Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  2

  From all over Europe, royalties were coming to Madrid for the royal wedding. The scene at the Spanish frontier town of Irun, at which a Spanish train de luxe was waiting to convey this host of royal guests to the capital, was said to be one of 'indescribable confusion'. Onto the dimly-lit platform, on a night of almost unbearable heat, assorted princes and princesses, together with their chamberlains, equerries, ladies-in-waiting, valets, maids and portmanteaux, alighted from one set of trains and, after milling about for an hour, boarded the waiting Spanish train de luxe. The coaches were like ovens. 'At midnight,' reports one of the guests, 'we all met in the dining-car and tried to refresh ourselves with cooling drinks.' Not until three the following afternoon, exhausted, dusty and dishevelled, did they reach Madrid.

  Immediately they were plunged into the stiff and colourful ceremonial for which the Spanish court was renowned. While brass bands blared appropriate national anthems, the guests stepped onto the red-carpeted platform into a dazzlement of national flags, potted palms, guards of honour, gold-embroidered uniforms and bemedalled officials. They were welcomed by the King's older sister, the Infanta Maria Thérèsa, and her husband. In strict order of precendence, entailing an agonizing wait for the less important, the royalties entered the waiting carriages and drove off.

  Through the hot, noisy streets and surrounded by their jogging escorts, they were driven to the Palacio Real. In its vast forecourt they faced still more pageantry. Drums rolled, trumpets shrilled, uniforms glittered, and again the various national anthems rang out as each carriage-load alighted at the main entrance. Between rows of magnificently uniformed halberdiers armed with pikes, the guests moved forward to greet the young King, his mother Queen Maria Cristina and the rest of the Spanish royal family. From here, and this time between rows of ladies-in-waiting in evening dress, they were conducted to the magnificent reception rooms. 'The heat,' says one of the royalties, 'was indescribable.'

  The wedding day itself – 31 May 1906 – was no less hot. In forty state coaches, each drawn by either six white or six black horses with pink and orange ostrich feathers on their heads, the guests drove to the Church of San Jeronimo. The streets were bright with the red and yellow bannersof Spain. From every window along the royal route fluttered silks and tapestries. Flowers blazed from every balcony. As Princess Ena, in white satin shimmering with silver, drove to the church, the great crowd roaredits approval. To the Spaniards, Ena was the beau-ideal of English womanhood. Her conventional prettiness – the corn-coloured hair, the sky-blue eyes, the milk-and-roses complexion – fitted their picture-book conception of an English princess exactly. 'La Reina hermosa' – the beautiful Queen – they called her.

  The wedding ceremony lasted for almost three hours. Not until after two o'clock in the afternoon did the procession again set off, still in brilliant sunshine and to the sea-like roar of the crowd, for the Palacio Real.

  At snail's pace it wound its way through the clamorous streets. In their coach, surmounted by a golden crown and drawn by eight lavishly plumed horses, sat Alfonso and Ena. They passed through the Puerta del Sol and on along the Calle Mayor, the narrow old high street of Madrid. Two-thirds of the way down the Calle Mayor, and a few hundred yards from their journey's end, the coach stopped. Upon Ena asking why, Alfonso answered that there was possibly some delay caused by those ahead alighting at the palace. 'In five minutes,' he said cheerfully, 'we shall be home.'

  It was as well that they had paused, for just then a large bouquet of flowers was thrown from the window of one of the narrow houses opposite. It landed in front of the carriage to the right of the horses. A second later, an explosion rocked the coach. There was a flash of flame, a sickening smell, the scream of wounded horses, and a cloud of smoke so black and thick that the King could not see his bride. The carriage, dragged by the rearing, terrified horses, plunged forward and then came to a dead stop.

  Ena was lying with her head back and her eyes closed. For a moment the King thought she was dead. After he had made certain that she was all right, he leaned out of the window and was told that it would be impossible to go on. One of the horses was dead and the others wounded. Alfonso remained calm. He commanded that the door of his coach be opened, that his mother and Princess Beatrice be told that they were safe and that the coche de respeto be brought. While the coche de respeto – the customary empty coach preceding the royal carriage – was made ready, Alfonso helped his Queen out of their coach. Her shoes and the train of her dress were soon red with blood. Trying to shield her from the sight of the torn and bleeding bodies of men and horses sprawled across the road, he led her to the waiting carriage. Then, in a loud, clear, deliberate voice, for all that stunned crowd to hear, he ordered the coachman to drive on very slowly to the palace.

  The procession moved on, leaving behind it in the street twelve dead and over a hundred wounded. If the royal coach had not been delayed for those few seconds before the bomb was thrown, the King and Queen would have been among the dead.

  A young man by the name of Mateo Morales was responsible for the outrage. He appears to have been a disciple of a well-known anarchist from Barcelona. Only on being unable to get into the Church of San Jeronimo with his bomb (and what a death toll amongst the royal guests would there have been if he had) had Morales made for the Calle Mayor. Having thrown the bomb, he escaped and was not arrested until two days later. As he was being led to prison, he shot both his guard and himself.

  But bomb or no bomb, the day's ceremonial had to continue. No sooner had the King and Queen arrived at the palace ('I saw a man without any legs! I saw a man without any legs!' the horrified Ena kept repeating) than they had to preside at a state luncheon. It was an anything but convivial affair. 'I proposed their healths,' wrote Ena's cousin, the Prince of Wales, 'not easy after the emotions caused by this terrible affair.' The already overwrought atmosphere was hardly improved by the Russian-born Duchess of Edinburgh, who kept assuring everyone that she was 'so accustomed to this sort of thing'. She was indeed, having had both her father and her brother blown to bits by anarchists.

  The luncheon over, the newly-married couple were obliged to expose themselves to the crowd once more and then, while the King visited the wounded in hospital, the Queen made ready for the state banquet. The banquet was no more successful than the luncheon had been. For all the artificially induced gaiety, a vein of hysteria lay very near the surface. It must have been with relief that the royal couple, whose day had lasted for something like seventeen hours, took leave of their guests and went to bed.

  Such a day was unlikely to inaugurate a peaceful reign or a happy marriage. For Queen Ena, it inaugurated neither.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Royal Disease

  1

  With this gradual spread of Queen Victoria's descendants throughout the courts of Europe, so was something more sinister being passed on. Haemophilia, the dreaded bleeding disease, was being introduced into the royal families of the Continent.

  Queen Victoria had always been worried about the quality of the blood of the British royal family. Both she and the Prince Consort had felt strongly about the necessity of revitalizing what the Queen called the 'lymphatic' blood of their house. 'I do wish one could find some more black eyed Princes and Princesses for our children!' she had once writtento her daughter Vicky. 'I can't help thinking what dear Papa said – that it was in fact a blessing when there was some little imperfection in the pure Royal descent and that some fresh blood was infused . . . For that constant fair hair and blue eyes makes the blood so lymphatic . . . it is not as trivial as you may think, for darling Papa – often with vehemence said: "We must have some strong dark blood '."

  At the time of writing this letter, it is doubtful whether the Queen knew exactly what was wrong with her family's blood. Later, she had learnt rather more. Haemophilia was rife in her family.

  The disease was, and is, a strange and frightening one. The blood of a haemophiliac lacks the qualities nec
essary to cause it to coagulate and so stop the flow of blood: clotting takes place either slowly or not at all. Any wound suffered by a haemophiliac can be fatal. Even an apparently harmless bump, causing internal haemorrhage, often leads to death.

  A peculiarity of the disease is that it occurs exclusively in males and is carried by females. However, not every male in a family will automatically suffer from it; nor will every female in the family be a carrier. Not until a woman has children will it be known whether or not she is a transmitter; not until a son first bleeds will it be known whether or not he has haemophilia.

  The disease first manifested itself in Queen Victoria's family in her fourth son, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany. From childhood, Leopold had been described as 'very delicate' and throughout his short life he had suffered severe haemorrhages. As any cut, or bump, could lead to death, he could not lead the life of a normal youngster. It had been necessary to keep him always under strict surveillance. Once, when a Prime Minister suggested that he go to Australia to open an exhibition, the Queen had been adamant in her refusal. 'She cannot bring herself to consent to send her very delicate son who has been four or five times at death's door and who is never hardly a few months without being laid up . . .' she protested.

  Prince Leopold died, at the age of thirty-one, in 1884, as the result of a minor fall.

  Anguished and bewildered by the fact that this mysterious disease had appeared in one of her sons, the Queen could only protest that it did not come from her side – the Hanoverian side – of the family.

  She was right. But then nor did it come from her husband's side. It appears that the disease had originated in Victoria herself; that a spontaneous mutation had occurred in her genes. It was she who had transmitted the disease to her son. Worse still, she had transmitted it to two of her daughters: Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice. They, in turn, transmitted it to their children and so carried it into the royal houses of Europe.

  Of the fact that she herself had originated the disease, the Queen was never aware. Indeed, neither she, nor the members of her family, understood much about it. The disease was rarely mentioned, and certainly never openly discussed, in public. Royal policy was to hush it up; to treat it simply as another risk to be faced by royal parents. It certainly never restrained royalties from marrying one another. Its causes and pattern were shrouded in mystery; it might as well have been something visited on the family by God.

  The more gullible whispered in terms of 'the curse of the Coburgs'. This curse was supposed to have dated from the early nineteenth century, when a Coburg prince had married a Hungarian princess named Antoinette de Kohary. As she was an only child, her rich and doting father (having made legal arrangements for her to receive the benefits due to a son) left her everything. The Coburg husband was delighted. Distinctly less delighted at having been thus deprived of their inheritance were the male members of the Kohary family. So incensed was one of them – a monk with an eye to the things of this world – that, having studied up his Manuale Exorcisorum, he positioned himself in a churchyard at midnight and there pronounced a curse.

  'Then verily shall I pray to the Lord Almighty to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of the Coburg line,' intoned the irate monk.

  To be cursed because one of one's predecessors had been fortunate enough to marry a rich wife seems unfair, but in the spread of haemophilia from generation to generation, the Coburg family certainly seemed cursed.

  It was through Queen Victoria's second daughter, Princess Alice, that the disease passed into the German and Russian imperial families. By her marriage to the Grand Duke of Hesse, Alice had six children. Of these, three were tainted with haemophilia. At the age of three, their son Frederick, known as Frittie, bled for three agonizing days from a cut on the ear. Eventually, the flow of blood was staunched. But a few months later, while romping wildly in his mother's room, little Frittie charged headlong through an open window and fell to the terrace below. At first it was thought that he had simply bruised himself. But he was bleeding internally and by the evening he was dead.

  Two of Princess Alice's daughters were carriers of the disease: Princess Irene and Princess Alix. Princess Irene married her first cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II's brother, the bumptious Prince Henry of Prussia. They had three sons, two of them haemophiliacs. Every attempt was made to conceal the fact that the dreaded disease had shown itself in the German imperial family but, at the age of four, the youngest of the princes bled to death. The other prince died, in 1945, at the age of fifty-six. He had had no children.

  Had Princess Alix, the other transmitter, accepted that offer of marriage from Prince Eddy and, after his untimely death, married (as Princess May had done) his brother George, haemophilia would have been introduced into the reigning branch of the British royal family. But Alicky married Tsar Nicolas II instead and so carried the disease into the Russian imperial family.

  Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice of Battenberg, was also a transmitter. Two of her three sons were haemophiliacs and her daughter, Ena, was a carrier. When Ena married King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the disease spread to the Spanish royal family.

  Thus, of Queen Victoria's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, sixteen were definitely sufferers from, or transmitters of, the disease. Another twenty princesses might well have been carriers. Present in the royal families of Britain, Germany, Russia and Spain, haemophilia came to be known as 'the royal disease'.

  The Grandmama of Europe, who had bequeathed this frightening affliction to her widely scattered descendants, could only cry out that 'Our poor family seems persecuted by this awful disease, the worst I know.'

  2

  The unalloyed joy of Nicky and Alicky at the birth of an heir to the Russian Empire was short-lived. Within a few months of Alexis's birth, his parents realized that he had haemophilia.

  The first sign had been some unexpected bleeding from the navel. After a few days this had stopped. Much more serious, however, were the dark swellings that appeared each time the child bumped an arm or a leg. The blood, failing to clot, was flowing unchecked to form painful swellings. And worst of all was the bleeding into the joints. This meant, as well as excruciating pain, a crippling of the affected limbs. As the boy grew older, he was often obliged to spend weeks in bed and, after he was up, to wear a heavy iron brace. For his affliction there was no cure.

  All this meant that the Tsarevich had to be ceaselessly watched. Throughout his infancy, nurses kept guard and, as he grew older, their places were taken by two sailors. As Alexis was, in all other respects, a normal boy – mischievous, adventurous and high-spirited – the task of watching his every move was an all but impossible one. Inevitably he slipped and fell. This could be followed by days or weeks of the most frightful pain, from which the only escape was fainting.

  From the beginning, it was decided that the Tsarevich's affliction must be kept secret. Russia must know nothing of the heir's illness. Rightly or wrongly, Nicholas and Alexandra decided that the dynasty would never withstand the pressures if the Russian people were to find out that the Tsar's only son could die at any moment.

  The keeping of this imperial secret was not quite as difficult as might have been imagined. For one thing, to the majority of the Russian people, the Tsar was a distant, god-like figure about whose private life they knew, and expected to know, very little. In addition to this, Nicholas and Alexandra had always led a self-contained life. They were almost as remote from St Petersburg society as they were from the masses. Moreover, since the revolutionary upheavals in 1905, the imperial family had lived in even greater seclusion; it was simply not safe for them to leave the confines of Tsarskoe Selo. Within the Alexander Palace itself there were many who did not appreciate the exact nature of the boy's illness. They knew that he had to be watched, that he had to spend long periods in bed, that he was often in pain or temporarily crippled. And those – the doctors and the intimate members of the ho
usehold – who did know what was wrong, were sworn to secrecy.

  On the Empress Alexandra, her son's illness had a devastating effect. She might not have known a great deal about the disease but she knew that it was hereditary and that she had passed it on to her son. It was her fault, therefore, that he had to suffer such terrible agonies. As a result, she became over-solicitous and over-protective. She lavished him with attention and could not bear to be parted from him. When he was ill, she would spend hours, days, even weeks by his bedside; soothing him, reassuring him, caressing him. Never knowing when the disease would strike, she could not relax. Not for one moment of his waking day was she free from anxiety.

  Always withdrawn and anti-social, Alicky became increasingly so; she lost all capacity for enjoying herself. As a result, her own health began to fail. She was always tired, she breathed with difficulty, she worried about her heart. She spent more and more time in bed or in a wheelchair. For days on end she lay stretched out on her mauve chaise-longue. She almost never appeared in public, not even to take meals with her husband and family. All her energies were needed to cope with her son's illness.

  'One morning I found the mother at her son's bedside,' writes Alexis's tutor, Pierre Gilliard, during one of his attacks. 'He had had a very bad night. Dr Derevenko was anxious as the haemorrhage had not stopped and his temperature was rising. The inflammation had spread and the pain was worse than the day before. The Tsarevich lay in bed groaning piteously. His head rested on his mother's arm and his small, deadly white face was unrecognizable. At times the groans ceased and he murmured the one word, "Mummy". His mother kissed him on the hair, forehead, and eyes as if the touch of her lips would relieve him of his pain and restore some of the life which was leaving him. Think of the torture of that mother, an impotent witness of her son's martyrdom in those hours of anguish – a mother who knew that she herself was the cause of those sufferings, that she had transmitted the terrible disease against which human science was powerless. Now I understood the secret tragedy of her life. How easy it was to reconstruct the stages of that long Calvary.'