her pulse. If the Observer actually had been present, it would not have liked what it saw. Lady Flora is as thin as a skeleton and almost as bald, a discarded rag doll rather than a soft, solid woman in her prime. Still, what you find your eyes drawn to again and again is not the patient’s once-elegant neck, now stretched like twisted rope, nor even her scalp, which is a rucked patchwork of bristle and skin. No, what you notice is her belly, which thrusts obscenely from her sparrow frame. In fact, if it did not seem so unlikely, you would swear that Lady Flora is about to give birth.
One floor up, the twenty-year-old virgin Queen of England sits writing her journal, as she does every night. It is, Victoria declares, ‘disagreeable and painful’ to have a dying person in her home. Just this week she has been obliged – although only after much ‘gulping’, according to one hostile witness – to cancel the end-of-Season ball she was planning in the Throne Room. Now that the novelty of Victoria’s fairy-tale first year on the throne has worn off, a smart quadrille is the only thing guaranteed to restore a rosy flush to that boiled-egg face. Sharp-eyed commentators can’t help noting a ‘bold and discontented’ tone to everything the young Queen does now. It was she who first started the rumour that the unmarried Lady Flora Hastings was, to use the polite equivocation, ‘enceinte’. Or if Victoria wasn’t the originator of the scandal, she was certainly quick to take it up, batting it around the middle-aged matrons in her retinue, searching their faces to see which bits of the story could be made to stick. And, although the doctors have more or less scotched the possibility, there is still an outside chance that at the very last moment Lady Flora, whether dying or not (and, frankly, the Queen has her doubts), will suddenly produce a baby from under her virgin skirts.
To understand ‘the Lady Flora Hastings affair’, a constitutional crisis that threatened to end Queen Victoria’s sixty-three-year reign almost before it had begun, you need to go back to 1834. It was in February that year that Lady Flora Hastings, then twenty-eight, sailed into court life under false colours. Officially she had been appointed as lady of the bedchamber to Victoria’s widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent, with whom the fourteen-year-old then-Princess lived in a suite of grubby rooms at Kensington Palace. But from all the muttered corner conversations and sliding glances it hadn’t taken the teenage heiress presumptive to the British throne long to work out that Mama’s new lady-in-waiting was actually intended as a companion for herself. The problem was that Victoria already had a confidante – her beloved governess Louise Lehzen, to whose firm care she had been entrusted at the age of five. Lehzen had been the Princess’s staunch ally in her struggles with the infamous ‘Kensington System’, that regime of isolation and control designed to ensure that when Victoria came to the throne at the age of seventeen or so (her ageing uncle William IV could not last much longer), she would appoint her mother as her Regent before retiring to the schoolroom for a further five years. That would allow time for the Kent coffers to refill, for the Duchess to entrench her Coburgian clan at court, and for Sir John Conroy, the Duchess’s Comptroller, to establish himself as the real power behind the throne.
Baroness (Louise) Lehzen
Yet for all its strenuous intentions, the Kensington System had proved unequal to its crooked task. According to Conroy, who had devised the elaborate set of rules by which young Victoria was to be shielded from any influence that might lessen her mother’s or his own, Lehzen had turned out to be a snake in the grass. Hiding in plain sight, as governesses are apt to, Lehzen ‘stole the child’s affections’ and set Victoria ‘against her mother’. The climax had come in 1835, when the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne refused to sign the papers that a desperate Conroy and the Duchess waved in front of her, the ones that promised to make them her Private Secretary and Regent the moment she became Queen. And in return for Lehzen’s steely support throughout all the shouting, slamming of doors and spraying of spittle, Victoria had funnelled towards her governess the affection that should, for safety’s sake, have been spread more evenly. When Lehzen’s name appears in Victoria’s nightly journal, it is spontaneously lavished with ‘dearest’ and ‘best’. The Duchess, meanwhile, is simply ‘Mama’, with an occasional limp ‘dear’ dutifully careted in as an afterthought.
The Duchess and her Comptroller had shuffled their plot to substitute Flora Hastings for Louise Lehzen behind a cover story about the latter’s unsuitability as companion to the young woman who could at any moment be called to be Queen. Lehzen might be known by the nominal title of ‘Baroness’, but that hardly qualified a Hanoverian pastor’s daughter who chomped caraway seeds (the Victorian equivalent of chewing gum) to provide the social gloss required to turn a German dumpling who muddled her ‘w’s and ‘v’s into an English Rose. Or, indeed, into ‘the Rose of England’, which is what some of the more gushing prints insisted on calling the heiress presumptive to the British throne. Dinner guests at Kensington Palace had started to whisper how unfortunate it was that Princess Victoria had yet to master the knack of eating with her mouth closed, especially given her habit of stuffing it so full of food that she resembled a small, pouched rodent. By contrast, Lady Flora’s table manners – indeed everything about her – were exemplary. The eldest daughter of the late Marquess of Hastings was known to be naturally pious yet sufficiently worldly to belong to what the newspapers liked to call ‘the Fashionables’. From the late 1820s you might spot the tall, slender young woman gliding around the supper room at Almack’s or attending one of Queen Adelaide’s Drawing Rooms (her brother was a gentleman of the bedchamber), her graceful figure and modish outfit warranting a short admiring paragraph in the gossipy Morning Post.
The Duchess of Kent and her daughter Princess Victoria, 1834
Within days of Lady Flora’s arrival at the Kensington court-in-waiting on 20 February 1834, fourteen-year-old Princess Victoria had protested in the only way available to her, by taking to her bed. Over the next six weeks she ran through her habitual repertoire of headaches, backache, sore throat, ‘biliousness’ and a fever, which not only got her the concentrated attention of ‘dear Lehzen’, who was ‘unceasing … in her attentions and care to me’, but also handily kept Mama’s new lady and her long neck at bay. Still, Lady Flora could not be dodged for ever. As summer gave way to autumn the Duchess made it clear that wherever Victoria and Lehzen went, Lady Flora was to go too, like an elegant hobble. The new lady of the bedchamber gamely trailed the inseparable girl and governess as they huffed up and down Hampstead Heath for the sake of the Princess’s convalescence, whiled away the holiday months in a series of grubby rented houses on the south coast, and sat through I Puritani at the opera for what seemed like the hundredth time. And it was here, in these awkward triangular huddles, that young Victoria had first grown to loathe Lady Flora as a ‘spie’ who snooped on her most private conversations, quarried her most intimate thoughts and bore them back in triumph to Conroy and Mama.
In the end, though, the Kensington System was bested simply by one silly old man living longer than anyone thought possible. By the time William IV, he of the pineapple-shaped head, died in the early hours of 20 June 1837, Victoria had passed her eighteenth birthday and was constitutionally entitled to reign alone. In those first thrilling days of power she tore through the old Kensington court like a tiny Tudor tyrant bent on restoring her favourites and casting her enemies into outer darkness (the Tower, sadly, being no longer an option). Lehzen was put in charge of running the royal household and became Victoria’s ‘Lady Attendant’, while the Duchess, angling for the title of ‘Queen Mother’, was told sharply that the thing was impossible. Lady Flora was left in no doubt either that her services as a companion to the new Queen were not required, although nothing could be done about the fact that she was still a member of the Duchess’s household, and would be moving with her employer to Buckingham Palace. Mercifully left behind in Kensington for good were the hateful Conroy girls, Victoire and Jane, whom Victoria had been forced to endure for years as unofficial maids of honour. Like the ugly sisters at the end of the pantomime, the beanpole pair now withdrew
