during the Kensington days, ‘I see what I shall not get today, I shall never get.’
The Duchess was undone. Whether or not she and Sir John ever had been lovers, the fact remained that she depended on him more than she ever had on either of her two husbands. ‘It is with the utmost pain,’ she wrote in her public response of 10 June, in such unnervingly good English that it suggests Conroy must have written it for her, ‘that I consent to be deprived of the continuance of your services.’ The Duchess was not the only wounded woman Sir John left in his wake. The week that he announced he was quitting the country, Lady Flora Hastings retreated to her rooms on the first floor of Buckingham Palace, never to leave them again. Victoria had no doubt that Conroy’s departure accelerated Flora’s decline: ‘she felt he deserted her’.
V
By the time Conroy quit the country it had been almost ten months since his fatal post-chaise trip to the Port of London with Lady Flora, and it was becoming clear to most sane people that no baby was about to appear. Yet that didn’t stop the Queen and her Prime Minister speculating that Lady Flora’s livid complexion, patchy scalp and still monstrous figure were evidence of a pregnancy gone wrong. Lady Portman, perhaps in desperation, had been heard gossiping that Lady Flora had recently given birth to a stillborn child. Periodically Victoria was still capable of taking refuge in the fantasy that there was nothing the matter with Lady Flora other than ‘a billious [sic] attack’ that she was exaggerating for effect, while Melbourne continued to smirk whenever the subject of the lady-in-waiting’s health was raised. When both of these explanations started to wear thin, the duo grumbled for the hundredth time that it was exceedingly ‘odd’ that the lady-in-waiting should continue to languish so.
Nonetheless, they followed the reports from the sickroom with a grim intensity, discussing Flora’s galloping diarrhoea in between briefings on the situation in Afghanistan. On 16 June Victoria reported to her Prime Minister that her mother had told her that Lady Flora was very ill, could keep nothing down and had a bad fever. This time, instead of raising a quizzical eyebrow, Lord M proceeded to berate Sir James Clark for not having spotted from the beginning that the stricken woman had been suffering from the kind of serious illness that produces ‘extraordinary phenomena’. Two days later Victoria reported to her diary that Dr William Chambers, the medical man now in attendance on Flora, said that ‘there was some bad Internal disorder, which would prove fatal’ – to which the young Queen added with the kind of breathtaking complacency that perhaps only young monarchs are allowed, ‘which I always thought’.
Sensing moral victory in the air, the Hastings family continued as provocative as ever. On 24 June Lady Sophia Hastings arrived at the palace to nurse her dying sister. Victoria grudgingly granted the request that she should be given a temporary room at the palace: ‘the Mother, I said, no human power would make me consent to lodge here; but … [Lord Melbourne] said the sister I must allow’. A week later Sophia was joined by her siblings Lady Selina and George the Marquess of Hastings, and sister-in-law Barbara. Making a point of refusing to sleep under the enemy’s roof, the quartet dozed ostentatiously on sofas instead, and refused to ask for food. ‘How stupid!’ snorted Lord M.
Boiling now with irritation at Hastingses singular and plural, Victoria ranted that it was ‘disagreeable and painful to me to think there was a dying person in the house’. Out there – in Mayfair and Piccadilly – the Season was reaching its climax, and she would normally be clattering home at three or four in the morning with flushed cheeks and sore feet. More crucially, she would be holding her own dinners and balls, as she had so delightfully earlier in the Season when playing host to the dashing Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, who had got all the ladies of the court – even Lady Flora – in a spin. But mutters were beginning to percolate that it simply would not be right for the Queen to continue holding lavish receptions in the Throne Room, when in another wing of the palace Lady Flora was drifting in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t just the propriety of the thing, but the noise. On 17 June the Duchess tearfully accosted Victoria, ‘saying Lady Flora was dying’, and dropped strong hints that the ball planned for later that day should be cancelled. This only had the unfortunate effect of provoking Victoria into snapping ‘that I didn’t believe she was so very ill as they said she was’. ‘As you say, Ma’am,’ said a tactful Lord M, ignoring this moment of high gracelessness, ‘it would be very awkward if that woman was to die.’
By the following week it was obvious even to Victoria that ‘that woman’ could not last much longer. Prayers were being said for Lady Flora in churches up and down the country. Mindful of the importance of playing these last few days carefully, Lord Melbourne urged his furious mistress to say a final, formal goodbye to her nemesis. That moment came on 27 June, during one of the Queen and the Prime Minister’s daily meetings: ‘Talked of Lady Flora, who, I said, was very weak, though they had thought she was better; “They never know,” Lord M. said … At this moment Lehzen knocked at the door, and I said to Lord M. if he would let me go down I would be up again in a minute; and he said “Don’t be in a hurry.”’ When Victoria arrived in the sickroom, Sophia Hastings departed, pointedly without curtseying. ‘I found poor Lady Flora stretched on a couch looking as thin as anybody can be who is still alive; literally a skeleton, but the body very much swollen like a person who is with child; a searching look in her eyes, a look rather like a person who is dying; … she was friendly, said she was very comfortable, and was very grateful for all I had done for her, and that she was glad to see me looking well. I said to her, I hoped to see her again when she was better, – upon which she grasped my hand as if to say “I shall not see you again.” I then instantly went upstairs and returned to Lord M. who said: “You remained a very short time.”’
If the Queen was momentarily caught off guard by Lady Flora’s unusual sweetness, or perhaps by the poorly disguised smells of liquid faeces and vomit that lingered in the sweltering sickroom, she soon snapped back into executive mode. By the following Wednesday Lady Flora was ‘as bad as could be; talked of the awkwardness of her dying in the house; and that when she died, as long as the Body remained in the Palace, I must not go out, or ask people (Lord Melbourne and my own Household excepted) to dinner’. Protocol decreed that, in normal circumstances, the corpse of a member of the royal household would be removed within twenty-four hours. However, Lady Sophia Hastings had already announced that if her sister did die, the family intended to hold a post-mortem to quash any rumours that she had perished in childbirth. Which would mean, as Victoria and Melbourne were quick to spot, that the whole ghastly business would drag on even longer. On Thursday, 4 July, as the final hours ticked down, that night’s dinner guests were put off and Victoria dined quietly with Lord M, while Mama remained with the family party – Ladies Sophia and Selina, Lord Hastings and Caroline Reichenbach – around Lady Flora’s bed. ‘As her mother is not here,’ explained the Duchess with the kind of simple dignity that had so often been missing in this nasty spectacle, ‘I wish to be in her place.’
In the early hours of 5 July, the waiting was over. ‘Lehzen came to my bedside at 9 and said poor Lady Flora died at a little after 2 … the poor thing died without a struggle and only just raised her hands and gave one gasp.’ Just as Victoria was steadying herself with the knowledge that in her last days Lady Flora had sent messages that ‘she had no ill will towards any one’, a triumphantly vicious note arrived from Mama ‘in which she said – what my feelings must be now’. Outraged, Victoria blustered to Melbourne later that day that ‘I felt no remorse, I felt I had done nothing to kill her.’ Melbourne clucked his agreement that the suggestion was ‘abominable’. Between them they decided that Victoria would send her verbal condolences to old Lady Hastings, but that a written communication was out of the question. She also sent £50 to Lady Flora’s maid, Caroline Reichenbach, which Lady Sophia insisted on being returned. All the same, there was a sense that a huge, malignant boil had burst. That afternoon, walking in the palace garden, the young monarch felt a wild desire to roll on the grass.
Even in death Lady Flora managed to rattle and harry. An article in the Morning Post on the very day of her passing tried to whip up fake outrage at the way discussions about what to do with her remains had taken place while she was still breathing. The Era chipped in with an incendiary remark about ‘persons capable of committing a murder’ having ‘kicked the body of their victim