by Barbara Vine
‘Who were these grandsons? The Tsarevich would be one, right?’
‘He was a great-grandson. His mother was the Tsarina, Princess Alice’s daughter. Her sister Irene was a carrier, one of her sons bled to death aged four and another, Waldemar, was also a haemophiliac. There were two Battenberg grandsons. Princess Beatrice’s sons. They both lived into their twenties. Leopold died in a car crash and Maurice in the retreat from Mons. Beatrice’s daughter Ena married the King of Spain, Alfonso the XIIIth. Two of her sons had it.’
Lachlan looks thoughtful and even gloomier than usual. ‘And now it’s just died out? Of the royal family, I mean.’
I say that considering Queen Victoria had five daughters and all but one of them had a daughter or daughters, it was astonishing how few males of the family had haemophilia and how relatively quickly it-had simply disappeared. ‘One or more of the Russian grand duchesses would almost certainly have been a carrier but we’ll never know because they died in the cellar in Ekaterinburg. Princess Helena’s sons were free of it. Of her daughters, one had her marriage annulled because her husband was homosexual and the other never married. They may have been carriers. By the end of the nineteen forties all the haemophiliacs were dead and all the carriers either childless or daughterless or dead or past childbearing. Queen Victoria brought it in or a mutation in her genes or her mother’s did and within forty-five years of her death it had gone.’
‘Your great-grandpapa,’ says Lachlan, ‘did he do anything to make those Battenberg boys live long enough to be cannon fodder or drive cars?’
‘I don’t see what he could have done apart from telling the parents to be careful they didn’t fall or cut themselves.’
‘What happened if haemophiliacs had to have their appendixes out?’
‘They died.’
He gives his dry laugh that has no hint of humour in it. It’s a signal with him that the subject is to be changed. His walrus face settles into bags and pouches. ‘You realize, do you, that if you and I want to come here next year we’ll have to come as Lord or Lady Life Peer’s guests?’
I hadn’t thought about it but now it casts a faint chill over me. Surely not, I say, with more optimism than I feel. We’ll still be able to come and eat and drink – won’t we? Not on your nelly, says Lachlan. And if we want to see someone in here we’ll have to wait inside the Peers’ Entrance and ask the doorkeeper to let someone know we’re here. ‘We’ll be told to clear our desks and hand in our computers and take our name cards off our coat pegs because this is the end, my boy. The Twilight of the Gods. I’m sure I don’t know what our great-grandpapa would have said.’
‘Or your remote laird of an ancestor.’
‘They’ll both of them be turning like spits in their graves,’ says Lachlan.
What shall I do with my robe when I have to go? Robes aren’t the same for every rank of peer. Barons have two rows of ‘ermine’, Viscounts two and a half, Earls three, Marquesses three and a half and Dukes four. There’s a fuss if any Baron or Baroness is spotted wearing a borrowed robe with, say, three rows of moth-eaten white fur. These things are very important to some hereditary peers who stand about in huddles on State Opening day listening to the scion of a noble house holding forth on who wears what and why.
I doubt if I’ll ever drape myself in Henry’s again. By the time the Queen next comes to the Palace of Westminster, I’ll be gone.
13
Henry was sixty when he was made a peer. An outsider, viewing his life, might have said that he had everything a man’s heart could desire: worldly success, a position at the top of his profession, a sufficient income to live in comfort, good health, a wife and four daughters and an heir. His son would inherit more now than his name and wealth; he would be a peer from the moment his father died. But Henry wanted another.
That son came along in 1897. Henry noted the birth in his diary even more curtly than last time: ‘Son born’. Instead of waiting three months as they had with Alexander, the parents had him baptized at six weeks. Certificates of baptism for both boys were in one of Henry’s trunks. I found none for the girls, though all the children were certainly christened. The new baby was named George Thomas.
Looking at these certificates, prettily engraved in red and blue and green with a minimal decoration in gold leaf, like a baby’s own coat of arms, makes me think about names for our child. I shall let Jude choose. I chose last time. What I mean is, I overruled Sally who wanted Paul called Torquil. Now I’m getting used to the idea of becoming a father again. Jude’s joy is so beautiful to see and it’s such a pleasure to know that she’ll be as happy when she wakes up in the morning as she was the night before, that I’m halfway to forgetting about broken nights and nappy-changing and the chronic anxiety children bring you. I suppose the truth is I’m so uxorious (or I am with this uxor) that I can put up with anything so long as she’s pleased.
And she’s well. The two previous times she wasn’t. She was sick in the mornings and always tired. I see her continued health as the best omen of all that this time it’s going to be all right. She’s going to be all right and that’s all I care about.
Georgie Croft-Jones has given birth to a huge boy weighing nine and a half pounds or, as she insists on putting it, four kilos and a bit.
‘You’ll all have to buy everything in kilos next year,’ she says briskly, ‘so you may as well get into the habit now.’
‘He’s for sale then, is he?’ I ask her. ‘Shall we buy him, Jude, to be a companion for ours?’
Jude likes jokes like that now. She loves holding Galahad Croft-Jones and listening to Georgie talking about her delivery, what a breeze it was, how Galahad was nearly born in their new BMW, how the maternity hospital staff said he was the loveliest child they’d seen for years, and so on. When they’ve gone we decide we shall privately call the Croft-Jones baby the Holy Grail.
Jude’s having the ultrasound next week. This is a kind of photograph of what’s inside the womb and apparently they can tell if the foetus is normal by the shape or position or something of a fold at the back of its neck. If that’s all right, and for some reason I’m confident it will be, there’ll be no need for an amniocentesis.
Henry had none of this to worry about in his wife’s pregnancies. With babies, in the 1890s, you took what came. There were no tests, beyond, I suppose, swinging a pendulum over the woman’s stomach or trying to detect if she was ‘carrying forwards’. Nor would Henry have been present at the births of his children. Perhaps he paced outside the bedroom door in the tradition of excluded fathers, but somehow I don’t think so. He’d have been relieved the new baby was a boy. A second boy was what he wanted but it wasn’t so that the child could inherit some relative’s money. I’ve made enquiries about the Vincent family and found there was very little money there at all and that the Manaton property was entailed on the late Squire Vincent’s nephew. A son was probably welcome to Henry because he already had four girls. In order to make the family better balanced this child should be male.
The elder one, Alexander (my chain-smoking philandering hedonistic grandfather) was a thriving lusty boy, big for his age, if the many photographs his mother took of him are a guide. She wrote no letters but she recorded the progress of her elder son, the apple of her eye, in pictures that dominate her 1896 to 1900 album. There is one on nearly every page, the legend underneath in her sloping Victorian hand: ‘Alexander aged nine months’ and ‘Alexander one year old today!’ and ‘Alex’ – he is known by his diminutive now – ‘walking at thirteen months, the earliest of the children to walk’.
It was George who was the less healthy one. Had he been sickly from birth and does that account for the prompt baptism? His mother seldom took photographs of him. This may have been because he wasn’t a favourite like Alexander or, more likely, because the few likenesses she took show him as thin and puny. He mostly appears in those sibling groups so dear to the Victorian heart, sitting on a sister’s lap while another sister rests one arm acr
oss the wing of the chair, her head on one side, and all looking soulfully at mother with the camera. Except that George doesn’t look soulful. He wears on his face that indescribable look of suffering and endurance chronically sick children can’t hide, not today or ever. He isn’t well. He has never been quite well and never will be. Tuberculosis has taken hold. Henry mentions it in the notebook. He calls it ‘consumption’.
I very much fear my younger son is a victim of consumption. Fortunately, the air of North London, of much higher elevation than the city itself, is beneficial to this condition. However, I must consider the prospect of Switzerland and its mountains as a possibility for him…
Whether or not he did isn’t known. Though things had changed a lot as far as travelling in Europe was concerned since Henry’s mother rejected the Alps and took the consumptive Billy to the Lake District; nowhere in the diaries or the notebook is any stay in Switzerland set down, nor does Henry, with or without George, apparently repeat his visit to that country of the early eighties. Tuberculosis was incurable, though life could be prolonged by mountain air, rest and, they believed, lack of excitement.
George was born much the same time that Henry would have received his coat of arms from the College of Arms. Maybe I’m conjecturing too much, taking too big a leap in the dark, but isn’t it possible Henry had no compulsion to frame and hang up this beautiful document because worry over his second son made him apathetic? Because he was beginning to see, late in the day, that his family might be more important than objects, however rare and valuable?
It’s a curious thing how often, throughout my family, an only or younger son has died in childhood. There’s no inheritance connection. It has to be coincidence. First there was Billy, dead of tuberculosis at six, and contemporaneous with him, Louisa Henderson’s little brother, the cause of whose death isn’t known, though it may have been scarlet fever. Henry’s son George was destined to die at the age of eleven and his daughter Elizabeth’s son, brother of Vanessa and Veronica, of diphtheria at nine. It suddenly occurs to me that this could account for Patricia Agnew’s nervousness about Veronica’s son, a superstitious dread that boys in the family were fated to die young. The objection there is that they obviously weren’t. How about Henry himself and Lionel Henderson and Alexander and my father?
Lionel had been married for ten years in 1898 and had three sons, all of whom grew up healthy, married and had children. They are vigorously present in David’s tree. His second son, born in 1890, lived into his nineties and died leaving behind him a quiverful of healthy descendants.
Samuel Henderson died a few days after his daughter took a photograph of him with his wife and Elizabeth, Mary and Helena in 1892. His death certificate gives stroke as the cause. He was just sixty, four years older than his son-in-law, Henry. The Providence she so often talked of preserved his widow for another seven years, but she died of ovarian cancer in the last month of the old century.
Queen Victoria had another year to live. She continued to keep Henry at her beck and call. Her health was failing, her eyesight worsening. On 12 January 1901 she wrote in her journal for the last time. It was not Henry but Sir James Reid who took the responsibility of telling Ponsonby’s office that the Queen was ill. She died ten days later, all her surviving children at her bedside.
Princess Beatrice’s husband Henry of Battenberg was also dead. He had succumbed to fever off West Africa in the year Henry got his peerage. After the Queen’s death Henry ceased to be Physician-in-Ordinary to the widowed Princess and her children, only one of whom, the eldest, Drino, Marquess of Carisbrooke, was free of haemophilia. The other two boys, Leopold aged twelve, and Maurice aged ten, both had the disease, the elder being the worse afflicted. In the daughter Ena it was of course concealed. No one could tell whether or not she was a carrier. When she was eighteen, in 1905, Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, came to Britain looking for a bride and his eye first lighted on Princess Patricia, daughter of Queen Victoria’s son Arthur, Duke of Connaught. But, although the chances of her inheriting the throne were remote – dozens of claimants would have got there before her – Princess Patricia was considered too close to the crown to be suitable. Undeterred by the rebuff, Alfonso had another go. This time his choice was Ena.
Henry wrote in his diary in the autumn of 1905, Audience with His Majesty, King Alfonso of Spain. No more than that, no details, no hint at his purpose in meeting the King and no mention in Alternative Henry that he was no longer Ena’s doctor. But in an essay he wrote,
I considered it my bounden duty to warn HM of the risks involved if he persisted with his suit to her Royal Highness the Princess Ena, and did so. I felt from the first he was a young gentleman who would not take advice or listen to counsel even from one speaking on a subject on which he was an acknowledged authority and old enough to be his grandfather. The facts were laid before him. I pointed out to him the cause of the death of HRH Prince Leopold, Princess Ena’s uncle, and the sufferings he endured in his lifetime; I enlightened him as to the delicate health of her two brothers, telling him that they had inherited haemophilia through their mother, who was a conductor and, finally, that though it was not certain the Princess he wished to marry carried the disease, in my opinion the chances of her doing so were very great. Of any children they might have, half the boys were likely to be haemophiliacs and half the girls conductors.
He listened to me but gave no indication he had heard, still less that what I said had any effect on him. I was not thanked. He merely nodded his head to an equerry and indicated that I should leave.
Good God, that any man should knowingly and willingly bring this grief upon himself! Should bring into the world a poor child whose daily lot is pain and incapacity, whose very innocent play may be the cause of torment and disablement, whose tumbles swell and distort his limbs and whose cuts and bruises, the simple hazards of childhood, result in the copious and unstaunchable gushes of blood comparable to those from wounds on the battlefield. I, who have seen it, know. And to consider that this poor fool, this Majesty, will rush headlong into a doom, not for himself but for those who come after him, for no more than a whim, a sudden passion for a girl he scarcely knows, makes me despair of humanity and this world and long, yes, long, to depart.
Very strong words for Henry, weren’t they? Passionate words for once, full of real feeling. Blood is no longer the ichor that once fascinated him to a degree of unhealthy obsession. Throughout a lifetime he had seen haemophilia and what it did, he continues to see it, in his work both in and out of royal households. He has had enough of it and is ready to die. But he has another four years to go, another four years before the heart attack takes him.
As for King Alfonso, he married Ena, in spite of Henry’s warning. Their first son had haemophilia, their second was a deaf mute, the third, probably also a haemophiliac, died at birth, the fifth was a haemophiliac. Only the fourth, father of the present King of Spain, was healthy. Unfortunately for Ena, Spaniards placed great importance on ‘blue blood’ and purity of descent and Queen Ena was blamed for bringing what we should now call defective genes into the Spanish Royal House. A gruesome story, almost certainly apocryphal, went about at the time that a Spanish soldier was sacrificed every day to infuse healthy blood into the King’s haemophiliac sons.
Henry, who would have known about the eldest prince’s inheritance, if not about the subsequent children, may well have remarked that Alfonso had only himself to blame.
14
It’s the House of Lords Bill again, first day of Report Stage, and we’re debating – what? It’s hard to say because what is really happening is that the Opposition is using every chance to delay the passage of the Bill. As the Leader of the House has just said, we seem today to be quoting previous remarks. Not that that’s unusual in any debate in here. Many peers have no compunction about saying the same thing at Third Reading as they said at Second Reading, Committee and Report Stages.
Lord Campbell of Alloway wants the Act not to come into for
ce until the people have approved it in a referendum. This makes me wonder if things will drift off into a discussion, which once happened before, of whether the plural of this increasingly popular word should be ‘referendums’ or ‘referenda’. I remember a bunch of elderly noble lords who ought to have known better hissing ‘Da, da, da!’ when the first construct was used, though Fowler unequivocally recommends it.
We vote on Lord Campbell’s motion and the Not Contents, who are most of us, win. The amendment is accordingly disagreed to. It’s too late for tea, so Lachlan Hamilton and I go to the Peers’ Guest Room for a drink. I tell him about my progress with Henry and mention that sudden unexpected gush of emotion over Alfonso XIII’s refusal to listen to his advice. Lachlan says he’s not surprised, but he means over the refusal not the emotion.
‘Royalty never take advice,’ he says in a voice more gloomy even than usual. ‘They’re taught not to at their mother’s knee. It’s about the only thing their mothers do teach ’em.’
I agree, though I don’t know if this is true or not, and ask him why he thinks Henry got so passionate, he being such a cold fish normally.
‘He’d seen a lot of suffering,’ he says. ‘Bound to, being a doc. Didn’t you tell me he’d a small brother who died young?’ Lachlan has a wonderful memory. ‘And his own boy was delicate, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, but he had tuberculosis.’
‘I daresay he thought it was just a damn’ shame. Alfonso getting wed willy-nilly, I mean. He probably liked kids. Some men do.’ He says this as if it’s a truth scarcely known to society. ‘I do myself. Don’t like to see ’em suffer. No doubt your great-grandpapa thought that poor bloody Alfonso a sort of murderer in advance, if you see what I mean.’ He glares at me. ‘He was under twenty at the time, you know.’