Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes

      Young Queen Victoria

      Most upsetting of all was her figure. That twenty-two-inch waist had immediately started to swell, as if queenship required something more of her. In addition to eating too often and too fast, she had taken to gulping down prodigious amounts of alcohol at mealtimes, much to Mama’s and even Lord M’s alarm. All the ladies at court were obliged to change their clothes several times a day, matching their outfits to the demands of the moment: eating breakfast, waving at charity children, entertaining dull Coburgians after dinner. In such an intensely visual economy, where you presented a new version of yourself to the world every three hours or so, it was hard to hide even a modest change of shape. As Victoria started to puff out she increasingly opted for fitted bodices that showed off her excellent bust (Lord M said that a good bust mattered more than anything), and bell-shaped skirts under which she could smuggle extra poundage and the disproportionately stumpy legs that had long been the despair of her dancing mistress. But that autumn, passing through Paris, Lady Holland had heard a whisper from the Queen’s dressmaker that her clothes were having to be made larger than ever. Incontrovertible proof came in mid-December when Victoria stepped on the scales and found that she weighed nearly nine stone, which was ‘incredible for my size’.

      Lord Melbourne did his best to try and jolly the Queen out of her physical and moral slump. What about eating only when hungry, he suggested. In that case, snapped the Queen, I would be eating all day long. Well, why not walk more, he asked. Victoria triumphantly fished out the example of Donna Maria of Portugal, exactly the same age as her, who walked all the time and still resembled a pudding. In any case, walking always meant getting stones in her shoes. Have them made tighter, came the mild prime ministerial reply. Melbourne also dropped hints about her personal hygiene, which had fallen off sharply. She really should try to change her clothes more often, something about which she admitted she had become ‘lazy’. And a bath taken in the early evening, before dinner, hinted the premier, might not go amiss.

      Perhaps, though, looking like a caricature and smelling like a sweating horse was exactly the effect Victoria was after. Her early brief spell of prettiness had turned out to have its disadvantages, for it had not only attracted the attention of slobbering old roués like Lord Holland, but also stirred up the male population in the strangest ways. Earlier that year an admirer had managed to get access to the Chapel Royal, where he disrupted Morning Service by bowing, kissing and waving his hand to Victoria. Then there was Tom Flower, who was convinced that he was going to marry the Queen, and on one frightening night in July 1838 had managed to get within seven yards of her bedroom to tell her so. A few months later the infamous urchin Edward ‘the Boy’ Jones would live for a week in the back passages of Buckingham Palace before being apprehended with the Queen’s underwear stuffed down his trousers.

      And then there was the endless heartless public chatter about which of her boy cousins she would marry – Hanoverian George, Coburgian Albert or Alexander from the House of Orange. For until Victoria’s body did what it was supposed to and produced a male heir, there was always the chance that the throne would be seized by her uncle the Duke of Cumberland, who, if Salic law had prevailed in Britain as it did in Hanover, would even now be ruling in her place. Yet none of Victoria’s suitors seemed to have the makings of a hero-prince in a Grimm fairy tale. They were plain, dull young men who blushed and stammered when they spoke to her, yet dared to imagine that they might one day lie alongside her in the marriage bed. Altogether more charming, although actually no less disturbing, was the way that ordinary Britons felt they owned the young Queen as if she were their personal pet. In the August of that second year some poor people left a kitten in a basket for her at Buckingham Palace. Next time, she was terrified that it would be a baby.

      III

      The culminating act of ‘the Lady Flora Hastings affair’ began in the darkest days of 1838. On 21 December Conroy won his case against The Times, and was overheard crowing that the Queen had been spotted coming in to dinner with red, swollen eyes. At the other end of the country Lady Flora was feeling queasy. She had been out of waiting since late August, and was spending Christmas with her family at Loudon Castle, near Kilmarnock, where she had been stricken with sickness and runny bowels. Her mother, the Dowager Lady Hastings, begged her eldest child not to return to London until her stomach had settled. But the sad news that Lady Mary Stopford was dying of consumption meant that Flora was urgently required to take her place. The Duchess of Kent, who was spending Christmas cooped up in that tatty fun palace Brighton Pavilion, with a daughter who barely acknowledged her, did not know how she would cope without at least one of her favourite ladies by her side. Flora, although hardly in a state to endure a four-day journey of deep winter ruts and uncertain privy stops, insisted on setting out for court the moment she was summoned, because she ‘could not bear to think of the D[uches]s’ being alone’.

      What happened next has come down to us as so solid and certain, so much a matter of documented and established fact, that it has never been called into question. According to this habitual version of events, Sir John Conroy, happening to be in Scotland, arranged to share a chaise on the journey south with Lady Flora. But this turns out to be quite wrong. The mistake occurred because few biographers have looked at the Hastings family letters, including those written by Lady Flora, since they were read by the original recipients 180 years ago. That, in turn, is because the documents lie scattered in archives around the world, folded into other people’s lives. But if you extract and collate these various correspondences from the Huntington Library, the British Library, Balliol College Archives, Mount Stuart Archives, and the Flintshire Record Office, it becomes apparent that Lady Flora set out on 2 January 1839 quite alone in a private carriage, and in such a hurry that she was forced to travel for sixteen straight hours, without making her usual break near Doncaster to visit her cousin Lady Helena Cooke of Owston Hall. Sir John, who had indeed paid a brief visit to Loudon over the holiday period, was now tucked up safely at home in Kensington with his wife and family. The confusion arose because three months earlier, at the end of her previous period in waiting, Sir John had escorted Flora in a post-chaise from the palace to the Port of London, where she was due to embark on what was colloquially known as ‘the steamer’, or steamboat, for Edinburgh. Given that their friendship was already the ‘matter of joke and loose talk’, this was enough to set tongues clacking.

      Why on earth had Flora Hastings risked ruining her reputation by travelling with a man to whom she was not related? Perhaps because, still unmarried at thirty-two, she considered herself such an old maid – her letters to family members are full of wry underlined phrases such as ‘at my years’ – that it would have seemed simpering to insist on a chaperone to protect her virtue while travelling with an old family friend such as Sir John. Then again, she may have considered that she did need a chaperone to make sure she was safely settled in her berth on the steamboat, and Sir John, a man she thought of as a second father, seemed an ideal protector of her maidenly virtue. A letter received by Conroy from the Dowager Marchioness Hastings on the day her daughter set off on her return journey south addresses him warmly, and thanks ‘you My Dear Sir John … & Lady Conroy, for all your kindness to My Dear Child & to say how I have felt