Far from calming things down, Lord Melbourne’s policy of laissez-faire only tightened the tension as everyone tried not to stare too obviously at Lady Flora Hastings’s mysteriously shifting shape. Baroness Lehzen, usually so flinty, retired to her bed with a migraine. Sir James meanwhile started to badger Lady Flora on his regular stomach-patting visits with the uncouth suggestion that he be allowed to examine her with her stays removed. Lady Flora had recently had some new corsetry made to take account of her changing shape, and the doctor clearly believed that she was trying to bamboozle him with the oldest trick in the book. Offended by Clark’s insinuation, Flora rejected the suggestion immediately. This act of impertinence swiftly got back to the Queen, who responded by sending Lady Portman, her favourite lady-in-waiting, to instruct Sir James that he was to confront Lady Flora with the suspicions against her. When it came to phrasing the charge, Lady Portman suggested that Clark should follow a formula devised by Baroness Lehzen. He was to ask Lady Flora whether she was ‘privately married’.
There are several versions of what happened next. Some of these accounts were constructed as cross-armed defences, some as finger-jabbing prosecutions; all were written out of panicky self-interest. However, what everyone agrees is that on 16 February Sir James Clark went to Lady Flora and challenged her with the obscure possibility that she must be ‘privately married’. Sir James always maintained that he had been polite and tactful; Lady Flora insisted that his demeanour was so wild, especially the way he barged in without waiting to be announced by a servant, that she thought he must be ‘out of his mind’. Setting the question of Sir James’s manners to one side, Lady Flora realised at once that the phrase ‘privately married’ was a weasel way of accusing her of carrying a bastard child. Furiously rejecting the charge, she told Sir James that she had recently had a period – in itself a huge and indelicate admission for a lady to make to her physician – and pointed out icily that, had he been taking notice, he would have spotted that she had actually been getting thinner recently. As evidence, she pointed to the fact that she had been obliged to have some of her dresses taken in.
At this, according to Lady Flora, Sir James started to behave like the ship’s surgeon he had once been. He became ‘coarse’ and ‘excited’, declaring, ‘You seem to me to grow larger every day, and so the ladies think.’ He urged her ‘to confess’, as ‘the only thing to save me!’ When the indignant woman refused, the doctor slammed back that nothing but ‘a medical examination could satisfy’ the court ladies, or remove the stigma from her name. At the urging of Lady Portman, whom Clark now preeningly referred to as his ‘confidante’, this needed to be done quickly, since news of the scandal had ‘reached’ the Queen.
This last bit was nonsense, of course. The Queen had actually been the first person to spot Flora’s jutting belly, as far back as 12 January, and had sent Lehzen bustling round the court spreading the news. Far from being hazy about the facts of life, few unmarried girls were more aware of the practicalities of pregnancy than Victoria. For her own jolting journey to the throne had rested entirely on the chancy mechanics of human reproduction in general, and the gynaecological frailty of women’s bodies in particular. Born Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent in 1819, she had been placed fifth in succession, such an irrelevant outlier that not one British newspaper bothered to announce her arrival. Only gradually, as her ageing uncles failed to produce viable heirs, did the little girl at Kensington Palace start to inch towards the throne. Even then there was always a good chance that she would be stopped in her tracks by the late arrival of a baby cousin. In 1835, just two years before Victoria passed the finishing line, it looked as though King William’s wife, forty-two-year-old Adelaide, might be pregnant again after years of miscarriages, stillbirths and wheezing infants who gave up the ghost after only a few months. ‘What do you think of the Queen’s “grossesse”?’ wrote a gleeful Princess Lieven, wife of the former Russian Ambassador and inveterate gossip, to her confidant Lord Grey, who had served as Prime Minister earlier in the decade. ‘It will lead to a most important event, and one entirely unexpected. I can well imagine the looks of all the people at the little Court of Kensington Palace.’ It turned out to be a false alarm, and ‘the little Court of Kensington’ was able to exhale, just as it had every time one of the scrapings from poor Queen Adelaide’s inhospitable womb had slipped from this world, leaving Princess Victoria of Kent her uncle’s primary heir once more.
Thus sixteen-year-old Princess Victoria had spent a good stretch of 1835 caught up in feverish speculation about whether her forty-two-year-old aunt was pregnant or merely developing middle-age spread. By the time she became Queen two years later, Victoria’s journal is full of sharp-eyed observations about the blooming appearance of the women around her. On 2 February 1839, the very day the Lady Flora scandal was breaking, Victoria recorded that ‘Mrs Hamilton was looking very handsome, but very large, and evidently not far from her lying-in.’ A few weeks earlier the girl regularly referred to in the papers as ‘our virgin Queen’ had conversed unblushingly with Lord Melbourne about the fact that his mother had suffered ‘one or two miscarriages’.
Posterity has found it difficult to countenance the idea of a young, unmarried Queen Victoria sizing up women’s bodies for evidence of their sexual lives. Indeed, when rakish Edward VII came to the throne in 1901 he was so appalled by the ‘precocious knowledge’ revealed in his mother’s letters during the Lady Flora business that he oversaw their immediate destruction, along with later material concerning her middle-aged affair with John Brown. Modern biographers too have been reluctant to contemplate the virgin Queen Victoria as a sex-mad teenager, perhaps because it spoils that moment in the fairy tale when the Princess in the Tower is finally rescued and initiated into married love by the arrival of her Prince Charming, Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Whatever the reason behind this desire to look away (something which, ironically, Victoria herself never did), it explains the longevity of that original error about Lady Flora and Conroy travelling together in January 1839, rather than September 1838. Cutting and pasting the later date into each subsequent retelling has allowed Posterity to shake its head fondly over those two foolish virgins, Queen Victoria and Baroness Lehzen, who apparently believed it was possible to be spread-legged on your back in a jolting chaise in early January and sporting a pregnant belly just two weeks later.
Nor was it the case, as some purse-lipped observers maintained at the time, that Lord Melbourne’s racy table talk was to blame for opening the virgin Queen’s eyes to the sex lives of the men and women of the upper classes. Although Mama had always made a great show of protecting her from the disreputable court of Uncle William and his ‘bâtards’, Victoria knew perfectly well – well enough to joke about it – that her rackety paternal Hanoverian relations had nothing on her maternal Coburgian line when it came to casual copulation. Pedantic Uncle Leopold, he of the excruciatingly pompous letters, had arrived in Britain to marry Princess Charlotte in 1817 all poxy with the lover’s disease. Over in Schleswig-Holstein, Uncle Ernest and Aunt Louise, parents to cousins Ernest and Albert, had divorced following their double adultery. And Mama herself was rumoured to have had lovers outside her two short-lived marriages, the most recent of whom was supposedly none other than John Conroy.
Indeed, as far as the smart money went, the reason Princess Victoria grew up hating her mother and Conroy had less to do with their bullying ambition to rule on her behalf, than with the fact they were sleeping together. According to the Duke of Wellington, speaking to Charles Greville, in 1829 ten-year-old Princess Victoria had ‘witnessed some familiarities’ between her mother and Sir John. When Greville quizzed the Duke as to whether by ‘familiarities’ he meant that the Duchess and her Comptroller were actually lovers, the Duke responded with a shrug that ‘he supposed so’. The matter hadn’t ended there, according to Greville, whose post as Clerk of the Council gave him access to all the best gossip of the day. The ten-year-old girl had blurted out what she had seen to Baroness Spaeth, a veteran lady-in-waiting and Lehzen’s best friend.