far removed from court gossip: she makes a point of mentioning in her letter to Conroy how pleased she is that 1838 ‘closed with the Defeat of the Machinations’, a reference to his vanquishing of The Times. Lady Hastings then proceeds to drop a pointed hint that it is to the Duchess (no mention of the Queen) that Flora feels ‘a very sincere & grateful’ attachment.
After spending several nights with the Conroys in Kensington, on Thursday, 10 January Flora made the short hop back to Buckingham Palace, where the court had reconvened from Brighton. The Duchess was in a particularly jumpy mood, fretting about a new staircase that had materialised insultingly close to her own rooms. That same day a nauseous Lady Flora consulted Sir James Clark, physician to both the Duchess and the Queen. As well as feeling sick, she had a pain low in her left side, and her stomach was swollen. On Victoria this extra poundage could have been stowed away under one of her carefully contrived bell-shaped skirts, but on Lady Flora, who favoured dresses that clung closer to her slender frame, you really couldn’t miss the swell. In addition, her complexion was yellow, and most disturbing of all, one of her legs throbbed with shooting pains. Clark, a Scotsman long known to the Hastings family, examined the patient over her dress and wrote a prescription for rhubarb pills, a standard treatment for constipation, together with a camphor liniment to rub into her stomach.
This may have reassured Flora. Alternatively, if she knew anything of Clark’s diagnostic record, she had every reason to continue feeling very worried indeed. Victoria had recently made her doctor a baronet in recognition of the way he had stood up to Conroy’s ferocious bullying in the autumn of 1835, when the Irishman had hung over her sickbed while Mama and Lady Flora loomed in the background, pressuring her to sign a contract that promised to make him her Private Secretary once she became Queen. But when it came to doctoring rather than flunkydom, Clark had a comically bad track record. Put in charge of John Keats in Rome in 1821, he had breezily diagnosed the poet with stomach trouble, despite the fact that the young man was spurting blood from his consumptive lungs. And the year before that, Clark had reassured Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, that he was on the mend just as the fifty-two-year-old succumbed to a fatal chill brought on by damp stockings. Clark’s apologists claim that he told patients what they wanted to hear, because he grasped the beneficial effect of an optimistic mind on a fretful body. He also needed the fees: Sir James, the son of a butler, was a man who minded very much what he was paid.
Flora, writing to her uncle with controlled venom weeks later, maintained that at that first consultation Clark had been negligent, if not downright incompetent: ‘Unfortunately he either did not pay much attention to my ailments or did not quite understand them, for in spite of his medicines, the bile did not take its departure.’ Although Clark visited Flora’s room twice a week throughout January, he did little beyond patting her stomach through her clothes and pronouncing himself blandly satisfied with her progress, and made unfunny jokes about how she must be suffering from gout. So Flora briskly took matters into her own hands: ‘by dint of walking and porter I gained a little strength; and, as I did so, the swelling subsided to a very remarkable degree’. By mid-February her usually slender figure was getting back to normal, and she had been able to give away some dresses that no longer fitted. Heartily relieved, she even felt sunny enough to pass on to her sister a risqué remark from her Swiss maid, Caroline Reichenbach, about how m’Lady no longer resembled ‘une femme grosse’, or a pregnant woman.
If Lady Flora was not sure what was wrong with her, the Queen had no doubts. ‘Lady Flora had not been above 2 days in the house,’ recorded a flushed Victoria on 2 February, ‘before Lehzen and I discovered how exceedingly suspicious her figure looked, – more have since observed this, and we have no doubt that she is – to use the plain words – with child!! Clark cannot deny the suspicion; the horrid cause of all this is the Monster and demon Incarnate, whose name I forbear to mention but which is the 1st word of the 2nd line of this page.’ You didn’t have to be much of a code-breaker to work out that she was referring to Sir John Conroy. Counting back on their fingers, Victoria and Lehzen reckoned that it was four months since the Duchess of Kent’s Comptroller and lady of the bedchamber had travelled together in a post-chaise to the Port of London. Now the consequences were beginning to show.
Victoria lost no time passing on her suspicions to Lord Melbourne, and he at this point was happy to stir the pot. To the Queen’s fishing comment on 18 January that ‘Ma. disliked staying at home, and disliked and was afraid of Lady Flora’, Melbourne had replied provocatively, ‘In fact she is jealous of her.’ What’s more, recorded Victoria in her journal, Lord M had looked ‘sharply, as if he knew more than he liked to say; (which God knows! I do about Flo, and which others will know too by and by). “She tells him everything the Duchess does”, he said.’ There was no need to spell out who ‘him’ was.
The news of Lady Flora’s pregnancy now flashed through the ladies and gentlemen of the court, carried on stage whispers, arched eyebrows, slight nods and smirking glances, so that by the time the senior lady-in-waiting, Lady Tavistock, came back on duty at the end of January she found ‘the Ladies all in a hubbub’, with ‘strong suspicions of an unpleasant nature existing there with respect to Lady Flora Hastings’s state of health’. The ladies, reported Greville, who had got the story from Lord Tavistock, begged Lady Tavistock to ‘protect their purity from this contamination’. This might sound like fake outrage, mimsy posturing designed to keep the scandal bubbling away. But behind the ladies’ flutter lay a genuine terror that their good names were about to go down with Lady Flora’s. Over the previous thirty years the English court had gained a reputation as a moral pigsty, with the Queen’s uncles George IV and William IV appearing to live permanently inside a Gillray cartoon, one in which pink-cheeked buffoons with crowns askew spent their days frolicking with their fat-bottomed mistresses in a puddle of drink. There was even a laboured joke doing the rounds about how you would search the court in vain to find a ‘maid of honour’. The arrival of a young virgin Queen in 1837 was meant to signal a fresh start, a new broom. Yet now it looked as though Victoria’s household was no more chaste than its predecessors, putting at risk the reputations of all those virtuous matrons and respectable girls who had been so recently recruited as shawlers-in-chief.
Since Victoria was, by her own admission, not ‘on good terms’ with her mother – a damning detail in itself, as far as watching moralists were concerned – Lady Tavistock rejected the obvious step of approaching the Duchess about Lady Flora’s swelling belly, and went to Lord Melbourne, an old friend, instead. Lord M responded with his habitual advice of wait and see. Privately, though, he must have been spooked, for he sent immediately for Dr Clark, a man for whom he had never much cared. Clark, with his handy knack of telling people what he thought they wanted to hear, agreed with Melbourne that Lady Flora’s figure looked ‘suspicious’, although she had given ‘other reasons’ for her odd shape – probably constipation. But the doctor admitted he was sceptical, for if Lady Flora’s guts were really so disordered, how then was she able to ‘perform her usual duties with apparent little inconvenience to herself’? Clark’s implication was clear: having evidently struggled through the puking, hollow-cheeked first trimester, Lady Flora was now showing the blooming health of someone in flourishing mid-term.
When Melbourne passed all this on to the nineteen-year-old Queen at dinner on 2 February, he found her primed to explode with vicious glee: ‘when they are bad, how disgracefully and disgustingly servile and low women are!!’ But such sententious self-pleasuring was exactly the kind of thing guaranteed to send Melbourne skittering crab-wise. It was impossible, he cautioned, for any doctor to be absolutely sure about a pregnancy, and as for women, they ‘often suspect when it isn’t so’. In fact, said the Prime Minister, trying to sound like a statesman rather than the old court tabby cat his political enemies sneered he had become, ‘The only way is to be quiet, and watch it’ – by which he meant that, given time, Lady Flora would either produce a baby or not, and the matter would be decided once and for all.
More than anything, Melbourne wanted to contain this petticoat frenzy, so that should a pregnant Lady Flora ‘wish to go’ quietly from Buckingham Palace to some country cottage for her confinement, it would be easily managed without firing up a scandal. Lord Melbourne was a man of the Regency. He was himself rumoured to be the result of an affair between his spectacularly promiscuous mother and