Queen Victoria's Gene by D M Potts

Author:D M Potts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Queen Victoria’s Gene: Haemophilia and the Royal Family
ISBN: 9780752471969
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

The family of Princess Alice. Carriers of haemophilia underlined, haemophiliacs boxed

Alexandra Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice was born on 6 June 1872 in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt. Her mother, Princess Alice, knew that her German relatives would never pronounce her English name correctly so called her Alix. What she could not know was that at her conception the egg that was fertilized contained an X chromosome carrying the gene for haemophilia.

Alice wrote to her mother Victoria that Alix was ‘a sweet, merry little person, always laughing with a dimple in one cheek’. When she was six Alix and her siblings went down with diphtheria. In the nineteenth century, with neither vaccination to prevent it nor antibiotics to cure it, diphtheria could be a deadly infection: today a whole nation may go for years without a single case. Queen Victoria sent her personal physician, but first Alix’s younger sister and then her mother died. The sunny little princess turned into a sullen, obstinate, sometimes bad-tempered child. Her grandmother poured affection on her and Alix became her favourite granddaughter. She frequently holidayed with Victoria at her summer palace in Osborne, on the Isle of Wight.

At first, Victoria hoped Alix would marry the Duke of Clarence, the elder brother of George V and then heir to her own throne. The duke was an unsavoury young man. His tutor Dalton3 referred to the ‘abnormally dormant condition of his mental powers’, but his problem may have been aggravated by deafness inherited from his mother. A coach appointed to help him enter Trinity College, Cambridge, said he could not ‘possibly derive much benefit’ from attending university as he hardly knew ‘the meaning of the words to read’. He was bisexual, frequenting a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street4 but sharing a mistress with his younger brother George, later King George V, while they were in the navy together.5 According to Knight6, he married and had a child by an Irish Roman Catholic girl who worked in a shop immediately opposite the brothel and this led to a blackmail attempt and to the Jack the Ripper murders. Clarence providentially died in 1892, allowing his more stable brother George as heir to inherit the throne. Appalled by Victoria’s plans for Alix, her sister Elizabeth, who was married to Nicholas’s uncle Serge, wrote, ‘I find the idea [of the Duke of Clarence marrying Alix] quite dreadful. He does not look over strong and is quite stupid.’ A union of Alix and Clarence might well have brought down the British throne instead of the Russian had not Elizabeth steered Alix towards the unfortunate Nicholas. The possibility of reintroducing haemophilia into the British royal family was evidently not a consideration.

No one in St Petersburg considered the possibility of haemophilia either, even though the risks were plain. No royal family took the risks into account until 1913 when the tsar offered his eldest daughter Olga to Crown Prince Carol of Romania. The crown prince’s mother was flattered by the idea but scotched it because of the risk of bringing haemophilia into the family.

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