Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  When a small force of French troops invaded in 1806 King John the Runaway and practically all the aristocracy fled to Brazil, leaving the defence of Portugal to the British. The king returned to Portugal when Napoleon had been defeated, but his son Pedro remained behind to become the first Emperor of Brazil. When John the Runaway died in 1826, Pedro made his younger brother Miguel Regent of Portugal on condition that he should marry his sevenyear-old daughter, Maria de Gloria, Miguel’s niece, when she came of age. Once in power, Miguel began a reign of terror, imprisoning 40,000 people. When the chief jailer in Oporto refused to take any more prisoners because the cells were full the governor asked ‘Are they full to the ceiling?’ ‘Not quite’, the jailer replied. ‘Then how dare you tell me they are full; put more men into them’, he was told.

  Several years after he had appointed Miguel regent, Pedro invaded Portugal and expelled him, not because of his outrageous behaviour but because he refused to carry out his side of the bargain and marry Pedro’s daughter, but the prolonged campaign exhausted Pedro who died shortly afterwards. On his death his daughter Maria succeeded in Portugal, while in Brazil her brother Pedro II became emperor. When Maria’s first husband providentially died shortly after the wedding, Leopold of Belgium saw the chance to extend the Coburg domains and persuaded Ferdinand to propose. Before Ferdinand set out for Portugal his uncle Leopold wrote him a small book entitled Directions and Advices. This contained his uncle’s advice for most situations and problems which a young king might encounter. Victoria was most impressed and noted in her diary that ‘Ferdinand simply cannot fail to succeed, thanks to Uncle Leopold’s instructions!’

  Soon after the marriage Ferdinand, now prince consort, plotted to seize power and overthrow the Portuguese constitution with the aid of troops to be supplied by Leopold, but Britain blocked the attempt. After bearing Leopold eleven children, Maria died in 1853 and Ferdinand became regent until his son, another Pedro, came of age. Queen Victoria was most favourably impressed with young Pedro and made strenuous efforts to persuade Charlotte, the daughter of Leopold of Belgium, to marry him, thus binding Portugal even more firmly into the Coburg orbit. ‘You may rely on our divulging nothing’, she wrote to Leopold. ‘We are, however, both very anxious that dear Pedro should be preferred.’ Even when Charlotte obviously preferred Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a younger son of the emperor, she wrote again to Leopold, ‘I still hope by your letter that Charlotte has not finally made up her mind – as we both feel so convinced of the immense superiority of Pedro over any other young Prince even dans les relations journalistes, besides which the position is so infinitely preferable.’ However, her efforts were in vain. When Charlotte insisted on marrying Maximilian they had to find him a throne, as befitted the husband of a Coburg. Leopold bombarded his relatives with letters full of advice, generally sensible but occasionally disastrous. He advised his unfortunate sonin-law Maximilian, ‘In America there are still splendid opportunities and I should like to see the Coburgs endeavouring to realise them’. Note that a son and possible heir of the ancient House of Habsburg had been promoted to an honorary Coburg. When Maximilian, setting out for Mexico, was asked to renounce his rights to the Austrian throne if his brother were to die childless, Leopold advised him, ‘My refrain is to surrender nothing’. With a little luck the Austro-Hungarian empire might fall into Coburg hands as well. Unfortunately, the Mexicans did not appreciate European monarchs and with inadequate European support Maximilian was defeated and executed, and poor Charlotte went mad.

  For sixty years after her husband’s execution in 1867 Charlotte lived in a Belgian palace, conversing with her dead husband, issuing orders to her imaginary soldiers and screaming in terror of being poisoned. Nutshells had to be unbroken as a precaution. Her brother ‘Leopold the Unloved’ used her private fortune to subsidize his Congo adventure so that the Coburg Congo empire grew from the ruins of their Mexican one.

  On the accession of young Pedro his father Ferdinand retired and went to live with an opera singer. When his uncle Leopold of Belgium successively tried to interest him in applying for the thrones of Greece, Spain and Mexico, he declined gracefully. He was sadly lacking in the true Coburg spirit. Leopold wished Ferdinand to exploit the progression from minor nobility to blood royal via prince consort, as he had done. He observed, ‘In my day, I had built upon my English hopes and Portugal was to do for Ferdinand what England had done for me.’ As Pedro was obviously deficient in ambition, Leopold tried sex. When offering Greece Leopold later confided, ‘I even went so far as to say that the beauty of Levantine women was known to be very great’, but they evidently could not compete with his opera singer.

  Having brought the throne of Portugal into the family Leopold then tried to incorporate Brazil. Pedro II of Brazil had married a Bourbon of the two Sicilies but this marriage produced two daughters, Dona Isabella and Dona Leopoldina. As Isabella was heir to the throne it was arranged that she should marry Augustus Saxe-Coburg, brother of the Tsar of Bulgaria. Unfortunately, Isabella was not enamoured of Augustus, and said that he had a face ‘like a Dutch cheese illuminated by a leer’. She married instead his cousin the Comte d’Eu, whose mother happened to be Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, so Augustus married Leopoldina, in case Isabella died childless. In the event Leopoldina died first and childless but Pedro II was deposed in a bloodless revolution before Isabella could succeed. Pedro II was an enlightened monarch who fostered the arts and sciences, but by abolishing slavery he created a host of enemies who eventually evicted him. After over a century of republican rule involving thirty-seven presidents, nineteen military revolts, nine dictators and six constitutions, the monarchists are still strong, although they failed to win a plebiscite on the restoration of the empire in 1993, in part because the monarchists were divided among several pretenders. A leading contender for the throne is Don Philippe de Saxe-Coburg & Orleans and Braganza, in private life, Philippe Braganza, an insurance salesman from Pittsburg.

  Apologists for the Coburgs have argued that they brought a more modern and enlightened view of kingship into the degenerate house of Braganza, but this view is hard to sustain. Pedro II of Brazil, who had no Coburg blood, was an enlightened and civilized monarch, a Braganza only in the extreme degree to which he showed these virtues, while the later kings of Portugal, of Saxe-Coburg descent, behaved like the old Braganzas, plundering the state treasury, cooking the books and cavorting with dancing girls until the Portuguese people, tiring of their monarchs after many centuries, finally threw them out.

  When Romania became independent of Turkey Leopold attempted to settle his second son, the Count of Flanders, on the new throne, but the Romanians went elsewhere for a king. Romania had to wait for a Coburg until 1893 when Marie, the daughter of Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, married King Ferdinand. The relationship was reinforced in 1921 when their son King Carol II married Princess Helene of Greece, Kaiser Wilhelm’s granddaughter and therefore great-great-grand-daughter of Queen Victoria.

  The Coburgs first attempted to marry into the Spanish royal house in the 1840s. In 1833 the three-year-old daughter of Ferdinand VII became Queen Isobel II of Spain with her mother Marie Christina as regent. The marriage of such a well-endowed heiress was a matter of international concern and the Coburgs were quickly in the field. In 1846 Prince Leopold of Coburg was negotiating with Marie Christina for Isobel’s hand but the French objected strenuously and the scheme collapsed. A few years later another Coburg, ‘Foxy’ Ferdinand, succeeded in obtaining the throne of Bulgaria. As Victoria’s children matured new possibilities opened up and Leopold lived to see his great-niece, Victoria’s eldest child, married to the German heir apparent. Before the century was out, among the major European royal families only the Spanish and Austrian were Coburgfree but Spain was to succumb a little later, gaining not only a queen of Coburg descent, but also haemophilia.

  Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Beatrice (1857–1944) transmitted the gene to three of her four children, a circumsta
nce that was to have a significant effect on the history of Spain at a critical time. Beatrice remained at Windsor with Queen Victoria when her brothers and sisters had departed and even after her marriage at the age of twenty-eight to Prince Henry of Battenberg, son of Prince Alexander of Hesse, she continued to live with her mother.

  As the old queen’s sight began to fail Beatrice read to her aloud the contents of the official boxes. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, one of the official secretaries, complained, ‘The most absurd mistakes occur and the Queen is not even au courant with the ordinary topics of the present day. Imagine Beatrice trying to explain the vaccination question or our policy on the East. Bigge or I may write out long precis of these things but they are often not read to HM as Beatrice is in a hurry to develop a photograph or wants to paint a flower for a bazaar.’ Victoria bequeathed all her private journals to Beatrice with instructions to censor them before publication. For forty years she copied the journals page by page eliminating anything of a controversial nature and produced a bland, emasculated version. The originals were burned.

  When her husband Henry died of fever off West Africa in 1896 his body was returned to England pickled in rum, but before the tragedy she bore him three sons and a daughter. The eldest, the Marquess of Carisbrooke (1886–1960) was fortunately free of the disease. The second son, Major Lord Leopold Mountbatten (1889–1922) was a sufferer; nevertheless, he joined the Kings Royal Rifle Corps and was gazetted in March 1914. ‘Physical delicacy’, according to his obituary in The Times, prevented active service, but he was mentioned in despatches! He suffered a serious illness in 1910 and was lame and ‘constitutionally delicate’. He died following a hip operation. Haemophilia is never mentioned. Her third son, Maurice, born in 1891, was also a haemophiliac according to McKusik, but was fit for active service. He gallantly joined the King’s Royal Fusiliers and died of wounds received at Ypres. Her daughter, Victoria Eugenie (1887–1969), who married Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, proved to be a carrier and the danger should have been obvious.

  The family of Princess Beatrice. Carriers of haemophilia underlined, haemophiliacs boxed. Dotted lines or boxes indicate an uncertain diagnosis

  At the beginning of the twentieth century Spain was wracked by fanaticism and extremism on both Left and Right, which was to lead to the horrors of the Civil War. Victoria Eugenie’s inheritance was one of the factors which weakened the forces of moderation.

  During the nineteenth century Spain lagged behind the rest of Western Europe both economically and politically. The Industrial Revolution came late to Spain and hardly affected the south. In the middle of the nineteenth century Spain had been divided by the Carlist wars fought between the supporters of two branches of the royal family and more recently had been humiliated by the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the USA. Moderate Spanish opinion looked to France and England for inspiration but the middle class was small and was threatened on the Left by an anarchist tradition devoted to bombing and assassination, which has continued down to the present, and by powerful Marxist and Socialist movements of several descriptions which inspired a succession of strikes and riots. On the right stood the Carlist traditionalists, a reactionary church and an army whose officer corps were confident that the interests of the state were identical with their own and reserved the right to intervene whenever they felt they were threatened.

  Officially, Spain was a constitutional monarchy and the constitution was based on that of Britain; even the two major political parties were named the Conservatives and the Liberals – but the political reality in Spain was very different. The parties were weak and divided. Governments rarely had the support of the majority of the Cortes and were short lived. The task of finding a new government fell on the king who was therefore continuously involved in politics and was held responsible for the governments he appointed.

  Spain was further divided by local independence movements in the Basque country and Catalonia and by the rival influences of the great powers of Western Europe: Britain, France, Germany and Austria. The officer corps admired Germany. Austrian influence went back to the days of the Habsburgs, and the queen mother was an Austrian. France, though Roman Catholic, was republican and the rival of Spain in Morocco.

  In the early years of the twentieth century Alfonso XIII had the difficult task of balancing these centrifugal forces. His father, Alfonso XII, had been restored to the throne following a republican interlude. After the early death of Alfonso XII, his Austrian queen, a Habsburg cousin of the Emperor Francis Joseph, became regent for his posthumous son Alfonso XIII, until he came of age at sixteen in 1902. Alfonso XII had been educated at Sandhurst but accepted a colonelcy in a German Uhlan regiment. German influence suffered when a German gunboat attempted to seize the Spanish island of Yap in the Pacific.

  The new king continued the delicate balancing act, but the pattern of forces in Western Europe was changing. During the reign of Victoria Britain and Germany were very close, although Britain never joined the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy. With the accession of Edward VII Britain drew nearer to France and established the Entente Cordiale. This change of policy was primarily due to the growing threat from the German fleet but was also made possible by Edward’s antipathy to his mother and her pro-German leanings. Edward’s pro-French feelings were extreme. During the Moroccan crisis of 1906 he told the French ambassador in London, ‘Tell us what you wish on each point and we will support you without restriction or reserves’.1 This is in interesting contrast to his father’s comment on the French in 1860, ‘I clearly foresee the day when this vainglorious and immoral people will have to be put down’.2 The Anglo-French Entente inevitably polarized influences in Spain. The army and the traditionalists looked to the Triple Alliance, while the Centre and moderate Left looked towards London and Paris. In 1904 the kaiser visited Spain with his fleet. To maintain the balance the young Alfonso visited Paris the following year, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life.

  The king’s choice of bride was of considerable symbolic importance. In spite of his restricted background and upbringing, Alfonso, though weak and unable to resist the temptation to intervene continuously in politics, was relatively liberal. While trying to maintain Spain’s neutral position he favoured a British bride, in spite of the religious complications that this would cause in Protestant Britain. In this he was probably influenced by his erstwhile Prime Minister Moret.

  Alfonso first contemplated marrying Princess Patricia, the daughter of HRH Prince Arthur. As Prince Arthur was not a haemophiliac Princess Patricia could not have been a carrier. However, the British Prime Minister Balfour consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury who objected on the grounds that the princess was too close in succession to the throne, although it would have required a quite extraordinary series of epidemics and disasters to have eliminated the two dozen or so claimants who came before her. Princess Patricia eventually married Admiral the Honourable Sir Alexander Ramsay. While her father was Governor-General of Canada, after the death of her mother and before her marriage, she acted as hostess to her father. A Canadian regiment, the Princess Patricias, and two geographical features were named in her honour.

  It is a sign of Alfonso’s determination that the rebuff did not deter him. In 1905 he paid an official visit to Britain, the first Spanish monarch to do so since Philip II in the sixteenth century. His visit was the more heroic as he was a bad sailor, and having sailed from Cherbourg to Portsmouth at Edward’s invitation, so that he could be shown the Channel Fleet, he insisted on returning home by the shortest sea route possible, from Dover to Calais. It was probably on this visit and through the influence of the old Empress Eugenie, the widow of Napoleon III, that Alfonso met Victoria Eugenie, otherwise known as Ena, the daughter of Princess Beatrice. Eugenie was Spanish herself and was the young Eugenie’s godmother.

  The premature death of Prince Leopold, Ena’s uncle, and the occurrence of haemophilia in her two brothers made it likely that Ena was herself
a carrier and, according to Sencourt, Alfonso was warned of the risk. Unfortunately, in the medieval rituals of twentieth-century monarchs the royalty of their ancestry was more important than their genetics and this risk was ignored. Princess Patricia, who was free of the defect, would have been a much better choice.

  When Princess Beatrice and Ena stayed at Biarritz on the Spanish border in January 1906, the suit became a matter of public knowledge. Extreme Protestant opinion in Britain was again opposed to the marriage as Ena would have had to desert the Protestant faith, but Edward VII favoured the match and refused to interfere. Ena was received into the Roman Catholic church by a Bishop of Nottingham with the reliable English name of Brindle. Following the Entente Cordiale with France, Edward saw the possibility of drawing Spain towards England and France and away from the Triple Alliance. In 1907 Britain and Spain reached a formal agreement following a meeting of Edward and Alfonso.

  On the return to the palace after the wedding of Alfonso and Ena, a bomb was thrown at the carriage which killed about twenty people but did not injure the bride or groom. Inevitably the new queen became the social focus of liberal society and of those sympathetic to the Anglo-French influences in Spain, while the Austrian queen mother’s court was the social centre of right-wing and pro-German society.

  The queen’s first son, Alfonso, was born in May 1907 and unfortunately inherited his great-grandmother’s gene. When it became known that the unfortunate child was a haemophiliac, anti-British circles in Spain claimed that the British had defiled the blue blood of Spain by imposing a genetically defective wife on the Spanish king, an argument which became increasingly difficult to refute when the second son, Jaime, was born a deaf mute and the third, who died at birth, was probably also a haemophiliac. Only the fourth son, Juan, the father of the present king Carlos, was healthy; the fifth son, Gonzalo, was again a haemophiliac. Many Spaniards believed the gruesome story that a young soldier had to be sacrificed every day so that his fresh blood could keep the haemophiliac sons of the king alive. Under Spanish law a physically defective son was excluded from the succession. The ever-growing list of disinherited heirs discredited the marriage and the liberal democratic forces which had engineered it. The humiliation was particularly embarrassing because the Spaniards placed greater importance on the purity of their royal blood than any other nation in Europe. ‘Blue blood’ is a Spanish term and the Spaniards required that their kings were of royal descent on both sides of the family.