Curious Chapbooks & Hysterical Histories

Chapter 2

THE BAD BLOOD of the HANOVERS

Queen Victoria was the last of the House of Hanover, a family that the poet Shelley characterized as "blind in blood ('England in 1819')." There was certainly some senseless impulse to violence and cruelty that ran rampant in the family character. The Hanovers were notorious for their brutality and systematic cruelties. Victoria's own father was a sadist who was removed from his military post at Malta because of his zest for flogging soldiers: "For a small fault in dress a hundred lashes; for greater misdemeanors five hundred (Creston, 28)." Worse still was his own brother, Ernest, the Duke of Cumberland, "who was believed guilty of frightful crimes, not excluding murder, and of incest with one of his sisters (Woodham-Smith, 5)." Even Bertie, Victoria's son and heir, was notorious as a child for his cruelty to servants (Harrison, 17).

Less well known is the effect of such behavior. The Prince of Wales' own wet nurse, Mary Ann Brough, became "morose and stupid" and, shortly after nursing Bertie's younger brother Leopold, went on to murder her own six children, an act that "preyed upon Queen Victoria's conscience (Longford, 235)."

This bad blood in the family can be traced back to its founder, George I. The Hanover dynasty in England began when George I assumed the throne after the death of Queen Anne in 1714. With the dynasty he founded, George I left a legacy of hate and mistrust, which repeatedly manifested itself through the generations in hostility toward the wife and in vicious attacks upon the first-born son.

George I began the family feud when he divorced his wife and imprisoned her in a castle in Germany. Their young son had to be stopped from swimming in the moat to be with his mother. As the boy grew to be a man, he resented his father. George I, in turn, feared and resented his son. At one point the King had the Prince of Wales arrested on the pretext of the son's insulting the Duke of Newcastle (Morris, 317). Likewise, when the Prince of Wales in time became George II, he too despised and mistreated his own son, Frederick, who antagonized his father by forming with William Pitt his own opposition cabinet in defiance to the King (329). In time the crown passed to George III, who once attempted to strangle his son, the Prince Regent, though Morris observes that this "could have been mere Hanoverian fatherly feeling (339)."

Jean Morris describes this peculiar family trait as almost genetic. According to Morris, "the loathing between the head of the House of Hanover and his eldest son . . . was like a hereditary disease, for it extended through the generations regardless of personalities or politics (316)."

Actually, the problem with the Hanovers was genetic; it was the hereditary disease of porphyria. Porphyria is a rare inherited blood disorder cause by the accumulation of porphyrians in the body, which cause the urine to turn purple and can lead to disfiguring hair growth, skin rashes, photosensitivity and insanity. The mental breakdown of George III is just the prime example of the illness, which Cecil Woodham-Smith claims was brought into the English royal family by the great-great grandmother of George I, Mary Queen of Scots (79).

This strange delusional illness was passed on from George III to his granddaughter, Queen Victoria. Certainly Victoria exhibited the monarch's traditional antipathy toward the Prince of Wales. According to Morris, "She had never in fact entirely forgiven him [Bertie] for what she thought to be his part in Albert's death [The Prince Consort caught a cold while scolding Bertie in the rain] (395)." Furthermore, 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 (Morris, 395)."

That the Queen's anger could sometimes be delusional was known not only by Bertie, but also by others in her family as well. Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote that their 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 (403)." 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 (292)!" In the scientific times of the mid-nineteenth 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.

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