Baby Bee was eager to marry but again religion threatened to scupper her plans. Those who married into the Spanish ruling family were expected to convert to Catholicism but the Coburg princess was far less obliging in the matter than Cousin Ena had been. When it was clear that Baby Bee could not be persuaded to convert, the Spanish King urged the couple to marry in secret, which they did in 1909. What the King had failed to consider, however, was that he was a constitutional monarch who had no right to make such decisions. When the news came out, parliament took a dim view of the Infante’s misdemeanour, stripped him of his commission and banished him from the country.
The couple settled for three years in Switzerland where two sons, Alvaro and Alonzo, were born. In 1912, the Spanish parliament relented and permitted the couple to return to Spain where, the following year, a third son, Ataulfo, was born.
If Queen Ena was initially pleased to welcome her cousin back to court, she soon discovered that Baby Bee would prove neither an asset nor a friend. Rather than attempting to ease the lonely Queen’s burden, she went out of her way to humiliate her, openly flirting with the King and even procuring new mistresses for him. Her bizarre behaviour became so unpleasant that eventually the King’s mother intervened and persuaded him to order her to leave the country again.
Baby Bee’s departure, however, did nothing to heal the rift between Ena and Alfonso. It was too late. The King could never forgive his wife for introducing ‘the terrible disease of the English family’ into his dynasty.
Chapter 28 - The Terrible Illness of the English Family
Charlotte: Princess of Saxe-Meiningen; Vicky’s eldest daughter
Alix: Tsarina of Russia
Nicholas: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
Ella: Alix’s elder sister
Irène: Princess Henry of Prussia; Alix’s elder sister
Louise, Toria & Maud: Daughters of Edward VII
Ena: Queen of Spain; daughter of Princess Beatrice
Alice: Princess of Teck; daughter of Prince Leopold
Queen Victoria had left a rich legacy to her granddaughters. To her they owed many happy memories, their status, their innate nobility and their stoical sense of duty. But there was another more tragic legacy: a legacy of ill-health which would not only affect the princesses themselves but would also have far-reaching consequences for several European dynasties.
Perhaps if the Prince Consort’s warnings of the need to bring ‘strong dark blood’ into the family had been heeded, the cousins might have been spared some of their suffering, for, in spite of Sir William Jenner’s assurances that inter-breeding among such healthy stock would produce strong children, a variety of medical problems were prevalent in the family, several of which were inherited from their grandmother. Letters to and from the princesses and their mothers were filled with references to their ailments, not all of which can be explained away by the tight-fitting corsets and the fashionable delicacy of aristocratic Victorian women.
Following extensive research, Rohl, Warren and Hunt[144], discovered strong evidence to suggest that several generations of Queen Victoria’s family suffered from the hereditary malady, porphyria. Characterised by a variety of symptoms including aversion to heat, rashes, severe abdominal pain, weakening of the legs and irrational behaviour, the illness had been in the family for several generations, manifesting itself most clearly in the ‘madness’ of Queen Victoria’s grandfather, King George III.
Though certainly more sane than her grandfather, Queen Victoria, unable to bear stuffy rooms, constantly longing for fresh air and displaying illogical mood-swings, might have suffered from the illness. At the time of her mother’s death in March 1861, Queen Victoria was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the death of Prince Albert nine months later, left her prostrate with grief. During her extended period of excessive mourning many of her ministers seriously believed she was on the brink of insanity and were convinced that she would abdicate in favour of her eldest son.
Though more rational in her behaviour, Vicky had certainly inherited many of her mother’s physical symptoms. Her aversion to heat left her constantly exhausted and desperate to escape from balls and social functions in the early years of her marriage. On several occasions she suffered from such terrible rashes that she was obliged to cover her face when appearing in public. Charlotte, in turn, inherited Vicky’s symptoms to a greater degree and she would pass them on to her tragic daughter, Feo.[·]
Even in childhood, Charlotte’s health had been poor, plagued as she was by continual nasal and throat complaints. Her delayed adolescence gave way to an abnormal growth spurt resulting in her ‘top-heavy’ appearance, and after her marriage her symptoms multiplied. She fainted three times during her extended wedding celebrations and her behaviour was often unaccountable not only to her family but even to Charlotte herself:
“She has the wish to be amicable and make herself pleasant,” Vicky had told the Queen, “but the poor dear Child never can be a helpmate or resource to anyone…Nature has made her so…”[145]
Frequently affected by numerous physical complaints, towards the end of the century Charlotte was virtually spending half the year in bed, tormented by rheumatic pains, sciatica, dental abscesses, abdominal swellings, paralysis of the legs and a myriad of other symptoms – which, incidentally bear a strong resemblance the symptoms Prince Albert endured in the weeks before his death[·]. As her condition remained undiagnosed, several of her doctors considered her ailments hysterical in origin, though both Charlotte and her mother seemed to recognise a similarity in their sufferings, caused by an underlying problem in their metabolism.
Though there is insufficient evidence to suggest that any of her cousins also suffered from porphyria, several of Charlotte’s symptoms were common to other members of the family. As children, the Wales girls were constantly ailing with neuralgia, rheumatic pains, dental problems, sciatica, and ear infections. At the time of her divorce, Marie Louise was advised to travel for the sake of her health which had been severely affected by ‘a series of never-ending bad colds’; in his boyhood, the Kaiser endured months of trouble from ear infections, which recurred throughout his life; Victoria of Hesse’s eldest daughter was deaf; and so intense was the pain in Alix of Hesse’s ears that she had to take a cure after Mossy’s wedding. Like Maud and Charlotte, Alix suffered too from facial neuralgia and pains in her jaw. Alix’s sister, Ella, who was, in her grandmother’s opinion ‘not very strong,’ was also particularly prone to colds and bronchial complaints:
“Ella has again had one of her bad attacks in her throat,” Princess Alice wrote to the Queen when Ella was four years old, “…Two nights ago she could not speak - barely breathe - and was so uncomfortable, poor child.”[146]
Though in Ella’s case the symptoms were exacerbated by the icy Russian winters, she herself considered them simply as family complaints. Following surgery to remove a benign tumour in 1908, she wrote the Tsar that she was ‘astonishingly well’ except:
“A wee cold or rheumatic twinges or gout can’t be prevented as our family all suffers from the latter…There is hardly a person who has not that.”[147]
In their correspondence, the cousins make numerous references to their sciatica, rheumatic pains and weakness in their legs. The heat of Athens, often left Sophie ‘very ill’, particularly during her pregnancies; Maud was so blighted by neuralgia that she was unable to walk in her coronation procession; Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, later consulted spiritual healers in search of a cure for arthritis; and shortly before her wedding, Alix of Hesse was so troubled by sciatica that her grandmother had sent her to the spa at Harrogate.
Alix’s problems increased after her marriage, and were exacerbated by pregnancy. The sciatic pain was often so severe that she was unable to walk and was reduced to being pushed around in a wheelchair. In early 1897, she was confined to bed for seven weeks and, by the end of the following year, her doctors recommended complete rest.
“Unluckily I cannot get
about at all,” she wrote in 1904, “and spend my days on the sofa ... walking and standing causes me great pain.... I know I must lie, it is the only remedy.”[148]
Alix’s complaints were not confined to her legs; headaches, exhaustion, and eventually ‘an enlarged heart’ added to her woes:
“The Empress certainly had bad luck where her health was concerned,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden. “In the years when she was neither expecting nor nursing a baby, she invariably fell ill. One winter she had influenza three times; another year she had measles…”[149]
Alongside their physical ailments, several of the princesses had inherited another unwelcome legacy from their grandmother: nerves. Queen Victoria wholeheartedly empathised with nervous complaints for throughout her life she suffered terribly, particularly when under stress.
‘Nerves’ and ‘neurasthenia’ were to feature regularly in the family correspondence. Vicky informed her mother that her daughter, Mossy’s nerves were ‘not of the strongest’; and doctors were amazed by Charlotte’s ‘broken down nerves’. In the midst of a dispute with Sophie of Greece, Victoria Battenberg’s daughter came to the conclusion that her Prussian cousin was ‘a bit mad.’ Even the stoical Marie of Roumania was liable to periods of depression during which she took to her bed, while her younger sister Baby Bee had ‘almost lost her mind’ over the affair with Misha. The slightest stress could stretch Toria of Wales’s nerves to their limit, and, during the First World War, the Tsarina was so stressed that courtiers suspected that she was insane.
The tensions of life in Russia were not solely responsible for Alix’s sensitivity; even before her marriage she had, according to Baroness Buxhoeveden, been ‘nearing a breakdown’ because:
“The shock of her father’s death and the fatigues that followed it were too much for her. She…had to be taken for a cure to Schwalbach by her brother.”[150]
As if porphyria, rheumatism, sciatica and nervous instability were not enough, there was a still more devastating legacy in Queen Victoria’s family. Through one defective gene, the Grandmother of Europe had ‘infected’ four European Houses with the terrible bleeding disease, haemophilia.
The blood of the haemophiliac fails to clot, which in the 19th Century, before the discovery of Factor VIII, meant that the slightest knock could cause bleeding into the joints, resulting in excruciating swellings, deformity or paralysis. A blow to the head could cause a fatal brain haemorrhage and even a minor cut could prove fatal.
Since the condition is carried in the dominant X gene, girls rarely suffer from haemophilia, but they can be carriers, transmitting the condition to their sons. In the Victorian era, there was insufficient knowledge of genetics to predict which of members of a family might have inherited the disease and the randomness of its occurrence made it all the more difficult to bear. Within one family group, some brothers might be haemophiliac, others perfectly healthy; some sisters carriers, others not, but there was no method of knowing which girls had inherited the gene until their sons were born. Prince Leopold was the only one of Queen Victoria’s four sons to have been haemophiliac, but two of his five sisters, Alice and Beatrice were carriers.
Since the age of seven, Irène of Hesse had been familiar with the devastating effects of the illness. In 1873, she had seen her three-year-old brother, Frittie, die as a result of a brain haemorrhage following a fall, and she was equally aware of the terrible agonies suffered by Uncle Leopold. Yet in 1888, when Irène married Cousin Henry, she had no idea that she had inherited the defective gene and would introduce the ‘English disease’ into the Prussian royal family with the birth of her first son, Waldemar. Mercifully, Irène’s second son, Sigismund escaped the illness, but her third and youngest child, Henry, was also a haemophiliac. In February 1904, in an almost identical replay of Frittie’s tragic death, three-year-old Henry fell and bumped his head, dying shortly afterwards. When the tragic news reached St. Petersburg, Irène’s sister, Alix, was devastated but, as she wept for her nephew, she had no idea that at that very moment the unborn baby she was carrying had also inherited the disease.
On 12th August 1904, only half an hour after going into labour, the Tsarina gave birth to a son. The years of prayers, pilgrimages and consultations with healers and quacks suddenly seemed worthwhile. The Tsar, ‘mad with joy’, gave orders for the canon of the Peter and Paul Fortress to fire the 301-gun salute to welcome the new Tsarevich Alexei. Even in the midst of the horrors of the Russo-Japanese War, the country rejoiced that the dynasty seemed secure.
The beautiful golden-haired baby with his father’s striking blue eyes, was christened twelve days later and in a show of gratitude to the troops fighting against Japan, every soldier in the army was proclaimed his godfather.
“No heir to the crown had been born in Russia, as heir, since the seventeenth century, and the ceremony was surrounded with splendour that matched the importance of the event. It took place in the Chapel of the big Peterhof Palace on August 24th, 1904. King George V of England (then Duke of York) and the German Emperor were among the baby’s godfathers. The Empress Marie Feodorovna was his godmother. The baby Tsarevich was appointed Colonel of many regiments and decorations were showered on him. Imperial bounty in every form, amnesties, remittances of sentences, gifts of money were among the signs of the Emperor’s joy at the birth of an heir.”[151]
The delight of his parents was ineffable. Every letter and every diary entry contained references to ‘Baby’ and there was no reason for Alix to suspect that there was anything wrong with her son. After all, her elder sister, Victoria, had given birth to four children, none of whom was a haemophiliac, and Alexei appeared too healthy to have inherited the terrible disease. Within a month, his mother was to be cruelly disillusioned.
In September 1904, Alexei began bleeding from his navel and when the doctors’ efforts to staunch the flow failed, Alix was left in little doubt as to its cause. The longed-for Tsarevich was a haemophiliac. For his mother the news was overwhelming. ‘She hardly knew a day’s happiness after she knew her boy’s fate,’ wrote her friend, Anna Vyrubova. From that moment, the rest of her life would be devoted to the care of her son. Every bump, every knock and every graze caused her indescribable anguish as night after night she sat by his bedside, helplessly listening to his cries. Tormented by fear for his safety, and guilt for having passed on the disease, she spent hours on her knees, desperately praying for a cure.
“Everything possible, everything known to medical science, was done for the child Alexei. The Empress nursed him herself, as indeed, with the assistance of professional women, she had nursed all her children. Three trained Russian nurses were in attendance, with the Empress always superintending. She bathed the babe herself, and was with him so much that the Court, ever censorious of her, complained that she was more of a nurse than an Empress.”[152]
To add to her anguish, the Tsarina knew that it was imperative to keep the truth from the public. By the time that Alexei’s diagnosis was confirmed, Russia was in the throes of the Japanese war. If it were known that the heir was a sickly child who could die at any moment, revolutionaries might well seize the chance of overthrowing the monarchy. Moreover, it would hardly improve the reputation of the Empress were it known that she had introduced haemophilia into the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. Nicholas consequently decided that Alexei’s haemophilia should be kept a state secret. No one outside their immediate circle – not even Nicholas’ sisters – should be told the true nature of his illness.
Living under such stress, Alix’s already taut nerves were stretched to the limit. One minute she was kneeling by her son’s bed, trying to soothe his pain and desperately trying to control her tears; the next she must appear before her guests, struggling to appear unperturbed. The Tsarevich’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, recalled an occasion when Alix’s daughters were presenting a play before a number of guests:
“I could see the Tsarina in the front row of the audience smiling and talking gaily to her neighbours.
When the play was over I…found myself in the corridor opposite Alexei’s room, from which a moaning sound came distinctly to my ears. I suddenly noticed the Tsarina running up, holding her long and awkward train in her two hands. I shrank back against the wall, and she passed me without observing my presence. There was a distracted and terror-stricken look on her face…A few minutes later the Tsarina came back. She had resumed her mask and forced herself to smile pleasantly at the guests who crowded around her.”[153]
Only among her sisters could Alix unburden herself. Ella had been informed of the truth; and Irène, who knew better than anyone the stress of such an existence, came as often as possible to offer what support she could; but no amount of sympathy could ease Alix’s suffering. The strain was unbearable. Her own health rapidly deteriorated so that for the greater part of a decade she was a semi-invalid, as her friend Anna Vyrubova recalled:
“In the autumn of 1910 the Emperor and Empress went to Nauheim, hoping that the waters would have a beneficial effect on her failing health. They left on a cold and rainy day and both were in a melancholy state, partly because of separation from the beloved home, and partly because of the quite apparent weakness of the Empress. On her account the Emperor showed himself deeply disturbed. “I would do anything,” he said to me, “even to going to prison, if she could only be well again.””[154]
The spas were of no avail and, when earthly help failed, the Tsarina turned with increasing desperation to her icons, praying fervently for a miracle to save her son.
In spite of her unutterable anguish, Alix at least had the unfailing support of her husband. Nicholas never blamed her or so much as hinted that Alix was responsible for their son’s affliction. On the contrary, their shared suffering and anxiety drew the Tsar and Tsarina even closer together. For Queen Ena in Spain, there was no such comfort.
Queen Victoria's Granddaughters 1860-1918 Page 24