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When Queen Victoria of England was seventeen, she met one of her many cousins, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. She fell deeply in love with him, and several years later, when they were both twenty years old, Victoria proposed to Albert.
They were married on February 11, 1840; both were deliriously happy, and Victoria made Albert Prince Consort, giving him an equal say in the running of the country. What neither of them knew at the time was that Victoria was carrying the gene for hemophilia.
Hemophilia is a blood disorder that affects approximately one in every 10,000 males. This ratio is consistent in all races and geographical areas. Hemophilia is a genetic blood-clotting deficiency. Women carry the defective genes and transmit the disease to their sons, but almost never suffer from the disease themselves. There is no way to predict how many males in any given family will be stricken with hemophilia, and as the gene can remain hidden for as many as six generations, some parents are baffled when told that their son is a victim of the disease. Also, genes can spontaneously mutate, which appears to be the case with either Victoria herself or her father, the Duke of Kent, who passed the X chromosome to her at conception.
Victoria bore nine children. The first two, Victoria and Edward, were perfectly healthy. The third, Alice, and the ninth, Beatrice, were carriers of the hemophilia gene. The eighth, Leopold, was a hemophiliac. The first signs of the disease appeared shortly after his birth, leading Victoria to exclaim, “This disease is not in our family!” She became overprotective of her son, coddling him and hovering over him as many parents of ill children do. As he grew into adulthood, however, he understandably wanted more freedom, and snuck off to party when he could. He married the German princess Helen of Waldeck, but they had just two years of happiness. Gambling in Cannes, Leopold fell, hit his head, and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 31.
Victoria’s youngest daughter, Beatrice, passed the hemophilia gene on to her granddaughter, Victoria-Eugenie, who married King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Of the four sons she bore him, two, Alfonso, who later became King, and Gonzalo, had hemophilia.
Most fatefully, Victoria’s second daughter, Alice, passed the gene on to two of her daughters, one of whom, Alix, married Czar Nicholas of Russia in 1894. Alix bore the Emperor four daughters before finally giving birth to a son and heir, Alexis, on August 12, 1904. The parents were ecstatic, but a short time later, they were devastated to learn that the boy was hemophiliac. Alexis was probably the most pampered and protected heir in history, carried by huge bodyguards wherever he went, but his parents couldn’t stop every accident from happening. Many times Alexis suffered such extreme pain from internal bleeding that he would pass out, and several times he almost died.
The Empress was driven nearly insane trying to protect her son, and turned to the evil monk Grigory Rasputin for comfort. Soon Rasputin was giving her advice not only on her son, but on the way the country should be run. This combined with her German blood turned the Russian people against her and the Czar, and on October 17, 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution began, changing the course of history and destroying the lives of millions of people.
Although it is treatable, there is still no cure for hemophilia.
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