Queen Victoria's Gene
Page 12
Whatever Franz Joseph thought about divine retribution privately, publicly Austria reacted to the murder briskly: Serbia was to be punished. But first the Austro-Hungarian ambassador was sent to visit the German kaiser who, acting alone, gave explicit and personal indications that Austria could depend on Germany’s backing. He hoped that Austrian bluster, backed by German military might, would win the Emperor Franz Joseph a diplomatic victory and the kaiser vicarious glory, without any call to arms. Serbia, Orthodox in religion and Slavonic in language, looked to Russia for support.
On 23 July 1914, Austria delivered a blistering and humiliating ultimatum to Serbia, which submitted within 48 hours. The kaiser’s gamble had apparently paid off handsomely, but stupidity and malice were eventually to turn diplomatic victory into military defeat. The Emperor Franz Joseph, now eighty-four-years old, was tricked into declaring war by false tales that Serbian troops had fired on Austrians, while the kaiser was not told of Serbia’s submission until 60 hours after it occurred: ‘. . . every reason for war has been removed’, he wrote when it was too late. Unfortunately, in Vienna, war had already been declared on Serbia and the troop trains were starting to roll. When the kaiser saw what had happened, he was shaken by the imminence of full-scale conflict. He cabled his cousin Nicholas, who was treaty-bound to support Serbia: ‘. . . with regard to the hearty and tender friendship which binds us both from long ago with firm ties, I am exerting my utmost influence to induce the Austrians to deal straightly to arrive to a [sic] satisfactory understanding with you. . . Your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin – Willy.’
The tsar had already sent a similar message: ‘in this most serious moment I appeal you to help me. . . . To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you to stop your allies from going too far. – Nicky.’ Poignantly, both telegrams were written in stilted English, but sadly, common descent and fraternal feelings could not avert war. Later, thinking of Queen Victoria’s reign, the kaiser declared, ‘To think that George and Nicky should have played me false. If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.’
Once the German war machine was set in motion it continued inexorably to the invasion of France and Belgium. The British guarantee to Belgium, originally intended to support Victoria’s uncle Leopold against the French, allowed Britain to intervene but was not obligatory. The British premier, Asquith, had already promised France support against Germany but needed an excuse. The German invasion of Belgium provided it.
But although Victoria was dead her genes lived on and were to play a critical role as the war ran its cruel and immeasurably destructive course. As noted earlier, the Romanovs had had close ties with the Coburgs since the days of Napoleon. Victoria’s second son, Alfred Duke of Edinburgh, had married the tsar’s daughter and it was not surprising that Nicholas II married one of Victoria’s granddaughters, Princess Alexandra, the daughter of the German Duke of Hesse.
Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s third child, was the first to inherit the defective gene. In due course a German husband, Ludvig Grand Duke of Hesse, was selected for her. The marriage took place in circumstances which foreshadowed the tragedies to come. Prince Albert died shortly before the wedding and Victoria insisted that the whole congregation, including the unfortunate bride, should wear only black or purple in respect. Depressed by the atmosphere and the loss of his elder sister, Prince Alfred sobbed loudly throughout the ceremony and even the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was conducting it, broke down. Victoria herself commented that it was more like a funeral than a wedding. Two of Princess Alice’s daughters, Irene and Alexandra, and her son Frederick were in turn to inherit the gene.
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.7 The disease was apparent in Alix’s family long before her marriage. Her mother Alice had seven children; two daughters, Alexandra and Irene, proved to be carriers and Alix’s brother Frederick William was a haemophiliac. One morning, when he was three years old, ‘Frittie’ dashed into his mother’s first floor bedroom and ran straight through the open window, which reached to floor level. He fell to the terrace below and although no bones were broken he was dead by evening of a brain haemorrhage. Alix’s sister Irene had two haemophiliac sons.
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.
Alix’s courtship was encouraged by her sister Elizabeth who invited her to St Petersburg for two summer seasons.8 During the second the 23-year-old Nicholas confided to his mistress, an imperial ballerina, that ‘of all possible fiancées he liked Princess Alice [sic] the best’. They were married in November 1894, one week after Nicholas’s father Alexander III had died from kidney disease. Nicholas quickly forgot the supple ballerina and after his wedding night wrote, ‘Never did I believe there could be such happiness in this world, such an utter feeling of unity between two mortal beings.’ Alexandra had been brought up more as an Englishwoman than a German, spending much of her adole
scence in Britain, and all her correspondence with her husband was conducted in English. Like Victoria and Albert – and unlike a great many of their relatives – Nicholas and Alexandra enjoyed a lifelong, faithful, loving, dependent, passionate relationship, all the more remarkable because they were also the rulers of a vast, brutal, totalitarian state.
Despite their love the marriage was also a mismatch. Alix, unlike her English cousins, was an ambitious, stubborn young woman with a will of iron and a passion for politics. She was a firm believer in the absolute right of monarchs, but she was married to a weak, almost will-less, monarch with little wisdom or discretion, but with almost absolute power. It was to prove a dangerous combination.
They lived in the Alexander Palace, started in Catherine the Great’s reign. Smaller than some other Russian palaces, it had more than a hundred rooms. Alix did her best to become a Russian. She converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, literally spitting on her old Protestant faith, and made a great effort to become word-perfect in Russian, but despite her efforts, Alexandra remained an outsider. Her mother-in-law did not like her and refused to pass down the imperial jewellery. The aristocracy was offended when she cut down the number of pompous palace balls.
The first duty of the tsarina was to provide the dynasty with a male heir. Instead, Alix bore a succession of daughters: Olga in 1895, Tatiana in 1897, Marie in 1899 and Anastasia in l901. As daughter succeeded daughter, Alix resorted to a variety of quacks, in particular to a ‘Dr’ Philippe Vachot, who began as a butcher’s assistant, and was thrice convicted in his native France for practising medicine without the necessary qualifications. He claimed to be able to communicate with the spirit of Alexander III, the previous tsar, and to foresee the future. He convinced Alix that he could help her bear a son. In her desperation she believed him and in 1902 it was publicly announced that she was with child. When, after six months, it became apparent that it was imaginary, the official embarrassment caused ‘Dr’ Philippe to leave Russia. It is a measure of the total lack of judgement of the imperial pair that following this débâcle Nicholas wrote to the French President commending Philippe for the French Academy. As he left, Philippe forecast to Alix that ‘One day you will have another friend like me to speak to you of God’. This prophecy helped to prepare the way for Rasputin.
On 12 August 1904 the guns of St Petersburg boomed out a salute of three hundred guns. In Nicholas’s words, it was ‘a great never-to-be-forgotten day when the mercy of God has visited us so clearly. Alix gave birth to a son at one o’clock.’ In a symbolic and belated attempt to civilize a primitive society, Nicholas chose the birth of his son as the occasion to abolish corporal punishment in the army and navy.
For a few weeks after his birth all seemed well with the little tsarevitch but on 8 September Nicholas noted in his diary: ‘Alix and I are disturbed by the constant bleeding of little Aleksei. It continued from his navel until evening.’ At first they could not admit that he had inherited the fateful disease, but eventually the truth had to be faced. His mother was naturally stricken. Anna Vyrubova, her closest confidante, later wrote, ‘She hardly knew a day’s happiness after she knew her boy’s fate’. Her health and spirits declined and she developed heart trouble. Although the boy’s affliction was in no conceivable way her fault, she dwelt morbidly on the fact that the disease is transmitted through the mother and that it was common in her family. ‘Although it was no one’s fault, the Russian people regarded any defect as a divine judgement for some sin. So the affliction of the future Tsar and supreme priest was concealed from all except the immediate family. It was understood that the child was frail but some trouble was obvious. The emperor aged ten years overnight,’ said the Grand Duke Aleksander Mikhailovic. He commented that the courtiers were ‘afraid to smile in the presence of the Tsar and Tsarina’, and noted that Alexandra especially ‘turned all of her thoughts towards religion and her face took on a hysterical character’. The secret forced the family even closer together and deepened their isolation. They rarely met their subjects. Nicholas rotated between his palaces, from St Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo to Lavadia, near Yalta on the Black Sea, seeking homeliness amid great opulence.9 Part of the summer was spent on the gigantic yacht, Standart, surrounded by a large part of the imperial fleet.
He and Alix called each other ‘Hubby’ and ‘Wifey’ in fashionable English. Like his cousin the King of England, the tsar smoked the increasingly popular machine-made cigarettes. The effort to protect the young child from trauma turned him into a spoiled brat believing his father was only half-joking when he called him ‘Aleksey the Terrible’. Alix had tastes like Imelda Marcos, and her favourite colours were mauve and cream. She filled the imperial apartments with solid Edwardian furniture selected from the mail-order catalogue of Maples in London. Her friends were mystics and nonentities and she valued loyalty and devotion above intelligence. Her friend, Anna Vyrubova, saw visions and was described by the tsarevitch’s tutor as having ‘the mind of a child lacking either intelligence or direction’.
Following Russia’s defeat by Japan and the civil disturbances that followed in 1905 a new constitution was introduced under which the tsar reluctantly agreed that his previous ‘autocratic and unlimited powers’ should be somewhat curtailed, but he still insisted on retaining his ‘autocratic powers’. Under the intelligent and able statesman Stolypin, a kind of tsarist Gorbachov, tragically and mysteriously assassinated in 1911, all political prisoners were freed and many reforms were introduced. The redistribution of land was so extensive that Lenin complained, ‘If this should continue . . . it might force us to renounce any agrarian programme at all’.
In 1905 Gregorii Rasputin10 came into this unhealthy and isolated family circle. Rasputin was a Siberian peasant who bore a scar on his head, the result of a beating he had received for horse stealing. His appearance was savage. He stank like a goat, ate with his fingers, which he wiped in his beard, and dressed in baggy peasant clothes, but was distinguished by his brilliant, penetrating, pale blue eyes. In his favour it should be added that he had a genuine sympathy for the conditions of the Russian peasant and strongly opposed the war with Germany, whose consequences he foresaw. Rasputin was filled with exuberant coarseness, the Siberian ability to drink himself and others under the table, and unrestrained lechery. He was also shrewd, forceful and possibly sincere in his preaching and had an hypnotic power, particularly with women. Women of all stations were not only willing to sleep with him but were curiously moved by his sexuality. Even his enemies credited him with an extraordinary power to withhold orgasm for long intervals. Sometimes he would sleep with one or more naked women to test his and their ability to resist temptation. He would kiss young girls to help them in their struggle against sin.
In 1891 Rasputin decided to become a wandering pilgrim; according to his father, this was because he was too idle to live as a peasant. Leaving his wife and children, he claimed he had had a vision of the Virgin and was to be under her guidance. He preached an unorthodox doctrine of salvation through sin, especially to the female members of his flock. ‘Man must sin in order to have something to repent of . . . If God sends us temptation, we must yield to it voluntarily and without resistance so we may afterwards do penance in utter contrition.’ Rasputin provided the temptation, the sin and the absolution.
Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, complained that he had files of letters from mothers ‘whose daughters had been dishonoured by this insolent rake’. The Minister of Finance described him as ‘the sort of Siberian tramp I encountered in Tsarist prisons’. Rodzianko read a report on his activities and said ‘Some of the details were so repulsive that they could not be read without abhorrence’. Undoubtedly, he had an hypnotic personality and the French ambassador referred to his ‘magnetic pupils’ that ‘seemed to read one’s inmost thoughts’. Stolypin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and one of the few really intelligent men who ever served Nicholas, described meeting him: ‘I felt an irrepressible repulsion to that h
orrible being rise in me. But, I realized that the man had great hypnotic power and was producing a strong psychic impression, truly one of repulsion. Mastering myself, I shouted at him. . . .’
Rodzianko had a similar experience: ‘Rasputin turned his face towards me and his eyes began to move over me: at first over the face, then over the region of the heart, and again over the eyes. This lasted several seconds. Personally, I am not in the least subject to the influence of hypnosis – I have tested it many times – but this time I experienced a tremendous and incomprehensible force. I felt a purely animal rage rising in me, blood rushed to my heart, and I realized I was approaching a state of genuine madness.’