by D M Potts
1. The confusing variety of titles requires some explanation. The family surname was Wettin. In the Middle Ages they ruled all Saxony but as the territory was repeatedly divided among the multiplying heirs the various fragments continued to be distinguished by the prefix Saxe-, as in Saxe-Coburg and Saxe-Meiningen. To further complicate the situation Coburg lay in two separate parts, one centred on Coburg, the other on the even smaller Gotha, hence the full title Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. When marriage with heiress cousins reunited sections, titles such as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Saalfeld, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld for short, were created.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Christened Elizabeth.
2. Roger Fulford, The Royal Dukes, Duckworth, 1933.
3. M. Gillen, The Prince and His Lady, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1971, p. 130.
4. Leopold to Victoria, 21 May 1845.
5. Duke of Kent to Wetherall, 14 November 1818.
6. Madame Siebold was one of the first women to qualify as a physician and she also called herself Dr Heidenreich. She had attended the University of Gottingen ‘like a man’.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. I. MacAlpine and R. Hunter, George III and the Mad Business, Allen Lane, 1969.
2. On one such trip in 1825 Victoria almost died of dysentery.
3. Ashdown, p.86.
4. C.C.F. Greville, 21 September 1836.
5. 8 September 1831.
6. Victoria was about 5 ft tall and puberty tends to be later in individuals whom childhood nutrition leaves this short.
7. The emphases are Victoria’s.
8. The lad was sentenced to death but later reprieved and confined to a mental asylum for life.
9. Dr John Snow is also remembered as the brilliant physician who traced a cholera epidemic to one water pump in Soho. When the authorities refused to believe that dirty water was the cause, he went at night and unscrewed the handle from the pump – the epidemic stopped. Until then it had been assumed that it was an airborne disease.
10. Unberufen – a superstitious remark to ward off evil, roughly equivalent to ‘touch wood’.
11. Victoria to Vicky, 10 April 1858.
12. 2 March 1859.
13. 2 May 1859.
14. 2 September 1859.
15. 16 November 1861.
16. ‘It is your little wife.’
17. It was without doubt a common disease. The Prince of Wales (in 1871), the queen’s second son Alfred (in 1863) and her grandson George (in 1890) all nearly died of typhoid. Two of Victoria’s second cousins – King Pedro of Portugal and his brother – had died from the disease earlier in the year of Albert’s death.
18. Elizabeth Longford, Darling Loosey, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991, p. 125.
19. Lillie was famous for her conversation as well as her good looks. On one occasion in her long friendship with Edward, he remarked, ‘I have spent enough on you to buy a battleship.’ Lillie replied, ‘You have spent enough in me, Sir, to float a battleship!’
20. Journal, 14 January 1875.
21. Letter to Gladstone, 31 January 1875.
22. Memorandum, 23 April 1880.
23. 1 September 1882.
24. The Countess of Warwick was also noted for her repartee and at one official function a guest, warning of Edward’s approach, said, ‘Hush, the King is coming.’ In a stage whisper the Countess remarked, ‘That is the first time for a long time.’
CHAPTER FIVE
1. E. Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, Doubleday, New York, 1992, p. 264.
CHAPTER SIX
1. W. Bullock and Sir P. Fildes, Haemophilia, A Treasury of Human Inheritance, Vol. I, Eugenics Society, 1911.
2. M. Gillen, The Prince and his Lady, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970.
3. 16 January 1790.
4. 28 July 1837.
5. 22 March 1829.
6. Greville, 25 February 1822.
7. Greville, 8 August 1829.
8. Greville, 8 August 1829.
9. Greville, 21 July 1830.
10. Greville, 29 February 1840.
11. Greville, 5 December 1841.
12. 15 February 1864.
13. 29 February 1840.
14. MacAlpine and Hunter, George III and the Mad Business.
15. Daily Telegraph, 21 March 1995.
16. Secret History, ‘Purple Secret. In search of Royal Madness’, Paldin Pictures, July 6th 1998; John C.G. Rohl, Martin Warren and David Hunt, Purple Secret, Bantam Press, 1998.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry a commoner, Mrs Simpson.
2. Von Schlieffen took as his military model the attack by Hannibal on the Roman flank at the battle of Cannae in 216 bc.
3. The father of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Attlee Government.
4. M. Harrison, 1972, Clarence.
5. K. Rose, George V, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.
6. S. Knight, Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution, Granada, 1977.
7. Ferdinand’s mother was herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
8. Elizabeth’s husband, Grand Duke Sergei, was murdered by anarchists in 1905, when she retired from public life and founded a religious order devoted to the relief of the poor and sick. She was thrown to her death, down a mineshaft, by the Communists in 1918, but has recently been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.
9. Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met in Nicholas’s palace for the Yalta Conference in 1945.
10. Rasputin in Russian sounds uncannily similar to rasputstvo, the word for debauchery.
11. 7 September 1916. My own Sweetheart, . . . Gregory begs you earnestly to name Protopopov (Minister of the Interior) . . . he likes our Friend since at least 4 years and that says much for a man.
12. Felix’s father was said to have a portrait gallery with paintings of his three hundred mistresses.
13. 12 March on our calendar – at this time Russia still adhered to the old calendar which was 13 days out of step with our present calendar. The modern calendar was adopted shortly after the tsar’s abdication.
14. The kaiser died in 1941 after the beginning of the Second World War: by helping to start the First he had helped create the situation that led to the Second.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. In 1960 the American U2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviets over the city.
2. The house was demolished twenty years ago by Boris Yeltsin, later President of Russia, but then acting under orders. The site is now a car park.
3. Sverdlov was head of the Central Executive Committee in Moscow, an old friend of Goloschchekin, and Ekaterinburg would be renamed in his honour until the end of Communism when it reverted to Ekaterinburg.
4. Eighteen pounds of small, 1/2 carat, diamonds would be worth over £60 million at 1992 prices. If larger gem stones were included, which is likely, the value might well be over £100 million at today’s prices. (Pers. comm. Banks Lyon, Jewellers, Lancaster.)
5. Sunday Times, 11 December 1994.
6. Daily Telegraph, 12 September 1992.
7. The Times, 10 July 1993, and Nature Genetics 6, 130–5.
8. The hammer toe and oddities of the fingers were known features of the royal children.
9. J.B. Lovell, Anastasia, the Lost Princess, Robson Books, 1992, pp. 282–3.
10. To this day Queen Elizabeth II sometimes still wears the tsar’s mother’s diamond tiara.
11. The Times, 6 October 1994.
12. Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1992.
13. M. Occleshaw, The Romanov Conspiracies.
14. Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1994.
15. Lovell, Anastasia the Lost Princess, p. 443.
16. Lovell, Anastasia the Lost Princess.
17. Prince Frederick of Saxe-Altenburg befriended Anna Anderson and supported her for many years. His sister had married Prince Sigismund of Prussia who was a son of Anastasia’s Aunt Irene.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Sir Charles Petrie, King Alfonso XIII, Billing & Sons, Guildford and London, 1963.
2. Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, ed. Gere and Sparrow, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 120.
3. The Times, 3 January 1940.
4. V.A. McKusik, ‘The Royal Haemophilia’, Scientific American, 213, 2, 1965, pp. 88–95.
CHAPTER TEN
1. V.A. McKusick, ‘The Royal Haemophilia’, Scientific American, 213, 2 (1965), 88–95.
2. The Times, 8 March 1954.
3. R.F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? Princeton University Press, 1982.
4. J. Costello, Ten Days that Saved the West, Bantam Press, 1990, esp. pp 201, 321 and Appendix 8.
5. 10 October 1988.
6. J. Costello, The Mask of Treachery, W. Morrow, New York, 1988.
7. It is partly thanks to Prince Ernst August that the British royal house has retained the family name of Windsor. ‘Queen Mary sent for me on February 18 to say that Prince Ernst August of Hanover had come back from Broadlands and informed her that Lord Mountbatten had said to an assembled house party of royal guests that the House of Mountbatten now reigned. The poor old lady, who had spent a sleepless night, was relieved when I said that I doubted if the Cabinet would contemplate such a change. Indeed when I told the PM he had at once consulted the Cabinet who said unanimously that they would tolerate no such thing.’ From The Fringes of Power. Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955, by John Colville, Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. Camilla Parker Bowles is the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel.
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