Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions. Matthew Dennison

Hastings, daughter of a Tory grandee, was an appointment of Sir John Conroy’s to the household of the Duchess of Kent. Her sympathies lay with her employer and her sponsor. Willowy in her spinsterhood, religious too, she nevertheless possessed a forked tongue: frequently in her conversation malice and wit merged. To Victoria, who lacked confidence in her own intellectual abilities, it was an unappealing trait exacerbated by her suspicion that Lady Flora spied on her. This wholly negative assessment is what made possible her treatment of the hapless lady-in-waiting in a manner that was both cruel and deadly in its flippancy.

      Lady Flora’s misfortune consisted of a coincidence and medical bungling. On her return from Scotland to London in the New Year of 1839, she shared a post-chaise with Conroy. Innocent it may have been: it was certainly unwise not to conceal so incendiary an indiscretion. That journey, however, cannot have inspired the tumour of the liver which, on 5 July, killed her.

      Within days of Lady Flora’s return, Victoria’s court interpreted her swollen abdomen as evidence of pregnancy. Apprised of her journey with Conroy, assumptions were made – including by Victoria – and afterwards confirmed by inept royal doctor Sir James Clark, who did not trouble himself to examine the patient. Speculation mounted. To maintain the new court’s reputation for moral probity, Lady Flora was forced to submit to a full examination, which found her without child and still a virgin. It ought to have been an end to the matter.

      But Victoria’s hatred for Conroy admitted no moderation. By neither word nor action did she move to clear Lady Flora’s name. Clark himself further muddied the waters with his startling suggestion that the appearance of virginity did not preclude pregnancy. Melbourne too was sceptical. No surprise that the Hastings family became incensed and, against advice, made their grievances public. Once the witch-hunt was exposed in the pages of The Times, there was little credit for Victoria in belatedly granting to Lady Flora that audience in which monarch and dying woman embraced and agreed to a truce for the sake of the Duchess. Neither the Hastings family nor the public was mollified. Reluctantly Victoria agreed to a further meeting. Days away from death, prostrate and skeletal bar her grotesquely swollen stomach, the wronged spinster clasped Victoria’s hand. Even so pitiful a sight, which forced Victoria’s compassion, did not move her to apologise. Rather the proximity of this ‘nasty woman’ dying under her own roof troubled and indeed irked her. Small consolation for Lady Flora that she died ‘the victim of a depraved court’, her own the heroine’s part.

      While the press disgorged this unedifying hullabaloo from which neither Victoria nor Melbourne emerged with credit, the Prime Minister was wrestling with problems of a different variety. Within Parliament his government faced defeat. For Victoria the prospect of losing Lord M was not one she could regard with equanimity. Her very strong feelings on the matter had little to do with politics or the good of the country. It was her own convenience, her own happiness, her own benefit that she considered. ‘The simple truth,’ according to Greville, ‘[was] that the Queen could not endure the thought of parting with Melbourne who [was] everything to her.’¹⁹ Melbourne’s resignation, on 7 May 1839, plunged her into despair: she cried, she panicked, she felt it like a physical blow. Unsettled if unrepentant as the scandal surrounding Lady Flora ground relentlessly on, she needed Lord M.

      Or did she? If Victoria wanted allies against the Hastings family, surrounded as she was by courtiers and companions, she did not have far to look. Her formal entourage consisted of her mistress of the robes, eight ladies of the bedchamber, eight women of the bedchamber and eight maids of honour, a substantial support network given the women’s overwhelmingly Whig sympathies. With Lord M at her side they constituted Victoria’s second line of defence. Without him, they became an essential bulwark between Victoria and her conscience.

      While the Whigs floundered, Sir Robert Peel was called upon to form a government. Oxford-educated son of a textiles manufacturer, tall but diffident, sporadically gauche, limp-haired but stiff in his manner, Peel correctly doubted Victoria’s sympathy. He required a token endorsement of his ministry: some Tory ladies among the royal attendants. It was a tinderbox request. Victoria would not yield. If she could not have Lord M, she would not be surrounded by Peel’s creatures crowing her defeat, not even one of them. She determined to stand her ground. Had not King Leopold once told her, ‘as a fundamental rule … be courageous, firm and honest’? Melbourne himself had echoed that advice: she must overcome personal inclination, treat the new ministry with fairness and a show of amiability – and make it clear that she hoped her household would not be subject to a cull. So recently Peel had observed Victoria’s firmness and her conviction of her own position. He could match her intransigence. Politely, fixedly, sovereign and minister engaged in a contest for mastery, a loveless pas de deux. Victoria continued to take advice from Melbourne, although he flouted constitutional propriety with every word he wrote to her, lessening with every instance of her persisting dependency her chances of political impartiality. Inevitably his advice strengthened her resolve. She refused to surrender a single lady.

      Once before, a man of slipshod manners whom she disliked had tried to force Victoria’s hand. She had not yielded to Sir John Conroy and she would not give way to Sir Robert Peel. She observed his discomfort in her presence, bolstered by Melbourne’s disdainful verdict that Sir Robert, though ‘a very gifted and able man’, was ‘an underbred fellow … not accustomed to talk to Kings and Princes’.²⁰ Undoubtedly the anguish of the Flora Hastings Affair influenced Victoria’s judgement. In her response to Peel’s request were suggestions of amateur dramatics run riot: ‘I was calm but very decided,’ she wrote to Melbourne of the critical interview. ‘I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness. The Queen of England will not submit to such trickery.’²¹ The soldier’s daughter had tasted the scent of blood: she embraced the rhetoric of triumphalism. This vigorous note would return – in her Boudicca-like response to the Crimean and Boer Wars and her imperturbability in the face of eight assassination attempts. Less attractively it coloured her personal relationships too: with her children and with other prime ministers she could not like, Palmerston and Gladstone. ‘They wished to treat me like a girl,’ Victoria told Lord M, ‘but I will show them that I am Queen of England.’ Such airy bluster was an inevitable legacy of the Duchess’s and Conroy’s mistreatment of the young Victoria; for the rest of her life she blotted out girlish vulnerability by asserting her impregnability as Queen of England.

      In May 1839, her differences with Peel became truly a battle royal: Victoria’s part, had she but known it, anticipated the empty bravado of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen – rank without reason. Her refusal to compromise was met by a similar refusal on Peel’s part, who declined to form a government on Victoria’s terms. The Whigs returned to power by default. Victoria once again had her Lord M. That night, buoyant with victory, she danced until quarter past three in the morning in the company of Tsarevitch Alexander of Russia, uncomprehending both of the battle she had fought and the significance of its outcome. In her exhilaration she even imagined herself ‘(talking jokingly) … a little in love’ with her distinguished foreign guest: he was ‘a dear, delightful young man’.