Shooting Victoria Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hanover, which, as a woman, Victoria was denied by Salic Law. Good riddance to him; he was the most reactionary of all her uncles: one of his first acts at Hanover was to abolish its constitution. The fact that he was Victoria’s heir only served to cause the overwhelming majority of her subjects to wish her a long life, and a fruitful one in every respect. Her popularity during this time was unparalleled, and Parliament testified in its own way to this royal excitement by voting the Queen £200,000 for her coronation, fully four times what had been spent on the coronation of William IV. It was very much a public affair, designed to represent her physical contact with her people, foregoing a closed coronation banquet (as had been the tradition before William IV) for a state procession through the streets of London. The procession echoed Princess Victoria’s journeys on a much larger scale, and once again brought home to Victoria the fundamental role that simply being among her subjects would play in the success of her reign:
    It was a fine day, and the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen; many as there were on the day I went to the City, it was nothing, nothing to the multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects, who were assembledin every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation.
    That idyllic relationship could not last forever, of course; and in 1839, in the second year of Victoria’s reign, she was personally and politically disturbed by two interrelated scandals at court, as her adamant partisanship and her innate stubbornness together worked to diminish her popularity.
    From the start, Victoria preferred to surround herself with sympathetic and loyal ladies—which, in her mind, meant Whig ladies. With Melbourne’s encouragement and in the face of Tory protests, she kept her household free of Tories. One exception to this—one that Victoria had little control over—was the Duchess of Kent’s Tory lady-in-waiting, the now 32-year-old Lady Flora Hastings, whom Conroy had attempted to impose upon the Princess as a companion years before. Though the Duchess was relegated to a distant part of the Palace, and Conroy effectively banished from the royal presence, Lady Flora Hastings was by her position a part of Court life—and therefore a living reminder to the Queen of the despised Kensington System. Moreover, there were rumors at court that Hastings and Conroy were romantically involved. In January 1839, Lady Flora returned to Court from home (sharing a carriage on the way with Conroy) with a protuberance of her stomach that clearly suggested to Victoria, Lehzen, and the ladies of the bedchamber that she was pregnant. Who exactly started this rumor is unknown, but Victoria was certainly one of the first to think so, recording in her journal her (and Lehzen’s) certainty not only that Hastings was “ with child! !” but that “the horrid cause of all this is the Monster & Demon Incarnate”—Conroy.
    Lady Flora was not pregnant. She was ill, with a growth on her liver that would, in a few months, kill her. She had the Duchess ofKent’s (and the Queen’s) physician, Sir James Clark, examine her, fully clothed; he prescribed rhubarb pills and a liniment, and was himself suspicious that she was pregnant. As suspicions grew, and as the moral welfare of the younger ladies in waiting was apparently being challenged in such a brazen fashion, the senior ladies in waiting—with the encouragement of Baroness Lehzen—took steps to force Lady Flora to prove her innocence, informing the Duchess that Lady Flora was no longer welcome at court unless she did so. The next day, Lady Flora consented to be examined under her clothes by Sir James Clark and another physician, Sir Charles Clark. The Doctors Clark examined her and issued