Free Sons, Servants and Statesmen by John Van der Kiste Page A

House of Lords emphasised, did not possess the confidence of the country. The prerogative powers of a monarch so closely identified with one party at the expense of another would surely be called into question.
    One disgruntled newly elected Tory member of parliament, signing himself ‘Laelius’, wrote a letter to the Queen, to be published in The Times . ‘You are a queen, but you are a human being and a woman,’ he said. He warned her that she would find herself ‘with the rapidity of enchantment the centre and puppet of a Camarilla, and Victoria, in the eyes of those Englishmen who once yielded to her in their devotion, will be reduced to the level of Madrid and Lisbon.’ The consequences of her ill-thought reaction to the problem could be disastrous. ‘Let not this crisis of your reign be recorded by the historian with a tear or a blush. The system which you are advised to establish is one degrading to the Minister, one which must be painful to the Monarch, one which may prove fatal to the monarchy.’ 16 Ironically, ‘Laelius’ concealed the identity of the man who was to become her favourite Prime Minister and eternally devoted admirer, Benjamin Disraeli. For a while, the Tories would find it hard to forgive and forget their sovereign’s behaviour.
    Melbourne had clung to office, but he was embarrassed by the circumstances which had enabled him to do so, and out of loyalty he found himself somewhat reluctantly obliged to defend the Queen’s conduct. ‘I now frankly declare,’ he said in a speech to the House of Lords, ‘that I resume office because I will not abandon my Sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress, when demands are made on her with which she ought not to comply.’ 17
    One of Peel’s earliest biographers, writing well within the Queen’s lifetime, explained the crisis with admirable even-handedness. The Tory leader, he said, was ‘little schooled in the ways of courts, and not particularly adroit in accommodating what he regarded as principle to their exigencies’, while the Queen was inexperienced, too ‘personally attached to the ministers who had surrounded her youthful throne’, as well as mortified by any proposal to dismiss her ladies. Melbourne’s judgement, he considered, was probably warped by his paternal regard for the sovereign over whose political education he had presided with rare devotion and discretion, and ‘some of his colleagues might not be proof against the temptation of giving such advice to the Crown as would enable them to pose before the country as defending a royal lady against an insult alike unmanly and unconstitutional’. 18 It was an unusual situation in which everyone inadvertently was at fault, but a mistake which fortunately for all would not be repeated.
    The damage done would have been limited had it not been for the tragic saga of Lady Flora Hastings, which was unfolding at the same time. Lady Flora was one of the Duchess of Kent’s ladies, and a close friend of the detested Sir John Conroy. Early that year, she had returned to London from Scotland in a railway carriage with Conroy, and soon afterwards she complained of feeling unwell. Rumours began to circulate that she was pregnant, and worse still, with Conroy’s child. The Queen and her old governess, Baroness Lehzen, were ready to believe the worst, and Melbourne foolishly did nothing to discourage them. In a desperate attempt to vindicate herself, Lady Flora underwent a medical examination which proved that, not only was she still a virgin, but also that the enlargement of her stomach was due to a cancerous tumour. Now painfully aware of the dreadful mistake she had made, the Queen did her best to make amends, but Lady Flora rapidly worsened and died in July. When the conscience-stricken sovereign sent a carriage to represent her at the funeral, it was stoned by angry crowds.

    It was time for a new start for the Queen. Both her predecessors on the throne had experienced periods