their ‘lying-in’ waddled and flopped, unable to get comfortable on the palace sofas. The thought of having a large number of children, she confided to Lord M, was ‘the only thing I dread’. Over the last two weeks, as Lady Flora lay dying, Victoria had keenly monitored the misery of her half-sister Fiddy, whose sixth – sixth! – pregnancy appeared to be going on for ever, so that it seemed as if she might be stuck permanently in that ugly, brutish state. Victoria had noticed too the occasional sudden absences of various court ladies, followed by their reappearance a few weeks later with red-rimmed eyes. It would happen soon to Lady Portman. Three weeks after Lady Flora’s death the thirty-year-old Viscountess miscarried her fifth child, terrified out of her wits at the way the newspapers were continuing to accuse her of shaming Lady Flora to her death.
For the Lady Flora affair had refused to die with Lady Flora. Indeed, she had barely been buried in Loudon kirk before a blizzard of publications resurrected the scandal. The idea of one young woman engaged by proxy in a sexual assault upon another, while a third (Lady Portman) watched, could have been designed to titillate the imaginations of the hack writers who now rushed into print with lurid reprises of the sickening events. For the more forensically minded, there were stand-alone pamphlets such as ‘The Court Doctor Dissected’, which poured scorn on Sir James Clark’s handling of Lady Flora’s case, especially in the matter of diagnosis. Meanwhile, ‘A Warning Letter to Baroness Lehzen’ urged ‘the Palace washerwoman’ to slink back to Germany, while ‘A Voice From the Grave of Lady Flora’ demanded that the Queen ask her mother’s forgiveness on her knees. As Victoria moved into her third year on the throne, it seemed as if the world had been reduced to a forest of pointing fingers and mocking voices, as insolent as the man, unseen in the crowd, who had shouted to her one day as she rode out in Hyde Park, ‘Who’s belly-up now?’
To make things worse, from the middle of August all the main players in the scandal were at it again, engaged in their own newspaper wars. With escalating vitriol Hamilton Fitzgerald, Lord Hastings, Lord Portman and Lord Tavistock now published full runs of their earlier correspondences with one another and with Lady Flora, setting out their own versions of what had really happened back in early spring. Even Lady Sophia Hastings would eventually chip in by publishing a volume of her late sister’s overheated devotional verse, nominally to raise money for the tottering steeple of Loudon kirk, but in reality to remind the world what a pure soul the Queen had hounded to her death. And then, in October, unable to bear any longer the way Lady Portman’s family was continuing to build a case against him as the source of the slander – and, implicitly, the cause of her miscarriage – Sir James Clark decided to do what he had been threatening all along. He published his own narrative account of the Lady Flora affair.
For Victoria this was a terrifying moment, perhaps the most terrifying of the entire scandal. For months now Clark had been haunting the palace looking pale, thin and angry as his Society patients deserted him, reluctant to retain the medical services of a butler’s son who was denounced as a ‘fingering slave’ who leered over aristocratic maidens before accusing them of immorality. Even worse, the medical profession had turned against him, with Chambers declaring to anyone who would listen that ‘there was no foundation and never had been any for the suspicions about Lady Flora’. In the newspapers, phrases like ‘medical fag’, ‘Inspector of Court Ladies’ and ‘Macsycophantic’ were splashed around. And now it was whispered that a desperate Clark was about to attempt to salvage his ruined reputation, not to mention his tumbling income, by putting ‘the saddle on the right horse’ – that is, by naming Victoria as the source of the slur against Lady Flora. For who else could it be? Lord Tavistock and Lady Portman in their written replies to Lord Hastings had explicitly but pointedly denied that Lehzen was the ‘originator of the slander’. That left only one person: the Queen herself. And if she was named as the source of the scandal, it was not impossible that she would be forced to abdicate in favour of the ever-looming Duke of Cumberland.
In the event, the doctor’s publication on 9 October held back from taking that final, fatal step, and stayed tactfully silent on the identity of the original calumniators. This refusal to throw her to the wolves secured Victoria’s lasting loyalty. From now on Sir James was allowed to potter around the court, misdiagnosing merrily as he went. Indeed, it could be argued that his fatal mistreatment of Prince Albert’s typhoid in 1861 was the price Victoria paid for his silence over the Lady Flora Hastings affair twenty years earlier.
Prince Albert around the time of his engagement to Queen Victoria
So perhaps we should not be surprised when, on 10 October, the day after she had escaped being branded by Clark as the originator of the lie against Lady Flora, Victoria found herself thinking differently about the twenty-year-old Albert of Saxe-Coburg. The first time they met he had seemed steady and dull. But the trauma of these past six months had made steady and dull seem strangely alluring. Which is why, on that autumn Friday morning when she ‘went to the top of the staircase and received my 2 dear cousins Ernest and Albert’, Victoria was, for a moment, quite taken aback. The Princes, she had to admit, were much improved: taller, older – in fact the sort of men who might make a maiden Queen’s heart beat faster. The younger one in particular … well, she could hardly believe her eyes: ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert,’ she wrote breathlessly in her journal that night, ‘– who is beautiful.’
2
I
On 28 April 1866 the Royal Society held a Saturday soirée at Burlington House, its grand Palladian headquarters just off Piccadilly. Although the event had been timed to coincide with London’s social season, it would be gilding things to describe the occasion as ‘glittering’. This was a gentlemen-only affair, attended by professional men of science and genteel savants in subfusc who gathered to ponder the latest advances in their own discipline, learn about developments in others, catch up with old friends and make contact with new ones. The glaring absence of ladies probably accounts for the glum mood of the twenty-four-year-old Prince of Wales, who had agreed to attend the event only after months of nagging from the Society’s President, General Edward Sabine. Bertie’s sulkiness was hardly helped by knowing that his hosts would have much preferred to be welcoming his father, the late Prince Albert, in his place. Now there was a man you could have guaranteed to take a genuine interest in the exhibits that cluttered the stately interior of Burlington House that night: deep-sea telegraph cables encrusted with barnacles, a machine for extracting oxygen from the atmosphere, photographs of sunspots, not forgetting ‘Mr Preece’s electrical signals for communication in railway trains’. Buzzing around these emblems of modernity were the leading geologists, naturalists and chemists of the day, all avid for a glimpse of tomorrow’s world. The Prince of Wales by contrast looked ‘utterly uninterested’ in any of it, managing to last for little more than an hour before slipping off into the Piccadilly night to begin his evening, this time for real.
Before he left, though, His Royal Callowness was scheduled to shake hands with some of the Royal Society’s most distinguished Fellows. Amongst the select group was a tall, stooped man with a long grizzled beard that appeared to put him in his mid-sixties at least. The Prince clearly had no idea who the old gentleman in the dress suit was, and the old gentleman appeared equally flustered in return. Failing to understand whatever listless remark the young Prince lobbed in his direction, the reluctant courtier gave a deep bow and scurried away.
It is hardly surprising that the Prince of Wales either did not know or did not care that the old man who had just been presented to him was Charles Darwin, the most celebrated scientist of the century, winner of the Copley Medal, and author of the epoch-making On the Origin of Species. What was extraordinary, though, was the fact that most of the other guests at the Royal Society had failed to recognise Darwin too. Indeed, the scientific superstar