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a vindication: Lady Flora, they declared, was a virgin. Victoria immediately wrote her a note of apology.
    The matter, however, did not end there. Both Doctors Clark still had their suspicions, and the day after the examination they brought them to Melbourne. Yes, they were sure that Lady Flora was a virgin. Nevertheless, they thought, she still might be pregnant—such a thing had been known to happen. Melbourne clung to this cynical theory of virgin pregnancy, and so did Victoria, writing to her mother that Sir Charles Clark “had said that though she is a virgin still that it might be possible and one could not tell if such things could not happen. There was an enlargement in the womb like a child.” The poisonous atmosphere only grew, and so did the rumors; soon, the press was involved, generally very unsympathetic to the Queen. Flora Hastings wrote frank accounts of her plight to her influential Tory relatives, who relayed details to the press. Soon there was a call for an investigation: Who had started this insidious rumor? Lehzen was the primary suspect, and Victoria could not help but think herself the victim of a campaign to remove her closest companion from her Court. (Her fears were only strengthened by the suspicion that Conroy was behind much of the press’s clamor.) At the end of March, one of Lady Flora’s letters, blaming “a foreign lady”—Lehzen, obviously—appeared in the Examiner : the entire affair,according to Lady Flora, was a Whig plot to discredit herself and the Duchess of Kent.
    By May, Lady Flora was gravely ill, but forced herself to go out into public, to dispel any rumors about her immorality. She was cheered, while Victoria found herself and Melbourne were hissed when in public—riding in Hyde Park, and at Ascot, where she was additionally mortified by cries of “Mrs. Melbourne.” Melbourne and Victoria held to their suspicions until very close to the end, laughing in early June at the excuse that illness was keeping Lady Flora from Court. When Victoria visited her in person at the end of the month, however, her suspicions were gone: Lady Flora was obviously dying. She died on 5 July 1839. A post-mortem revealed that she had of course never been pregnant. With Lady Flora’s death, the newspaper attacks on the Queen redoubled, and her public image was seriously compromised. In accord with the tradition of the time, she sent her empty carriage to Lady Flora’s funeral: some threw rocks at it.
    In the midst of the Flora Hastings affair came another crisis, of shorter duration in itself, but of longer-lasting consequence. Melbourne’s government existed by virtue of a tiny majority; it was sure to fall at any time. In early May 1839, it did, when radicals and Tories combined to defeat the government’s motion to impose Parliamentary control over Jamaica. Victoria was thrown into a “state of agony, grief and despair,” both at the prospect at losing her Melbourne—whom she would obviously prefer to have as her minister forever—and at the unpleasant prospect of working with his successor. Sir Robert Peel was “stiff” and “close,” according to Melbourne. In her first interview with Peel, Victoria found him a complete contrast to Melbourne: he was cold and inflexible—someone, apparently, cut from the Conroy cloth.
    Melbourne advised her fully during the negotiations for a new government, and did her a great disservice by appealing to her fierce Whig partisanship, encouraging her to make no changes whatsoever in her household, “except those who are engaged inPolitics,” by which he meant those male members of her household who were also members of Parliament. Conroy had imposed her companions on her; she should not let Peel do the same. And Melbourne had assured her that by precedent, queens had the power of choice over their ladies. Peel disagreed, holding that precedent—the