Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  Edward Duke of Kent, like his brother George IV, Frederick Duke of York and Augustus Duke of Sussex, also suffered from porphyria. While a young man at Gibraltar he suffered frequent bilious attacks which were recognized as being similar to his father’s complaint. In a letter to his father he observed, ‘by my remaining here another summer season my health would be exposed not only to the most prejudicial but perhaps the most fatal attacks of a complaint, the severity of which, is, I believe, not unknown to your majesty’. A few years later his skin was so sensitive that he complained of ‘being unable to wear anything but a pair of loose trowsers’. Abdominal pains due to porphyria may well be the origin of the tale that he developed symptoms of couvade while his wife was carrying Victoria. Some of the symptoms of his last illness may also have been due to this affliction. If Queen Anne’s inability to bear a healthy child was due in part to porphyria, then this disease played a part in both the origin of the Hanoverian succession and its end.

  MacAlpine and Hunter, in their pioneering study George III and the Mad Business, found no evidence of porphyria in Queen Victoria or among her numerous descendants. However, it has recently been demonstrated that Charlotte, the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm, and a granddaughter of Victoria, was a sufferer – ‘itching of the skin, constipation, abdominal trouble and, the clinching symptom, orangey dark-red urine’.15 Unfortunately this does not confirm her descent from the Duke of Kent, as she might well have inherited it from her father’s family, the House of Prussia, descended from the porphyriac Frederick the Great. This is the more likely hypothesis because if Victoria had carried the gene it should be common among her progeny, even allowing for the fact that it can remain dormant in many individuals.

  To summarize: the case cannot be closed as there is insufficient evidence to decide whether Victoria’s gene was a recent mutation or derived from an illicit union. Certainly there is no evidence of haemophilia among the putative ancestors of either Victoria or the Duke of Kent. The disease either appeared as a new mutation in Queen Victoria’s mother or in the Duke of Kent, or her father was a haemophiliac who was not the Duke of Kent. The probability of a mutation for haemophilia is 1 in 25,000 to 1 in 100,000, and Victoria’s failure to inherit the porphyria of the Duke of Kent lengthens the odds. A mutation could have occurred during her early development in the cell line leading to her ovaries or in either of the cell lines leading to the eggs or sperm from which she came. The peculiar circumstances of Victoria’s conception, the unrivalled ambition of her uncle Leopold and some aspects of her mother’s behaviour make it possible that Victoria was not the daughter of the Duke of Kent but was the child of some haemophiliac who has gone unrecognized or, as all the explanations of her haemophilia are by their nature statistically improbable, the third possibility is that she was a bastard but the haemophilia came from a mutation that occurred in either the sperm or the egg from which she came. On the other hand, about a quarter of all haemophiliacs are the result of mutation, not inheritance, and if Victoire had been unfaithful the chances of choosing a haemophiliac as father are about 1 in 20,000. In the absence of a haemophiliac candidate Victoire must be given the benefit of the doubt. If not, then the true line of British kingship would have passed through Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, the unsuccessful rapist and later King of Hanover.

  Had Queen Victoria carried the gene for porphyria we might expect that she would have had at least as many descendants who carried the gene for porphyria as for haemophilia. Not all those who carry the gene for porphyria have episodes of porphyria but only males who carry the gene for haemophilia are haemophiliacs. MacAlpine and Hunter discovered only two caes of porphyria amongst Victoria’s descendants, Kaiser Wilhelm’s sister and niece, but as these could have inherited the gene from their Hohenzollern ancestors, they seemed to confirm that Victoria did not carry that gene. Recently however, it has been claimed in a television programme,16 that two more cases have been identified amongst her descendants, Princess Victoria, the Queen’s eldest daughter, and Prince William of Gloucester, a nephew of George V. The evidence that Princess Victoria was a sufferer lies in the unpublished correspondence of her husband Frederick William of Prussia, that for Gloucester in hearsay. If they were both porphyriacs, the apparent absence of more cases among Victoria’s numerous family is difficult to understand, even allowing for the likely reticence of any victims, while Victoria herself doesn’t refer to the subject in her published voluminous correspondence with her mother. If the two cases are correctly identified then they would confirm that Victoria was indeed the daughter of the Duke of Kent, but it would also make her statistically even more improbable. If the chance of carrying the gene for haemophilia is about one in twenty thousand and the chance of carrying that for porphyria is about one in thirty thousand, then the chance of being unfortunate enough to inherit both is about one in six hundred million, the population of the world when Victoria was born. The royal families of Europe may have risked acquiring not one but two lethal genes when they queued to marry her granddaughters.

  SEVEN

  CROWNS ROLLING ABOUT THE FLOOR

  The First World War laid the foundations of the modern world. It changed the political map of Europe, altered the social order irrevocably in Western Europe and brought Lenin to power in Russia. By its very destructiveness, it left the USA as the richest and most powerful nation in the world. The battles of 1914–18 also set the stage for another even more bloody conflict twenty-five years later. It was also a feud between Victoria’s grandchildren and relatives – both those with and those without the haemophilia gene.

  By 1918 the world Queen Victoria had known and helped to shape had fallen apart, abruptly and catastrophically. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Coburg descendants ruled Europe and much of the rest of the world. By the time the First World War ended the emperors of Germany, Austria and Russia had all lost their thrones, while Britain had lost its pre-eminent position to the USA. Among all the cataclysmic changes that occurred between August 1914 and November 1918, the greatest were in Russia, and here the role played by the tsar in the destruction of his throne was directly influenced by his son’s inheritance of Victoria’s gene.

  So much has changed in the past seventy-five years that it requires some effort to appreciate the world of 1914. At the turn of the century twenty kings sat on the thrones of Europe. Victoria’s son King Edward VII had been called the ‘Uncle of Europe’. When he died in May 1910, nine kings, seven queens, five royal heirs and forty other royal personages followed the dead monarch’s cortège to Westminster Abbey. In 1914 his son King George V had first cousins on the thrones of Germany, Russia, Norway and Spain and other cousins were heirs to the crowns of Sweden and Romania. The kings of Denmark and Greece were his uncles. The Dowager Tsarina of Russia was his aunt and his sister was Queen of Norway. Other relatives, through the British king’s Coburg ancestry, reigned in Bulgaria, Belgium and numerous principalities of the German Empire, while a Coburg had recently abdicated in Portugal. It was a tangled knot of interrelated families who exchanged state visits and called on one another in sumptuous yachts.

  George V assumed the British throne on the death of Edward VII in 1910. He was a solid, unexciting, not too intelligent king. He had none of his father’s European focus, skill in languages or diplomatic interest, although he did have a proud interest in the British Empire. Like his grandmother he could be quick tempered, but unlike her he could also swear like the seaman he had been in his youth. Whereas Edward VII had gained the nickname ‘Edward the Caresser’ as a result of his active sex life, George led a spotless domestic life, having married Princess Mary of Teck in 1893. They had six children and the Tsar Nicholas of Russia and Tsarina Alexandra were godparents to the first born, who later briefly became Edward VIII.1 Victoria’s direct male descendants, other than Leopold, were free of the haemophilia gene, but as we will see shortly, the gene was very nearly reintroduced into George V’s generation.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II
of Germany was also a grandson of Queen Victoria and, as he never ceased telling people, it was in his arms that she breathed her last. Wilhelm’s mother, Queen Victoria’s eldest child, the Princess Royal, had been promised to the Crown Prince Frederick at the tender age of fourteen and was married to him – amidst floods of royal tears – at seventeen. Her liberal ideas were to make her unpopular in conservative Prussia. Fortunately, she was not a carrier of haemophilia, but she was unlucky in her first delivery. She had a long labour complicated by a breech presentation and a placenta praevia, and while her German and English obstetricians quarrelled over how to treat her, both mother and child nearly died. Baby Wilhelm did survive but his left arm was always paralysed. He had a spartan education and as he grew up his arm was encased in a variety of torturing – but purposeless – iron and leather devices. To his parents’ dismay, he turned into an egocentric, impetuous, loquacious militarist, made all the more dangerous by a hearty dose of Coburg energy and intelligence. He told the British ambassador in Berlin: ‘My mother and I have the same characters. I have inherited hers. That good stubborn English blood which will not give way is in both our veins.’

  Wilhelm became emperor at the age of twenty-nine, on the death of his father from throat cancer. He made a bombastic monarch: he erected thirty-two statues to his Hohenzollern dynasty, kept a wardrobe of over three hundred uniforms and called on God as his ‘Celestial Ally’. Constitutionally he was less restrained in his powers than his cousin George. The Reichstag, or Germany’s parliament, was described by one member as ‘the figleaf of absolutism’. The nation Wilhelm ruled was growing fast in wealth, overtaking British industrial production in the 1890s.

  The third giant of Western Europe was France, glorying in its past but uncertain about its future. The distant United States and France were the only significant nations on the globe without a monarch. Like Germany, France took pride in its powerful land army, almost too big for its borders.

  In the now half-forgotten map of Europe in 1914 the Russian frontier was a mere 180 miles east of Berlin but the country stretched eastwards halfway round the world, covering one-sixth of the world’s land mass. Tsar Nicholas II came to the Russian throne in October 1894. Nicholas’s mother was the daughter of Christian IX of Denmark and her sister, Alexandra, had been married to Edward VII; thus George V of Britain and Nicholas II of Russia were first cousins and bore a striking resemblance to one another.

  Not only was Nicholas styled Emperor of Russia but he was also King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland and Lithuania and Prince of Estonia. Unlike all other contemporary monarchs, his powers were absolute; his formal titles included that of Autocrat and Lord and Master of All Northern Countries, and he personally owned 600 million acres of land. His powers inside Russia were limited only by his conscience. While Victoria was Defender of the Faith and constitutionally Head of the Anglican Church, the Tsar was literally a priest. At his coronation he crowned himself – no one else was worthy enough. Only the emperors of China and Japan were as close to divine as Nicholas. The post office officials were even reluctant to frank the royal portrait on Russian stamps.

  ‘Everyone in Russia’, observed a British diplomat, ‘is a little mad.’ Russia produced great literature, ballet and theatre, and was the birthplace of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kandinsky, Chagall, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Stravinsky, but the peasants had only been freed from the last vestiges of serfdom in 1906 and lived their lives, in Tolstoy’s words, ‘in want and heavy work’. Before 1906 many were still bound to their communal farms. Although the land was the property of the farmers the farms were in debt to the state. Peasants could buy themselves out, but in practice few could afford the capital. Byzantine tradition lingered in the church which, as in medieval Europe, was part of the state. Daily life was invested with religious rituals: a cross was hung around a child’s neck at birth and never removed throughout life; the church prescribed strict fasts and gluttonous feasts; an icon hung in every house and was saluted by everyone even before they greeted their own family. The bulk of the people followed the Orthodox Church, but there were significant Nonconformist sects and three million Jews. There were atheists in the cities and extreme fundamentalist sects in the countryside. One believed in total abstinence and self-castration: the castrates were subject to the ‘little seal’ where they removed the testicles and scrotum with a razor, or the ‘second degree of purity’ or ‘great seal’ when they also sliced off the penis. Nikitian, in imitation of Abraham, cut his children’s throats and when exiled to Siberia for his religious zealotry, managed to nail his feet to a cross on Good Friday, wielding his hammer with his right hand while he held on to the cross with his left. The Holy Ghost Worshippers breathed especially deeply while praying, in hope of swallowing the Third Person of the Trinity. Even older traditions survived, including the popular and ecclesiastical belief in the half-mad, half-divine miracle-working holy man, whose ancestry went back to the pre-Christian shamans of the northern forests. Even the most educated believed in medievally quaint miracles. Prince Zhevakhov observed that St Petersburg preferred to mistake a sinner for a saint than to fail to recognize a saint. Nicholas ordered the digging up of a long dead cleric and although his body had decomposed, which saints traditionally are not supposed to do, Nicholas argued that the state of preservation of his bones, teeth and hair was sufficient to justify canonization.

  Terrorist acts resulted in 2,691 deaths between 1905 and 1909 and in turn thousands of terrorists were executed or sent into exile. As a thirteen-year-old, Nicholas had stood at the end of the bed in which his grandfather was dying from an assassin’s bomb, both his feet blown off and his belly ripped open. As tsar, Nicholas remained afraid of liberal changes, yet for once Lord Acton’s aphorism that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely was not fulfilled. Nicholas was not a sadistic tyrant, but a reserved, frequently indecisive ruler: the kaiser described him as ‘only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips’.

  The only European dynasty not directly related to Victoria and the Coburgs was that of the Habsburgs. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was composed of what is now Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and parts of Romania, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia and the Ukraine. The Emperor Franz Joseph was born thirteen years after Victoria, and was the only monarch to equal her in longevity (he died in 1916) – or to approach her in majesty. Constitutionally he had more authority than Victoria, but his government had no secure roots in democracy and the parts of the empire were united only in their common crown. To the south of Franz Joseph’s empire, geography and history had broken the uninterrupted land mass of the Balkans into small, unstable units – Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece, Albania and Romania – which were still in turmoil following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In his long reign Franz Joseph saw his wife assassinated, his only son commit suicide, his brother executed, his sister-in-law go mad, his heir assassinated, and before he died he was to fire the diplomatic salvos that triggered the First World War.

  Prior to 1914 Germany’s foreign policy was dominated by the fear that some day it might have to fight a war on two fronts. In 1882 Bismarck had completed a Triple Alliance between Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy, where each nation guaranteed the others’ borders if attacked. Britain, with borders protected by the sea, was less inclined to sign treaties with continental blocs. However, as Germany deliberately built a battle fleet to rival the British Royal Navy, Britain shifted from relative isolationism to join Russia and France in a Triple Entente. The kaiser particularly disliked King Edward’s role, calling him ‘Edward the Encircler’.

  When war eventually came it was brought about by a combination of changing technology, human idiosyncrasies and family pettiness among the royalty of Europe. Militarism had become an obsession. Generals believed whichever side mobilized first would win and planned endless paper wars, moving millions of pretend men by rail and winning quick victories with imaginary cavalry charges. They forgot that the machine-gun had
been invented and overlooked the experience of the American Civil War when massed formations had been massacred by men behind muzzle-loading guns in trenches. If war broke out Germany planned to knock out France by a lightning attack before Russia could intervene effectively. The German military strategy of attack had been designed by the late General Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who planned to carry his troops to the French and Belgian borders on 11,000 carefully scheduled trains.2 Diplomats and military theorists had prepared for war for so long that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, the apparent advantage of striking first once a crisis had arisen adding dangerously to the instability of the system of alliances. It took only the murder of a royal personage to start the guns firing in August 1914.

  The Emperor Franz Joseph’s only son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolph, had killed his mistress and then committed suicide in 1889, making the emperor’s nephew Franz Ferdinand heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Ferdinand, in turn, had annoyed his uncle by entering into a morganatic marriage with a mere countess, and any heir they produced could not inherit the Austro-Hungarian throne since their mother was not of royal blood. However, unlike most Habsburg marriages, it was an unusually happy union and it rankled with Franz Ferdinand that his wife could not be accorded the protocol due an archduchess. On Sunday 28 June 1914, the royal couple’s fourteenth wedding anniversary, they visited Sarajevo in Slavonic Bosnia, which had recently been annexed from Turkey. It was a well-known hotbed of militants who would have preferred to become Serbian citizens, and a group of six young men, funded by the Serbian secret service, were planning to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. Bosnia was under military control. The Archduke, as Commander-in-Chief, had extensive powers and, for once, could arrange that his wife was treated with full honours. In order to give his wife the prominence he thought she deserved the Archduke published the itinerary for his visit in great detail, while the officials organizing the tour, taking their cue from the disgruntled Emperor, provided only light police protection. As the heir apparent approached the town hall a bomb was thrown, injuring two officers. The royal visit continued but secret changes were agreed in the route. Unfortunately, the royal chauffeur was not informed and began to drive down the previously announced route. When the motorcade had stopped and was trying to reverse, one of the Serbian nationalists – a nineteen-year-old youth called Gavrilo Princips – who had given up his assassination attempt and dropped into a coffee shop to steady his nerves, suddenly and unexpectedly found himself 10 ft from the Archduke, who was sitting bolt upright in an open-topped car. He shot Franz Ferdinand and his wife, who both died within 15 minutes, Franz Ferdinand mumbling, ‘It is nothing’. His life might have been saved had he not taken such pride in his military bearing that he insisted on being literally sewn into his uniform – and no one could find the scissors quickly enough to staunch his wounds. When the news reached the old Emperor in Vienna, he coldly remarked, referring to the dead couple’s despised marriage, ‘The Almighty does not allow Himself to be challenged with impunity . . . A higher Power has restored the old order, which I unfortunately was unable to uphold’.