Читать книгу Queen Victoria: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 19

‘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.’

ONE DAY IN THE WEEK after the coronation the Queen recorded in her diary that she was ‘quite cross…annoyed and put out’. Irritated as she often was by other people’s illnesses, she was particularly exasperated by Lord Melbourne who had taken to his bed. He had obviously been exhausted by the service in the Abbey where he had appeared quite worn out by the weight of the Sword of State which it had been his duty to carry. ‘It was most provoking and vexatious’, the Queen complained, that she should be deprived of the ‘agreeable daily visit’ of her Prime Minister, who would talk to her so amusingly, sitting beside her so comfortingly and protectively, letting Dash, or another of her dogs, a Scotch terrier called Islay, lick his hand. ‘All dogs like me,’ he said complacently.

The Queen was also put out whenever he did not come to dinner. ‘Lord Melbourne dines with Lady Holland,’ she wrote after one of these Melbourneless evenings. ‘I wish he dined with me.’ She was jealous and admitted it. She was also jealous of the beautiful Duchess of Sutherland, who often sat next to Lord Melbourne at dinner and made it almost impossible for him to talk to anyone else.

His absence was particularly tiresome 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 later, however, she appeared in the Queen’s sitting room. ‘She was dreadfully agitated,’ the Queen wrote, ‘and looked very ill, but on my embracing her, taking her by the hand, and expressing great concern at what had happened, and my wish that all should be forgotten, she expressed herself exceedingly grateful to me, and said that, for Mama’s sake, she would suppress every wounded feeling and would forget it, etc.’¹⁵

The Hastings family were not prepared to forget it, though; nor was Lady Flora’s friend, Sir John Conroy, who was quick to seize this opportunity to make trouble for those who had thwarted his ambition; nor were certain Tory propagandists who recognized in this scandal at Court a useful stick with which to beat Melbourne and the Whigs whom the Queen so openly supported; and nor, on reflection, was Lady Flora herself who wrote to her uncle by marriage, Captain Hamilton Fitzgerald, then living in Brussels, informing him that her honour had been ‘most basely assailed’.

Fitzgerald left for London immediately. Lord Hastings, Lady Flora’s brother, was equally determined to avenge this slur on his family’s good name. Having seen his sister, he was convinced that Lord Melbourne was responsible for promoting the scandal, and he announced that he would challenge him to a duel. But, having talked to him, he was forced to conclude that the Prime Minister had tried to keep everything quiet and that he must look elsewhere for a culprit. His sister generously maintained that the Queen herself was not responsible. She was quite sure, she said, ‘that the Queen does not understand what they have betrayed her into. She has endeavoured to show her regret by her civility to me, and expressed it most handsomely with tears in her eyes.’¹⁶ Even so, her brother demanded an audience with the Queen which Lord Melbourne tried to prevent, thereby provoking an outraged letter from Lord Hastings:

Having waited two days in the hope of having an audience with Her Majesty which I requested (if not as a matter of right as a Peer, at least as one of feeling), my patience being exhausted, and being anxious to return to the bosom of my afflicted and insulted family, I am forced to resort to the only means now left in my power, of recording my abhorrence and detestation of the treatment which my sister has lately sustained.¹⁷

He shared his sister’s belief that the Queen was not directly responsible for this treatment, declaring that responsibility rested with the ‘baneful influence’ which surrounded the throne and declaring that if he discovered any more relevant facts about the whole affair he would return to Court from whose ‘polluted atmosphere’ he for the time being retired.

The ‘baneful influence’ Lady Flora herself identified in her letter to Hamilton Fitzgerald as ‘a certain foreign Lady’, Baroness Lehzen, whose ‘hatred of the Duchess of Kent [was] no secret’. Lady Flora also blamed Lady Portman, her ‘accuser’ in this ‘diabolical conspiracy’. ‘Good bye, my dear uncle,’ her letter ended. ‘I blush to send you so revolting a letter, but I wish you to know the truth, and nothing but the truth – and you are welcome to tell it right and left.’¹⁸

Excerpts from this letter were accordingly sent to the press;^* so were letters written to both the Queen and Lord Melbourne by Lady Flora’s mother, the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings, who praised the behaviour of the Queen’s ‘admirable mother’, contended that Her Majesty’s honour demanded that ‘the criminal inventor’ of the falsehoods spread about her daughter should not ‘remain without discovery’, and demanded as a ‘mark of public justice’ the removal of Sir James Clark from the Queen’s Household. To this last request Melbourne replied, ‘The demand which your Ladyship’s letter makes upon me is so unprecedented and objectionable that even the respect due to your Ladyship’s sex, rank, family and character would not justify me in more, if indeed it authorizes so much than acknowledging the letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your Ladyship that I have received it.’ This letter, with the rest of the correspondence, was published in the Morning Post.¹⁹

By now Lady Flora’s humiliation, the Queen’s supposed failure to make a proper apology for it, as well as her failure to dismiss her Scottish doctor, Sir James Clark, from her Household as he had been dismissed from her mother’s, were the subject of intriguing gossip in almost every drawing room in London.

Lord Melbourne characteristically advised the Queen to take no notice of such gossip, nor of the letters which were appearing in the newspapers. But the Queen could not bring herself to ignore them; and the more she fretted about them the more she worked herself up into a fury with Lady Hastings, that ‘wicked, foolish old woman’, and with ‘that wretched Ly. Flo.’.²⁰ She would like to see the whole Hastings family hanged alongside the editor of the Morning Post. As for her mother, who had taken Lady Flora’s side and was reported to have looked after her when she was ill as though she had been her own child, her behaviour had been unforgivable. Indeed, it was her mother’s behaviour which angered the Queen quite as much as that of the Hastings family. She confessed to Lord Melbourne that she felt ‘a growing dislike for Mama’, and that it was like ‘having an enemy in the house’.

Day after day she spoke in these terms, week after week the atmosphere in the Palace became more charged, and the coolness between the rival households of the Queen and the Duchess became more marked. Lady Tavistock, fearful that Lord Hastings would challenge her husband to a duel, followed Lady Flora about in an effort to make amends. ‘Won’t you speak to me? Won’t you shake hands?’ she pleaded. ‘That is quite impossible,’ Lady Flora said.²¹

She became increasingly ill, while the Queen, dismissive as usual of other people’s complaints and always most reluctant to change an opinion once formed, continued to deny the seriousness of Lady Flora’s illness which she felt sure was just ‘a billious attack’. Her mother insisted that, on the contrary, the poor woman was gravely ill; she was ‘in a dreadful state’ about her; indeed, she thought Lady Flora was dying. The thought that she might die greatly alarmed Lord Melbourne. That would certainly lay the Queen open to reproach; it would be wise to send to enquire after her. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘because she is under your roof, and then because it shows feeling.’

But the Queen’s dislike of the woman had become so intense that she could not show such feeling. While her mother, who now refused to sit next to Lady Tavistock at the whist table, kept crying and insisting that Lady Flora was mortally ill, her daughter attended a ball and enjoyed herself ‘excessively’.

There then, however, came very grave reports from Sir William Chambers, one of the leading physicians in London, who had succeeded Sir James Clark as the Duchess of Kent’s physician. The Queen was advised to postpone another ball which was due to be held on 26 June. This she did and sent word that she would go to see Lady Flora that afternoon. But the dying woman felt too ill to see her then. Chambers advised her to go to her as soon as she could the next day.

I went in alone [the Queen recorded of this distressing visit]. I found poor Lady Flora stretched on a couch looking as thin as anybody can be who is still alive; literally a skeleton, but the body very much swollen like a person who is with child; a searching look in her eyes, a look rather like a person who is dying; her voice like usual, and a good deal of strength in her hands; she was friendly, said she was very comfortable, and was very grateful for all I had done for her, and that she was glad to see me looking well. I said to her, I hoped to see her again when she was better, upon which she grasped my hand as if to say ‘I shall not see you again.’ I then instantly went upstairs and returned to Lord M. who said, ‘You remained a very short time.’²²

Four days later Lady Flora was still clinging weakly to life. The Queen said to Lord Melbourne that she found it very disagreeable and painful ‘to think there was a dying person in the house’.²³ On 5 July in the early hours of the morning, over a week since the Queen had last seen her, Lady Flora died. A post mortem was conducted by the distinguished surgeon, Sir Benjamin Brodie, who discovered a large tumour on the liver: ‘the uterus and its appendages presented the usual appearances of the healthy virgin state’.

The Queen felt no remorse, she told Lord Melbourne defiantly. She had ‘done nothing to kill her’. However, much of the Press, led by the Morning Post, and many of the public at large considered that she should have felt remorse. At Ascot that summer, as her open carriage was driven up the course, two ladies in a private stand, one of them a duchess (two ‘foolish, vulgar women’ in the Queen’s opinion, who ought to be flogged), hissed her loudly. Other voices could be heard shouting, ‘Mrs Melbourne’. She was hissed and booed also in the streets of London, as she had been at the opera in Lady Flora’s lifetime; and insults such as ‘Whose belly up now?’ were hurled at her as she rode by. Few men troubled to raise their hats at sight of her as they had done in the recent past. In fact, as Greville commented, it seemed that nobody cared for the Queen any more; loyalty was a dead letter; the scandal had played the devil with her popularity.

The Morning Post continued to upbraid her, attacking The Times for the excuses it offered for her behaviour. Pamphlets, assailing the ‘evil counsellors’ by whom she was surrounded, the ‘stranger harboured in our country’ (Baroness Lehzen) and the ‘court physician with his cringing back’ (Sir James Clark), were hawked about the streets. At a dinner in Nottingham, so General Sir Charles Napier said, his was the only voice to respond to the royal toast. Lord Ilchester believed the Queen would be well advised to leave London for a time to avoid further insult. Lord Melbourne suggested that a body of police should be made available on the day of Lady Flora’s funeral in case the Queen’s mourning carriage, which he thought should be sent as a token of respect, was stoned by demonstrators.

The family disdainfully returned the £50 which the Queen had sent to Lady Flora’s maid; and for many years thereafter the blinds of Loudon Castle were drawn whenever Queen Victoria went to Scotland.

Not long after the funeral which, in fact, was conducted without serious interruption though, as Melbourne feared, a few stones and jeers were directed at the Queen’s coach, Her Majesty was riding in Hyde Park where, although the crowd was ‘very great’, there was ‘not one hiss’. In fact a few people cheered her as she rode through the gate into St James’s Park. This, she wrote with complacent satisfaction, ‘is a good answer to those fools who say that the public feeling – a few paid Wretches – was displayed on Thursday by hooting at Ministers’.²⁴

She was, however, far from as content and relieved as her protestations suggested. The Lady Flora Hastings affair had upset her deeply, and induced in her that malaise and inappetence so often consequent upon her emotional distress. She was ‘disgusted with everything’ and would have left the country immediately had she been a private individual. She was even, so she told Lord Melbourne, ‘tired of riding’. As for Melbourne himself, he was conscious of not having guided the young Queen in the way he should have done: he certainly should not have shuffled the blame on to her ladies during his interview with Lord Hastings. He felt penitent. So did the Queen at last. When she got a stone in her shoe while walking with him, he told her it was a penance. She did not contradict him.²⁵