still carry that past somewhere inside her, legible to those who knew how to look. Both girls had fathers who thought nothing of siring bastards as they circled the world in pursuit of military glory. Lord Hastings, part of whose family name ‘Rawdon-Hastings’ would be snaffled by Thackeray in 1847 for Vanity Fair’s Rawdon Crawley, ‘a heavy dragoon with strong desires and small brain, who had never controlled a passion in his life’, was believed to have had an affair with an Irish girl called Jemima Ffrench during his long bachelorhood. The result was George Nobbs, born in 1799, an adventurer who ended up lording it over the natives of Pitcairn, where he did his personal best to help the South Sea islanders replenish their gene pool.
Queen Victoria likewise had illegitimate half-siblings, quite distinct from the children of her mother’s first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen. In 1789 two Genevan women gave birth to babies, both of whom had been fathered by a young student Prince, Edward, Duke of Kent. The boy baby, Edward Schencker Scheener, would grow up to be placed as a clerk in the British Foreign Office, only leaving the country tactfully in 1837 when his half-sister Victoria came to the throne. In addition, the Duke of Kent was strongly rumoured to have fathered other illegitimate children during his posting to Quebec in the 1790s. Indeed, Sir John Conroy believed that his own wife, Elizabeth, was the result of an affair between the Duke and Mrs Fisher, wife of a leading military engineer stationed in the garrison town. Here, say some, were the roots of Conroy’s obsessive efforts to graft his own family on to that of the Duke of Kent during the cloistered Kensington years. By turning his family into ‘the Conroyals’, Conroy wasn’t attempting to haul his wife and daughters up the social ladder so much as restore them to their rightful position as blood relatives of the British Queen.
Such tangled family trees provided ample opportunity to spin what Freud, writing at the other end of the century, would term a ‘family romance’. Here was the elite version of all those peasant tales collected by the Grimms featuring lost children, missing parents and restored bags of golden coins. On a more immediate level, these tangled dynastic dramas provided a specific context for anyone over the age of forty to read the Lady Flora Hastings affair. The more that people came to think about the antecedents of Lady Flora and Queen Victoria, the more they realised that the Old Pleasure hadn’t disappeared, but was simply lying dormant in new bodies. Chances were that Lady Flora was as ‘light’ as her father, the Duchess of Kent was sleeping with Conroy, and Queen Victoria was tumbling with Lord Melbourne amongst the despatch boxes.
Faced with this thickened stew of reheated Society gossip, Sir John Conroy urged the Hastings family to appeal over the heads of loose-lipped diplomats and prurient clubmen to the British people – or, in Flora’s phrase, ‘good John Bull’. On the same day that Conroy had arranged for the Age to publish an account denouncing the Queen and Lehzen for ordering a sexual assault upon blameless Lady Flora, the Examiner produced A STATEMENT IN VINDICATION OF LADY FLORA HASTINGS. This came not from Flora’s brother, but from her uncle by marriage Hamilton Fitzgerald, a Briton living in Belgium. ‘Uncle Fitz’ proceeded to set the record straight by publishing a version of events as told to him by Flora herself in a letter of 8 March. He tactfully left out the more inflammatory parts of her statement – the fact, for instance, that she believed herself to be the victim of a ‘diabolical conspiracy’ against ‘the Duchess of Kent and myself’, led by a ‘certain foreign lady, whose hatred to the Duchess is no secret’. In Fitzgerald’s published précis, blame was laid instead at the door of Lady Portman and Lady Tavistock, while leaving space for the fact that there was an ‘originator of the slander’ who had yet to be named. Fitzgerald tactfully shielded the Queen from direct responsibility for Flora’s humiliating medical torture, yet still managed to imply that Victoria had done something to feel guilty about: ‘Lady Flora is convinced that the Queen … did not understand what she was betrayed into – for ever since the horrid event her Majesty has showed her regret by the most gracious kindness to Lady Flora and “expressed it warmly with tears in her eyes”.’
If Victoria did have tears in her eyes when the Examiner article appeared on 24 March, they were ones of blazing rage. Even unshockable Lord M shuddered at the way Fitzgerald’s account of Lady Flora’s examination was ‘so coarsely put’. The next day a letter arrived from the Duchess at the other end of the palace claiming that ‘Lady Flora had been so horrified at this account, and denied knowing any thing about it’. Which, said Lord M, was absolute nonsense: ‘We know … that she knew about it.’ But, actually, did she? Flora certainly ended her original letter to Fitzgerald with a ringing ‘Good bye dear uncle, I blush to send you so revolting a tale … but you are welcome to tell it right and left.’ However, from letters in the Hastings archive it looks as though she was taken aback by Hamilton Fitzgerald’s decision to go ahead with national publication without seeking her permission first.
The mood at court now became molten. Excited gabble that Lady Portman was about to go was countered with an equally strong assertion that the Queen would not part with any of her ladies, for fear of seeming to admit having done wrong. The Duchess, meanwhile, was holding firm on her refusal to appear in public with Lady Tavistock. Lady Tavistock, in turn, was convinced that she was about to be widowed, since Lord Hastings was rumoured to be on the point of ‘calling out’ her husband to a duel – a ridiculously Ruritanian gesture that was just plausible enough in this febrile atmosphere to be truly terrifying. A petrified Lady Tavistock trailed an elusive Lady Flora around the palace corridors for several days before bursting out in agitation, ‘Won’t you speak to me, won’t you shake hands with me?’ – to which Lady Flora replied icily that it was ‘impossible’.
For the moment for shaking hands was past. From this point, all conversations took place in shouted capitals via the public prints. Twenty years earlier a young Prince Leopold, at that time married to the daughter of the Prince Regent, Princess Charlotte, had warned his sister, Princess Sophie of Saxe-Coburg, that in Britain ‘No noble or upper-class family can do anything which is of the remotest interest without its being known and straightway published in the newspapers with comments favourable or otherwise.’ And this particular scandal seemed to have absolutely everything that the British press liked best: young aristocratic women, lascivious doctors, slippery foreigners and, above all, several stripes of illicit sex. Melbourne was insulted as ‘a painted old floozy’ in the Tory press, while Lehzen was reduced to that familiar archetype of the scheming servant. Claims were made about the appearance and moral character of the court ladies that would bring immediate libel charges today, a reminder that in the early years of Victoria’s reign Britain had not yet become Victorian.
The climax of spite and bad temper was reached on 15 April, when the Marquess of Hastings published an abusive open letter to Lord Melbourne in the Morning Post, complaining about the failure to sack any of the people responsible for the outrage on his sister. As a consequence of this wilful inertia, wrote Hastings, Lady Flora was obliged to face her ‘tormentors’ on a daily basis; leaving the court wasn’t an option, since it would only fuel rumours that she had bolted in shame. The following day, and after a great deal of heart-searching, Flora’s frail fifty-nine-year-old mother also took to the newspapers to publish the correspondence she had exchanged with the Queen and Lord Melbourne in the immediate aftermath of her daughter’s humiliating ordeal. ‘This is not a matter that can or will be hushed up,’ the Dowager Marchioness declaimed from the fastness of Loudon Castle, before calling in a second letter for Sir James Clark’s dismissal ‘as a mark of public justice’. Melbourne’s response, on behalf of the Queen, had been withering, describing Lady Hastings’s demand as ‘unprecedented and objectionable’.
This correspondence, which appeared to show a sneering Lord Melbourne treating a distraught mother, a widow too, with ungentlemanly rudeness, was now set before a fascinated nation to gulp down with its breakfast. Victoria was incandescent: ‘That wicked old foolish woman Lady Hastings has had her whole correspondence with Lord Melbourne published in the Morning Post.’ She would, she said, like ‘to have hanged the Editor and the whole Hastings family for their Infamy’. Convinced that the Duchess had put her old friend Lady Hastings up to it (it had actually been Conroy), Victoria now marched her mother on to the imaginary scaffold she had built for the Hastings family. How she wished, she said to Lord M, that she could get rid of the Duchess: ‘it was having an Enemy in the house; “It is having