at this time, as she had a meeting of the Privy Council to attend on 4 July; and there she must be without the person who made her ‘feel safe and comfortable’.
She was not feeling very well herself. A rash had broken out on her hands; and, as the summer turned into autumn, she grew increasingly prone to headaches, outbursts of irritation and bouts of lethargy during which she found it an effort to get out of bed in the morning, get dressed, or even brush her teeth. Her handwriting suffered: she wrote indistinctly, misspelling words and leaving others out.
Lord Melbourne, by then recovered from his illness, told her she ate too much, was too fond of highly spiced food, drank too much ale and not enough wine; and did not take enough exercise: she ought to walk more in the open air. She protested that walking made her feel tired as well as sick, and she got stones in her shoes and her feet got swollen. As for Lord Melbourne’s contention that she should eat only when she was hungry, she was always hungry, she retorted, so, if she followed his advice, she would be eating all day long. In any case, the Queen of Portugal was always taking exercise, yet she was very fat. It was certainly true that Victoria was putting on weight: she was weighed on 13 December and, to her consternation, discovered that she was only one pound under nine stone.1 Her skin had taken on a yellowish tinge; her eyes were sore and troublesome – she once showed Melbourne a stye which rather disgusted him – and she feared she might be going blind, as her grandfather, George III, had done. Moreover, her hands were always cold in winter and her fingers red and swollen. She admitted herself that she was ‘cross and low’. By the end of the year she was given to lamenting that she was ‘unfit for [her] station’; and it took all Melbourne’s tact and powers of persuasion to get her to think otherwise.
Baron Stockmar reported to King Leopold that she had become rather difficult of late, over-conscious of her exalted position, quick to take offence, impatient of advice and thoroughly out of sorts. By the beginning of the next year she was still far from being as lively and happy as she had been in the months immediately following her accession, and quite unprepared to deal rationally with a scandal concerning Lady Flora Hastings that now engulfed the Court.
She had never liked Lady Flora, known to her friends as ‘Scotty’. The woman was an ‘amazing spy who would repeat everything she heard’, an ‘odious’ person. It was ‘very disagreeable having her in the house’.2 The Queen was quite ready to believe the worst of her when it appeared from her distended figure that she might be pregnant. Both the Queen and Baroness Lehzen, who much resented Lady Flora’s teasing of her, became convinced that she was pregnant. So did others; and ‘the horrid cause’ of this condition, so the Queen decided, was undoubtedly that ‘Monster and demon Incarnate’, Sir John Conroy who, so it was believed, had travelled back from Scotland overnight in a post-chaise alone with his friend, the ‘amiable & virtuous’ Lady Flora, after spending the Christmas holidays with her mother, at Loudon Castle.3 Conroy had taken the opportunity – ‘to use plain words’ – to get her ‘with child’.4 Lady Tavistock – who, as senior Lady of the Bedchamber, had been approached by other ladies to protect their purity from this contamination – was authorized to consult Lord Melbourne.
Melbourne had already heard something about Lady Flora’s supposed condition from Sir James Clark, who had been appointed Physician in Ordinary to the Queen in 1837, and predictably gave the advice that he was wont to do when faced with a difficult problem that had no easy solution. He had once told the Queen, ‘All depends on the urgency of a thing. If a thing is very urgent, you can always find time for it; but if a thing can be put off, well then you put it off.’ So, on this occasion, he advised that the ‘only way’ was ‘to be quiet and watch it’.5 If no fuss was made it would no doubt all blow over. Similar advice was later given to Lord Hastings, Lady Flora’s young brother, by the Duke of Wellington, who was generally consulted, and loved to be consulted, in such tracasseries: the wisest plan, the Duke advised, was to hush the whole matter up.6
Unfortunately, Lady Flora, concerned about her condition, consulted Sir James Clark who, as a man who had started his professional life as a surgeon in the Navy, was not as well qualified as he might have been to give advice on female complaints. He did not ‘pay much attention’ to her ailments, Lady Flora said, or, perhaps, he ‘did not understand them’. He prescribed rhubarb and ipecacuanha pills and a liniment largely composed of camphor and opium.7 However, having felt her stomach over her dress, he discovered a ‘considerable enlargement of the lower part of her abdomen’. But ‘being unable to satisfy myself as to the nature of the enlargement,’ he reported, ‘I at length expressed to her my uneasiness respecting her size, and requested that at my next visit, I might be permitted to lay my hand upon her abdomen with her stays removed. To this Lady Flora declined to accede.’8 Clark then said, according to Lady Flora’s own account, that Lady Portman and others of the Queen’s ladies were talking about her; he considered that they did so with justification; he thought no one could look at her and doubt that she was pregnant; he urged her to confess as ‘the only thing’ to save her; nothing but a thorough medical examination ‘could satisfy the ladies of the Palace, so deeply were their suspicions rooted’.9
After this unpleasant conversation Clark consulted the Duchess of Kent, who refused to believe that her lady-in-waiting was pregnant. However, Lady Portman, who also went to see the Duchess, insisted that it was ‘impossible that the honour either of the Court or of the Lady can admit of the least doubt or delay in clearing up the matter’.10
So the Duchess, rather than allow Lady Flora to leave Court under unwarranted suspicion, advised her to agree to what Sir James Clark had proposed.
And so Lady Flora changed her mind about submitting to a proper medical examination. She consented to undergoing one, provided Sir Charles Clarke, an experienced accoucheur and leading practitioner in midwifery, who had known the Hastings family for years, was present in the room with Sir James Clark. The two doctors accordingly conducted their examination in the presence of Lady Portman, who stood by the window with her head in her hands, and Lady Flora’s maid, who was in tears throughout.11 After this examination a formal declaration was issued in both the doctors’ names:
We have examined with great care the state of Lady Flora Hastings with a view to determine the existence, or non-existence, of pregnancy, and it is our opinion, although there is an enlargement of the stomach, that there are no grounds for suspicion that pregnancy does exist, or ever has existed.12
This report was expected to settle the matter. But in a conversation with Lord Melbourne, Sir Charles Clarke remarked that there were cases when, despite appearances of virginity, pregnancies had occurred. Sir Charles had observed such cases himself.13 Melbourne reported this conversation to the Queen and was evidently persuaded that Lady Flora’s condition was one of those which Sir Charles had mentioned. When the Queen remarked that Lady Flora had not been seen in the Palace for some time because she was so sick, Melbourne repeated, ‘Sick?’ with what the Queen described as ‘a significant laugh’.14
Having read the doctors’ report, the Queen agreed with Melbourne that the whole matter was getting ‘very uncomfortable’ and she thought that it would be as well that she should see Lady Flora and conciliate her. So she sent a message of regret to her through Lady Portman, who had already apologized herself, and offered to see her immediately. Lady Flora replied that she was too ill to see the Queen at present. A few days