‘That circle of courtiers and female sycophants who crowd about the sovereign’: Fictional Representations of the Women and Influence of Queen Victoria’s Court, 1839-1847

Throughout Queen Victoria’s lengthy reign, she endured nearly 100 intrusions on her privacy from individuals whom we would today call “stalkers”. These intruders included men and women of all ages and from across the United Kingdom and the wider world. While the specific reasons behind their intrusions varied, each intruder attempted to access the Queen. Some intruders approached the Queen when she appeared in public, but dozens more wrote letters or attempted to break into Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. These intruders quickly gained notoriety, and newspapers from across the United Kingdom and the British Empire dedicated significant attention to the intruders and their sensational attempts to access the Queen. Some sectors of the media even invented intruders on royal privacy. Two of the most popular fictional intruders included the Penny Satirist’s ‘The Queen’s Lover’, a would-be suitor who wrote love letters to the Queen, and G.W.M. Reynolds’s Henry Holford, a character in The Mysteries of London who sneaked into Buckingham Palace.[i] While capitalising on the popularity of real intruders, fictional intruders also allowed their creators to comment on a wide range of social issues and concerns, including the royal court. Indeed, as these invented intruders sought to access the Queen, they often had fictional interactions with the ladies of her court. These interactions were used to highlight courtly corruption, the unsuitability of the Queen’s current ladies-in-waiting, and the potentially damaging implications of their power and influence over her – issues that were of great concern to the British public in the aftermath of a scandal involving the royal court in 1839.

In January 1839, Lady Flora Hastings, a member of a prominent Tory family and lady-in-waiting to Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, began experiencing severe stomach pains. When her stomach became enlarged, Flora consulted the Queen’s physician, Sir James Clark, but he could not determine the cause of her ailment. Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, who were affiliated with the Whig party, noticed the swelling and began to spread rumours that Flora was pregnant. A few weeks earlier, Flora had travelled unchaperoned in a carriage with Sir John Conroy, the comptroller of the Duchess of Kent’s household. Victoria despised Conroy, who had been incredibly controlling of the Queen throughout her childhood and adolescence, and gladly believed that he was responsible for Flora’s disgrace.[ii]

Although Flora’s swelling reduced in March, the gossip about her condition only increased. After Lady Portman, a senior Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber, expressed her concerns to Sir James Clark, he approached Flora and asked to conduct a second examination to confirm that she was not pregnant. The shocked Flora refused initially but was informed that she would not be permitted into the Queen’s presence unless she agreed. Flora was thus forced to undergo a degrading and humiliating medical examination to prove her innocence. When Flora died in July 1839, a post-mortem revealed that the swelling in her stomach had been caused by a tumour on her liver.[iii] This revelation prompted outrage in the popular press, and the Queen and her ladies were widely condemned for their rumourmongering and attempts to besmirch Flora’s reputation.[iv] The scandal also raised questions about the propriety, power, and influence of the court – questions which the Penny Satirist and G.W.M. Reynolds addressed by having their fictional intruders interact with female courtiers.[v]

The Penny Satirist was a popular, cheap, satirical periodical which ran from 1837 to 1849. In 1839, the paper introduced a new column called ‘The Queen’s Lover’, which parodied the many would-be suitors who endeavoured to present themselves as candidates for the Queen’s hand in marriage before (and, in some cases, after) her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in February 1840. From 1839 to 1847, the Queen’s Lover ‘wrote’ lengthy missives and poems to the paper, commenting on his deep love for Victoria and his attempts to win her heart. 

The Queen’s Lover recognized that the ladies of the royal court held significant influence over the Queen and hoped to gain their favour so that they would promote his cause. However, the Queen’s Lover quickly made ‘enemies at court’, and he complained that the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting were sabotaging him.[vi] The Queen’s Lover was particularly frustrated when Miss Caroline Sommers-Cocks, one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, refused to deliver a letter to Victoria because he used the wrong seal on the envelope.[vii] While this added a comically tragic angle to the Queen’s Lover’s plight, it also reminded readers of the power and influence which the ladies of the court held. In recounting the Queen’s Lover’s struggle against the pettiness and powerplays of the royal court, the Penny Satirist encouraged readers to reflect on whether the Queen’s ladies were equal to the responsibilities which accompanied their lofty positions. 

 The Queen’s Lover also complained about a ‘foreign lady’ who was ‘evidently busy in poisoning the ears of her Majesty against him’.[viii] This ‘foreign lady’ was Baroness Louise Lehzen, Queen Victoria’s private secretary, former governess, and closest confidant. The Queen’s Lover’s frustration with Lehzen’s influence reflected the popular animosity towards the Baroness in the aftermath of the Hastings Scandal. Although all of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting attracted blame for the Hastings Scandal, Lehzen was singled out for turning the Queen against Flora.[ix] In Richard Watts’s defence of Flora, published shortly after her death, Watts wrote that Flora had believed “a certain foreign lady” had been conspiring against her.[x] Watts further accused Lehzen of ‘pull[ing] the wires of a diabolical conspiracy, of which Lady Flora was to be the first victim’.[xi] Although Lady Portman attempted to clear Lehzen’s name, the public remained convinced that Lehzen had been a key player in the scandal.[xii]

The Penny Satirist’s references to a ‘certain foreign lady’, therefore, served as an explicit reference to the Hastings Scandal and the questions it raised about Lehzen, the other ladies of Queen Victoria’s court, and the influence they exerted over the Queen. While the Penny Satirist was ultimately concerned with making fun of the ladies of the court, the paper also reminded readers that there were real and serious consequences to the influence these women wielded over the Queen, something which Flora Hastings experienced firsthand.

A similar critique of courtly power and influence appears in G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London, a sensational weekly serial which ran from 1844 to 1848.[xiii]One of the characters in the story is a young boy called Henry Holford, who was based on the most famous intruder on royal privacy: Edward ‘Boy’ Jones. Jones became a minor celebrity after he entered Buckingham Palace on at least three separate occasions, and his stories of sitting on the Queen’s throne, eating in the royal kitchens, and hiding in the Princess Royal’s nursery received significant attention.[xiv] In Reynolds’s story, Holford is commissioned by the ‘Resurrection Man’, Anthony Tidkins, to steal a plate from the royal kitchens. After entering the palace through an open door, Holford spends a fascinating evening overhearing royal courtiers, seeing the Queen, and exploring the palace.[xv] His visit whets his curiosity, and he returns to the palace, where he learns more gossip, attends a royal ball, and listens to a conversation between the Queen and Prince Albert.[xvi]

Reynolds often used his writing to comment on the corruption of social elites and aristocratic privilege – a method which appealed greatly to his mostly working-class readership.[xvii] In the same way, Reynolds used Holford to critique the royal court. During Holford’s visits to the palace, he is privy to suggestive and titillating gossip about previous generations of the royal family from two of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting: a Countess and a Duchess. When Holford first enters the palace, he hears the Countess promise to tell the Duchess ‘strange revelations connected with the family of George the Third’.[xviii] On a later visit, Holford finally learns these secrets. The Countess claims that George III was a bigamist and that he had legally married a Quaker woman, Hannah Lightfoot, before his marriage to Princess Charlotte.[xix] She also suggests that George’s madness was caused in part by his guilt for his bigamy. The two women then turn to the ‘profligacy’ of George III’s children, remarking on his daughters’ supposed sexual appetites – ‘the honour of the princesses became sacrificed to illicit passion – passion which was still natural, although illicit!’[xx] Additionally, they discuss the wildly unpopular Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover, who was implicated in the death of his manservant and was rumoured to have seduced his sister. Finally, the women express their hatred for George IV – ‘the word honour must not be mentioned in connexion with the name of George the Fourth’ – and defend Queen Caroline, whom the King attempted to divorce in 1820, stating that any flaws in Caroline’s conduct were a result of the ‘wide distinction between our manners and customs and those of the Continent’.[xxi]

The Countess and Duchess’s conversation highlights Reynolds’s belief that certain members of the royal family were corrupt and immoral, and serves as an outlet for Reynolds’s republican sentiments.[xxii] However, it also acts as a critique of the women of the royal court. Reynolds paints a condemnatory picture of the court, presenting female courtiers as salacious busybodies who waste their time engaging in gossip and scandal. Indeed, Reynolds writes that ‘nowhere are scandal and tittle-tattle more extensively indulged in, than amongst the members of that circle of courtiers and female sycophants who crowd about the sovereign’.[xxiii] This reflects the popular outrage with the Queen’s court which followed the Hastings Scandal. It was widely acknowledged that Flora had been an unfortunate victim of waggling tongues at court.[xxiv] Reynolds used the Countess and Duchess’s gossip to remind his readers of the type of ladies who had the Queen’s ear and shaped her political and personal ideas. Although gossip was a part of Victorian everyday life, it was widely perceived as a vice, particularly in women.[xxv] The Hastings Scandal suggested that the court was full of women who were happy to compromise their respectability by giving in to gossip. Henry Holford’s sojourn into the palace reminded readers of the corrupt sycophants in the Queen’s court and the potentially damaging implications of their ability to influence the Queen.

In the aftermath of the Hastings Scandal, Britons were concerned with the behaviour and power of the women who comprised the royal court. The Queen’s Lover and Henry Holford’s fictional interactions with ladies of the royal court represented these broader social debates about the conduct of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and whether they were the most fitting candidates to exert influence over a young, impressionable sovereign.

Rachel Peacock

Rachel Peacock is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University, where she studies nearly 100 individuals who attempted to intrude on the privacy of (or “stalk”) Queen Victoria and the British royal family between 1837 and 1901. Her doctoral research, funded by the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada, considers how these intrusions shaped popular debates about monarchical accessibility and the royal family’s right to privacy throughout the nineteenth century. Her thesis also addresses the ways these intrusions contributed to understandings of gender, madness, and policing. The content included in this blog post is part of a chapter on fictional intruders and the ways they were used to comment on both the phenomenon of intrusions on royal privacy and broader social issues.

Rachel is also pleased to serve as a regular contributor to Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal for the 2024-25 academic year.

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[i] John Plunkett has written analyses of these fictional intruders in Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and ‘Regicide and Reginamania: G.W.M Reynolds and The Mysteries of London’, in Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (eds), Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 15-27. He focuses on these fictional intruders in the context of the fetishization of Queen Victoria’s image in the media. While my research acknowledges the importance of this perspective on Henry Holford and “The Queen’s Lover,” I also consider the ways fictional intruders provided their creators with the means to conduct a broader social commentary which expanded beyond the Queen and her body. 

[ii] Kate Hubbard, Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012), pp. 27-28; Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 15; Richard Francis Spall, ‘The Bedchamber Crisis and the Hastings Scandal: Morals, Politics, and the Press at the Beginning of Victoria’s Reign’, Canadian Journal of History 22 (1) (1987) 19-39 (p. 22).

[iii] Hubbard, Serving Victoria, pp. 29, 35; Spall, ‘The Bedchamber Crisis and the Hastings Scandal’, p. 23.

[iv] For example, Hubbard, Serving Victoria, pp. 30-31; ‘Statement in Vindication of Lady Flora Hastings,’ Examiner, 24 March 1839, p. 3. 

[v] Spall, ‘The Bedchamber Crisis’, pp. 26-29.

[vi] ‘The Queen’s Lover’, The Penny Satirist, 3 (112) (8 June 1839), p. 2.

[vii] ‘The Queen’s Lover’, The Penny Satirist, 3 (125)(7 September 1839), p. 3.

[viii] ‘The Queen’s Lover’, The Penny Satirist, 3 (112) (8 June 1839), p. 2.

[ix] Hubbard, Serving Victoria, pp. 30-31. 

[x] Richard Watts, The Dangers of Evil Counsel; or, A Voice from the Grave of Lady Flora Hastings; to Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen (London: T. Cadell and W. Blackwood and Sons, 1839), pp. 2-9.

[xi] Watts, The Dangers of Evil Counsel, p. 11.

[xii] ‘Statement of Lady Portman’, Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser, 17 September 1839, p. 2. 

[xiii] Stephen Basdeo and Mya Driver, Victorian Britain’s Best-Selling Author: The Revolutionary life of G.W.M. Reynolds (Haverton: Pen and Sword Books, 2022), p. 54. 

[xiv] Jan Bondeson, Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2011), pp. 15-18, 28-29.

[xv] George W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 1, pp. 332-335.

[xvi] Geroge W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 2, pp. 192-199.

[xvii] Basdeo and Driver, Victorian Britain’s Best-Selling Author, p. 55; Andrew King, “Literature of the Kitchen’: Cheap Serial Fiction of the 1840s and the 1850s’, inPamela K. Gilbert (ed.), A Companion to Sensation Literature, (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 38-53 (p. 39); Kimberly Harrison, “Come Buy, Come Buy’, Sensation Fiction in the Context of Consumer and Commodity Culture’, in Gilbert, pp. 528-539 (p. 535).

[xviii] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 1, pp. 330-335.

[xix] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 2, pp. 193-194.

[xx] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 2, pp. 193-194.

[xxi] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 2, pp. 192-194.

[xxii] Basdeo and Driver, Victorian Britain’s Best-Selling Author, p. 49.   

[xxiii] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, Volume 2, p. 196.

[xxiv] ‘Court of Queen Victoria’, Planet (12 May 1839), p. 1; ‘Delicate Investigation in the Queen’s Palace’, Weekly Chronicle (17 March 1839), p. 5; ‘Poetry. Elegiac Stanzas’, Barbadian (28 August 1839), p. 4; ‘Original Lady Flora Hastings’, Dorset County Chronicle (29 August 1839), p. 2.

[xxv] Mike Huggins, Vice and the Victorians (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 181.

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