would be wise to send to enquire after her. 'First of all,' he said, 'because she is under your roof, and then because it shows feeling.'
But the Queen's dislike of the woman had become so intense that she could not show such feeling. While her mother, who now refused to sit next to Lady Tavistock at the whist table, kept crying and insisting that Lady Flora was mortally ill, her daughter attended a ball and enjoyed herself 'excessively'. There then, however, came very grave reports from Sir William Chambers, one of the leading physicians in London, who had succeeded Sir James Clark as the Duchess of Kent's physician. The Queen was advised to postpone another ball which was due to be held on 26 June. This she did and sent word that she would go to see Lady Flora that afternoon. But the dying woman felt too ill to see her then. Chambers advised her to go to her as soon as she could the next day.
I went in alone [the Queen recorded of this distressing visit]. I found poor Lady 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, and was very grateful for all I had done for her, and that she was glad to see me looking 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.' I then instantly went upstairs and returned to Lord M. who said, 'You remained a very short time.'22
Four days later Lady Flora was still clinging weakly to life. The Queen said to Lord Melbourne that she found it very disagreeable and painful 'to think there was a dying person in the house'.23 On 5 July in the early hours of the morning, over a week since the Queen had last seen her, Lady Flora died. A post mortem was conducted by the distinguished surgeon, Sir Benjamin Brodie, who discovered a large tumour on the liver: 'the uterus and its appendages presented the usual appearances of the healthy virgin state'.
The Queen felt no remorse, she told Lord Melbourne defiantly. She had 'done nothing to kill her'. However, much of the Press, led by the Morning Post, and many of the public at large considered that she should have felt remorse. At Ascot that summer, as her open carriage was driven up the course, two ladies in a private stand, one of them a duchess (two 'foolish, vulgar women' in the Queen's opinion, who ought to be flogged), hissed her loudly. Other voices could be heard shouting, 'Mrs Melbourne'. She was hissed and booed also in the streets of London, as she had been at the opera in Lady Flora's lifetime; and insults such as 'Whose belly up now?' were hurled at her as she rode by. Few men troubled to raise their hats at sight of her as they had done in the recent past. In fact, as Greville commented, it seemed that nobody cared for the Queen any more; loyalty was a dead letter; the scandal had played the devil with her popularity.
The Morning Post continued to upbraid her, attacking The Times for the excuses it offered for her behaviour. Pamphlets, assailing the 'evil counsellors' by whom she was surrounded, the 'stranger harboured in our country' (Baroness Lehzen) and the 'court physician with his cringing back' (Sir James Clark), were hawked about the streets. At a dinner in Nottingham, so General Sir Charles Napier said, his was the only voice to respond to the royal toast. Lord Ilchester believed the Queen would be well advised to leave London for a time to avoid further insult. Lord Melbourne suggested that a body of police should be made available on the day of Lady Flora's funeral in case the Queen's mourning carriage, which he thought should be sent as a token of respect, was stoned by demonstrators.
The family disdainfully returned the £50 which the Queen had sent to Lady Flora's maid; and for many years thereafter the blinds of Loudon Castle were drawn whenever Queen Victoria went to Scotland.
Not long after the funeral which, in fact, was conducted without serious interruption though, as Melbourne feared, a few stones and jeers were directed at the Queen's coach, Her Majesty was riding in Hyde Park where, although the crowd was 'very great', there was 'not one hiss'. In fact a few people cheered her as she rode through the gate into St James's Park. This, she wrote with complacent satisfaction, 'is a good answer to those fools who say that the public feeling - a few paid Wretches - was displayed on Thursday by hooting at Ministers'.24
She was, however, far from as content and relieved as her protestations suggested. The Lady Flora Hastings affair had upset her deeply, and induced in her that malaise and inappetence so often consequent upon her emotional distress. She was 'disgusted with everything' and would have left the country immediately had she been a private individual. She was even, so she told Lord Melbourne, 'tired of riding'. As f
or Melbourne himself, he was conscious of not having guided the young Queen in the way he should have done: he certainly should not have shuffled the blame on to her ladies during his interview with Lord Hastings. He felt penitent. So did the Queen at last. When she got a stone in her shoe while walking with him, he told her it was a penance. She did not contradict him.25
Chapter 11
'A PLEASANT LIFE'
'If Melbourne ever left the room her eyes followed him, and ... she sighed when he was gone.'
For all Victoria's occasional withering disapproval and what Lady Paget called her 'commanding look', and for all the criticism levelled at her in the immediate aftermath of the Lady Flora Hastings affair, it was generally conceded that the Queen was a young woman of charm and character, self-willed and pertinacious admittedly but determined, as she confided to her journal, to do her utmost to fulfil her duty to her country. 'I am very young,' she wrote with unconscious pietism, 'and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.'
Certainly she was relishing her new role as Queen and was scarcely in need of the sympathy expressed for the 'poor little Queen' by Thomas Carlyle who said that she could hardly be expected to choose a bonnet for herself let alone undertake a task 'from which an archangel might shrink'.1 She said that sometimes when she woke up in the morning she was 'quite afraid that it should all be a dream'. It was such 'a pleasant life', she said. 'Everybody says that I am quite another person since I came to the throne,' she told Princess Feodora. 'I look and am so very well ... I [lead] just the sort of life I like. I have a good deal of business to do, and all that does me a world of good.'2
She had left Kensington Palace with mixed feelings: she had had days of great unhappiness there; but she had pleasing memories of it too, most particularly of the earlier days of her childhood. But she had been anxious to move into Buckingham Palace as soon as possible, even though it was scarcely habitable yet, builders still having much work to complete at the time of King William IV's death. She had insisted on moving within three weeks of her accession; and so she had done. She was delighted with it. Thomas Creevey thought it a dreadful building which really ought to be called The Brunswick Hotel: it displayed 'every species of infirmity', its costly ornamentations exceeding 'all belief in their bad taste', its raspberry-coloured pillars enough to 'quite turn you sick to look at'.3 The Queen, however, having no pretensions to taste in the design and decoration of rooms, was delighted with the Palace, its 'high, pleasant and cheerful' interiors, and its garden of forty-five acres laid out by the botanist, W. J. Aiton. It was just the place for parties, she thought, for balls and for concerts given by her own band.
Her first state ball had been given in the Palace in May 1838. She had 'felt a little shy in going in' but had soon been caught up in the excitement of the music, the galops and quadrilles. She 'had not danced for so long & was so glad to do so again'. She felt 'so happy and so merry'. Her cousin, Prince George of Cambridge, 'thought she danced really very nicely and seemed to be very much amused'.4 She did not leave the ballroom until ten minutes to four and by the time she climbed into bed the sun was up.5 She had shocked some of her guests, including old Lady Ilchester, by eating her supper standing up in the ballroom, breaking with the custom of King William IV who, as Mary Frampton said, was 'quite Citizen King enough' but who 'always supped with the Queen in his private apartments with a select party'.6 Charles Greville, however, was much struck by Queen Victoria's 'exceedingly graceful manners', blended with 'dignity and cordiality, a simplicity and good humour, when She talks to people, which are mighty captivating. When supper was announced She moved from her seat, all her officers going before her -She, first, alone, and the Royal Family following; her exceeding youth strikingly contrasted with their mature ages, but She did it well.'7
She was not so taken with the Marine Pavilion at Brighton, that remarkably exotic structure which John Nash had created for her uncle, George IV, 'a strange, odd, Chinese-looking thing, both inside and outside', the 'most extraordinary Palace' that she had ever seen.8 But, although she felt too much on display there, she grew to be less censorious of the place. Her sitting room was 'pretty & cheerful' and from her bedroom she had 'a nice little peep of the sea'.9
To begin with she was not much taken with Windsor Castle either. She had first arrived there as Queen towards the end of August 1837 on a rainy day when the great stone towers and terraces, haunted by the cawing of rooks, looked particularly gloomy. She had felt that she did not belong there, that she was not mistress of the place, that at any moment she might 'see the poor King and Queen'.10 Memories of the King's quarrels with her mother, and of herself being 'terribly scolded' by her mother in the Tapestry Room in the Lancaster Tower because of her wish to be on good terms with her uncle, had come back to depress her. It was not long, however, before the atmosphere of the place captured her imagination. She even grew to like the tolling of the bells and the striking of her grandfather's numerous clocks. She enjoyed the games of battledore and shuttlecock she played with her Ladies in the immensely long Great Corridor beneath the Canalettos and the family portraits. Ministers whose company she enjoyed came to stay. So, to her 'inexpressible happiness', did King Leopold and Queen Louise; and when they had gone she wrote to Queen Louise to say that the late summer she had spent at Windsor was the 'pleasantest summer she had EVER passed in her life'.11[xv]
Back in London she settled down to the routine of her life with perfect contentment, much enjoying, indeed 'delighting' in her work. She had been advised to be methodical about this by King Leopold who told her 'the best plan is to devote certain hours to [business]; if you do that, you will get through it with great ease. I think you would do well to tell your Ministers that for the present you would be ready to receive those who should wish to see you between the hours of eleven and half-past one.' He went on to suggest that 'whenever a question of some importance' arose with these Ministers 'it should not be decided on the day it [was] submitted'.12
Although her obedience to this advice sometimes annoyed her Ministers, none of them could deny that she was extremely conscientious in her consideration of the matters put to her; and when King Leopold suggested that she ought to spend more time at Claremont and less in London she retorted that she could not possibly do so: she had to see her Ministers 'every day'. She did 'regular, hard but delightful work with them' and 'never felt tired or annoyed' by the hours she had to devote to it.13
She got up promptly at eight o'clock and dealt with papers until it was time for breakfast at which her mother usually joined her, but not until she had received a formal invitation. At eleven o'clock she saw Lord Melbourne, not only as her Prime Minister but also as a kind of private secretary and confidential adviser. After luncheon she went out riding with various ladies and gentlemen of her Household, Melbourne on one side, an equerry on the other. She was usually dressed in a black velvet riding habit, sometimes galloping ahead of the others on her lively horse, displaying her skill and grace as a horsewoman. 'She has a small, active, safe but very fleet horse,' Lady Holland told her son, 'nor does she undervalue the last quality, or allow it to rust for want of using: the pace at which she returns is tremendous ... I am startled by the thinness of Lord Melbourne. It is too much; but it may be partly ascribed to the hard riding of those who are attendants of the Queen.'14
Before dinner at eight, the Queen took up her sketchbook or her music; and, after dinner, there were those dutiful, stilted conversations with her guests which Charles Greville had described, followed by more intimate talk with a few friends, games of chess and draughts, jigsaw puzzles and spillikins. Or she might look into books of prints, Lord Melbourne at her side, making comments pertinent or wry, paradoxical, funny or facetious, occasionally reducing both her and himself to helpless laughter, the loud hoots of Melbourne's laugh, like those of the Duke of Wellington, being heard all over the ro
om. He told her, for instance, when talking of cannibalism, of the old woman ill in bed who was asked if there was anything she would like to have and who replied, 'I think I could eat a little piece of the small bone of a boy's head.' He defended Henry VIII's treatment of his wives by declaring, 'Oh, those women bothered him so.' He recommended the employment of Dissenters as gardeners because they wouldn't take time off to go hunting or to the races. He read out 'so funnily' a printed paper which he had come across in a packet of Assam tea and which contained a commendation of the product by one Dr Lun Qua, a name that 'put him into paroxysms of laughter, from which he couldn't recover for some time, and did one good to hear'. She herself, she said, would sometimes almost 'die with laughing' in his company.15
The Duke of Wellington, while admitting that he liked Melbourne and thought that he was 'the best Minister' the Queen could have, was 'afraid he joked too much with her, and made her treat things too lightly which are very serious'.16 When Melbourne told the Queen of this criticism, which he had heard about through Lord Clarendon, he conceded that there was some truth in it. She protested, however, that it was not so. Nor would she have agreed with the earnest and upright Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury, who, while recognizing that the Prime Minister had 'a sincere and even ardent affection for the Queen', suggested that he did not possess the 'courage to act and advise her according to her real interests'. 'His society and conversation are pernicious to a young mind,' Ashley believed. 'His sentiments and manner blunt the moral sense ... [His cynicism] and 'reckless language' were a 'perpetual source of poison to her mind'.17
The Queen would have none of this. As for the confidence of the Crown, she insisted, 'God knows, No Minister, no friend EVER possessed it so entirely, as this truly excellent Lord Melbourne possesses mine!'
QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History Page 10