They may have been the very model of Victorian morality, but Victoria and her family weren’t immune to a few embarrassments of their own.
“Conroy encouraged the press to report that Victoria had dismissed a dying woman in her hour of need”
Though she has become synonymous with morality and ushering in the straight-laced, straight-faced Victorian era, Queen Victoria’s royal household had plenty of scandals of its own. From freewheeling sons to rumours of illegitimate pregnancy and more, what went on behind closed Victorian doors was often far from respectable!
Queen Victoria had only been on the throne for a couple of years when she faced her first brush not only with scandal, but with the realities of maintaining good public relations. After a childhood spent in the oppressive household of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, Victoria’s relationship with her only surviving parent had become strained to the point of virtual estrangement. Though both lived in Buckingham Palace, the Duchess’ quarters were distant from the queen and her family, and Victoria was unwilling to let members of her mother’s circle get too close.
One member of that circle was Lady Flora Hastings, an unmarried noblewoman who served as lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Kent. She was also rumoured to be having an affair with the duchess’ manipulative comptroller, John Conroy. Conroy was a busy man, having long been rumoured to be the duchess’ lover. In fact some even believed that he was Victoria’s real father.
So the young queen did all she could to keep her mother and the attendants who had once been her virtual jailers at arm’s length. However, in 1839 Lady Flora began complaining of pain and a swollen abdomen. Victoria wrongly assumed that the unmarried woman was pregnant and believed that she finally had the opportunity to get rid of her once and for all. Victoria’s confidante, Baroness Lehzen, along with other courtiers loyal to the queen, spread rumours of the supposed pregnancy and Lady Flora’s reputation plummeted. In reply she wrote an open letter to a newspaper dismissing the rumours and blaming an unnamed foreign woman (Baroness Lehzen) for spreading gossip about her.
In order to silence the gossip frenzy, Lady Flora underwent a physical examination by court physicians and they confirmed that far from being pregnant, she was actually suffering with a fatal tumour on her liver. A repentant Victoria visited Lady Flora in the summer of 1839, just a week before she died, but the damage had been done to the young queen’s public image. Conroy encouraged the press to report that Victoria had spread malicious rumours and dismissed a dying woman in her hour of need. He hoped that by doing this Victoria would appoint him her secretary and beg him to win back the support of the public. Even though her reputation with her subjects suffered, however, she did no such thing. Instead she learned the lesson the hard way and became a little more circumspect when it came to gossip in the future. For years after, though, the memory of her treatment of the unfortunate Lady Flora haunted Victoria.
As Lady Flora was growing weaker in May 1839, another potential catastrophe was about to rear its head in the shape of the Bedchamber Crisis. Lord Melbourne, the Whig prime minister and one of Queen Victoria’s most trusted allies, declared that he intended to resign. As an ardent Whig herself, if Victoria must have a Tory prime minister, she wanted the Duke of Wellington. The aging duke declined the position and told her that she must invite Robert Peel, the leader of the Conservatives, to assume the role.
“By far the biggest source of trouble in the lives of Victoria and Albert was their eldest son, Albert Edward”
Yet Peel knew that a Tory administration would be in the minority and enjoy little power in Commons. He told the queen that he would accept the role only if she would dismiss a number of Ladies of the Bedchamber who were wives or otherwise related to senior Whigs. This wasn’t a particularly shocking move, as the prime minister traditionally played a part in the staffing of the royal household. Yet these women weren’t just servants to the queen, they were close friends and Victoria, who had not been allowed friends as a child, wasn’t about to sacrifice them to the whims of a politician. Though Peel wanted to replace just six of the 25 women, Victoria was sure that he intended to get rid of them all and she wouldn’t be moved. Melbourne supported her and as a result, Peel refused to serve as prime minister if the queen wouldn’t bow to his demands. Her friend and mentor, Lord Melbourne, was persuaded to return to office.
By the time Peel won a majority at the 1841 general election, Victoria was a wife and those confidantes who she had fought to protect had been shunted aside in favour of the company of her husband. This time she accepted Prince Albert’s suggestion that she replace three of her ladies with Tory sympathisers. Later she reflected that she wished she’d listened to Peel’s first offer but she had been inexperienced and far from the doughty queen she became.
By far the biggest source of trouble in the lives of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, however, didn’t come from an outside source but was in fact their eldest son, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII. Known as Bertie, he had struggled in childhood against his father’s strict regime of education and discipline, and as soon as he was able to strike out alone, he was determined to make up for all the fun he hadn’t had.
At 19 Bertie longed to join the army but as heir to the throne, his parents wouldn’t hear of it. Instead they sent him to Ireland, where he could spend the summer undertaking military manoeuvres at Curragh with the Grenadier Guards. The soldiers were surprised to learn that the young man was still a virgin and they were determined to change that. They smuggled an actress named Nellie Clifden into the camp and in his diary entries for three dates in September 1861, Bertie recorded his sexual awakening in very short notes. He wrote, “NC 1st time, NC 2nd time, NC 3rd time”. It was the start of a lifelong love of sexual decadence and the mysterious Nellie was the first of dozens of lovers who shared the bed of the Prince of Wales.
Bertie had intended to keep the tryst a secret but such hot gossip couldn’t be kept under wraps. When he returned to England his parents sent him on to Germany to meet Princess Alexandra, the daughter of Prince Christian and Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel. The couple hoped that she would be the perfect wife for the future king but while he was out of the country, somehow Victoria and Albert heard of his liaisons with Nellie. On their son’s return to England, Albert travelled through a storm to confront the Prince of Wales in Cambridge, where he was studying. Just a few days later Albert’s health failed and when he died two weeks after the trip of typhoid fever, Victoria was bereft. She blamed Bertie for Albert’s death until the end of her days.
Nobody in Victoria’s family caused her more annoyance than Bertie. Despite marrying Princess Alexandra, his love of the high life seemed to make him a magnet for scandal. Rumour had it that he was the lover of Lady Harriet Mordaunt, wife of Conservative MP Sir Charles Mordaunt, and that he had fathered a daughter with her. The little girl was born blind and Lady Harriet became convinced that this was divine punishment for her love affairs, a belief that saw her confined to an asylum. When the Mordaunts divorced, Sir Charles threatened to read out explicit letters from the prince or even force him to take the stand and though neither came to pass, society was ablaze with the gossip.
In fact it seemed as though society was often ablaze with gossip about Bertie, from the divorce of the Mordaunts to his long love affair with the famed Lillie Langtry, wrongly rumoured to be mother to another of his illegitimate children. Yet by far the most potentially damaging scandal involving Bertie was caused not by his love life, but by his passion for gambling. In September 1890 a game of baccarat erupted into what became known as the Tranby Croft affair, taking the chattering classes by storm.
The Prince of Wales was part of a group staying at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire as guests of wealthy shipping magnate, Arthur Wilson. Also among the party was Sir William Gordon-Cumming, a lieutenant-colonel in the Scots Guards. When the other attendees told Bertie that they believed Gordon-Cumming was cheating, Bertie told them that they should confront the soldier with their suspicions. This they did, promising to let Gordon-Cumming keep his reputation if he agreed to sign a binding document promising that he would never play cards again. Gordon-Cumming agreed to this but in 1891 somebody leaked the story of his cheating to the press and the outraged lieutenant-colonel took the journalist to court, demanding a retraction.
Arthur Wilson was charged with defamation and among the witnesses called to testify was the Prince of Wales. No heir to the throne had been in court since 1411 and the court case became London’s hottest ticket. Though Gordon- Cumming lost the case, his reputation and his commission, the damage to Bertie was considerable too. His so-called Marlborough House social set came under intense scrutiny and the public demanded to know exactly what the heir to the throne wasgetting up to on the public purse. It was one more nail in the coffin of the prince’s relationship with Victoria and he had no choice but to rein himself in, even going so far as to all but abandon his beloved gaming tables.
Bertie’s son, Albert, was to bring the aging queen some fresh headaches. Eddy, as he was known, had little interest in learning but like his father, he was keen to embrace more physical pursuits. He was caught up in the so-called Cleveland Street scandal that erupted when a brothel was found to be procuring young men for the illustrious gentlemen of London. In a time when homosexuality was illegal, the influence of some of those named as clients meant that the press was reluctant to report on the case but gossip spread that one of the supposed clients was none other than Lord Arthur Somerset, the head of Eddy’s stables.
When Somerset mysteriously went abroad with the royal family, the gossips soon whispered that the royal family had arranged his safe passage out of the country in return for his silence. The whispers got louder when those who were prosecuted received extremely light sentences, suggesting that someone with serious influence had intervened to ensure that the minimum embarrassment was caused to the establishment. Had Eddy been prosecuted or outed as a homosexual, the royal family might never have recovered from the scandal. It was a far cry from the morally unblemished family Victoria and Albert had once envisioned.
Eddy died in 1892, but not before he had been implicated in the suicide of a heartbroken Gaiety Girl named Lydia Miller with whom he had been having an affair. However, it wasn’t only the princes who seemed to attract scandal – Princess Louise, Victoria and Albert’s daughter, was rumoured to have had an affair with her brother’s tutor and her mother’s secretary, Arthur Bigge.
Even Victoria herself wasn’t immune from scandal in her later life and her famed friendship with her Scottish aide, John Brown, led some to believe that they were lovers or even secretly husband and wife. The two were inseparable and certainly devoted to one another. They slept in adjoining bedrooms and Victoria’s children referred to Brown as “mama’s lover”, but there is no evidence of an affair between them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen and when Victoria died she left instructions that she should be buried with a photo of Brown, as well as his mother’s wedding ring, which he had given to her years before. The queen, it seemed, may well have had some scandalous secrets of her own.
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