Lady Flora Elizabeth Rawdon-Hastings, 11 February 1806–5 July 1839, was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent. She was one of the daughters of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings, and his wife, Flora Mure-Campbell.
In 1839, she was the subject of a scandal at the court of Queen Victoria.
Lady Flora was friendly with Sir John Conroy, the Duchess of Kent’s comptroller and alleged lover. Queen Victoria detested Conroy, while Flora disliked the queen’s adored friend and mentor, Baroness Lehzen, as well as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Once she ascended the throne in June 1837, Victoria made every attempt to keep her mother’s household, including Lady Flora and Conroy, away from her in distant parts of Buckingham Palace.
Sometime in 1839, Lady Flora began to experience pain and swelling in her lower abdomen. She visited the queen’s physician, who could not diagnose her condition without an internal examination, which she refused. The physician assumed the abdominal growth was a pregnancy; as Lady Flora was unmarried, his suspicions were hushed up. However, her enemies, Baroness Lehzen and the Marchioness of Tavistock, spread the rumour that she was “with child”, and eventually these rumours reached Lord Melbourne.
On February 2, the queen wrote in her journal that she suspected Conroy, a man whom she loathed intensely, to be the father. Lady Flora was sent away from court by Queen Victoria.
Finally, Lady Flora consented to a physical examination by two doctors: the Queen’s physician and her own family doctor. Both confirmed that she was not pregnant. They both signed a certificate that said “There are no grounds for believing pregnancy does exist or ever has existed”. She did, however, have an advanced cancerous liver tumour and had only months left to live. Her family demanded a public apology, that the Queen’s physician be dismissed, and that the original rumourmonger named. They were warned not to bring the matter up for fear of being accused of attacking the Crown.
Flora wrote a detailed and moving account to her uncle, Hamilton Fitzgerald, and ended it: “Goodbye, my dear uncle. I blush to send you so revolting a tale, but I wished you to know the truth, the whole truth – and you are welcome to tell it right and left.” Her uncle sent the letter to the Examiner, and it was published in full, causing a great public outcry towards the Queen over how the whole affair was handled. Victoria was booed and hissed at when out and about.
Perhaps feeling remorse, Queen Victoria visited Lady Flora a few days before her death and wrote in her journal that Flora looked “as thin as anybody can be who is still alive, literally a skeleton. I said to her, I hoped to see her again when she was better, upon which she grasped my hand as if to say, ‘I shall not see you again.’”
Lady Flora died at 2 o’clock on the morning on July 5, 1839. In her last days, she insisted on a postmortem and for its results to be published in every detail to demonstrate, as indeed it did, her innocence to the world.
In her long reign, Victoria noted four events that haunted her with nightmares; one was the death of Lady Flora Hastings.
Sources:
Queen Victoria: A Personal History, Christopher Hibbert
Queen Victoria. Folio Society, Elizabeth Longford, p.446
Victoria R.I., Elizabeth Longford
