We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  270 But once a respected statesman Lord Palmerston wrote: “The real ground for my dismissal [in 1851] was a weak truckling to the hostile intrigues of the Orléans family, Austria, Russia, Saxony, and Bavaria and in some degree the present Prussian government. All these parties found their respective views and systems of policy thwarted by the course pursued by the British Government, and they thought that if they could move the Minister they would change the policy. They had for a long time past effectually poisoned the mind of the Queen and Prince against me, and John Russell giving way, rather encouraged than discountenanced the desire of the Queen to remove me from the Foreign Office.” Quoted in vol. ii of Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, where Queen Victoria does her best to defend her dead husband against the charge that he unfairly conspired against Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary.

  272 But he was not an aggressive Trollope writes of Palmerston: “He could fight and would fight as long as he could stand; but as a conqueror he could be thoroughly generous” (p. 9).

  274 One crucial source of information The Hampshire property of William Nightingale, Florence Nightingale’s father, abutted on Broadlands, Lord Palmerston’s country estate. The two men were allies in local politics and went hunting together. On one occasion, Florence was invited to spend the weekend at Broadlands and met Lady Palmerston and her daughters. Florence Nightingale had strong ties to Palmerston’s stepson-in-law, the reforming Tory politician Lord Shaftesbury who, like Nightingale herself and Palmerston, was a convinced sanitarian—in other words, supporter of public health policy.

  274 When the Queen asked specifically In my book Nightingales, I give a thorough account of the origins and conduct of the Crimean War. For the condition of the troops during the winter of 1854–1855 and Nightingale’s correspondence on the soldiers’ needs, see especially chapter 16.

  275 Two more such tassels decorated My Mistress the Queen, p. 19.

  275 In April 1856, the Queen Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, ed. Hibbert, p. 135.

  276 His struggle with Prince Albert Attempts have been made by historians, especially in Germany, to establish Prince Albert’s importance as a statesman. Kurt Jagow, who edited the major collection of Prince Albert’s letters, wrote: “When all is considered, it is in essence due to the merits of the German prince, who for less than two decades sat upon, or rather stood by, the throne of England as a faithful guardian of the Crown, that today the British monarchy is able to command the power, prestige, and internal strength, required by the British Empire to hold together its self-governing members, and to take rank as a World Power.” Unfortunately, Jagow was writing this in 1938, as an adherent of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

  276 That the new prime minister In their biography of the prince, Queen Victoria and Theodore Martin offer detailed evidence of what they regard as Lord Palmerston’s sins at the foreign office and of Prince Albert’s strenuous efforts to get him sacked. They then choose to interpret the subsequent cooperation between the Crown and Lord Palmerston as prime minister not to Palmerston’s graciousness in victory but to Albert’s greatness. Albert, as Victoria sees it, could not be wrong. “In the discussions which ensued in the public journals and in society upon Lord Palmerston’s removal from office [in 1851], it was often broadly hinted by his supporters that the Prince Consort had been the chief instrument of his fall. Whether Lord Palmerston encouraged this view, or not, is now of little moment. This much is certain, however, that in after years no man spoke more warmly of the Prince, or was readier to acknowledge his services to this country” (Martin, vol. ii, p. 348–349).

  277 The Queen recorded in her journal Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, ed. Hibbert, p. 134.

  Chapter 22: BLUE BLOOD AND RED

  278 The Queen was due to give Longford p. 315, quoting the Queen’s journal of 1855.

  278 They then communicated See Cecil Woodham-Smith, chapter 11, for the most detailed and insightful account of the evolving relationship between the Queen and the prince.

  278 She claimed that, like most men “Oh! If those selfish men—who are the cause of all one’s misery, only knew what their poor slaves go through! What suffering—what humiliation to the delicate feelings of a poor woman, above all a young one—especially with those nasty doctors” (Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, p. 115).

  278 Pregnant, Victoria felt less like Queen Victoria to Vicky, expecting her first child: “What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that. I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments.” (Dearest Child, p. 115).

  279 There is no doubt that Queen Victoria In deciding whether husband or wife had the most to bear in the royal marriage, the Queen’s many biographers have been swayed more by their personal experience and the period they lived in than by the available documentation. Writing around the time of the First World War, Lytton Strachey, a gay man in hot rebellion against the Victoria era, sympathizes deeply with Albert and implies that Victoria harried her husband into an early grave. Fifty years later, Elizabeth Longford, herself a devoted wife and mother to a large family, assumes that Victoria was right to fulfill the traditional female role and obey her husband. Monica Charlot, writing in the 1990s, sees Victoria as a woman struggling against a misogynist society and a repressive husband.

  280 In fact, the pregnancy proceeded This is the same John Snow famous in the annals of epidemiology for disconnecting the Broad Street pump in London and thus proving that cholera was caused by infected water.

  280 Her fourth son “Leopold” was in affectionate remembrance of “dearest uncle,” and “Duncan” a gracious gesture toward the royal couple’s increasingly beloved Scotland. Queen Victoria gave all her sons the name Albert. Two of the five daughters received the name Victoria, and the fourth was called Louise Alberta. She gave her name to the Canadian province of Alberta and to Lake Louise.

  280 Remembering the recent fire Longford, Victoria R.I., p. 294.

  280 Thus when Albert went to Ipswich Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. II, p. 310.

  281 “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen Ibid, p. 495.

  281 As Victoria once told her friend Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, p. 100. 281 To her daughter Vicky, Queen Victoria Dearest Child p. 112.

  281 Deprived of Albert, her ideal companion This point emerges clearly from Queen Victoria’s letters to her daughter Vicky, as editor Roger Fulford points out in his introduction to Dearest Child, p. 10.

  282 To convey just how busy Martin and Dearest Child p. 386.

  283 She was unhappy about this See Dearest Child p. 104.

  283 “Abstractedly, I have no tender for them Dearest Child p. 191.

  283 She told Princess Augusta of Prussia Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, pp. 99–100.

  283 Albert, to the contrary, reveled When her daughter Vicky wrote about how enchanted her husband Fritz was by their first baby, Queen Victoria remarked that Prince Albert “cannot enter into [Fritz’s] ecstasy about him [baby Willy]; he has never felt it himself. After a certain age if they are nice (and not like Bertie and Leopold were) he is very fond of playing with them” (Dearest Child, p. 191).

  284 She made their father’s perfection Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky soon after Vicky’s wedding: “You know my dearest, that I will never admit any other wife can be as happy as I am—so I can admit no comparison for I maintain Papa is unlike anyone who lives or ever lived or will live … Dear Papa has always been my oracle” (Dearest Child, pp. 45–46).

  284 A full understanding of hemophilia Hemophilia is a genetic disease that afflicts males. Today it can be treated effectively through blood transfusions and can be eliminated by genetic counseling, but it is still incurable. Hemophiliac patients have a defective copy of the gene that codes a key component in blood coagulation, usually factor VIII, rarely factor IX. This defective gene is carried on the X
chromosome, and so boys inherit it from their mothers. Each woman has two X chromosomes, receiving an X from each parent. Even if one X has the factor VIII defect, a woman’s blood will clot normally. There are almost no cases of hemophilia in women, as a girl would need to inherit a defective chromosome from both parents. The few hemophiliac girls known in medical literature died when they began to menstruate. When she reproduces, a woman passes one of her two X chromosomes to her child. Each male child receives an X from his mother and a Y from his father. Thus the male child of a woman carrying the genetic defect has a 50 percent chance of receiving her defective X chromosome and suffering from hemophilia. Each female child of a woman carrying the genetic defect also has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the defective X chromosome. Like her mother, she will be symptom free, but each male child she has will run a 50 percent risk of being hemophiliac and each daughter a 50 percent risk for being a carrier. On average, one in two of the sons of a female carrier will get the disease, and one in two of the daughters of a carrier will become carriers in their turn.

  The science of hemophilia has advanced enormously since 1950, and certain advances in genetic testing date only from the last decade or so. Information on the disease in books written before 1990 is incomplete and often incorrect. Even Robert K. Massie’s deservedly famous Nicholas and Alexandra (1967) does not have the facts on hemophilia quite right.

  284 However, even in 1854 Jewish doctors who practiced ritual male circumcision were among the first to report on the phenomenon of baby boys whose blood kept flowing and occasionally bled to death. Before the second half of the twentieth century, the ravages on male children ensured that families afflicted by the disease tended to disappear within two or three generations. However, the disease did not die out. New cases of hemophilia occur regularly because clotting factor VIII is on a large, complex gene, highly subject to random mutation. One-third of all cases of hemophilia are the result of new mutations—that is to say there is no previous history of the disease in the family—contributing to an incidence of 1 in 5,000 males born with hemophilia worldwide, or approximately 1 in 10,000 persons overall.

  286 Even a suggestion that Historians of the British royal family have been intrigued by the question of how Queen Victoria became a carrier for hemophilia. Her father was certainly not hemophiliac, and all available evidence shows that her mother was not a carrier. The overwhelming probability is that hemophilia entered the British royal family as a result of a spontaneously mutated gene. But random mutation is an unexciting solution to a famous historical puzzle and a few historians in recent years have found it seductive to suggest that Leopold’s hemophilia proved that Queen Victoria was not her father’s daughter. This is a recent and apparently more scientific counterpart to the old rumor that, since Prince Albert bore no resemblance either to his “father,” or to his elder brother, he must have been a bastard (see chapter 9). In 1997 two eminent British doctors, the brothers D. M. and W.T.W. Potts, published a sensational book called Queen Victoria’s Gene: Haemophilia in the Royal Family (Alan Sutton, 1995), in which they purport to examine all the possible explanations for how the hemophilia gene came into the royal family. Potts and Potts unearthed an unpublished study that traced both the Hanoverians and the Coburgs back for many generations and found no evidence that there had ever been a bleeder in the family before Leopold, Duke of Albany. Could it be, then, they hypothesize, that Queen Victoria was a bastard, foisted on the English people by her mother, an unscrupulous and immoral intrigant who despaired of ever conceiving a child with the aging duke she had just been persuaded to marry? For this theory to work, the unknown lover selected within weeks of marriage by the Duchess of Kent to father the royal baby would most probably be a hemophiliac who had survived to reproductive age. Every daughter of a hemophiliac carries the defective gene, inherited from her father. Unfortunately, the duchess’s phantom lover has never been glimpsed, much less identified. In the end, Potts and Potts admit that a spontaneously occurring genetic mutation in one of her parents is most probably how Queen Victoria came to carry the gene for hemophilia. However, they spend so many pages working through the more interesting (and wildly improbable) theories that historians such as Jerrold M. Packer in his book Queen Victoria’s Daughters have failed to follow the medical argument to its conclusion. They cite the worthy doctors as authorities for the hypothesis that Queen Victoria’s gene for hemophilia proves that she was not the granddaughter of George III. It is ironic that so much respectable historiographic ink has been spilled arguing that the great dynasts Victoria and Albert were, in fact—both of them—illegitimate.

  286 What doctor, or indeed what husband Before genetic analysis, it was impossible for a woman or her doctor to know for sure that she was not a carrier. The birth of a hemophiliac son proved that she was. Had Queen Victoria decided to stop having babies after the birth of three “normal” sons, the presumption would have been that she was not a carrier.

  287 Leopold was a plucky, willful child Leopold’s hemophiliac nephew Frederick (“Frittie”), the second son of his sister Alice, was not so fortunate. The wife of a mere duke of Hesse, Alice could not afford a large staff. One day she was in her rooms sewing as her favorite child Frittie, three years old, played. Hearing his older siblings outside, Frittie ran to the window, tumbled out onto the stone courtyard below, and was soon dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. Head injuries were almost invariably fatal for hemophiliacs. Queen Victoria mourned darling Frittie but also reproached her daughter for not looking after the child properly. Alice of Hesse never recovered from the sorrow and guilt she felt at the death of her son. She died at the age of thirty-five, leaving one son and four daughters, the latter largely educated by their grandmother Queen Victoria. Alice of Hesse was a woman of high intelligence and conscience, a skilled nurse and an expert on women’s health issues. She was the person in the family who might have unearthed the medical facts about hemophilia, seen its long-term significance for women like herself and her daughters, and explained them to her mother, Queen Victoria.

  288 She liked pretty, obedient, healthy children Victoria makes regular mentions of Leopold in her letters to her daughter in Prussia and is severe about his physical handicaps and odd character.

  288 Perhaps a kingdom would be found In the last half of the nineteenth century, countries in need of a new king turned reflexively to Saxe-Coburgs. This is how one of the many Ferdinands (“Foxy’) became, for a while, king of Bulgaria.

  288 He not only survived childhood Prince Leopold, created Duke of Connaught by his mother to improve his chances of finding a wife, married in his late twenties and quickly sired a daughter and a son. But Leopold never knew his son, as in 1884, aged thirty-one, he fell on some steps, took massive doses of alcohol and opium to kill the pain, and hemorrhaged to death. Since the X or female chromosome is responsible for clotting, Leopold’s son Charles, who inherited a healthy X from his mother, Princess Helene of Pyrmont Waldeck, and a healthy Y from his father, was not a hemophiliac. Leopold’s daughter Alice inherited her father’s defective X chromosome and was thus necessarily a carrier. She married Prince Alexander of Teck (later Earl of Athlone) and had a daughter and two sons who were both hemophiliac. One died in early childhood, but the other lived to adulthood and even served in the First World War.

  289 However, Ella’s sister Irene Stephanie Coontz, in her Marriage—A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (Penguin Books, 2005), shows that once biological science established the deleterious effects of inbreeding, the marriage of first cousins became increasingly frowned upon in advanced European cultures. In this regard, the Saxe-Coburgs were a throwback to an earlier age, since they were intermarrying at an even higher rate at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning.

  289 The men of the far-flung The family also spawned a psychopath (Kaiser Wilhelm II), a cretin (Edward VII’s eldest son Albert Victor, who could barely read or tell the time), an idiot-epileptic (George V’s son John, who died at nineteen
after a secluded life on the Sandringham estate), several social deviants (including Alfred, only son of the Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe Coburg, who died paralyzed and raving mad from syphilis at age twenty-five), and a fascist (Charles Edward, second Duke of Albany, Duke of Saxe-Coburg) who fought in the kaiser’s army in World War I and was a Nazi sympathizer in World War II. On the other hand, the family produced at least three women of outstanding brilliance: Queen Victoria’s two eldest daughters, Victoria (the Princess Royal, Empress Frederick of Prussia) and Alice (Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt), and her granddaughter Marie (queen of Romania). Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, Louise (Duchess of Argyll), was also a very bright woman and, as her statue of her mother in Kensington Gardens proves, an artist of some standing.

  294 She had passed to her son The Empress Alexandra of Russia was only thirty-two when she gave birth to her fifth child and first son, Alexei, and discovered to her horror that he was hemophiliac. Unlike her cousin Ena, queen of Spain, who kept having children until she produced a healthy boy, Alexandra lapsed into chronic invalidism and religious mania. She concentrated all her energies on her son’s survival, kept his hemophilia a secret even from other members of the family, and resisted all democratic reforms that might lead to a republic and thus deprive “Baby,” as she called Alexei, of his divine right to rule. Convinced that God was punishing her, Alexandra went mad from guilt and remorse, and her four daughters were the innocent victims of her obsession with Alexei’s illness.

  294 As the medical historians Queen Victoria’s Gene: Haemophilia and the Royal Family, D. M. Potts and W.T.W. Potts, Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995, p. 82.

  294 Alfonso XIII trusted his eyes Unlike her cousin Alix, Victoria Eugenie (Ena), Queen of Spain, was a survivor. She can be seen in the pictures of the coronation of her great-great-niece Elizabeth II. Ena was at first in love with her husband King Alfonso XIII, but he turned against her when their first child was a hemophiliac boy. Despite the bitter relations with his wife, Alfonso was determined on having more sons, since under Spanish law only a healthy heir could inherit the throne. Jaime, Ena’s second child, became blind and deaf after an attack of meningitis, so he also was barred from the succession. She then produced two girls, a healthy boy, and another hemophiliac boy. In Spain, news of the hemophiliac princes leaked out, and the public was fed fantastic rumors that they survived by drinking the blood of young soldiers. Alfonso was an ineffective and highly promiscuous ruler, but it was at least in part because of his sons’ ill health that he was deposed in 1930. The interregnum in the Spanish monarchy ended when Ena’s grandson Juan Carlos was recalled to the throne in 1975.