Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes
Now, all businesslike attention to detail, the Hastings family set about organising the post-mortem. They sent a message that the Queen might have any of her own medical men present at the examination, with the pointed exception of Sir James Clark. Victoria chose Chambers, who had cared for Lady Flora in her final weeks. Melbourne advised her not to insist on any more of her people being present – it would give the impression that she was ‘so very anxious’ about the result. In addition to Chambers, the Hastings family picked four leading physicians and surgeons, including the venerable medical patriarchs Astley Cooper and Benjamin Brodie, both of whom had a loose connection with the royal household. They also insisted that their own man, a cousin called John King, should be present at what Victoria, always of a shuddering turn of mind, insisted on calling ‘the Dissection’.
Lady Flora Hastings’s post-mortem on 5 July was a strange reprise of the examination of her ‘person’ that had taken place six months earlier. Whereas the procedure on 17 February had taken forty-five fumbling and embarrassed minutes, this one lasted three calm and purposeful hours. And while the first occasion had involved Lady Flora being partly stripped, on this occasion merely her stomach was uncovered, so that, as Lady Sophia assured her mother, there was ‘nothing to wound the feelings, nothing as bad as Sir James Clark’. When the doctors sliced into the abdominal cavity they found it riddled with stringy adhesions, the result of inflammation from some ‘former and distant period of time’. These bands of fibrous material had most probably wrapped themselves around the intestine, progressively blocking a portion of the bowel. Consequently the stomach and intestines were ‘distended with air’ and ‘very much attenuated’. Here, then, was one cause of Lady Flora’s swollen stomach. The examination went on to reveal that while the liver was structurally sound, it was also ‘very much enlarged, extending downwards as low as the pelvis’. Another reason why Lady Flora’s belly might swell out in a way that suggested a baby was nesting inside. ‘The uterus and its appendages,’ the doctors concluded, ‘presented the usual appearances of the healthy virgin state.’ This was the medical quintet’s way of saying that Lady Flora had never had sex.
‘Can’t say that,’ said Lord M, on hearing there was no evidence that Lady Flora had ever been pregnant; ‘no one on earth can say that there never has been such a thing.’ This may reflect Melbourne’s habitual cynicism, especially where women were concerned. For the fact remains that Lady Flora was both deeply pious and great friends with the Conroy ladies, Elizabeth and Jane particularly. All the same, rumours continue to this day that Flora Hastings was indeed John Conroy’s mistress, and had already given birth to a child in 1838. And, given the evidence, you can see why the case might be made. Flora Hastings and John Conroy were clearly close, as close as that other daughter–father pairing of Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne. In both cases, too, there was an erotic charge that was sufficiently clear to observers for jokes to be made about it. Just as there were cries of ‘Mrs Melbourne’ when Victoria appeared yet again with her Prime Minister by her side, there were plenty of people who wondered at the amount of time Flora and Conroy spent closeted together in her room. The passionate letter she wrote him, her mad dash to Kensington within minutes of being accused of carrying his baby, and her sudden and final collapse when he left the country that June, confirm her dependence on him. But whether their bodies ever touched in the very particular way that Sir Charles Clarke suggested – close enough to allow for pregnancy, separate enough to ensure Flora’s technical virginity – we cannot know.
Lady Flora Hastings’s death certificate states that she died as a result of ‘exhaustion from the disease of the liver and intestines’. This was what would kill her younger sister Selina twenty-eight years later, which suggests a genetic component. Still, as far as a sizeable chunk of the British press was concerned, the published post-mortem was sufficiently ambiguous to leave open the picturesque possibility that Lady Flora Hastings had died of shame at having her body treated as if she were a common prostitute. ‘What they’ll say is, it accelerated it,’ said Lord M, and he turned out to be spot on. The Morning Post, the Standard and the Spectator all made a feature of the fact that Lady Flora had apparently been suffering from a chronic condition dating from ‘an earlier and distant time’. This suggested, they said, that she might have lived to a reasonable age had not the court set about ‘hunting her to death’. Whenever a paper ventured a qualifying view – in what way, asked The Times reasonably, could Ladies Portman and Tavistock really be said to have contributed to the killing of a woman who was already suffering from serious disease? – back came the rallying cry that it was Lady Flora’s mortification at what amounted to rape, rather than her kinked and puckered guts, that had sent her to an early grave.
This inky bickering raised the temperature in the country even as it chilled the spirits in Buckingham Palace. Always-anxious Lord Tavistock was not the only one who thought Victoria should leave town until Lady Flora had been safely consigned to her native peat. Protective Lord Liverpool also worried that if the Queen remained in London there would be some kind of ‘insult’ staged against her on the day of the funeral. Even the usually sanguine Lord M fretted that the long ten-day delay between death and burial would allow time for aggressive mischief: ‘People are up to anything.’
Victoria, however, showed herself calmer than the old men. Just like Flora, she would not bolt. She would not scuttle away to Windsor as if she had reason to be ashamed. She would stick it out in this boiling palace with this decaying corpse. She would stick it out even when her mother sent carping notes hinting that she was altogether ‘too merry’ when sitting down to dinner with her household. She would stick it out through the sweltering nights, unable to sleep, terrified that Lady Flora would stray into her dreams. On the night before the hearse was due to remove the body, Victoria sat up writing to dear old Baroness Spaeth in Germany, the besotted guardian of her earliest years who always insisted that her little ‘Drina’ could do no wrong. When she did finally retire to bed, she made Lehzen stay on the sofa in her room until her eyes eventually fluttered shut at 4 a.m., just as the carriage carrying Lady Flora’s body, over which the devoted Caroline Reichenbach kept watch, rolled out of the western courtyard.
As Flora Hastings lay in state in her old room at Loudon, Victoria finally turned her attention back to her own suspended life. In a few weeks’ time her Saxe-Coburg cousins Albert and Ernest would be visiting. Albert, the younger, had been marked out from birth as a possible match by Uncle Leopold, who was determined to stitch Europe back together after Napoleon’s vandalism, using Coburgian blood and sinew. But the first and only meeting between the young people three years earlier had ended on a doubtful note. The Prince was pleasant, clever and thoughtful. Yet there was an off-putting prissiness to him. He was clearly uncomfortable with the endless chatter of the court ladies, and, worst of all from Victoria’s point of view, hated dancing, preferring to be in bed by 9.30. And now he was coming again, with who-knows-what expectations. That night, still confined to the palace out of respect for Lady Flora, Victoria and Lord M
talked of … my having no great wish to see Albert, as the whole subject was an odious one, and one which I hated to decide about; there was no engagement between us, I said, but that the young man was aware that there was the possibility of such a union; … I said it was disagreeable for me to see him though, and a disagreeable thing; ‘It’s very disagreeable,’ Lord M. said. I begged him to say nothing about it to anybody, or to answer questions about it, as it would be very disagreeable to me if other people knew it. Lord M. I didn’t mind, as I told him everything … ‘Certainly better wait for a year or two,’ he said; ‘it’s a very serious question.’ I said I wished if possible never to marry; ‘I don’t know about that,’ he replied.
The ‘disagreeability’ that Victoria registered so insistently was less about one German princeling’s lack of charisma on the ballroom floor than the terror she felt at being hurtled into adulthood in full view of ‘other people’, that gawping audience which now seemed to surround her even when she was quite alone. For the Lady Flora business had stripped bare the realpolitik of women’s sexual lives at court. No one was spared this relentless surveillance, not even Victoria. Her reign would not be secure until her body had done what queens’ bodies are supposed to, which is produce a male heir. Assuming that she took after her mother rather than poor Aunt Adelaide, within a few months of meeting Albert for a second time Victoria might be