Lady Flora Hastings

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: {{blockquote|Lady Flora Hastings writes not like a person of quality. She has set aside all conventional forms and terms, "to look on nature with a poet's eye." With a fine eye and ear for the external world, her compositions evince an intellect cultivated by the study of the best models; and, had she been spared to literature, and made to feel, by public approbation, a greater confidence in the powers which she assuredly possessed, it is not difficult to say to what degree of excellence it was within her reach to attain. [...] The last verses of Lady Flora Hastings were written in May 1839, shortly before her melancholy departure from among us. There is a dirgelike tone, even in their versification, which is sufficiently striking:— :"Break not by heedless word the spell ::With which that strain hath bound me; :For the bright thoughts of former years ::Are thronging fast around me. :Voices long hush'd are heard again, ::Smiles that have pass'd away :Beam on my memory, as once ::They bless'd mine early day. :Hopes that have melted into air, ::And sorrows that have slept— :And bending from the spirits' land, ::The loved—the lost—the wept. :My very heart is young again, ::As in the days of yore; :I feel that I could trust—alas! ::As I may trust no more!" A second edition of the poems was published in 1842. ==Bibliography==