if someone had outlined Lady Flora with a firm lead pencil: wherever you looked she was always there, ‘spying’ on the company and making her sharp little jokes. All of which was ironic when you considered that her status had tumbled along with her employer’s. At Kensington Flora had prided herself on keeping her desk as well-organised as ‘a Secretary of States’, as befitted a key member of the court-in-waiting. But with Victoria ascending to the throne on 20 June 1837 as a legal adult, Flora had been demoted overnight to the position of paid companion to the middle-aged widow of a minor Prince. Yet if she felt the humiliation, she said nothing. Instead she continued to behave as she always had: ‘restrained and uncommunicative’, according to Mary Davys, who was shaping up to be as good a ‘spie’ as Lady Flora herself. While the other court ladies popped in and out of each other’s sitting rooms to while away the endless hours with drawing, sewing, practising magic tricks and reading the Bible, Lady Flora made it quite clear that she was not open to such invitations: ‘we never think of going to her room’, explained Mary; ‘she does not wish it’.
At the end of April 1838 Lady Mary Stopford, about to finish her current period of waiting on the Duchess, was getting ready to hand over to Lady Flora, who had been away from court since the previous August. For the first time since their positions had been so dramatically reversed during the first few hours of the new reign, those two old foes, Baroness Lehzen and Lady Flora Hastings, would be obliged to live alongside each other once more. Lady Mary Stopford took advantage of a brisk carriage ride around Windsor Great Park to give Mary Davys ‘some hints about my conduct to Lady Flora Hastings, and said now was the time that I might by a little tact be useful to the Baroness and Queen whom she will try to annoy’. Twenty-two-year-old Mary, though, was not optimistic about her chances of neutralising ‘Scotty’s’ astringent reappearance at the palace. ‘The poor Baroness will be much plagued, I fear!’ wrote the worried clergyman’s daughter, ‘but we will hope for the best.’
Victoria, meanwhile, was not hoping for the best at all. On 18 April the young Queen confided to ‘Lord M’ how much she ‘regretted’ the fact that Lady Flora would soon be back in waiting, since she was, and always had been, the ‘Spie’ of her mother and Sir John. Lord M pronounced himself ‘sorry’ at the news too, and proceeded to pluck from his teeming memory a scurrilous account of Lady Flora’s antecedents. In response to the Queen’s pointed enquiry as to whether the late Marquess of Hastings had been a man of any talent, Lord M said emphatically not: ‘he could make a good pompous speech and gained a sort of public admiration’, but ‘“he was very unprincipled about money”’. Five days later, and with the ‘odious’ Lady Flora’s arrival now imminent, Victoria returned to the subject that had begun to obsess her: ‘I warned him against … [Lady Flora], as being an amazing Spy, who would repeat everything she heard, and that he better take care of what he said before her; he said: “I’ll take care”; and we both agreed it was a very disagreeable thing having her in the House. Spoke of J.C., &c.’
This segue in Victoria’s journal from Lady Flora to ‘JC’, trailed by that insinuating ‘et cetera’, was nothing new. During the Kensington years she had been forced to watch as Lady Flora and Sir John plotted ostentatiously in corners to get Lehzen – whom they snootily dubbed ‘the nursery governess’ – dismissed from Kensington Palace and bundled back to Hanover. But now, with that battle definitively lost, the fact that the conspirators were still spending so much time together was beginning to make people talk. Conroy’s constant presence at Buckingham Palace could be explained away by the fact that, while he had been dismissed from the Queen’s household (or rather, never appointed), he was still her mother’s Comptroller. To emphasise the point, he had taken to travelling every day from his Kensington mansion to the Duchess’s cramped suite in what was still referred to as the ‘new palace’, where he got under the feet of her visiting Coburg relatives and provoked some of Victoria’s more nimble ladies to dive for cover whenever they heard his booming voice on the stairs. There was, though, one room where he could always be sure of a warm welcome. Even Mary Davys, who tried so hard to keep her mind on ‘subjects of higher importance’, allowed herself to drop hints in her letters home. The real reason, she explained, why she would not think of knocking on Lady Flora’s door was because ‘I should be afraid of meeting Sir John who is there a good deal.’
Sir John Conroy, 1837
To those who wondered what on earth the stand-offish Scotswoman and the noisy Irishman had in common, it was doubtless pointed out by more sober-minded courtiers that, actually, their two families had been allies for decades. Conroy’s brother had been the Irish-born Marquess of Hastings’s aide de camp during his governorship of India from 1813 to 1823. The two men had bonded in adversity when both had been implicated in a banking scandal that had left their reputations in tatters – hence Lord Melbourne’s jibe about Hastings being ‘unprincipled about money’. In addition, Conroy’s anger at being let down by the Crown chimed with Flora’s own family mythology. Twenty years earlier her father had been left bankrupt after lending money to the Prince Regent. Lord Hastings’s final years had been spent trying to scrabble back his fortune by accepting the Governorship of Malta, a position that smacked of desperation for a man who had once been spoken of as a future Prime Minister.
So Lady Flora and Sir John had ample reason to bond over the way ingrate monarchs habitually swindled their most devoted public servants. In a letter written at the end of the first summer of the new reign, Conroy had spewed out his bile to Flora at how the Queen and Melbourne were currently batting away his claims to a peerage. Flattered by being taken into his confidence, the usually ‘uncommunicative’ Flora responded with what sounds remarkably like passion: ‘I feel that to know how deeply that letter touched me, you would require to see into my heart – I feel all its nobleness, all its generosity; of how kind in you thus to allow me to enter into your feelings to think me worthy of sharing them, to tell me I can be a comfort to you!’ Lady Flora is adamant that Conroy is ‘not treated as you deserve’, and that he ‘suffers for his integrity’. However, ‘these are days when the injustice of a court can influence only its own petty tribe of sycophants. You have met with much ingratitude & doubtless you will meet with more, but there are true hearts still left.’ Sir John, she concludes, is her ‘dearest friend’. From here her thoughts scramble to the fact that ‘in much you resemble my father. In much also your fate bears some analogy to his’, before finishing with ‘your reward is in Heaven’, which is probably not what Conroy was hoping to hear. At this point the usually ‘restrained’ lady of the bedchamber signs off to ‘my beloved friend’, calling herself simply ‘Flora’.
Around the time Lady Flora came back into waiting, Conroy unleashed the full blast of his anger towards Victoria for withholding the things that made his black heart beat faster: power, a peerage, a public stage on which to strut and bluster. By 11 June 1838, a fortnight before the coronation, to which he was pointedly not invited, Conroy had filed a charge of ‘criminal information’ against The Times. In effect he was suing the paper for claiming that he had siphoned off money from the Duchess of Kent’s bank account. Such was the tinderbox of bad feeling between the two households at the palace that Conroy suspected Victoria of having planted the piece herself. The list of witnesses to be called included Lord Melbourne, the Duchess of Kent and a jittery Baroness Lehzen, who had turned to jelly at the prospect of giving evidence at the Queen’s Bench. Which is exactly, of course, what Conroy had hoped for.
In the end none of the witnesses appeared. All the same, the Times business provided the nagging mood music to Victoria’s post-honeymoon period as Queen, a grinding reminder that the ‘torments’ of the Kensington years had not gone, but were waiting to bloom in strange new shapes. ‘I got such a letter from Ma., Oh! oh! such a letter!’ recorded a blazing Victoria in January 1838, reluctant to commit further details to paper, convinced that someone was reading her journal and blabbing its contents around the court. A few weeks later the Duchess attempted to patch things up by writing Lehzen a conciliatory note, but when that fell flat she retreated into her old nest of grievances, and added a few new ones for good measure. She complained that her ‘childish’ daughter was rude to her in front of other people and always took