It is still a mystery how the haemophilia gene came into Queen Victoria's family, as this gene mutation helped to bring about the downfall of some of the most powerful Royal Houses of Europe.
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| Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Buckingham Palace, 11 May 1854 |
Evidence shows that up to a third of haemophiliac males do not have a family history of the condition and that the gene mutation, is usually thought to be the result of a relatively high mutation rate occurring in either affected males or female carriers.
Haemophilia mostly affects males, because while females carry the defective gene on one of their X chromosomes, they have another X chromosome which will balance the abnormal gene. Males, however, have only one X chromosome and so they have no way to compensate for the missing clotting factor in the blood, which results in blood that takes days instead of minutes to clot. Of course, nobody is to blame for this, us none of us get to pick our genes.
But how did the haemophilia gene appear in Queen Victoria's family when it was not evident in her family history? Did the mutation appear spontaneously in Victoria's DNA because her father was over 50 years of age when Victoria was born and so his sperm was more likely to have genetic mutations to pass along? Perhaps.
Queen Victoria, who arranged advantageous marriages for her nine children across Europe, was called "the grandmother of Europe", as her descendants became twenty-one reigning monarchs and nineteen consorts. However, haemophilia was to severely damage many of these European Royal Families.
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| Prince Albert, Queen Victoria and their nine children. c.1857 |
Prince Leopold, who was born on 7th April 1853, was the first of Queen Victoria's descendants to suffer from haemophilia; he also had epilepsy. Leopold was a delicate child and he had been "4 or 5 times at death’s door", but he did get married to a German princess, Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont. Sadly, Leopold died at the age of 31, after suffering a seizure and hitting his head, which resulted in a cerebral haemorrhage.
However, Leopold was the only one of Queen Victoria’s descendants with haemophilia to have children, as his marriage to Helena of Waldeck produced two offspring. His daughter, Princess Alice of Albany, was a haemophilia carrier and her son Prince Rupert who was born on 24 August 1907 was a haemophiliac, who died as the result of an intracerebral haemorrhage after a car crash in France. The family title, Earl of Athlone, became extinct in 1957, when Prince Rupert's father died.
Two of Queen Victoria's daughters, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and Beatrice, Princess of Battenberg, were both carriers of haemophilia and they both helped to spread the mutated gene to many of the Royal Families of Europe.
Princess Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt and gave birth to a son, Frederick of Hesse, who had haemophilia; he died at a young age of a brain haemorrhage in 1873 after falling from a window. Two of Alice's daughters, Irene and Alix were also carriers of the haemophilia gene and so when Irene married her first cousin, Prince Henry of Prussia, she passed the disease along to two of their sons, Princes Waldemar, who married but died without children, due a lack of blood transfusion facilities; and Henry of Prussia, who died at the age of four.
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| Prince Leopold and Alice of Albany in 1883 |
Alice's fourth daughter Alix, became Empress Alexandra of Russia when she married Nicholas II—the last ruler of the Russian Empire. Alix gave birth to four daughters before giving birth to their only son, the Tsarevitch Alexis, heir to the Russian throne. Unfortunately, in her desperation to cure her son and heir to the throne, Alix fell under the influence of the faith healer Grigori Rasputin, who believed that he could treat the disease and this helped bring about the end of the Romanov dynasty. The whole family were shot by a Bolshevik firing squad in a cellar at Ekaterinberg on 17th July 1918.
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| Alexandra Fyodorovna (Alix of Hesse) and Nicholas II of Russia. C. 1894 |
Princess Beatrice was Queen Victoria's youngest daughter and she married the dashing Prince Henry of Battenberg and had three sons and a daughter. The two sons, Leopold Mountbatten and Maurice, Prince of Battenburg inherited haemophilia. Lord Leopold died on 23 April 1922 (aged 32), during a hip operation and Maurice died whilst serving in the armed forces during the First World War.
The only daughter of Princess Beatrice, Victoria Eugenie of Battenburg married into the Spanish royal family and became Queen of Spain. Two of her sons were afflicted with haemophilia.
Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, died at the age of 31 after a car accident, when his haemophilia led to fatal internal bleeding. The other son, Infante Gonzalo of Spain died from severe abdominal bleeding after a car crash and he died at age 19.
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| Princess Beatrice in mourning with Queen Victoria C 1880 (coloured photo) |
