“Everyone there knew of it before I did,” he commented later in understandable annoyance, nothing being more irritating, as we all know, than such a state of affairs. Letters poured in from all quarters containing injurious reports. According to these, the vigorous proceedings of Lord Hastings were unknown except in his own circle and at the palace. The poor man was being abused in the London clubs for not having acted with sufficient spirit. Infamous stories were circulating about his sister. Family friends were discovering to their cost how impossible it is to manage the world or to persuade it to let go once it has got its teeth into a juicy scandal. Whenever Mr. Fitzgerald, racing about Brussels, tried to trace some such story to its source he got the same infuriating reply: “I cannot give up my authority; I must beg of you not to quote me, but I assure you the report is very generally believed.”
“It was said,” wrote Mr. Fitzgerald, “that the present was, at least, her second error, as when she left the palace last year she was certainly pregnant.” Bets were laid as to when she would have to bolt from the palace, he said wryly. “At Vienna it was believed on the 15th of March, that she had remained on her knees an hour begging mercy of the Queen, and that Lord Hastings, having as a Peer forced his way into the Royal presence, had upbraided her Majesty, who made him no answer, but curtsied and retired when his tirade was over.”
There speaks the very voice of Scandal, imaginative lady that she is. It would be difficult to surpass the apparent authenticity of that touch about the curtsy.
Hamilton Fitzgerald hurried to England and found that his friends had told the truth; they had even understated the unpleasantness of the situation. The Hastings family themselves were not in town and were as yet unaware of many stories now being told about them. The inference was always that Lady Flora was guilty but had been spared by the humane Queen. There was nothing to check this belief, Lady Flora’s uncle decided, but the Duchess of Kent’s prompt dismissal of Sir James. Grimly Fitzgerald set himself to learn the worst. With passion and no slightest trace of the humorous philosophy which most men of today would use to alleviate similar trials, he did his duty, making the rounds of the city incognito, listening in on conversations in taverns, clubs, and even private parties.
“At those respectable houses, where men of business pass their evenings, and discuss the news and speculations of the day, I found public opinion was universally against Lady Flora. The general idea was that she had been treated with unnecessary harshness; that she should have been got quietly out of the way; that such things occur every day in palaces; that people who place their daughters in them must take the consequence of doing so. It was often said that her brother would not have been so quiet if he had known ‘that more than he liked would have come out if the thing had not been hushed up.’”
Really, shocking as the idea may be, one cannot help but reflect that the Hastings family might actually have suffered less if Lady Flora had been pregnant, instead of merely honorably moribund of a cancerous liver.
Having duly considered the situation and looked over the correspondence, the family, in the name of Hamilton Fitzgerald, published the entire bag of tricks. This action was taken on the twenty-fourth of March, and provoked a violent reaction. The Hastings family had done an unconventional thing, a thing condemned by many people in their class, those to whom publicity itself was worse than any private crime no matter how great. Added to the fact that the Hastingses had deliberately publicized such a delicate matter was the disloyalty to the Queen thus implied. But not everyone, even in the aristocracy, felt like this; most people, when they knew the facts, were on Lady Flora’s side.
A wider question was indirectly affected by the business. Her people in general felt disappointed in the Queen, and for a time abandoned their sentimental admiration of the young girl who so picturesquely wore a heavy crown. She became unpopular. The public observed, and did not like, the spectacle of smug unrelenting cruelty. A young healthy woman had done grave wrong to an older ailing one, and did not have the grace to admit it when her mistake became apparent. Was it argued that Victoria was badly advised? Then one must blame the advisers, and they were Whig ladies. And it was a Whig Government, already not too popular, which ruled at Whitehall. Thus the controversy over Lady Flora’s figure, trifling as it had seemed at first, began to threaten the Government of England.
The Queen was stubborn; the Queen was defiant. She would not dismiss Sir James. Lehzen’s possible guilt was not so much as mentioned. The Queen’s temper was not too good just then in any case; she was holding long, serious discussions every day with Melbourne about a choice of bridegrooms, and her decision was wavering, though it came back every now and again with noticeable frequency to her cousin Albert, the young Prince of Saxe-Coburg. It was all very vexing, and now here were the Hastings family being disagreeable. Victoria thought it most unfair. She made no attempt to conceal her displeasure with Lady Flora.
“With one exception,” wrote Lady Flora in her diary, “an enquiry after Lady Forbes’s children, her Majesty showed Lady Flora no notice from the 24th of March, the date when Mr. Fitzgerald’s letter was published, until the 9th of June, when her Majesty sent to ask how she was.”
Soon the matter of Lady Flora’s figure entered the realm of high politics. On May 7 the Government passed a bill with a majority of only five; it became obvious that they would have to resign. To Victoria this seemed disastrous. She would lose her adored Melbourne, on whom she depended heavily. She sent for Wellington, but he pleaded his extreme age in refusing to act and named Sir Robert Peel for his substitute. The Queen did not like Peel, and she liked him less when he told her while forming his Cabinet that some of her household ladies, most of whom were Whigs, should be replaced, according to accepted custom, by ladies from Tory families.
This touched a sore point with Victoria. The Tories were angry with the Queen because of Lady Flora, and the Queen was angry with the Tories for the same reason. Hand herself over to her enemies? Victoria dug her heels in; she would not change her household. She would never change her household. In vain did Peel reason with her. In vain did Melbourne advise her to give in. Victoria maintained that her bedchamber arrangements were her own affair and had nothing to do with the public interest. In the end, Peel respectfully bowed out. He could not form a Cabinet, he said, if the Queen would not give in on this matter. Melbourne came back; the Government remained in office.
Victoria won that battle, but Lady Flora had the last word after all; she died. It happened on July 5, 1839, in Buckingham Palace. One of her final requests, a very urgent one, was for a post-mortem, so that the unhappy mystery of her swollen abdomen might be settled and her reputation definitely cleared. It was then discovered that her liver was diseased so badly that all the organs of the stomach were involved.
The poor lady was to be buried from Loudoun Castle, and her brother came down from the country to accompany the body on its journey. Victoria sent a carriage to join in the procession to the station in London, but the populace actually hissed it, and threw stones. At Loudoun Kirk five thousand people attended the funeral. Onlookers wept when the old Dowager Marchioness tottered painfully to the graveside to look her last on the coffin of her martyred daughter. The next Sunday the local preacher spoke openly of the circumstances which had led to Lady Flora’s death. Feeling had never before run so high against the Queen.
Small wonder, then, that the preparations for Victoria’s marriage were speeded up. A royal wedding is always popular, and perhaps as a matron, thought Melbourne, the Queen might be less fiercely virtuous. Albert was summoned. Even on the night before he arrived, three full months after the death of Lady Flora, somebody threw stones at the palace and broke a few windows. Decidedly, it was high time the Queen was married.
Summing It Up
Well, there they are, and a pretty sorry spectacle they make for anyone who happens to be a romantic, though I found them an interesting lot notwithstanding. Misgivings now assail my conscience. Have I
possibly been guilty of stacking the cards, committing the worst sin known to science, selecting my evidence to bolster up a theory? I swear I haven’t. I can’t make an exact cross-section of history, or sample it as if I were doing a Gallup poll, but I have ranged without prejudice, to the best of my ability, through the centuries.
Let us be fair and careful, however. Before closing, we might go at this thing the other way; reverse the process of reasoning and see what we get out of it. If some of these characters had not loved as they did, but had found other objects for their passion, would it have made any difference to the world at large?
It’s no good speculating further about Sappho; that would merely be piling one conjecture on top of another. Nor do I feel anything would be gained by investigating alternative programs for Nzinga. Frankly, Nzinga’s inner life defeats me; I simply don’t know how she felt about people. The Chevalier d’Eon, a special case, likewise defies our methods, and some of the others will be difficult to play the game with for one reason or another. But we can have a try.
Let’s suppose that Helen of Troy had been worse behaved. If she had taken matters into her own hands, if she had tried for once to influence Fate instead of lying back with a complacent smile, repeatedly permitting people to carry her off, what might have come of it? I believe she would have approached Hector if she had dared, and told him that she loved him and that she was fed up with Paris and ready to be abducted. We are told she was irresistible. Hector, presumably, would have forgotten his wife Andromache and his son, and obediently run away with Helen. That fresh scandal would have caused considerable flurry among the attacking Greeks. Menelaus might have challenged Hector to a duel, and if there had been a fair fight (though with those tiresome meddling gods always butting in, one never knows), Hector, who was the better man, would certainly have won. Would Troy, then, have been saved? I don’t think for one minute that it would. The besieging army had invested too much time and matériel to let the war lapse at that point. The thousand ships were already launched; the topless towers of Ilium were doomed. So much for Helen’s influence.… I am inclined to be a little catty about Helen, I am afraid.
Had Antony and Cleopatra failed to click, we would have been much the poorer for want of Shakespeare’s play. Moreover, humanity would not have gained peace; the dreary march of hostilities could not have been halted just at that time. Rome was bound to quarrel with Egypt, for she couldn’t afford to let such a fabulously wealthy colony slip out of her grasp. Octavian did not intend to allow Caesarion to grow up at a safe distance, developing kingly ambition at his leisure. Cleopatra, however, might have had a better life had she chosen a husband who didn’t drink. But even if she had done so, even if the hypothetical husband had put up a better show than Antony did against Octavian’s forces, he and she and all of Egypt were bound to be incorporated in the Roman pattern sooner or later. Cleopatra, courageous and hungry for power, lived and died as she would have chosen. I can scarcely imagine her a softly smiling old lady, the Egyptian equivalent of Whistler’s mother.
The details of Henry VIII’s attachments had little to do with the crazily cruel life he led. Less than any other man was he affected by marriage. Perhaps if he had married Katharine Parr before Katheryn Howard—— But that could not have happened. Henry had to become a beaten man, weary of sensuality, before he would turn to Katharine Parr’s dull safety. If Jane Seymour had lived she might have made the story less revolting. On the other hand, things might have been worse if she hadn’t died. Henry would have been got at by scheming courtiers who were always ready and waiting to poison him against whatever wife he had at the moment. Not even conjecture or the game of might-have-been can mitigate the horror that was Henry VIII.
Marie Françoise, Princess of Savoy, seems a rather pallid personality next to him. She changed husbands in midstream, to be sure, and if the Church had not obligingly come to her rescue, the lady would have been a bigamist, an incestuous bigamist at that. However, the Church helped her out. Marie Françoise was saved, and after all the excitement had died down it was pretty obvious that none of it made much difference to Portugal anyway. The Princess of Savoy is quickly forgotten as we turn to look instead at her contemporaries the Königsmarks, roistering away in North Europe like the hearty extroverts they were.
Did the Königsmarks matter? Two of them did, there is no doubt of that. Karl Johann caused only a few weeks of scandal in London’s streets, but Philipp Christoph and his sister Aurora made their mark on world affairs. If Philipp had not fallen in love with Sophie Dorothea of Celle, her son George II of England might have been a nicer man. Might have been, but I am dubious about it. He was the son of George I, and his mother loved him none the better for that. If she had not taken a lover, if she had not been imprisoned, if her son and daughter had not been cut off from all communication with her, even so it is likely that George II would have developed into the lout he was. Philipp, had he not fallen fatally in love with Sophie Dorothea, would have drifted away to other love affairs, possibly to marriage and a settling down in Sweden. It is unlikely, however, that he would have died in bed, even so. He was a Königsmark.
On the subject of Aurora there is no possibility of conjecture. Aurora collected fewer regrets than most women of her time, for she always did just as she liked. She never married. From among her lovers she picked out Philipp’s good friend, the elector Frederick Augustus, and lived with him, if not for the rest of her life at least for a long time. Their son grew up to become famous as Marshal Saxe. Aurora and Frederick Augustus used to quarrel often and enjoyably. Once when he was accusing her of infidelity (the elector himself had more than a hundred illegitimate children, but consistency is not carried to extremes by such men) he quoted the proverb, “Caesar’s wife ought to be above suspicion.”
“Doubtless,” said Aurora, “but I must confess I can’t quite see how it applies. You are not Caesar, and I am not your wife.”
I have tried earnestly to envisage Lord Nelson under other circumstances than the ones we know. It all adds up to nothing. Whatever one does with him, he remains the intrepid admiral. Abolish Lady Nelson, marry him to Lady Hamilton or somebody else, leave him unmarried, do what you will; none of it makes any difference. He was a genius of an admiral; let it stop there.
However, our other eighteenth-century heroes and heroines, Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hastings and the Princess Talleyrand, are not of the same unalterable stuff. Warren Hastings depended very much upon his wife. He was a marrying sort of man too; he would have married somebody else if Marian had not been aboard when he made his long journey out to India as a recently bereaved widower. Only suppose it had been Mademoiselle Worlée instead! Would she have been less frail, I wonder, if she had been married to a clever man with a good position, like Hastings? He was too old for her, but so was Junius. However, I don’t think it would ever have happened. Mademoiselle was not his type.
As for the other Hastings, Lady Flora, it is quite impossible to suppose she could have led another sort of life than the one bestowed upon her by Fate. Only the narrow Whiggish minds of Victoria’s ladies in waiting, only the ignorant Queen herself would have made such an appalling mistake. Let us not add to the sum of their miscalculations.
There they are; I rest my case. Out of these thirteen people, four achieved a certain measure of happiness or content. What, you may ask, does it signify? Nothing very much, perhaps, save that I would like to put on record somewhere the following revised proverb:
ALL CONQUERS LOVE
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Copyright © 1959 by Emily Hahn
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1110-5
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Emily Hahn, Love Conquers Nothing
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