Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions. Matthew Dennison

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СКАЧАТЬ of jubilees did Victoria regain the giddily unquestioning adulation granted her in the summer of 1837.

      For all her good intentions she did not mean to reform her wilfulness. She addressed the problem of her mother with childish heavy-handedness, banishing the Duchess to quarters remote from her own in Buckingham Palace; communication took the form of hastily scribbled notes. ‘Neither a particle of affection nor of respect’ remained in Victoria’s feelings towards her mother, according to the Duke of Wellington.¹⁷ Lehzen by contrast, retained her cherished status as ‘precious Lehzen … my “best and truest” friend I have had’, and was permitted largely unfettered access to Victoria. If the atmosphere at court was markedly better than that formerly at Kensington Palace, grounds for acrimony between mother and daughter persisted. For her birthday in 1838, the Duchess of Kent presented Victoria with a copy of King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragedy of ingratitude; Melbourne did nothing to counter Victoria’s opinion of the Duchess as a ‘liar and a hypocrite’. Victoria was peremptory and obstinate on all occasions, quick to consult her own desires and inclinations: her courtiers’ language of deference included few words of caution. On state occasions mother and daughter enacted loving kindness. To the intelligent, or malicious, observer the tensions were palpable. Such an atmosphere partly explains those instances of misguided behaviour – the Flora Hastings Affair and the Bedchamber Crisis – which soon convinced politicians and courtiers alike that the time for Victoria’s marriage was approaching. Even Victoria herself was shortly reconciled to overcoming her ‘great reluctance’ to change her state.

      Five years previously Leopold had written to his niece on the importance of good behaviour: ‘By the dispensation of providence you are destined to fill a most eminent station, and to fill it well, must now become your study. A good heart and a truly honourable character are amongst the most indispensable qualifications for that position.’¹⁸ The young Victoria came close to ignoring both.

      Pride and prejudice more than honour or a good heart shaped the Queen’s conduct in the Flora Hastings Affair and the Bedchamber Crisis. Both debacles tarnished Victoria’s reputation and spoilt her early pleasure in her queenship. In government circles they emphasised the dangers of any overlap of the personal and the political in the court life of a young and inexperienced sovereign, and undermined Victoria’s perceived fitness to exercise her remaining constitutional powers.

      Flora Hastings, daughter of a Tory grandee, was an appointment of Sir John Conroy’s to the household of the Duchess of Kent. Her sympathies lay with her employer and her sponsor. Willowy in her spinsterhood, religious too, she nevertheless possessed a forked tongue: frequently in her conversation malice and wit merged. To Victoria, who lacked confidence in her own intellectual abilities, it was an unappealing trait exacerbated by her suspicion that Lady Flora spied on her. This wholly negative assessment is what made possible her treatment of the hapless lady-in-waiting in a manner that was both cruel and deadly in its flippancy.

      Lady Flora’s misfortune consisted of a coincidence and medical bungling. On her return from Scotland to London in the New Year of 1839, she shared a post-chaise with Conroy. Innocent it may have been: it was certainly unwise not to conceal so incendiary an indiscretion. That journey, however, cannot have inspired the tumour of the liver which, on 5 July, killed her.

      Within days of Lady Flora’s return, Victoria’s court interpreted her swollen abdomen as evidence of pregnancy. Apprised of her journey with Conroy, assumptions were made – including by Victoria – and afterwards confirmed by inept royal doctor Sir James Clark, who did not trouble himself to examine the patient. Speculation mounted. To maintain the new court’s reputation for moral probity, Lady Flora was forced to submit to a full examination, which found her without child and still a virgin. It ought to have been an end to the matter.

      But Victoria’s hatred for Conroy admitted no moderation. By neither word nor action did she move to clear Lady Flora’s name. Clark himself further muddied the waters with his startling suggestion that the appearance of virginity did not preclude pregnancy. Melbourne too was sceptical. No surprise that the Hastings family became incensed and, against advice, made their grievances public. Once the witch-hunt was exposed in the pages of The Times, there was little credit for Victoria in belatedly granting to Lady Flora that audience in which monarch and dying woman embraced and agreed to a truce for the sake of the Duchess. Neither the Hastings family nor the public was mollified. Reluctantly Victoria agreed to a further meeting. Days away from death, prostrate and skeletal bar her grotesquely swollen stomach, the wronged spinster clasped Victoria’s hand. Even so pitiful a sight, which forced Victoria’s compassion, did not move her to apologise. Rather the proximity of this ‘nasty woman’ dying under her own roof troubled and indeed irked her. Small consolation for Lady Flora that she died ‘the victim of a depraved court’, her own the heroine’s part.

      While the press disgorged this unedifying hullabaloo from which neither Victoria nor Melbourne emerged with credit, the Prime Minister was wrestling with problems of a different variety. Within Parliament his government faced defeat. For Victoria the prospect of losing Lord M was not one she could regard with equanimity. Her very strong feelings on the matter had little to do with politics or the good of the country. It was her own convenience, her own happiness, her own benefit that she considered. ‘The simple truth,’ according to Greville, ‘[was] that the Queen could not endure the thought of parting with Melbourne who [was] everything to her.’¹⁹ Melbourne’s resignation, on 7 May 1839, plunged her into despair: she cried, she panicked, she felt it like a physical blow. Unsettled if unrepentant as the scandal surrounding Lady Flora ground relentlessly on, she needed Lord M.

      Or did she? If Victoria wanted allies against the Hastings family, surrounded as she was by courtiers and companions, she did not have far to look. Her formal entourage consisted of her mistress of the robes, eight ladies of the bedchamber, eight women of the bedchamber and eight maids of honour, a substantial support network given the women’s overwhelmingly Whig sympathies. With Lord M at her side they constituted Victoria’s second line of defence. Without him, they became an essential bulwark between Victoria and her conscience.

      While the Whigs floundered, Sir Robert Peel was called upon to form a government. Oxford-educated son of a textiles manufacturer, tall but diffident, sporadically gauche, limp-haired but stiff in his manner, Peel correctly doubted Victoria’s sympathy. He required a token endorsement of his ministry: some Tory ladies among the royal attendants. It was a tinderbox request. Victoria would not yield. If she could not have Lord M, she would not be surrounded by Peel’s creatures crowing her defeat, not even one of them. She determined to stand her ground. Had not King Leopold once told her, ‘as a fundamental rule … be courageous, firm and honest’? Melbourne himself had echoed that advice: she must overcome personal inclination, treat the new ministry with fairness and a show of amiability – and make it clear that she hoped her household would not be subject to a cull. So recently Peel had observed Victoria’s firmness and her conviction of her own position. He could match her intransigence. Politely, fixedly, sovereign and minister engaged in a contest for mastery, a loveless pas de deux. Victoria continued to take advice from Melbourne, although he flouted constitutional propriety with every word he wrote to her, lessening with every instance of her persisting dependency her chances of political impartiality. Inevitably his advice strengthened her resolve. She refused to surrender a single lady.

      Once before, a man of slipshod manners whom she disliked had tried to force Victoria’s hand. She had not yielded to Sir John Conroy and she would not give way to Sir Robert Peel. She observed his discomfort in her presence, bolstered by Melbourne’s disdainful verdict that Sir Robert, though ‘a very gifted and able man’, was ‘an underbred fellow … not accustomed to talk to Kings and Princes’.²⁰ Undoubtedly the anguish of the Flora Hastings Affair influenced Victoria’s judgement. In her response to Peel’s request were suggestions of amateur dramatics run riot: ‘I was calm but very decided,’ she wrote to Melbourne of the critical interview. ‘I think you СКАЧАТЬ