Later on the evening of the examination, 17 February, Lady Flora grudgingly accepted an apology in person from Lady Portman. When it came to Victoria, though, a whole week passed before the lady-in-waiting finally agreed to a meeting, an act of impertinence that was not lost on the Queen. ‘She was dreadfully agitated, and looked very ill,’ recorded Victoria, suppressing her annoyance at being made to wait, ‘but on my embracing her, taking her by the hand, and expressing great concern at all what had happened, and my wish that all should be forgotten, – she expressed herself exceedingly grateful to me, and said, that for Ma.’s sake she would suppress every wounded feeling, and would forget it, &c.’
That is not, of course, how Flora experienced the meeting. According to the letter she wrote that evening to her sister Sophia – whom she called ‘Phy’ – the atmosphere in the room had been heated and adversarial, with the lady of the bedchamber declaiming, ‘You have treated me as guilty without a trial.’ But Victoria had a wonderful knack of rewriting the day’s events in her journal so that they came out how she wanted – not for nothing do historians refer to diaries as ‘ego documents’. Having shrugged off Flora’s accusation and smuggled her own nagging conscience into one of those capacious ‘etc’s, Victoria bustled off to the theatre that night with Lady Normanby and Miss Cavendish, a lack of sensitivity that did not go unnoticed by the hawk-eyed Hastings clan. The play was William Tell, with Victoria’s favourite actor William Macready in the title role. At least this broke the spell of her current obsession with Isaac Van Amburgh, the celebrity lion-tamer who was resident at Drury Lane. Six times in as many weeks Victoria had watched entranced while the young American ventured into a flimsy cage filled with hungry lions, tigers and cheetahs:
… they all seem actuated by the most awful fear of him … he takes them by their paws, throws them down, makes them roar; and lies upon them after enraging them. It’s quite beautiful to see, and makes me wish I could do the same!
‘Van Amburgh and the Lions’. Engraving after Edwin Landseer, 1847
IV
It was now that the Lady Flora Hastings scandal entered its second, and infinitely more dangerous, stage. ‘The grand mover of all the subsequent hubbub’, according to the ever-attentive Greville, was Sir John Conroy, who seized this final chance to achieve what he had failed to manage during the Kensington years: the expulsion of Baroness Lehzen from the court, and the formal recognition of the Duchess of Kent as Queen Victoria’s Regent and co-ruler. Conroy’s plan was to leverage the disgraceful blunder over Lady Flora’s phantom pregnancy as proof that the teenage Queen was out of control, a ‘heartless child’ incapable of running her own household, let alone the country, without help from the grown-ups. As a first step Conroy instructed the Duchess to bustle around the court ‘spreading the story … of the cruelty practised and the plot contrived against a Lady of her household’. His second was to whip the Hastings family into taking a very public revenge.
The initial reaction of Flora’s mother and sisters to the events of 16–17 February had been disbelief, followed swiftly by outrage. ‘A most foul attack, for political purposes has been made on Flora’s moral character, on her honour!’ wrote Sophia Hastings to her cousin, her pen stumbling in indignation across the page. By ‘political purposes’ Lady Sophia may have been referring to the fact that Lady Flora was a Tory in a Whig court – or she could have had a more domestic kind of politics in mind: the apocalyptic falling-out between the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. Either way, the Hastings ladies’ particular anger was reserved for Sir James Clark, whom ‘we … thought a dear upright Scotchman’, but who had now become ‘a wretch’, ‘ignorant’, ‘that vile man’, for the way he had mistreated Flora. Particularly ‘wicked’ was the way that, during the initial consultation on 10 January, Clark must have only pretended to believe Flora when she told him that her periods – ‘always so regular’ – continued unchanged. Unchanged, that is, until she started taking his medicine. From various hints in the archive – outrage had liberated the Hastings ladies’ pens so that they were now prepared to commit to paper details about bowel movements and menstruation in a way that would have been unthinkable in normal circumstances – it looks as though Flora had her last period at the beginning of February. There could be only one explanation. Sir James, always so desperate to please his royal mistress, must have prescribed Flora a potion designed to hinder the ‘affairs of nature’ and cause her stomach to swell; to produce, in fact, all the signs of pregnancy. On 7 March Lady Hastings wrote to the Queen demanding the physician’s immediate dismissal.
But, as the Duke of Wellington shrewdly pointed out, it would be impossible for the Queen to dismiss Clark ‘as a punishment’ without triggering an inquiry that would result in ‘the most painful results to all parties’. The only thing to do was for the court to brazen it out. So it was left to the Hastings men to take the fight for Flora’s good name to the public. Over the next three weeks her brother, the young Marquess, charged up to town to challenge Melbourne to a duel, barged his way into a brief, tense interview with the Queen, and threatened Ladies Tavistock and Portman with a lawsuit if they refused to name Baroness Lehzen as the source of the slander. Such bluster, though, was no match for an Establishment that had already begun to close ranks. After a whole month of finding himself shouting at closed doors, Lord Hastings was no nearer punishing ‘the ORIGINATORS of the plot’. Worse still, gossip about Flora had started to leak beyond Buckingham Palace, so that according to Greville ‘society at large’ had begun to talk of ‘this disgraceful and mischievous scandal’. Since no one had actually been dismissed from court for slander, the conclusion in London clubland was that Lady Flora must indeed have been carrying on with Conroy, and the affair ‘hushed up’. Hushed up, that is, until now.
In Brussels, where the expatriate British community was particularly dirty-minded, the rumours were even more elaborate. There was a theory that if the father of Lady Flora’s bastard wasn’t Conroy, then it might be a rather silly elderly Marquess called Lord Headfort. What is more, Baron Stockmar, King Leopold’s right-hand man, had been busy telling all those officers on half-pay, hack novelists, bankrupt gamblers and their slapdash wives that this was in fact Flora’s second ‘error’, that she had been pregnant the previous year too. The seed for this story goes back to the beginning of 1838, when the Duchess had granted Flora an extension to her leave of absence because the rotten Scottish weather would have made the journey back to London particularly hazardous. Counting backwards, Victoria and Lehzen had worked out that, from the late summer of 1837, Flora had been absent from court for a highly suggestive seven and a half months. The picture that was emerging now was of Lady Flora as Conroy’s habitual mistress, the mother of his second, illegitimate, family.
This might seem an unfeasibly sudden bit of character assassination. One minute Lady Flora Hastings was known as an ageing spinster who divided her time between caring tenderly for two elderly widows, her mother and her employer. And in the next breath she is the mistress of a married man to whom she has given two bastards. But the age in which Flora – and Victoria – lived was one where such imaginative transformations were possible. The Prince Regent (latterly George IV) may have died nearly a decade earlier, but the spirit of ‘the Old Pleasure’ lived on not just in memory but in embodied habits of feeling. For every Regency rake who felt the stern hand of Evangelical reform on his shoulder in the 1820s and took care to adjust his manner and his morals, there were ten who carried on much as before, getting stouter, drunker, and happier than ever to believe the worst of everyone. Historians tend to talk of the unbuttoned Georgians ceding to the strait-laced Victorians as if these were two distinct cohorts, rather than the same people spilling awkwardly out of different clothes.
All