We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Even as they got older, her children bored Victoria. She told Princess Augusta of Prussia in 1856 that once her eldest daughter Vicky was married, she did not expect to miss her as Augusta missed her married daughter: “With me the circumstances are quite different. I see the children much less and even here [London], where Albert is often away all day long, I find no especial pleasure or compensation in the company of the elder children. You will remember I told you this at Osborne. Usually they go out with me in the afternoon … and only exceptionally do I find the rather informal intercourse with them either agreeable or easy … I am used to carrying on my many affairs quite alone; and then I have grown up all alone, accustomed to the society of adult (and never with younger) people.”

  Albert, to the contrary, reveled in the company of his children, at least once they had learned to walk and talk. With the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1841, Albert became king of the nursery, and he was a far more active and engaged parent than his wife. He enjoyed swinging a baby in his huge dinner napkin, teaching a three-year-old to turn somersaults or an eight-year-old to skate. He loved to lead an excited group of tots on shell-collecting expeditions or to take teenaged sons out on the moors. It was usually the prince who read the daily reports from governesses and tutors, corrected the smaller children’s table manners, and grilled the older ones about what they had learned that week. Victoria generously acknowledged Albert’s talents as a father in her journal and letters. She made their father’s perfection an article of faith for her children. But the subordinate role allotted to her in home life was irksome at times. As the older children entered their teens, she wanted to have a bigger say in their upbringing.

  She rather resented the hours that Albert devoted to the children when they were all on vacation. Athletic and high spirited, the children brought out the boy in Albert, and he seemed unusually carefree and happy with them. At times Victoria joined in the fun. But “romping” with the children was not easy in the bell skirts and heavy layers of petticoat that women wore at that time, and when she was pregnant the Queen was forbidden to engage in vigorous exercise. Watching her growing family at play with their father, Victoria was more than a little envious, especially of Vicky, who was her father’s special pet.

  LITTLE LEOPOLD QUICKLY proved to be a new strain on his mother’s nerves and his father’s resilience. He was skinny and failed to thrive as an infant despite a change of wet nurse. When he began to move around, it became clear that there was something seriously wrong. When Leopold fell and bumped himself, he was horribly bruised, his joints swelled up, and he had to be put to bed, howling. The royal doctors had no difficulty in making their diagnosis. The disease the prince suffered from, though rare, had long been described in the medical literature. Leopold suffered from hemophilia.

  A full understanding of hemophilia was reached only after the First World War when the ideas of Gregor Mendel had finally been accepted and developed into the modern science of genetics. However, even in 1854, certain key facts were well established, notably that the bleeding disease tended to run in families and that it affected only boys.

  In 1803 John Conrad Otto, a Philadelphia doctor, made a major conceptual breakthrough. Otto published a paper entitled “An Account of a Hemorrhagic Disposition Existing in Certain Families.” Otto traced a single hemophiliac family back to 1720, when the first woman to be identified as what we would now call a carrier arrived in New Hampshire. He identified three key facts: (1) The sufferers, whom he called “bleeders,” were boys. (2) They inherited the disease from their mothers, who did not manifest any bleeding problems. (3) Some of the bleeders’ sisters had sons who were bleeders in their turn. Thus the disease was carried through the generations from healthy mother to healthy daughter. Otto was not the first medical observer to suggest that hemophilia was a disease that boys inherited from their mothers, but his report was the most careful longitudinal study to date. In an 1828 paper called “Uber die Hämophilie oder die erbliche Anlage zu todlichen Blutungen” (“On Hemophilia or the Hereditary Tendency to Fatal Bleedings”), Friedrich Hopff of the University of Zurich went over the same ground as Otto. Hopff called the disease hemophilia, the name subsequently adopted by medical science.

  Medical knowledge filtered into general practice very slowly in the early part of the nineteenth century, and, though Otto and Hopff are now famous in medical history, in their day they were not prominent physicians. However, their specific observations and conclusions may have been particularly slow to gain general acceptance because they posed a new and daunting challenge to the medical profession.

  A diagnosis of hemophilia was simple for a doctor to make and terrible for a parent to receive. It meant that their baby son’s blood was failing to clot normally, filling his internal cavities and joints and causing excruciating pain. The disease was incurable and treatment at best inefficacious. Most afflicted boys died when very young. A hemophiliac baby who fell out of the crib or merely banged his head on a chair when he started to crawl suffered abnormally severe damage and could easily die. Case studies in the medical literature showed that even if a child survived infancy, his large joints gradually became deformed by arthritis as a result of internal bleeding. The few hemophiliacs who lived into their teenage years suffered chronic pain interspersed with periods of agony and were severely restricted in their activities. The extremely rare adult sufferer was haunted by the knowledge that he could kill himself with a careless slip of the razor, a stumble on the stairs, or a neglected hemorrhoid.

  Otto’s new information on the ancient bleeding disease offered no ideas for better treatment and would only increase the anguish of affected families. A woman who was coping with a son afflicted with episodes of unstanchable bleeding would learn that, mysteriously, the fault for the child’s problems lay with her, adding guilt to her sorrow. She was advised that if she had other sons, they too could face a short life full of pain. A girl who held the hand of her hemophiliac brother as he writhed in agony might hesitate to marry if she understood that her sons and grandsons might suffer like her brother. Was it useful to such families to understand how the disease worked and look to the future with dread? Surely the best course for a responsible physician was to keep silent, advise the parents to watch their child with an eagle eye, and accept the will of God.

  There is no indication that the royal doctors who attended the infant Prince Leopold had read the papers by Otto and Hopff. To the contrary, the likelihood is that Prince Albert was never introduced to the term hemophilia. However, even if Sir James Clark or one of the other doctors at Buckingham Palace had got word from an American or Swiss correspondent about the newly named hemophilia and its transmission, he would not have rushed off to tell the Queen and the prince.

  Hemophilia was a disease of the blood and a disease of boys. Given that inheritance was preferentially carried through the male line in all families, hemophilia was likely to have dire consequences for anyone. But for royal families, obsessed with genealogy and pure breeding, blood had an almost mystic significance. Even a suggestion that certain members of the international caste of royalty had developed a “hereditary tendency to fatal bleedings” would be catastrophic. If Otto and Hopff were right—and medical science over the course of the nineteenth century would amply confirm their observations—the fact that Prince Leopold of England suffered from hemophilia meant that he had inherited the disease from his mother. What doctor, or indeed what husband, would have the courage to tell Queen Victoria that she had a “hemorrhagic disposition” and that some of her five daughters were likely to have it too and cause “fatal bleedings” in their male children?

  For several generations the Saxe-Coburg family had been famous for its fertility and its beauty. It married its children to kings and queens where possible or, failing that, to first cousins, keeping power and wealth within the family. This policy had been spectacularly successful, and the English branch of the family sired by Prince Albert was now poised to reach even greate
r dynastic glory. Prince Leopold’s unfortunate joint problems could not be allowed to jeopardize the family’s advance. Given the state of medical care and the catastrophic and incalculable risks involved in the bleeding disease, the course of action was intuitively obvious. The nature of Prince Leopold’s illness must be kept secret, and the best way to keep a secret is not to know it. Willed ignorance, especially in the extended family itself, was essential. The Queen, whose state of mind was considered so delicate and whose frankness was renowned, must not be given the facts about hemophilia and its transmission.

  As the first parent confronted with the problem of hemophilia, as the parent who believed it his duty to assume complete responsibility for his family, as the most intelligent, well-informed, and powerful male in his family for several generations, Prince Albert is the person most likely to have decided on the course of action to be taken in regard to Leopold’s illness. Whether or not an actual policy was formulated at any one stage or by any one person is not known, and in some ways it does not matter. What we know is that both Prince Albert and Queen Victoria during their lifetimes and their descendents for two generations thereafter faced the family’s problem of a “hereditary tendency to fatal bleedings” in male children with silence, denial, and calculated ignorance.

  The Buckingham Palace doctors, sensitive to their patrons’ concerns— and eager to remain at court—probably made no inquiries and gave as little information about Prince Leopold’s medical problems as possible. Prince Albert was a calm and rational man, forever boning up on the technicalities of mill machines, small-bore rifles, or cattle breeding, but it does not seem that he asked questions of his doctors or launched inquiries into the medical literature. In their five-volume biography, the Queen and Theodore Martin never mention any memoranda the prince wrote on hemophilia. Baron Stockmar was a physician as well as the prince’s best friend and chief counselor. Surely the two men must have discussed Prince Leopold, but no letters or journal entries have been published to indicate what was said between them.

  What we know is that Prince Albert handled Prince Leopold’s hemophilia as if it was asthma or arthritis or some other distressing, possibly life-threatening and yet garden-variety ailment. He expressed the hope that the boy would grow out of his difficulties and insisted that comparable cases had never occurred in either his own or the Queen’s family, which was true. He tailored a system of care to address his son’s weaknesses and supervised the caregivers diligently. He clearly understood, and made his wife understand, that Leopold must be wrapped in cotton wool if he was to survive.

  Though he definitely did not see it that way, Prince Leopold was lucky. Before the advent of safe blood infusions, a hemophiliac born in a palace had a far better chance of survival than a hemophiliac born in a cottage or a tenement. While under his parents’ supervision, Leopold was watched night and day. This was not as difficult as it might seem, since, according to Prince Albert’s strict instructions, no royal child could be left alone. Even two of the older children—Vicky and Bertie, or even Bertie and Affie— could never be left alone together: The presence of a tutor or governess or servant was always required.

  Leopold was a plucky, willful child who longed to lead a normal life and kept putting himself at risk, but, remarkably, he got through the crises of bleeding. Presumably the many servants his mother was able to employ were devoted and highly competent, and her doctors opted not to take any “heroic” measures. Amazingly some nineteenth-century physicians tried to treat their hemophiliac patients by bleeding them, an expeditious form of homicide.

  Neither Queen Victoria nor Prince Albert was involved in the daily care given to their son Leopold, and he probably saw less of them even than his siblings did. He was confined more to the nursery quarters, both parents had heavy workloads, and, of course, Leopold was only one of nine. Queen Victoria was critical of Leopold as a boy. She liked pretty, obedient, healthy children, and he was ugly, ungainly, and regularly at death’s door. However, the Queen became frantically anxious when Leopold had what she called a “bruising.” She hovered over his bedside, and this was probably unhelpful to both the boy and his caregivers. As Grigory Rasputin would prove in his care of Victoria’s hemophiliac great-grandson Alexei, calm authority and hypnotic assurance can stop internal bleeding as if by magic. Prince Albert was kinder and more sympathetic to Leopold. He himself had often been ill as a child, and he saw in the boy his own quick intelligence and love of learning. However, Leopold was a drain on his father’s time and energies, and he caused friction between his parents at a time when they were beginning to have serious marital issues.

  Had Leopold died in one of his serious bleeding episodes, his parents would have mourned him most sincerely. But parents in the nineteenth century were obliged to accept that children often died, and Leopold, from the dynastic point of view, did not seem to be an important child. He had three handsome and healthy older brothers. Between them, Bertie, Affie, and Arthur could ensure the future of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty both in Great Britain, where Bertie would succeed his mother, and in Coburg, where Affie would succeed his uncle Ernest. Perhaps a kingdom would be found for Arthur too sometime in the future.

  Prince Albert and Queen Victoria gave exemplary care to their son Leopold. He not only survived childhood but married and produced a son and a daughter before he died at the age of thirty-one. This was something of a landmark in the annals of hemophilia. But just as important as giving Leopold the best chance of life possible was keeping his disease secret. Extreme discretion was the watchword. In family letters, that were so often copied and sent on, Leopold’s health problems could be alluded to in general terms, but no details would be given of what was wrong with him, and no name would be put on his condition. The impression given to friends and even the extended family was that Prince Leopold was ill from time to time and suffered from physical handicaps. This was sad for the boy and difficult for the family, but it was not important.

  For two generations, the dynastic policy followed by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria was a fabulous success. By 1914 the royal families of Russia, Prussia, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Norway, and Romania, as well as Great Britain, were all directly descended from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Following the example of the illustrious founders of the dynasty, first cousins were encouraged to marry first cousins when no kings and queens were available. Since all these cousins shared a small pool of names, notably Victoria, Albert, Ernest, William, and Frederick, it became necessary to use nicknames to distinguish one from another. Thus Queen Victoria wanted to marry her granddaughter Alix of Hesse to her grandson Albert Victor (“Eddy”), third in line to the throne, but Alix refused. Eddy’s brother, the future George V, was extremely anxious to marry his first cousin Marie of Edinburgh, but her Russian mother did not like him, so Marie was quickly sent off to Romania to marry the crown prince of that country. William (Willy), the heir to the throne of Prussia, wanted to marry his first cousin Ella of Hesse, but she refused him. However, Ella’s sister Irene did marry Willy’s brother Heinrich (Henry), and her brother Ernst (Ernie) did marry Marie’s sister Victoria Melita (“Ducky”).

  But the laws of genetics apply even if you refuse to learn them, and, since the Saxe-Coburgs continued to marry and procreate with such enthusiasm, they got their education the hard way. So much endogamy joined to so much privilege seems to have had dire results on the all-important males of the family. The men of the far-flung Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Windsor dynasty up to World War II were a generally lackluster set of drones, profligates, and stuffed shirts. Porphyria, the terrible disease of the blood that caused the madness of George III, cropped up again in Queen Victoria’s Prussian descendents. Worse yet, each generation in the family produced more bleeding sons who suffered and died young and more guilt-racked mothers who helplessly watched and wept.

  In 1894 a Saxe-Coburg princess named Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt achieved the most magnificent Coburg marital coup of all. To the delight of her grandmother
Queen Victoria, who had largely brought her up, Alix married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, where she was known as Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodorovna. Alix and Nicky were passionately in love and children came quickly, but, to Alix’s growing distress, the first four children were all girls: Olga, Maria, Tatiana, and Anastasia. Now we know that it is the father who determines the sex of a child by passing on his Y or X chromosome, but at the time, a mother felt responsible if she produced only girls. Finally a son, Alexei, was born in 1904, but the rejoicing lasted barely a day.

  Like his mother’s brother Frederick (“Frittie”), her uncle Leopold, and her nephews Waldemar and Henry, Alexei was a hemophiliac. His case was so serious that doctors found it difficult to stanch the bleeding when the umbilical cord was detached. For this his mother was responsible. She had passed to her son the defective X chromosome that had come down to her from her mother and her grandmother. Finally the Saxe-Coburg luck ran out. A hemophiliac prince had been born whose disease mattered because he was the only male child and the heir to a great empire. Tsarevitch Alexei’s hemophilia led quite directly to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and to the cellar at Ekaterinberg where he, his parents, and his four sisters were shot to death at point-blank range in 1918.

  Nicholas and Alix went into marriage wholly ignorant of the “hereditary tendency to fatal bleedings” in her family. Young and in love, they might have married even had they known, willing to take risks that still had not been calculated. As the medical historians D. M. and W.T.W. Potts note: “The failure of the tsar’s family to appreciate the genetic risks was not due to ignorance in Russian scientific circles. More likely it was due to the isolation of the royal family from the intellectual life of the country and the scientific ignorance of the narrow circle of aristocrats and politicians with whom they associated.” The Saxe-Coburg policy of secrecy and willed ignorance had been all too successful.