Curious Chapbooks & Hysterical Histories

Chapter 4

THE BLEEDING SICKNESS

If there were a curse upon the Saxe-Coburg family, no greater agent of misfortune could be found than the dreaded disease hemophilia. 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 (235)?"

Theo Aronson suggests that it occurred through spontaneous genetic mutation when first cousins Victoria and Albert married (172). 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 (235).

As Victoria watched this scourge fell her own son, 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 die of hemophilia was Leopold in 1884, at the age of twenty-nine. Raised as an invalid, Prince Leopold had to fight his doting mother for any chance to live an adult life. His mother thought it unnecessary for him to live in a home of his own, to marry or to have children. Though Queen Victoria kept close watch, Leopold would occasionally escape curfew to kick up his heels. Unfortunately, his last escapade was in Monte Carlo where, suffering a fall at a roulette table, he bled to death from internal hemorrhaging.

Princess Beatrice, or Baby, was Queen Victoria's youngest child. She stayed home with her mother all her life. Even her marriage to the minor princeling Henry of Battenberg did not remove her from Victoria's side. A painfully shy person, Princess Beatrice was known to rest "her shoulder against her neighbor's at dinner (Longford, 477)." She was devastated by her husband's death in 1896 in Africa during the Boer War. After her mother's death in 1901, Beatrice lived for her children, principally her daughter, Victoria Eugenie. Mother and daughter shared much in common and, significantly, both were transmitters of hemophilia, as became known after Victoria Eugenie became Queen Ena of Spain. On May 31, 1906, Ena married Alfonso XIII of Spain. In 1907 she produced an heir, Prince Austrias, who was hemophiliac. A second son, born the following year, was a deaf mute. Another was stillborn. Two daughters and one son were born healthy, but Ena's last child was a hemophiliac as well (Aronson, 179).

Although King Alfonso inherited a strong throne and was himself one of the few absolute monarchs of Europe in the twentieth century, Spain itself was seething with revolutionary tendencies. Ena and Alfonso's own wedding procession had been disrupted by an anarchist's bomb. Throughout the country people were lobbying for more representative rule. Therefore, the weak blood of the Prince Austrias and his brothers played a significant role in weakening the power of the throne. Alfonso did not help matters himself. After a disastrous war with Morocco in 1921, Alfonso dissolved the Spanish parliament to form a military dictatorship with General Primo de Rivera in 1923.

Finally, in 1931, when elections were permitted, there were enough Republican votes to force King Alfonso to relinquish his absolute powers. "I renounce nothing of my rights," he wrote in a brief manifesto, "because rather than my own, they are a deposit accumulated by history (Aronson, 284)." Bold words! Nevertheless, immediately after writing them the King left for Paris, leaving his family behind. Ena stayed the night with her children in the cavernously empty Palacio Real since two of her sons were too sick to move. Mobs gathered outside the palace walls shouting, "Viva la Repulica!" A truck was driven into the palace doors attempting to break it down. Partisans climbed the facade and hung a Republican flag from the balcony. With the help of a loyal squad of Hussars, Queen Ena and her family made a mad scramble for the rail yards to join King Alfonso in Paris. Prince Austrias, the heir apparent, was too weak to move and had to be carried on board the train (Aronson, 285).

Long before this painful exile took pace, Queen Victoria defended her approval of Beatrice's Battenberg marriage by saying, "If there were no fresh blood, the royal race would degenerate morally and physically (Longford, 479)." Unfortunately for Queen Ena, being half Battenberg was not enough to avert the family curse.

Another of Victoria's grandchildren through which hemophilia would bring down a royal throne was Princess Alexandra of Hesse, who married Nicholas II of Russia. Her own mother, Alice, died when she was small, so Alecky (or Sunny as she was called) came to live with her grandmother, Queen Victoria. Victoria had hopes that her pretty little granddaughter would marry "the heir but one" to the British throne, Prince Albert Victor, Bertie's son. It would have been a splendid match for an insignificant German princess who was an orphan at that. To everyone's dismay, Alexandra rejected Eddie, then, to everyone's surprise, accepted the proposal of marriage from the Russian Tsarevich Nicolai. Victoria feared the worst. In a letter to Alexandra's older sister, Princess Louis of Battenberg, the Queen of England wrote, "My blood runs cold when I think of her so young most likely placed on that very unsafe throne . . . She has no parents and I am her only grandparent and I feel I have a claim on her (Hibbert, 329)!"

History proved the Queen's fears to be justified. Though a happy marriage, it was a disastrous union. Nicholas and Alexandra brought tragedy to themselves, their children and their country, and all through the strangest of means. Like her mother, Alice, Alexandra was a carrier of hemophilia. The young Tsarevich was a sufferer, and yet it was not so much the bleeding sickness that brought about the tragedy of their lives as it was the weird, hysterical mysticism this disease drove them to seek.

From the very beginning of their marriage, misfortune haunted them. More than 3,000 injuries were sustained by onlookers during Nicholas's coronation. Then 300 souls were lost when a ship, decorated in his honor, suddenly sank at Kiev. According to Rene Fulop-Miller:

These ominous happenings at the time of his accession and coronation were the beginnings of an almost unbroken series of disasters; fresh misfortunes dogged his steps in a hundred different forms and variations. As if subject to an inevitable curse, all Nikolai's enactments, however well meant they might be, turned out badly (84).

The royal disease of hemophilia explains in part the disastrous reign of Nicholas and Alexandra. Yet it does not explain enough. There was a curse as well.

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