Figure 1.--g.

The Queen's discendents suffered from a then strange delusional illness. George III was the best example and passed the disease on to his granddaughter, Victoria. Certainly Victoria exhibited the monarch's traditional antipathy toward the Prince of Wales. According to Morris, She had never in fact entirely forgiven Bertie for what she thought to be his part in Albert's death. Bertie from his youth had been a very diificut child of limited intelectual abilities. After years of difficulty with Bertie, the Prince Consort had caught a cold while scolding Bertie in the rain. Victoria found her first son to be "shiftless and irresponsible," and quite naturally, the Prince and his young wife, like all Hanoverian heirs, formed their own court and society.

That the Queen's anger could sometimes be delusional was known not only by Bertie, but by others in her family as well. Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote that Albert and Victoria's trusted advisor, Baron Stockmar, is alleged to have described the Prince [Albert] as 'completely cowed' and living in perpetual dread of bringing on the 'hereditary malady' in the Queen, the madness of which was then thought to afflict her grandfather, George III, now known to be the disease called porphyria. Moreover, Lady Elizabeth Longford wrote that as early as 1858, rumors were spread that the Queen was deranged: The old legend which had been revived in 1858 burst again into vicious activity. The Queen was mad .... A letter from Vicky warned the Prince Consort of 'monstrous reports' circulating in Germany that Mama was attended by all the doctors of Europe! In the scientific times of the mid-19th century madness was an understandable explanation for evidence that would be inexplicable otherwise. Darker rumors of family ills worse than madness were circulating as well. These whisperings told of a blood curse and its horrible consequences upon Victoria, Albert, their family and their heirs.

If there were a curse upon the Saxe-Coburg family, no greater agent of misfortune could be found than the dreaded disease hemophilia. The disease hemophilia occurs when plasma in the blood lacks the normal clotting material in its globulin fraction, slowing the coagulation time of the blood and causing the victim to bleed to death. This illness was discovered in 1803 by a U.S. physician, Dr. John C. Otto of Philadelphia, only a few years before Victoria's birth. Dr. Otto wrote, "It is a strange affliction . . . although the females are exempt, they are still capable of transmitting it to their male children ("Hemophilia"). "

The marriage of Victoria and Albert marked the beginning of hemophilia in the British royal line that would eventually infect most of the royal houses of Europe, earning the title of "the royal disease." Queen Victoria herself was mystified by its occurrence, first in her eighth child, Prince Leopold, and then subsequently in her grandchildren through her daughters Vicky, Alice and Beatrice. According to Lady Elizabeth Longford, "A cloud of worry and bewilderment henceforth overhung the Queen caused by her oft-repeated and perfectly correct belief that hemophilia was "not in our family"--meaning the House of Hanover. Where did it come from?"

Theo Aronson suggests that it occurred through spontaneous genetic mutation when first cousins Victoria and Albert married. Longford speculates: The Queen may have inherited the genes through her mother, the Duchess of Kent, a princess of Saxe-Coburg. This seems unlikely since no instance of hemophilia can be traced on either side of the Duchess's family, and yet no evidence of hemophilia can be found in the Duke's family either. Nevertheless, there it was in Victoria and Albert's children. Prince Leopold was the only victim among their children and therefore the only male transmitter. Three of the daughters, the Princess Royal, Princess Alice, and Princess Beatrice, were transmitters and their marriages spread the disease through the royal houses of Europe.

As Victoria watched this scourge fell her own son Prince Leopold, then grandsons, then great-grandsons, the most powerful woman in the world could only lament, "Our poor family seems persecuted by this awful disease." [Aronson, 172] The first to actually die of hemophilia was Prince Leopold in 1884, at the age of only 29 years.

Created: February 26, 1999
Last updated: June 18, 2001