Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes
to counsel the younger woman. But she had miscalculated badly. Spaeth, whom the young Victoria adored, was promptly banished to Germany, where she served out her retirement in the service of Feodora, Victoria’s half-sister, who was now installed in a draughty Schloss as Princess Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg.
In court circles, the relationship between the Duchess and Conroy had long been a standing joke. Lord Camden liked to tell the story of how his little grandson, noticing the ‘assiduous attentions’ of Conroy to the Duchess, had blithely prattled that Sir John was ‘a sort of husband’ to her. Out of the mouths of babes. But while contemporaries, including Melbourne, were convinced that the Duchess and Conroy were lovers, historians have been less sure, suspecting the rumour to have been spread by Victoria’s uncle and heir presumptive, the resentful Duke of Cumberland, who doubled as the King of Hanover. All that matters, really, is that young Victoria, who ‘sees everything that passes’, according to the insightful Duchess of Northumberland, thought they might have been. Consequently she grew up with one eye fixed firmly on her mother’s waistline, waiting for the change of shape that would prove beyond any doubt that the ‘familiarities’ she had witnessed were no figment of her imagination. And when, in the course of 1838, Sir John Conroy turned his attention from the fifty-one-year-old Duchess to thirty-two-year-old Lady Flora, it was only natural that Victoria’s beady eye would follow suit, settling on the younger woman’s profile.
While teenage Victoria prided herself on being able to spot a pregnancy at fifty paces, she never ceased to be amazed at her mother’s myopia. Only recently the Duchess had caused embarrassed smirks and shocked glances when she had insisted on asking a very pregnant lady to ride with her. So it was to jolt her mother out of her habitual ‘mist’ that Victoria sent Lady Portman on 16 February down one floor to break the news that her unmarried lady of the bedchamber was suspected of expecting, and needed to submit to an examination to decide the matter. To drive the message home, Victoria condescended to visit her mother personally that same day, and later sent a message that Lady Flora should consider herself banned from court until she had proved that she was not ‘in the family way’.
The Duchess was ‘horror-struck’ by these revelations, noted a pleased Victoria. But she did not, according to Lady Flora, believe them: ‘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’. And indeed throughout the crisis the Duchess never allowed resentment of Conroy’s waning sexual interest in her to infect her great fondness for her lady-in-waiting, whatever Lord Melbourne liked to suggest. The idea of the proposed examination appalled the Duchess as ‘an humiliation’, and she had no doubt, as she explained in a letter to Flora’s mother, that ‘this attack, my dear Lady Hastings, was levelled at me through your innocent child’. To show her solidarity with Lady Flora, she refused to attend dinner that night without her. When later that same evening Miss Spring Rice, the Queen’s maid of honour, asked permission to pop down to see how Lady Flora was feeling, Lady Portman stepped in to enforce the cordon sanitaire that now surrounded the disgraced lady-in-waiting. In the end Miss Rice was obliged to resort to posting a tupenny letter by Royal Mail as the only way of being certain to get a message to Flora at the other end of the palace. Infuriated by ‘Springy’s’ show of divided loyalties, yet relishing every second of the escalating melodrama, Victoria asked Lord M eagerly ‘if I didn’t look pale or red, as I had been so much agitated’. Desperate now to calm things down, Lord M assured her briskly that she did not.
Lady Flora’s immediate response to the accusation that she was pregnant by Sir John Conroy had been unfortunate to say the least. In an uncharacteristic panic and with her ‘brain bursting’, she had immediately taken a carriage to his Kensington mansion to ask what she should do. Conroy, who had spies everywhere, had assessed the situation already, and, spotting how ‘malice would distort’ her flight to his house, ordered her to return immediately to Buckingham Palace. Flora spent the evening in anxious talks with the Duchess, who begged her not to agree to an examination. The Duchess was convinced that Victoria’s real intention in demanding such a degrading procedure was to humiliate her, using the body of her lady of the bedchamber as a proxy.
But by the following afternoon, and having prayed for guidance, Flora Hastings had made the decision to submit to an examination as the ‘most instantaneous mode of refuting the calumny’. Her decision was prompted by the fact that a doctor whom she knew and trusted, Sir Charles Clarke, happened to be in the palace. Sir Charles was not only a specialist in female reproduction, he was physician to the weepy-skinned, red-eyed Dowager Queen Adelaide, whose touch-and-go obstetric history had propelled Victoria from obscure Princess to reigning monarch. Flora wanted Clarke to be present at the examination not simply because he was a friendly face, but because without him as a witness she knew that she would be vulnerable to Sir James Clark’s (no relation) need to prove himself correct in his diagnosis. With the Duchess of Kent still wailing about how cruel and unnecessary it all was, the lady of the bedchamber summoned the two doctors to her room.
It is at this point that the protagonists’ narratives start to veer wildly, so that what we are left with is a babble of jabbering voices, angry, scared, wheedling, desperate to save their own skins. In the account he published several months later, Sir James does his best to hand off the role of unfeeling, brutish physician to Sir Charles. According to Clark, Sir Charles gave Lady Flora one last chance to confess her pregnancy, since after the examination it would be ‘too late’. Refusing to do so, Lady Flora then requested that Lady Portman, whom she referred to as ‘my accuser’, should be called as a witness. On Lady Portman’s arrival, Lady Flora retired to her bedchamber with Caroline Reichenbach, her Swiss maid. At this point Sir James breaks off his story abruptly, as if he can’t quite bring himself to describe what happened during the forty-five minutes that followed. The next thing we hear is: ‘After Sir Charles Clarke had made an examination, he returned with me to the sitting room, and stated as the result that there could be no pregnancy; but at the same time he expressed a wish that I also should make an examination. This I first declined, stating it to be unnecessary; but, on his earnestly urging me to do so, I felt that a further refusal might be construed into a desire to shrink from a share of the responsibility and I accordingly yielded.’
Notice how Sir James carefully paints himself as a ‘shrinking’ creature, who has to be forced to ‘yield’ to the masterful demands of his more experienced colleague. He even claims unconvincingly that it had never crossed his mind that this was going to be a ‘medical examination’, by which he means an internal one. He had assumed, he maintains, that Lady Flora would be examined thoroughly through her clothing, probably with her stays removed. Just like the poor patient, he has been ambushed into the ‘ordeal’. However, according to the maid Caroline Reichenbach, swearing her account on oath on 23 July in the presence of an Ayrshire magistrate, Sir James’s behaviour during the examination was the exact reverse of what he had described: ‘while the whole demeanour of Sir Charles Clarke during the painful and humiliating scene was characterised by kindness, the conduct of Sir JAMES Clark, as well as that of Lady Portman, was unnecessarily abrupt, unfeeling, and indelicate’.
As Caroline recounts it, the little scene had indeed begun with Sir Charles gently suggesting to Lady Flora that if she were ‘guilty’, it would be better to admit it now, before the examination went ahead. Flora’s response was so emphatic and sincere that Sir Charles suggested that he was disposed to sign a certificate denying the pregnancy then and there. But at this point Sir James interrupted with, ‘If Lady Flora is so sure of her innocence, she can have no objection to what is proposed.’
And what was being proposed was indeed truly shocking.
In the nineteenth century most upper-class women – indeed most women – would reckon to get through life without exposing their ‘person’ to anyone except their husband and, perhaps, a midwife. Single women could avoid even this. Physicians, keen to distinguish themselves from their rougher surgeon colleagues, made a point of laying hands on a patient, especially a genteel one, as seldom as possible. As would-be gentlemen they asked forensic questions about symptoms, took careful notes and diagnosed from the other side of a heavy desk. Sometimes, to avoid any unpleasantness, the whole consultation was done by post. When on a rare occasion there was no way to