January 27, 2016 • 28 mins
Queen Victoria reigned for more than six decades, but her early years as ruler were peppered with a number of disastrous missteps. By participating in a horrible rumor campaign about her mother's lady-in-waiting, she ended up damaging her own reputation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from stuff
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast from
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So, Tracy, I
talk all the time about how much I love Queen Victoria.
That is true, and how I'm a little afraid to
(00:22):
do an episode about Queen Victoria because I know I
will be a fan girl and I will be totally
unable to be objective if you have it's a problem. Uh,
it's a problem for a woman that keeps a picture
of Queen Victoria with her at all time. It's like
my little good luck charm. I know luck isn't real,
but I still love it. But today we're gonna go
(00:43):
ahead and dive in. And I figured the best way
that I could maybe do a Queen Victoria episode without
getting super duper gushy about it, would be to talk
about one of the major missteps in Victoria's early reign.
And this may even be one that you know about
in Passing. It is about Lady Flora Hastings and kind
of what happened with her in Queen Victoria. But one
(01:04):
thing that really came to light as I was talking
about this because I was traveling this weekend and I
was mentioning that it was what I was going to
work on with friends, and they know some of the
parts of it, but they really don't know kind of
the icky ways some of this played out and really
what the ramifications were in terms of the political landscape.
So we were going to talk about the Lady Hastings affair.
(01:25):
You've sometimes also seen it listed as the Lady Hastings
scandal or the Flora Hastings scandal, or any number of
variations on those words. But that is what we're covering today.
So to begin, in eighteen thirty four, Lady Flora Hastings
began her appointment as an attendant to the Duchess of Kent.
This was three years before Victoria would become queen. She
(01:48):
was basically walking into a powder keg. She really was,
because at this point Victoria was fifteen and she was angry,
She was rebellious, and she was unhappy because she was
a teenager, is what you're telling me, but a teenager
with extra layers. She was at odds with her mother,
Princess Victoria of Sex Coburg Saffield, the Duchess of Kent,
(02:09):
who we just mentioned, and the Duchess of Kent and
her controller, Sir John Conroy, who Uh, if you listen
to the episode where I was on stuff mom and
never told you, and we talked about Queen Victoria, we
talked about him a lot. Uh. They were notoriously controlling
of the girl who would eventually be Queen. Victoria hated
them for this, and she was much closer to her governess,
(02:31):
the Verness Lesen and Conroy and the Duchess resented Lesin
because of it, so they brought in Lady Flora. She
was intended, although this was really naively on her part
to serve as kind of a wedge between Lesen and Victoria.
Conroy and the Duchess wanted Flora to be a companion
for their teenage charge, and Victoria, as a consequence, was
(02:53):
really suspicious of the young woman who was suddenly introduced
into their household. And Lady Flora Hastings was from a
Tory family and this was in contrast to Queen Victoria
and Prime Minister Lord Lord Melbourne, who was a wig
who was her primary adviser once she became queen, and
because Flora was really not welcomed by Victoria, her role
(03:15):
pretty much became Lady in waiting to the Duchess of Kent.
In December eighteen thirty eight, Lady Flora went to Scotland
to visit her family. Sir Conroy accompanied her and throughout
the trip she just wasn't well. She had this abdominal
pain and swelling in January, so this was after the holidays.
In eight thirty nine, Conroy and Lady Hastings returned to
(03:38):
Buckingham Palace. Flora's discomfort at this point was so great
that she consulted with Sir James Clark, who was the
physician who normally treated Victoria and the Duchess of Kent.
Dr Clark prescribed a camper opium liniment and rhubarb and
ipecac pills for the young woman's maladies, and unsurprisingly this
did not actually do much to help her out. At
(03:59):
this point the condition had become really chronic. It had
been plaguing her for weeks, and this is probably where
we should note that Sir James Clark had begun his
medical career as a Navy surgeon. Women's bodies were by
no means an area of expertise for him, and he
often spoke of his approach to medicine as being one
(04:20):
in which urgent matters were attended to quickly, and less
urgent and potentially more complicated matters were put off a
little bit to see how they developed so that he
could get a clearer picture, So that camphor and rhubarb
and the liniment and pills option were likely all part
of more of a putting off kind of thing than
a real attempt to try to remedy the problem. Lady
(04:43):
Flora thought that either he didn't understand her illness or
he just wasn't paying attention to her descriptions of her symptoms. Yeah,
and her writings. You can tell She's like, I don't
think this doctor is really listening to me, which is
something we certainly all deal with sometimes in modern society. So, uh,
(05:04):
this has been going on for a long time. Uh.
Clark had felt her abdomen over her dress, but that
was the only physical examination of the patient that took place.
Clark did ask to examine her without her stays, without
her corsetry, but Lady Flora did not agree to that,
so he had only that cursory examination of her abdomen
to go on. As far as diagnosis, and he did
(05:26):
notice that there was something odd, but he couldn't get
any more information about it. So, as is often the
case with chronic conditions, she had good days and bad days,
and there were even times when she thought she was recovering.
At one point, Hamilton Fitzgerald, who was Lady Flora's uncle,
got a letter from her in which she mentioned that
getting a little exercise through walking seemed to really be
(05:47):
helping her. She reported that her strolls were reducing both
the sweat, the swelling and the pain that was accompanying it.
And if you don't know this story and what's going
to happen, you might be thinking right about now that
a anthem pain and abdominal swelling might indicate a pregnancy.
And if that's where your mind went, you would be
thinking very similarly to members of Queen Victoria's household and court.
(06:11):
So we're going to talk about how this evolved into
a scandal and Queen Victoria's part and all that, But
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(08:20):
So to get back to Queen Victoria and Lady Flora's story, Uh,
the young Queen herself was quite drawn in by the
possibility of a scandalous out of wedlock pregnancy, so the
young queen herself again. Victoria had taken the throne three
years after Flora had come into the household, and this
was roughly five years after she had come into the household,
(08:41):
so she had been queen for a little while. At
this point she was quite drawn in by the possibility
of a scandalous out of wedlock pregnancy, and she actually
wrote in her journal on February second of eighteen thirty
nine that Flora's swollen abdomen looked suspicious and that all
of the ladies of the court had come to the
same conclusion she had that Lady Flora must be with
(09:02):
child and cast in the role of father in this
perceived scandal was, of course, the man that Victoria already detested,
her mother's comptroller, Sir John Conroy. Rumors started circulating throughout
Buckingham Palace. Lady Flora's name basically was being dragged through
the mud and all kinds of whispers beyond behind people's
fans and exchanging of knowing glances. Eventually, the rumors and
(09:27):
the murmurs got so pervasive that Sir Charles Clark was
once again involved, and when he visited with Flora. Clark
was quite plain. He explained that all of the ladies
of the court were convinced that she was pregnant and
that she must be secretly married, or that maybe she
should be secretly married if she was with child. He
(09:48):
pressed Flora to confess what many believed to be the
reality of her situation. It seemed at this point that
even he really thought she probably was pregnant, and that
might have been why she didn't want him to examine
her a few weeks prior. But for her part, Lady
Flora was utterly horrified by the accusation and she denied
it vehemently. The doctor told her that if she was
(10:10):
steadfast in this assertion of her innocence, the only thing
that was going to truly clear her name would be
a full medical examination to ascertain the status of her womb.
This was something of an ultimatum that recommendation of a
physical exam until Lady Flora was proven by a doctor
not to be carrying a child, Queen Victoria would not
(10:31):
allow her in court. Yeah, this is kind of like uh.
I was talking to our colleague Julie Douglas about this,
and she was saying, like, this is sort of the
ultimate kind of modern high school clique, but on a
level we can't even deal with because it is royalty
and court and matters of politics. But it's similar stuff, um.
(10:54):
And all of this was of course tied up with
Victoria's disdain for her mother. Not having her attendant Lady
in waiting on hand would make the Duchess of Kent's
life more difficult, and moreover, if Flora looked bad, the
Duchess of Kent looked bad, and Victoria was kind of
in favor of that. So the Duchess was basically given
the exact same ultimatum. She needed to convince Lady Flora
(11:17):
Hastings to submit to an examination or she would just
have to prepare to do without her Lady in waiting
whenever she was at court. The Duchess was naturally distressed,
both for her own station as well as for the
reputation of Lady Flora, so she advised this young woman
that it would be best if she would simply given
and let the doctor perform a more thorough examination to
(11:39):
clear her name and put an end to all of
these rumors. And the Duchess of Kent, interceding, did the trick.
Lady Flora finally agreed to the exam, although she did
so under the condition that a Hastings family friend who
was also an experienced doctor, Sir Charles Clark, would also
be present. So yes, just to make this confusing for you,
(12:00):
that is another doctor named Clark uh and Lady Flora's
made as well as another Lady of the Court, were
also present throughout the exam. The two doctors made a
joint statement after the exam quote, we have examined with
great care the state of Lady Flora Hastings with a
view to determine the existence or non existence of pregnancy,
(12:20):
and in our opinion, although there is enlargement of the stomach,
there are no grounds for suspicion that pregnancy does exist
or has ever existed. But unfortunately the rumors did not
end with that statement. Uh. They mostly were checking to
see if she was a virgin at that point, and
(12:40):
so the doctor that Lady Hastings had insisted be a
participant in this exam, Sir Charles Clark, had apparently mentioned
in sort of an off hand way to Prime Minister
Lord Melbourne that there were rare cases where a woman
could be pregnant despite appearing to be a virgin, and
that one little remark was really all Melbourne needed because
he was convinced that this must be the case in
(13:03):
Lady Flora's condition as well. He shared this opinion with
Queen Victoria, but the young Ruler had read the report
that the doctor's made. She had read it herself, and
she really wasn't quite ready to take Lord Melbourne's opinion
as a medical fact. And so the Queen summoned Lady
Flora to visit her, but the Lady in waiting sent
a reply that she was too ill to do so
(13:23):
at that time. Several days later, though, she did feel
well enough and she went to see Victoria. So the
Queen's opinion was that she did actually look very ill.
So Victoria and Lady Hastings made up and they agreed
to put this whole affair behind them. But while the
two women may have made a sort of piece with
one another, Lady Flora's family tories, who saw the whole
(13:47):
thing is a shameful mark against Melbourne and the Queen
is some sort of wig propaganda answer John Conroy, were
simply not ready to leave the matter alone, and really
Lady Flora wasn't entirely either. She sort of fanned the
flames of this unrest around the matter when she wrote
her uncle complaining that her honor had really been questioned
in a really rude way. Although she did not place
(14:09):
blame on Victoria at this point for the gossip that
had stained her reputation, Lady Flora's brother, Lord Hastings, was
particularly angry about the way his sister had been treated.
He was intent on challenging Melbourne to a duel, and
he placed the blame for the rumors squarely I'm ahead
of the Prime Minister. After the two men met, though,
(14:30):
Lord Hastings was convinced that Melbourne had attempted to keep
the matter as quiet as a kid, so instead of
looking for a duel, he instead asked to have an
audience with the Queen. And in this request, Lord Melbourne
really did everything he could to block Lord Hastings. He
really didn't want him speaking to Queen Victoria about the matter,
and eventually Hastings gave up on waiting to see the Queen,
(14:51):
but he did write a really angry letter to Melbourne
expressing how insulted he was how poorly their family had
been treated and that he still into ended to get
to the bottom of who it was that started these
terrible rumors about Flora. Lady Flora herself came to the
conclusion that it was Baroness Lazin, Victoria's beloved and trusted friend,
who had started this whole scandal. Flaura wrote a letter
(15:14):
to her uncle that implicated both Lazin and Lady Portman,
who was one of the Queen's ladies, as the villains
of this whole affair. She signed off that letter with quote,
I wish you to know the truth and nothing but
the truth, and you are welcome to tell it right
and left and tell it he did. He sent her
letter to the press for publication. Also published was a
(15:37):
back and forth between Dour Marchioness of Hastings, that's Lady
Flora's mother, and Lord Melbourne, in which Melbourne rebuffed the
matriarchs demand that Sir James Clark be removed from his
post as doctor in the Royal household. Similarly rejected were
Flora's mother's demands that the culprit in this scandal be
identified officially. All that correspondence was printed in the Morning
(15:58):
Post and the affair air transitioned from being the talk
of the court to the talk of all of London,
and it made Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne looked very,
very bad to the public. It basically made them look
like a couple of uncaring bullies who had victimized a
young girl for the crime of being the Duchess of
Kent's lady in waiting. Yeah, they really were perceived to
(16:20):
just have been complete jerks to this poor young woman
just because she worked for Victoria's mother, who they detested.
And Melbourne seemed to dismiss all of this hubbub as
nothing more than idle gossip. But Queen Victoria was incensed.
It really got to her. She felt that she had
made amends with Lady Flora and from her point of view,
(16:40):
the Hastings family was stirring the pot needlessly after she
felt like she and Flora had worked it all out,
and when the Duchess of Kent took up Ladies Lady
Flora's side in the matter. As this whole you know,
rumor mill continued to happen, it was like throwing gasoline
on a fire. Victoria was absolutely livid and a serious
tension was kind of ever present in the palace at
(17:02):
this point is the two sides quietly seeded it one
another because everyone divided on either siding with Victoria and
Melbourne or with Lady Hastings. To make matters worse, the
Queen insisted that Flora's illness, which really, I mean this
is being going on for a while. She insisted it
was just some passing ailment and not anything serious, although
(17:23):
the Lady in waiting was plainly getting worse every day.
The Duchess of Kent was extremely frank and sharing her
belief that Flora was in fact mortally ill. And so
earnest was the Duchess of Kent's position on Lady Flora's
health that Melbourne finally became convinced that things were quite serious,
and it genuinely terrified him. Although it did not seem
(17:46):
so much that he was worried about Flora, but he
knew that if she died, her death was going to
make both him and Queen Victoria look even worse than
they already did. He urged the Queen to make an
effort to check up on Lady Flora, because, as he
put quote, it shows feeling so At first, Victoria was
completely unmoved by these please to offer some kind of
(18:07):
kindness to Lady Flora. But her mind did eventually change.
We'll talk about that in just a moment, but first
we're going to take another brief break to talk about
one of our awesome sponsors. So when word was finally
sent by another doctor, this time Sir William Chambers, that
the Queen should postpone a ball that was scheduled for
June eighteen thirty nine out of respect for the seriousness
(18:28):
of Lady Flora's condition, Victoria heeded his word. She did
cancel the event, and finally realizing that things were indeed
very serious, planned to visit Lady Flora that very day.
And remember this is June, and this had been going
on since January, so she had been just ill for
at this point, almost half of the year. However, at
this point Lady Flora just wasn't feeling well enough for visitors.
(18:51):
The next day, the Queen did visit, and she instantly
was sobered up to the gravity of the situation. She
wrote in her diary that Lady appeared quote literally like
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, and
(19:12):
the two women really spoke only briefly. According to Victoria's writings,
Lady Flora told her that she had been grateful for
all that the Queen had done for her, and Victoria
said that she hoped to see Lady Flora again when
she was feeling better, and at that point Flora, who
clearly understood what was going on with her health, said
that they were not going to see each other again.
(19:33):
On July thirty nine, at just after two am, Lady
Flora Hastings died in her bedroom in Beckingham Palace. Her
brother was with her, as was his wife, and Queen
Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent, was there as well.
And when Lady Flora's body was examined by Sir Benjamin Brodie,
who was a well respected surgeon of the time, he
(19:54):
found that Flora was indeed a virgin right up until
her death, and he also found a significant tumor on
her liver. The press had a field day publishing opinions
about how guilty Victoria should have felt over the death
of the innocent Lady Flora, who had been subjected to
such nasty treatment by the Queen's gossipy court. Privately, Victoria
(20:15):
was outraged over this, pointing out that she had not
killed the girl. Public opinion about the Queen was definitely
soured by this entire scandal, and as she traveled in
her carriage throughout London for the remainder of that summer,
she was often hissed at openly and booed, and men
would refuse to raise their hats as she passed, and
at some point people would even shout Mrs Melbourne after
(20:39):
the carriage because they felt that she had been so
heavily influenced by Melbourne's belief that Lady Flora had been pregnant,
even though in that initial examination by the two doctors
she had appeared to be a virgin. Pamphlets circulated the
streets of London detailing the evil and nefarious influences Victoria
held close in her cabinet. They called out Baroness Lazon
(21:02):
as a foreigner, answer James Clark as a worthless physician. Basically,
everybody who was close to the Queen wound up being
smeared in some way, and by extension, the Queen was
as well. When the Royal morning carriage was sent to
Lady Flora's funeral services. A police guard attended it because
Melbourne was so afraid of an attack. Uh there was
no serious attack. There were perhaps some stones thrown, but
(21:25):
it was not a major situation. The Hastings family also
returned the money that Queen Victoria sent to Lady Flora's
maid and the blinds of the hasting families. Scotland residences
were always closed whenever the Queen was in the country
for several years afterward, so Queen Victoria was in the
midst of a really dark time. This constant criticism of
(21:46):
her behavior towards Lady Flora deeply affected her, and even
though she claims to feel no guilt in the matter,
really odds are that her conscience was eating away at her.
She said that if she had just been a regular person,
she would have run away and left the country. And
Lord Melbourne was also knocked down a few pegs in
all of this. He really did come around a feeling
(22:07):
that he had handled things very poorly in a couple
of different ways. One in not shifting the blame for
the whole matter squarely on the Queen's ladies in order
to protect the monarch, which he felt was part of
his duty, and he felt guilty for having advised Victoria poorly,
and hopefully he felt guilty for his part in spreading
horrible rumors. The Lady Hastening scandal was really one of
(22:31):
Victoria's greatest missteps in her early reign, both because she
had treated this young woman quite poorly and because she
had handled the matter very poorly in a political sense.
It took her quite a while and her getting married
to Albert to really live down the damage that was
done to her image during this whole scandal. Yeah, thankfully, uh,
(22:52):
you know, Albert kind of gave Queen Victoria a much
needed layer of thoughtfulness and calm my. Uh you know,
he became a sounding board for her, and she did
have a little bit of a temper, and to have
someone around that was so close to her that she
could kind of talk things through with, I think really
(23:12):
helped her as she moved on through her career as queen.
But yeah, the Lady Hastings scandal, it's heartbreaking because there
were a lot of people hurt and damaged in the
whole thing when it was really completely not what anybody
thought it was. Well and like with the state of
medical care and surgery where they were at the time,
It's it's extremely unlikely that even if they had correctly
(23:35):
detected what was the matter, that they could have done
anything about it. Like, yeah, extremely unlikely that a different
course of events would have saved her life, But a
different course of events definitely would have made her last
months less horrible, right, Like how sad that she was
dying and she was having to write all these letters
about how she was being treated, and you know, trying
(23:58):
to figure out who had done it at end to
go through and yeah, it's bad. So I love you, Victoria,
but that one was ugly. You did some bad things
along with the good things, And I can acknowledge that
I'm only laughing at my own ridiculousness, certainly not at
the horribleness of someone dying. I do have some more
(24:19):
peppy listener mail, though, that we can switch to. Okay,
if you're game. I actually have two things. One is
uh a lovely holiday card we got and it came
from so far away that it got here a little
bit late, but I love it. Uh. It is both
a beautiful card and a postcard, and they are from St. Petersburg, Russia,
and it says, Hello Holly and Tracy. I really like
(24:41):
your podcast. I'm writing to wish you happy New Year
and merry Christmas. Today is December, so probably you'll get
this letter by the end of January, which is correct.
We did well, better late than never, as we see
in Russia. We say that here as well, So I'm
looking forward to your new podcast is best Podcasts, best
wishes a category enough from Russia, and she also sent
(25:01):
us a beautiful holiday card and she translated it for
us because it is in Russian and it's she says.
It says, best wishes from Father Frost. A good job podcasting.
You are cool. Thank you for your show. It's so
pretty and nice. Super love it. Thank you for sending
us that. What a wonderful treat to get a small
parcel from so far across the globe. The other one
(25:22):
that I have is an email that we received from
our listener Caroline, and it is actually going back a
bit to our history of peanut butter. She says, I
just finished listening to your podcast on peanut butter. I
realized I hadn't had peanut butter in years and had
to go out and buy some the ecological crunchy kind
that I had to stir, she says, with a smiley face.
I love old ads and they can tell us so
much of the social history of previous eras. And your
(25:45):
podcast made me think of the one that she attached.
It's a She attached the photograph and then she translated
for us. It's from nineteen sixty advertised in Donald Duck magazine.
It's in Norwegian, but the text reads, and this is
her own translation, power food for riotous askulls. Healthy kids
have a vitality that can take the breath away from
any adults. They need plenty of calories. Therefore, you should
(26:07):
give the kids Mills peanut butter on their sandwiches. Nutritious
and super tasty topping just right for children's taste buds.
Mills peanut butter is a natural product made from freshly
roasted peanuts without any added sugar. When it comes to calories,
Mills peanut butter is on level with our most valuable
sandwich toppings. Other than the focus on healthy calories, she says.
(26:28):
And the picture of the blonde, blue eyed boys, yes,
this is also a cliche. And Scandinavia, we do not
actually look like that. I like to note that the
product was so new that they had not yet come
up with the Norwegian name for the product, and that
they had to point out on the label that it
was in fact a sandwich spread. I hope this ad
brought some joy to you. Thank you for the wonderful podcast.
It really did. I loved it. I love the the
(26:50):
old school kind of health and vitality advertising of a
lot of foods, and that one is spectacular. So thank
you so much, Caroline. I really really enjoyed it. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
that at History Podcast at house to Works dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com,
slash missed in History, on Twitter at misst in history,
(27:11):
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If you go online and search mist in history, you
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(27:34):
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of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from stuff
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast from
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So, Tracy, I
talk all the time about how much I love Queen Victoria.
That is true, and how I'm a little afraid to
(00:22):
do an episode about Queen Victoria because I know I
will be a fan girl and I will be totally
unable to be objective if you have it's a problem. Uh,
it's a problem for a woman that keeps a picture
of Queen Victoria with her at all time. It's like
my little good luck charm. I know luck isn't real,
but I still love it. But today we're gonna go
(00:43):
ahead and dive in. And I figured the best way
that I could maybe do a Queen Victoria episode without
getting super duper gushy about it, would be to talk
about one of the major missteps in Victoria's early reign.
And this may even be one that you know about
in Passing. It is about Lady Flora Hastings and kind
of what happened with her in Queen Victoria. But one
(01:04):
thing that really came to light as I was talking
about this because I was traveling this weekend and I
was mentioning that it was what I was going to
work on with friends, and they know some of the
parts of it, but they really don't know kind of
the icky ways some of this played out and really
what the ramifications were in terms of the political landscape.
So we were going to talk about the Lady Hastings affair.
(01:25):
You've sometimes also seen it listed as the Lady Hastings
scandal or the Flora Hastings scandal, or any number of
variations on those words. But that is what we're covering today.
So to begin, in eighteen thirty four, Lady Flora Hastings
began her appointment as an attendant to the Duchess of Kent.
This was three years before Victoria would become queen. She
(01:48):
was basically walking into a powder keg. She really was,
because at this point Victoria was fifteen and she was angry,
She was rebellious, and she was unhappy because she was
a teenager, is what you're telling me, but a teenager
with extra layers. She was at odds with her mother,
Princess Victoria of Sex Coburg Saffield, the Duchess of Kent,
(02:09):
who we just mentioned, and the Duchess of Kent and
her controller, Sir John Conroy, who Uh, if you listen
to the episode where I was on stuff mom and
never told you, and we talked about Queen Victoria, we
talked about him a lot. Uh. They were notoriously controlling
of the girl who would eventually be Queen. Victoria hated
them for this, and she was much closer to her governess,
(02:31):
the Verness Lesen and Conroy and the Duchess resented Lesin
because of it, so they brought in Lady Flora. She
was intended, although this was really naively on her part
to serve as kind of a wedge between Lesen and Victoria.
Conroy and the Duchess wanted Flora to be a companion
for their teenage charge, and Victoria, as a consequence, was
(02:53):
really suspicious of the young woman who was suddenly introduced
into their household. And Lady Flora Hastings was from a
Tory family and this was in contrast to Queen Victoria
and Prime Minister Lord Lord Melbourne, who was a wig
who was her primary adviser once she became queen, and
because Flora was really not welcomed by Victoria, her role
(03:15):
pretty much became Lady in waiting to the Duchess of Kent.
In December eighteen thirty eight, Lady Flora went to Scotland
to visit her family. Sir Conroy accompanied her and throughout
the trip she just wasn't well. She had this abdominal
pain and swelling in January, so this was after the holidays.
In eight thirty nine, Conroy and Lady Hastings returned to
(03:38):
Buckingham Palace. Flora's discomfort at this point was so great
that she consulted with Sir James Clark, who was the
physician who normally treated Victoria and the Duchess of Kent.
Dr Clark prescribed a camper opium liniment and rhubarb and
ipecac pills for the young woman's maladies, and unsurprisingly this
did not actually do much to help her out. At
(03:59):
this point the condition had become really chronic. It had
been plaguing her for weeks, and this is probably where
we should note that Sir James Clark had begun his
medical career as a Navy surgeon. Women's bodies were by
no means an area of expertise for him, and he
often spoke of his approach to medicine as being one
(04:20):
in which urgent matters were attended to quickly, and less
urgent and potentially more complicated matters were put off a
little bit to see how they developed so that he
could get a clearer picture, So that camphor and rhubarb
and the liniment and pills option were likely all part
of more of a putting off kind of thing than
a real attempt to try to remedy the problem. Lady
(04:43):
Flora thought that either he didn't understand her illness or
he just wasn't paying attention to her descriptions of her symptoms. Yeah,
and her writings. You can tell She's like, I don't
think this doctor is really listening to me, which is
something we certainly all deal with sometimes in modern society. So, uh,
(05:04):
this has been going on for a long time. Uh.
Clark had felt her abdomen over her dress, but that
was the only physical examination of the patient that took place.
Clark did ask to examine her without her stays, without
her corsetry, but Lady Flora did not agree to that,
so he had only that cursory examination of her abdomen
to go on. As far as diagnosis, and he did
(05:26):
notice that there was something odd, but he couldn't get
any more information about it. So, as is often the
case with chronic conditions, she had good days and bad days,
and there were even times when she thought she was recovering.
At one point, Hamilton Fitzgerald, who was Lady Flora's uncle,
got a letter from her in which she mentioned that
getting a little exercise through walking seemed to really be
(05:47):
helping her. She reported that her strolls were reducing both
the sweat, the swelling and the pain that was accompanying it.
And if you don't know this story and what's going
to happen, you might be thinking right about now that
a anthem pain and abdominal swelling might indicate a pregnancy.
And if that's where your mind went, you would be
thinking very similarly to members of Queen Victoria's household and court.
(06:11):
So we're going to talk about how this evolved into
a scandal and Queen Victoria's part and all that, But
first we're going to take a quick break for a
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(08:20):
So to get back to Queen Victoria and Lady Flora's story, Uh,
the young Queen herself was quite drawn in by the
possibility of a scandalous out of wedlock pregnancy, so the
young queen herself again. Victoria had taken the throne three
years after Flora had come into the household, and this
was roughly five years after she had come into the household,
(08:41):
so she had been queen for a little while. At
this point she was quite drawn in by the possibility
of a scandalous out of wedlock pregnancy, and she actually
wrote in her journal on February second of eighteen thirty
nine that Flora's swollen abdomen looked suspicious and that all
of the ladies of the court had come to the
same conclusion she had that Lady Flora must be with
(09:02):
child and cast in the role of father in this
perceived scandal was, of course, the man that Victoria already detested,
her mother's comptroller, Sir John Conroy. Rumors started circulating throughout
Buckingham Palace. Lady Flora's name basically was being dragged through
the mud and all kinds of whispers beyond behind people's
fans and exchanging of knowing glances. Eventually, the rumors and
(09:27):
the murmurs got so pervasive that Sir Charles Clark was
once again involved, and when he visited with Flora. Clark
was quite plain. He explained that all of the ladies
of the court were convinced that she was pregnant and
that she must be secretly married, or that maybe she
should be secretly married if she was with child. He
(09:48):
pressed Flora to confess what many believed to be the
reality of her situation. It seemed at this point that
even he really thought she probably was pregnant, and that
might have been why she didn't want him to examine
her a few weeks prior. But for her part, Lady
Flora was utterly horrified by the accusation and she denied
it vehemently. The doctor told her that if she was
(10:10):
steadfast in this assertion of her innocence, the only thing
that was going to truly clear her name would be
a full medical examination to ascertain the status of her womb.
This was something of an ultimatum that recommendation of a
physical exam until Lady Flora was proven by a doctor
not to be carrying a child, Queen Victoria would not
(10:31):
allow her in court. Yeah, this is kind of like uh.
I was talking to our colleague Julie Douglas about this,
and she was saying, like, this is sort of the
ultimate kind of modern high school clique, but on a
level we can't even deal with because it is royalty
and court and matters of politics. But it's similar stuff, um.
(10:54):
And all of this was of course tied up with
Victoria's disdain for her mother. Not having her attendant Lady
in waiting on hand would make the Duchess of Kent's
life more difficult, and moreover, if Flora looked bad, the
Duchess of Kent looked bad, and Victoria was kind of
in favor of that. So the Duchess was basically given
the exact same ultimatum. She needed to convince Lady Flora
(11:17):
Hastings to submit to an examination or she would just
have to prepare to do without her Lady in waiting
whenever she was at court. The Duchess was naturally distressed,
both for her own station as well as for the
reputation of Lady Flora, so she advised this young woman
that it would be best if she would simply given
and let the doctor perform a more thorough examination to
(11:39):
clear her name and put an end to all of
these rumors. And the Duchess of Kent, interceding, did the trick.
Lady Flora finally agreed to the exam, although she did
so under the condition that a Hastings family friend who
was also an experienced doctor, Sir Charles Clark, would also
be present. So yes, just to make this confusing for you,
(12:00):
that is another doctor named Clark uh and Lady Flora's
made as well as another Lady of the Court, were
also present throughout the exam. The two doctors made a
joint statement after the exam quote, we have examined with
great care the state of Lady Flora Hastings with a
view to determine the existence or non existence of pregnancy,
(12:20):
and in our opinion, although there is enlargement of the stomach,
there are no grounds for suspicion that pregnancy does exist
or has ever existed. But unfortunately the rumors did not
end with that statement. Uh. They mostly were checking to
see if she was a virgin at that point, and
(12:40):
so the doctor that Lady Hastings had insisted be a
participant in this exam, Sir Charles Clark, had apparently mentioned
in sort of an off hand way to Prime Minister
Lord Melbourne that there were rare cases where a woman
could be pregnant despite appearing to be a virgin, and
that one little remark was really all Melbourne needed because
he was convinced that this must be the case in
(13:03):
Lady Flora's condition as well. He shared this opinion with
Queen Victoria, but the young Ruler had read the report
that the doctor's made. She had read it herself, and
she really wasn't quite ready to take Lord Melbourne's opinion
as a medical fact. And so the Queen summoned Lady
Flora to visit her, but the Lady in waiting sent
a reply that she was too ill to do so
(13:23):
at that time. Several days later, though, she did feel
well enough and she went to see Victoria. So the
Queen's opinion was that she did actually look very ill.
So Victoria and Lady Hastings made up and they agreed
to put this whole affair behind them. But while the
two women may have made a sort of piece with
one another, Lady Flora's family tories, who saw the whole
(13:47):
thing is a shameful mark against Melbourne and the Queen
is some sort of wig propaganda answer John Conroy, were
simply not ready to leave the matter alone, and really
Lady Flora wasn't entirely either. She sort of fanned the
flames of this unrest around the matter when she wrote
her uncle complaining that her honor had really been questioned
in a really rude way. Although she did not place
(14:09):
blame on Victoria at this point for the gossip that
had stained her reputation, Lady Flora's brother, Lord Hastings, was
particularly angry about the way his sister had been treated.
He was intent on challenging Melbourne to a duel, and
he placed the blame for the rumors squarely I'm ahead
of the Prime Minister. After the two men met, though,
(14:30):
Lord Hastings was convinced that Melbourne had attempted to keep
the matter as quiet as a kid, so instead of
looking for a duel, he instead asked to have an
audience with the Queen. And in this request, Lord Melbourne
really did everything he could to block Lord Hastings. He
really didn't want him speaking to Queen Victoria about the matter,
and eventually Hastings gave up on waiting to see the Queen,
(14:51):
but he did write a really angry letter to Melbourne
expressing how insulted he was how poorly their family had
been treated and that he still into ended to get
to the bottom of who it was that started these
terrible rumors about Flora. Lady Flora herself came to the
conclusion that it was Baroness Lazin, Victoria's beloved and trusted friend,
who had started this whole scandal. Flaura wrote a letter
(15:14):
to her uncle that implicated both Lazin and Lady Portman,
who was one of the Queen's ladies, as the villains
of this whole affair. She signed off that letter with quote,
I wish you to know the truth and nothing but
the truth, and you are welcome to tell it right
and left and tell it he did. He sent her
letter to the press for publication. Also published was a
(15:37):
back and forth between Dour Marchioness of Hastings, that's Lady
Flora's mother, and Lord Melbourne, in which Melbourne rebuffed the
matriarchs demand that Sir James Clark be removed from his
post as doctor in the Royal household. Similarly rejected were
Flora's mother's demands that the culprit in this scandal be
identified officially. All that correspondence was printed in the Morning
(15:58):
Post and the affair air transitioned from being the talk
of the court to the talk of all of London,
and it made Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne looked very,
very bad to the public. It basically made them look
like a couple of uncaring bullies who had victimized a
young girl for the crime of being the Duchess of
Kent's lady in waiting. Yeah, they really were perceived to
(16:20):
just have been complete jerks to this poor young woman
just because she worked for Victoria's mother, who they detested.
And Melbourne seemed to dismiss all of this hubbub as
nothing more than idle gossip. But Queen Victoria was incensed.
It really got to her. She felt that she had
made amends with Lady Flora and from her point of view,
(16:40):
the Hastings family was stirring the pot needlessly after she
felt like she and Flora had worked it all out,
and when the Duchess of Kent took up Ladies Lady
Flora's side in the matter. As this whole you know,
rumor mill continued to happen, it was like throwing gasoline
on a fire. Victoria was absolutely livid and a serious
tension was kind of ever present in the palace at
(17:02):
this point is the two sides quietly seeded it one
another because everyone divided on either siding with Victoria and
Melbourne or with Lady Hastings. To make matters worse, the
Queen insisted that Flora's illness, which really, I mean this
is being going on for a while. She insisted it
was just some passing ailment and not anything serious, although
(17:23):
the Lady in waiting was plainly getting worse every day.
The Duchess of Kent was extremely frank and sharing her
belief that Flora was in fact mortally ill. And so
earnest was the Duchess of Kent's position on Lady Flora's
health that Melbourne finally became convinced that things were quite serious,
and it genuinely terrified him. Although it did not seem
(17:46):
so much that he was worried about Flora, but he
knew that if she died, her death was going to
make both him and Queen Victoria look even worse than
they already did. He urged the Queen to make an
effort to check up on Lady Flora, because, as he
put quote, it shows feeling so At first, Victoria was
completely unmoved by these please to offer some kind of
(18:07):
kindness to Lady Flora. But her mind did eventually change.
We'll talk about that in just a moment, but first
we're going to take another brief break to talk about
one of our awesome sponsors. So when word was finally
sent by another doctor, this time Sir William Chambers, that
the Queen should postpone a ball that was scheduled for
June eighteen thirty nine out of respect for the seriousness
(18:28):
of Lady Flora's condition, Victoria heeded his word. She did
cancel the event, and finally realizing that things were indeed
very serious, planned to visit Lady Flora that very day.
And remember this is June, and this had been going
on since January, so she had been just ill for
at this point, almost half of the year. However, at
this point Lady Flora just wasn't feeling well enough for visitors.
(18:51):
The next day, the Queen did visit, and she instantly
was sobered up to the gravity of the situation. She
wrote in her diary that Lady appeared quote literally like
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, and
(19:12):
the two women really spoke only briefly. According to Victoria's writings,
Lady Flora told her that she had been grateful for
all that the Queen had done for her, and Victoria
said that she hoped to see Lady Flora again when
she was feeling better, and at that point Flora, who
clearly understood what was going on with her health, said
that they were not going to see each other again.
(19:33):
On July thirty nine, at just after two am, Lady
Flora Hastings died in her bedroom in Beckingham Palace. Her
brother was with her, as was his wife, and Queen
Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent, was there as well.
And when Lady Flora's body was examined by Sir Benjamin Brodie,
who was a well respected surgeon of the time, he
(19:54):
found that Flora was indeed a virgin right up until
her death, and he also found a significant tumor on
her liver. The press had a field day publishing opinions
about how guilty Victoria should have felt over the death
of the innocent Lady Flora, who had been subjected to
such nasty treatment by the Queen's gossipy court. Privately, Victoria
(20:15):
was outraged over this, pointing out that she had not
killed the girl. Public opinion about the Queen was definitely
soured by this entire scandal, and as she traveled in
her carriage throughout London for the remainder of that summer,
she was often hissed at openly and booed, and men
would refuse to raise their hats as she passed, and
at some point people would even shout Mrs Melbourne after
(20:39):
the carriage because they felt that she had been so
heavily influenced by Melbourne's belief that Lady Flora had been pregnant,
even though in that initial examination by the two doctors
she had appeared to be a virgin. Pamphlets circulated the
streets of London detailing the evil and nefarious influences Victoria
held close in her cabinet. They called out Baroness Lazon
(21:02):
as a foreigner, answer James Clark as a worthless physician. Basically,
everybody who was close to the Queen wound up being
smeared in some way, and by extension, the Queen was
as well. When the Royal morning carriage was sent to
Lady Flora's funeral services. A police guard attended it because
Melbourne was so afraid of an attack. Uh there was
no serious attack. There were perhaps some stones thrown, but
(21:25):
it was not a major situation. The Hastings family also
returned the money that Queen Victoria sent to Lady Flora's
maid and the blinds of the hasting families. Scotland residences
were always closed whenever the Queen was in the country
for several years afterward, so Queen Victoria was in the
midst of a really dark time. This constant criticism of
(21:46):
her behavior towards Lady Flora deeply affected her, and even
though she claims to feel no guilt in the matter,
really odds are that her conscience was eating away at her.
She said that if she had just been a regular person,
she would have run away and left the country. And
Lord Melbourne was also knocked down a few pegs in
all of this. He really did come around a feeling
(22:07):
that he had handled things very poorly in a couple
of different ways. One in not shifting the blame for
the whole matter squarely on the Queen's ladies in order
to protect the monarch, which he felt was part of
his duty, and he felt guilty for having advised Victoria poorly,
and hopefully he felt guilty for his part in spreading
horrible rumors. The Lady Hastening scandal was really one of
(22:31):
Victoria's greatest missteps in her early reign, both because she
had treated this young woman quite poorly and because she
had handled the matter very poorly in a political sense.
It took her quite a while and her getting married
to Albert to really live down the damage that was
done to her image during this whole scandal. Yeah, thankfully, uh,
(22:52):
you know, Albert kind of gave Queen Victoria a much
needed layer of thoughtfulness and calm my. Uh you know,
he became a sounding board for her, and she did
have a little bit of a temper, and to have
someone around that was so close to her that she
could kind of talk things through with, I think really
(23:12):
helped her as she moved on through her career as queen.
But yeah, the Lady Hastings scandal, it's heartbreaking because there
were a lot of people hurt and damaged in the
whole thing when it was really completely not what anybody
thought it was. Well and like with the state of
medical care and surgery where they were at the time,
It's it's extremely unlikely that even if they had correctly
(23:35):
detected what was the matter, that they could have done
anything about it. Like, yeah, extremely unlikely that a different
course of events would have saved her life, But a
different course of events definitely would have made her last
months less horrible, right, Like how sad that she was
dying and she was having to write all these letters
about how she was being treated, and you know, trying
(23:58):
to figure out who had done it at end to
go through and yeah, it's bad. So I love you, Victoria,
but that one was ugly. You did some bad things
along with the good things, And I can acknowledge that
I'm only laughing at my own ridiculousness, certainly not at
the horribleness of someone dying. I do have some more
(24:19):
peppy listener mail, though, that we can switch to. Okay,
if you're game. I actually have two things. One is
uh a lovely holiday card we got and it came
from so far away that it got here a little
bit late, but I love it. Uh. It is both
a beautiful card and a postcard, and they are from St. Petersburg, Russia,
and it says, Hello Holly and Tracy. I really like
(24:41):
your podcast. I'm writing to wish you happy New Year
and merry Christmas. Today is December, so probably you'll get
this letter by the end of January, which is correct.
We did well, better late than never, as we see
in Russia. We say that here as well, So I'm
looking forward to your new podcast is best Podcasts, best
wishes a category enough from Russia, and she also sent
(25:01):
us a beautiful holiday card and she translated it for
us because it is in Russian and it's she says.
It says, best wishes from Father Frost. A good job podcasting.
You are cool. Thank you for your show. It's so
pretty and nice. Super love it. Thank you for sending
us that. What a wonderful treat to get a small
parcel from so far across the globe. The other one
(25:22):
that I have is an email that we received from
our listener Caroline, and it is actually going back a
bit to our history of peanut butter. She says, I
just finished listening to your podcast on peanut butter. I
realized I hadn't had peanut butter in years and had
to go out and buy some the ecological crunchy kind
that I had to stir, she says, with a smiley face.
I love old ads and they can tell us so
much of the social history of previous eras. And your
(25:45):
podcast made me think of the one that she attached.
It's a She attached the photograph and then she translated
for us. It's from nineteen sixty advertised in Donald Duck magazine.
It's in Norwegian, but the text reads, and this is
her own translation, power food for riotous askulls. Healthy kids
have a vitality that can take the breath away from
any adults. They need plenty of calories. Therefore, you should
(26:07):
give the kids Mills peanut butter on their sandwiches. Nutritious
and super tasty topping just right for children's taste buds.
Mills peanut butter is a natural product made from freshly
roasted peanuts without any added sugar. When it comes to calories,
Mills peanut butter is on level with our most valuable
sandwich toppings. Other than the focus on healthy calories, she says.
(26:28):
And the picture of the blonde, blue eyed boys, yes,
this is also a cliche. And Scandinavia, we do not
actually look like that. I like to note that the
product was so new that they had not yet come
up with the Norwegian name for the product, and that
they had to point out on the label that it
was in fact a sandwich spread. I hope this ad
brought some joy to you. Thank you for the wonderful podcast.
It really did. I loved it. I love the the
(26:50):
old school kind of health and vitality advertising of a
lot of foods, and that one is spectacular. So thank
you so much, Caroline. I really really enjoyed it. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
that at History Podcast at house to Works dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com,
slash missed in History, on Twitter at misst in history,
(27:11):
on pinterest dot com, slash mist in history at miss
in history dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram at
misst in history. You can basically connect with us anywhere.
If you go online and search mist in history, you
will bring up a lot of our social as well
as our website just missed in history dot com, where
you can check out our archives of every episode that's
ever happened, show notes for every episode. Tracy and I
(27:34):
have worked on, as well as a variety of other goodies.
You can also visit our parents site, which is how
staff works dot com. So we encourage you to come
and visit us at Misston history dot com and how
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