Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes
also with the Duchess’.
Victoria’s determination to ignore her mother and Lady Flora demanded a level of emotional control that had not been required of her since the old days at Kensington when, at Lehzen’s urging, she had packed her true feelings behind that hard, mineral mask. But, oddly, she found she could no longer do it. Only four days after her promise to be ‘very distant’ she fell upon the woman whom she now routinely referred to as ‘the Duchess’ with the kind of frenzy Van Amburgh used to control his snarling lions. She screamed at her mother to control Lady Flora, to stop her carrying on in this insane way, tattling to the newspapers while continuing to squat in the palace like an enormous, bulging cuckoo.
I said her remaining here, and letting all these vile attacks go on, was beyond everything, and that I could not be friendly to her; … and that if Ma. hadn’t talked of the matter nothing of the whole would have been known. To this the Duchess replied with all the old story of the indignity [i.e. the examination] and so forth; and I stopped her, and merely said, I could not behave otherwise while this was going on. The Duchess expressed regret and went away.
In her frenzy, Victoria had overestimated the degree to which Lady Flora was directing her own press coverage. While hot-headed Lord Hastings and his wife – alarmingly known as ‘the galloping Marchioness’ – continued to follow Conroy’s lead in stirring up as much dust as possible, Lady Flora’s mother and sisters were drawing back. It was finally becoming clear to them that Sir John’s chief motive was not to achieve justice for Flora, but to discredit Victoria to the point where the Duchess of Kent would be drafted in as either Regent or co-ruler. Far from being a personal embarrassment for Conroy, this scandal had actually been a miraculous last chance to grab those elusive prizes he had pursued for so long: a regency for the Duchess and a position of executive power for himself. Realising belatedly that Sir John was no friend of theirs, the Hastings ladies turned for advice instead to the infinitely more sober James Macnabb, a cousin by marriage who was former secretary to the late Marquess in India and could therefore be relied upon to protect the family’s interests. Heading up to town from Scotland to monitor events as they continued to unfold, and to keep an eye on the impetuous Lord Hastings, cautious Mr Macnabb begged Lady Hastings to ignore Conroy’s suggestion that she publish the letters of support that the Duchess had written to her over the past few weeks. It was not worth sacrificing the nation’s growing good will towards Lady Flora, whose behaviour, reported Macnabb, was now generally regarded as ‘heroic and dignified beyond measure’.
Heroic and dignified she may have been, but that didn’t mean Lady Flora was above reprising her old profession of court ‘spie’. Her increasingly odd appearance might make it hard to slip around court as before, but she hadn’t lost the knack of overhearing things not meant for her ears. At the beginning of May she reported that an indiscreet and exhausted Lord Melbourne had been overheard admitting, ‘D— it, I can’t dismiss anyone because the Q [the Queen] and Br L [Baroness Lehzen] began it.’ Her gaze was pitiless, too, when it came to the way that certain of the court ladies now flapped around protesting their innocence by claiming loudly within her hearing, ‘I was commanded,’ or ‘I was over-ruled,’ to justify their part in keeping the slander bowling along. Lehzen had even been spotted in tears, a choice bit of intelligence that naturally flew straight back to Loudon Castle.
Matters became still more tangled when the court ventured out. Self-conscious about the bonnet she was now obliged to wear even indoors to conceal her balding scalp, Flora nonetheless remained sufficiently composed to notice how her presence at any gathering caused an automatic stir, ‘separating old friends & acquaintances, [with] people cutting each other or looking embarrassed with each other’. Some old family friends, such as Lord and Lady Harewood, the parents of Lady Portman, were obliged to snub her, even though it was clear these ‘dear old people’ found it painful, while others overcompensated by rushing up with bright enquiries after her health and that of her dear mother. Above all, everyone tried to avoid letting their eyes drop to Flora’s flat, milkless breasts and jutting belly.
Pushing further outwards to ‘good John Bull’, though, it was clear that public support was overwhelmingly behind the Hastings family. The poet Elizabeth Barrett, writing to a friend, wailed, ‘Poor, poor Lady Flora. Was it the Queen’s doing? Do you think she really has no feelings?’ For Thomas Carlyle, meanwhile, Victoria had ‘behaved like a hapless little fool’. Wherever Flora appeared in full view – accompanying the Duchess to the opera, or appearing as a bridesmaid at a family wedding – she was greeted with cheers and hurrahs and raised hats. On a trip to Ascot in mid-May, a rousing male voice was heard to cry ‘Lady Flora!’, followed by several cheers. (Actually, noted Victoria tartly in her journal, it was just ‘one cheer for Lady Flora at the races, though a very partial one’.) Flora, being Flora, had worked out in advance what to do: ‘I bowed in return but looked steadily before me, not to court a demonstration of public feeling.’ Later that afternoon Lord Melbourne was thoroughly hissed, and this time the ever-watchful ‘spie’ noticed that he really minded: ‘he grew very red – & his eye & corner of his mouth grew crooked, a sign I can decipher pretty well by this time’.
The Queen was hissed that day too, although not by the usual ‘paid wretches’ whose jeers she had learned to face down with that old, stony stare. The culprits turned out to be the eminently respectable Lady Sarah Ingestre and the Duchess of Montrose. It was no coincidence that both women were, like the Hastings family, Tories. Earlier that month the country had blundered through the most intense political drama of the reign to date. The story of ‘the Bedchamber Crisis’ has been told many times. Of how Lord Melbourne was forced to resign on 7 May following his government’s near-defeat on a vote over the suspension of Jamaica’s constitution. Of how a distraught Victoria was hardly able to bring herself to talk to Sir Robert Peel when he presented himself the next day with the intention of forming a Tory government. Of how, in anticipation of the new administration, Peel had insisted on the Queen changing some of her senior ladies-in-waiting for the wives and daughters of his new ministers. Of how, again, Victoria had refused point blank, and when questioned about it by Lord M, fudged by pretending that Peel had asked her to swap all of her ladies. And of how, finally, Lord Melbourne and the Whigs came back into government just six days later, and remained in shaky power for a further two years.
What tends to get missed, though, is that Victoria’s refusal to part with her ladies during that first week of May was not, as has usually been written, a Miss-ish refusal to be told what to do by the ‘cold odd man’ who had replaced her beloved Lord M. Nor was it entirely, or even mostly, a gambit to make it impossible for Peel to form a government, and so ensure the speedy return of Lord M and the Whigs. No, what Victoria heard in Lancashire-born Peel’s flat-vowelled request that she remove her senior ladies was the voice of a jeering nation that was calling publicly, bluntly, lewdly even, for the removal of Ladies Tavistock and Portman and Baroness Lehzen from her household. Tory papers such as the Morning Post and the Examiner routinely painted the trio as sleazy beldames whispering obscenities into the virgin Queen’s ear, planting scenarios in her mind that no decent girl should entertain. The fact that the trio were leeringly described as ‘Ladies of the Bedchamber’ only added to the sense that Victoria’s court now rivalled that of Henry VIII or Charles II for female debauchery. No wonder Dr Davys, Victoria’s old tutor and newly installed as Bishop of Peterborough, had withdrawn his daughter Mary from the court and insisted she join her family in the Cathedral Close, where any scandals were likely to be of a milder kind.
And then, suddenly, just as everyone was smoothing down their feathers and congratulating themselves on the fact that the monarchy had, yet again, managed to right itself, Sir John Conroy announced that he was leaving public life for good. He would quit his post as the Duchess’s Comptroller and move his family abroad. Naturally, he used the occasion to puff himself up, explaining that, since the nation assumed he was ‘the sole cause’ of the ‘disunion’ between the Queen and her mother, he had decided to do the statesmanlike thing and resign. In fact, what had actually happened was that the old devil realised that once more his machinations had come to nothing. While his stirring of the Lady Flora business had hugely discredited the Crown, Lehzen was still as entrenched as ever, and the Duchess no nearer being appointed Regent. As for his own proposed peerage, it was clearly