Lady Flora Hastings

Lady Flora Elizabeth Rawdon-Hastings (11 February 1806 – 5 July 1839) was a British aristocrat and lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent. Her death in 1839 was the subject of a court scandal that gave the Queen a negative image.

Family Lady Flora was one of the daughters of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings (1754–1826) and his wife Flora Mure-Campbell (1780–1840). Her siblings were George, Sophia, Selina, and Adelaide. She was brought up at Loudon Castle near Galston, East Ayrshire in Ayrshire.

Scandal

The unmarried Lady Flora was alleged to have had an affair with John Conroy, comptroller, "favourite" and also suspected lover of Queen Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent.

Background The Duchess's daughter, Alexandrina Victoria (later Queen Victoria), detested Conroy, while Flora disliked the queen's adored friend and mentor, Baroness Lehzen, as well as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

1839 Sometime in 1839, Lady Flora began to experience pain and swelling in her lower abdomen. She visited the queen's physician, Sir James Clark, who could not diagnose her condition without an examination, which she refused. Clark assumed the abdominal growth was pregnancy, and met with Lady Flora twice a week from 10 January to 16 February. Queen Victoria visited the now emaciated and clearly dying Lady Flora on 27 June. She was buried at Loudoun Castle, her family home. Conroy and Lord Hastings, her brother, stirred up a press campaign against both the Queen and Doctor Clark which attacked them for insulting and disgracing Lady Flora with false rumours and for plotting against her and the entire Hastings family.

Published in The Morning Post, their campaign also condemned the queen's "fellow conspirators", Baroness Lehzen and Lady Tavistock, as the guilty parties who had originated the false rumour of pregnancy.

Poetry

Hastings was also a poet; a collection of her work, Poems by the Lady Flora Hastings, was edited by her sister Sophia (later the Marchioness of Bute), and published posthumously. The publication received an enthusiastic review in The Literary Gazette, which commented:

A second edition of the poems was published in 1842.