sixty-seven-year-old uncle Ernest, Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover, a man who cut a handsome dash in full regalia (see plate 4). Indeed, it had been so as to see off the unpopular Ernest’s claims to be the most convincing – that is, male – heir to William IV that John Conroy had insisted on bustling Princess Victoria around the country in the years prior to the old King’s death. In a series of staged public appearances at factories, charity schools and regattas – ‘progresses’, an annoyed King William called them – the Princess had been presented to her future subjects as their next monarch, this insistence on her constitutional status as the first in line to the throne intended to blot out any lingering anxiety about that small, female body.
There was a further complication. It wasn’t simply that Victoria didn’t look like a Prince, it was that she didn’t look much like a Princess either. Her long torso and stumpy legs were a world away from the tall, slender, high-waisted aristocratic female ideal modelled by the 130 costume dolls that had been her constant companions during her later childhood and adolescence. Having reached menarche early, at twelve and a half, she had stopped growing before she was quite five feet tall. What’s more, her menstrual cramps and exhaustion, coded in her journal as ‘billiousness’ and ‘weakness’, had woven their way into her difficult life at Kensington, so that low, dragging belly pain became the recurring accompaniment to all the tension, all the shouting and the tears. And like any young woman who has been schooled not to express her emotions (Lehzen had always been very strict about that), Victoria had fallen into the habit of managing her feelings through food. Over the past few years she had swung between being fat and slim, according to whether she felt she was winning or losing the war against Mama, Conroy and Lady Flora.
All of which explains why, at the time of her succession, Victoria was looking her slenderest best, with a handspan waist of just twenty-two inches. No wonder that returning from his first meeting with the new Queen in the summer of 1837, the habitual old rake Lord Holland had declared himself ‘a bit of a lover’, finding her ‘in person, in face, & especially in eyes & complexion, a very nice girl & quite such as might tempt’. Yet the fact was that just a year later, no one was feeling particularly tempted by Victoria. After the early bloom of those first few months on the throne she was, suggested several commentators, reverting to her former fat and commonplace incarnation. Indeed, she now resembled nothing so much as a vulgar minor Duchess from an unpronounceable bit of Germany: those pouchy jowls, oyster eyes, and a chin that became a neck without you quite noticing how. In the summer of 1838, and increasingly feeling ‘cross’, Victoria developed a rash over her hands, while some months later one of her eyes sprouted a stye, which she insisted on showing to a repulsed Lord M. Meanwhile, her short upper lip, which her elder half-sister Feodora (so beautiful that men stopped and stared) had nagged about keeping over her teeth, was now permanently hitched to reveal sharp little rodent points. As a result she looked, in the words of one appalled maid of honour, like a caricature of the merry little rosebud of a Princess who until recently had so enchanted the nation.
Young Queen Victoria
Most upsetting of all was her figure. That twenty-two-inch waist had immediately started to swell, as if queenship required something more of her. In addition to eating too often and too fast, she had taken to gulping down prodigious amounts of alcohol at mealtimes, much to Mama’s and even Lord M’s alarm. All the ladies at court were obliged to change their clothes several times a day, matching their outfits to the demands of the moment: eating breakfast, waving at charity children, entertaining dull Coburgians after dinner. In such an intensely visual economy, where you presented a new version of yourself to the world every three hours or so, it was hard to hide even a modest change of shape. As Victoria started to puff out she increasingly opted for fitted bodices that showed off her excellent bust (Lord M said that a good bust mattered more than anything), and bell-shaped skirts under which she could smuggle extra poundage and the disproportionately stumpy legs that had long been the despair of her dancing mistress. But that autumn, passing through Paris, Lady Holland had heard a whisper from the Queen’s dressmaker that her clothes were having to be made larger than ever. Incontrovertible proof came in mid-December when Victoria stepped on the scales and found that she weighed nearly nine stone, which was ‘incredible for my size’.
Lord Melbourne did his best to try and jolly the Queen out of her physical and moral slump. What about eating only when hungry, he suggested. In that case, snapped the Queen, I would be eating all day long. Well, why not walk more, he asked. Victoria triumphantly fished out the example of Donna Maria of Portugal, exactly the same age as her, who walked all the time and still resembled a pudding. In any case, walking always meant getting stones in her shoes. Have them made tighter, came the mild prime ministerial reply. Melbourne also dropped hints about her personal hygiene, which had fallen off sharply. She really should try to change her clothes more often, something about which she admitted she had become ‘lazy’. And a bath taken in the early evening, before dinner, hinted the premier, might not go amiss.
Perhaps, though, looking like a caricature and smelling like a sweating horse was exactly the effect Victoria was after. Her early brief spell of prettiness had turned out to have its disadvantages, for it had not only attracted the attention of slobbering old roués like Lord Holland, but also stirred up the male population in the strangest ways. Earlier that year an admirer had managed to get access to the Chapel Royal, where he disrupted Morning Service by bowing, kissing and waving his hand to Victoria. Then there was Tom Flower, who was convinced that he was going to marry the Queen, and on one frightening night in July 1838 had managed to get within seven yards of her bedroom to tell her so. A few months later the infamous urchin Edward ‘the Boy’ Jones would live for a week in the back passages of Buckingham Palace before being apprehended with the Queen’s underwear stuffed down his trousers.
And then there was the endless heartless public chatter about which of her boy cousins she would marry – Hanoverian George, Coburgian Albert or Alexander from the House of Orange. For until Victoria’s body did what it was supposed to and produced a male heir, there was always the chance that the throne would be seized by her uncle the Duke of Cumberland, who, if Salic law had prevailed in Britain as it did in Hanover, would even now be ruling in her place. Yet none of Victoria’s suitors seemed to have the makings of a hero-prince in a Grimm fairy tale. They were plain, dull young men who blushed and stammered when they spoke to her, yet dared to imagine that they might one day lie alongside her in the marriage bed. Altogether more charming, although actually no less disturbing, was the way that ordinary Britons felt they owned the young Queen as if she were their personal pet. In the August of that second year some poor people left a kitten in a basket for her at Buckingham Palace. Next time, she was terrified that it would be a baby.
III
The culminating act of ‘the Lady Flora Hastings affair’ began in the darkest days of 1838. On 21 December Conroy won his case against The Times, and was overheard crowing that the Queen had been spotted coming in to dinner with red, swollen eyes. At the other end of the country Lady Flora was feeling queasy. She had been out of waiting since late August, and was spending Christmas with her family at Loudon Castle, near Kilmarnock, where she had been stricken with sickness and runny bowels. Her mother, the Dowager Lady Hastings, begged her eldest child not to return to London until her stomach had settled. But the sad news that Lady Mary Stopford was dying of consumption meant that Flora was urgently required to take her place. The Duchess of Kent, who was spending Christmas cooped up in that tatty fun palace Brighton Pavilion, with a daughter who barely acknowledged her, did not know how she would cope without at least one of her favourite ladies by her side. Flora, although hardly in a state to endure a four-day journey of deep winter ruts and uncertain privy stops, insisted on setting out for court the moment she was summoned, because she ‘could not bear to think of the D[uches]s’ being alone’.
What happened next has come down to us as so solid and certain, so much a matter of documented and
