How Queen Victoria Spread Haemophilia Through Europe’s Royal Families | what was the royal disease?

This is the tragic story of a royal blood curse, of how Queen Victoria spread haemophilia throughout Europe's royal families, causing untold misery to her descendants and even contributing to the downfall of the Russian monarchy, all thanks to a rare mutation in her DNA which made her a genetic time bomb from the moment she was born. Make sure you stay till the end as I'll also be revealing if the tragic Russian Grand Duchesses, daughters of the last Tsar, would have been at risk of passing this illness to their children if they hadn't been murdered before they had the chance. Before we dig in, if you love history content based on an analysis of primary sources and not sensationalist clickbait garbage that spreads misinformation, please consider liking and this video and subscribing to my channel with the notification bell switched on so you never miss an upload. It's all totally free and it really helps the channel. Haemophilia is an inherited blood disorder, whereby those who have it either have very low or even non-existent levels of one of the clotting factor proteins that our blood needs to clot after an injury. Without modern treatments, this makes it very hard, sometimes impossible, for sufferers to stop bleeding once hurt. There are two types of haemophilia. Type A is a deficiency of the factor VIII protein. Type B is much more rare and is caused by a deficiency of the factor IX protein. It is also called Christmas disease because the very first patient diagnosed specifically with that type in 1952 was called Stephen Christmas. Victoria was passing down Type B as a much later analysis of Nowadays, the illness can be effectively treated with average life expectancies close to normal according to a study run in the Netherlands between 2001 and 2018. But prior to the 20th century, successful treatments were not an option and that is what made it a curse on those who had it, as the simplest little bump or cut could cause death by either internal or external bleeding. Average life expectancy for those with the condition was just 13 years old at the turn of that century. The only real treatment options available were being excessively careful to try to avoid all injuries and applying pressure and straps to areas once they were injured and praying that the wound would eventually clot on its own before death occurred. As the 20th century progressed, blood transfusions from a family member and even diluted snake venom were used as well. But in 1960, average life expectancy for a severe case was still only 20 years and it was only in the 1970s that more modern treatments with donated blood plasma were invented. As a pretty rare disorder which killed most of its sufferers before they could reproduce and pass their genes on, it probably wouldn't be as well known about as it is but for the fact that in the Victoria was born in 1819, the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and his wife, also called Victoria. She was the product of the Royal Baby Race which had begun after the death and child birth of her cousin and second in line to the throne, Princess Charlotte of Wales along with baby son in November 1817. See my video all about that race and how Victoria ultimately got the throne despite the odds being stacked against her which I'll leave linked below for you. In 1837, she inherited the crown from her uncle, William IV and in February 1840, she married her maternal first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The couple conceived immediately and would ultimately have an impressive nine children, all of whom survived into adulthood. They were Princess Victoria, the Princess Royal, born in 1840, the future Edward VII, born in 1841, Princess Alice, born in 1843, Prince Alfred, born in 1844 and Princess Helena, born in 1846. I know some people say Helena but the current princess usually has this as one of her middle names and she pronounces it Helena so that's what I'm going with. Next came Princess Louise, born in 1848, then Prince Arthur, born in 1850, Prince Leopold, born in 1853 and Princess Beatrice, born in 1857. Albert then died in December 1861 to Victoria's great grief and I'll leave my episode all about his demise linked for you. Now Queen Victoria did not have haemophilia and there is absolutely no way she could have known that she was at risk of passing the gene for it to her children. Furthermore, it was a long way into her and Albert's reproductive career before the problem became apparent. Because of all their children, it was only number eight, Prince Leopold, who actually had the illness. It would then turn out later on that at least two of his sisters, Princesses Alice and Beatrice, were carriers of the faulty gene that causes it as well, as they passed it to some of their children. Of the remaining girls, Princess Louise never had children so we don't know if she was a carrier and her other sisters might have been and just got lucky by not passing it to their children. Though I find that level of luck unlikely as the Princess Royal had eight children and Princess Helena had five, including two sons who definitely lived long enough for symptoms of the disease to present if they had it and another who lived eight days, which might be long enough for the illness to present depending on its severity. You'll hear later about a baby whose condition was obvious from the moment the umbilical cord was cut, for instance. To better understand how the condition is passed from parent to child, here's a quote from the bleeding.org website which says that Haemophilia is inherited in an X-linked recessive manner. Females inherit two X chromosomes, one from their mother and one from their father, XX. Males inherit an X chromosome from their mother and a Y chromosome from their father, XY. That means if a son inherits an X chromosome carrying Haemophilia from his mother, he will have Haemophilia. It also means that fathers cannot pass Haemophilia onto their sons. That's because fathers have to pass their Y chromosome to their boys. There's nowhere else for that Y chromosome to come from except dad. But because daughters have two X chromosomes, even if they inherit the Haemophilia gene from their mother, most likely they will inherit a healthy X chromosome from their father and not have Haemophilia. A daughter who inherits an X chromosome that contains the gene for Haemophilia is called a carrier. She can pass the gene onto her children. Switching to the Haemophilia.org.uk website for a moment, it also explains that in extremely rare cases it is possible for a daughter to inherit two faulty Haemophilia genes. This happens when the father has Haemophilia and the mother is a carrier, so the daughter inherits an affected X chromosome from both parents. It's probably easier to understand all this information if we look at the various combinations of X and Y chromosomes that you can get from your parents. With a mother and father who both have Haemophilia, all their children will also have it, as there's nowhere for them to get a healthy X chromosome from. With a mother who is a carrier and a father who does not have Haemophilia, there is a 25% chance of a daughter who is a carrier, a 25% chance of a daughter who is not, a 25% chance of a son with the illness because he inherited his mother's faulty X chromosome and that's the only X chromosome he got, and a 25% chance of a healthy boy who inherited his mother's good X chromosome instead of her mutated one. With a mother who is a carrier and a father who has Haemophilia, there is a 25% chance of a daughter who has Haemophilia and is therefore also a carrier, a 25% chance of a daughter who doesn't have Haemophilia but is still a carrier, a 25% chance of a son who has Haemophilia and a 25% chance of a healthy son. With a Haemophiliac father and a healthy mother, all daughters will be carriers while any sons will be healthy. So we can tell from this that the gene for Haemophilia came from Victoria and not from Albert as he didn't have Haemophilia but one of his sons did and boys have to inherit their X chromosomes from their mother. Though their children were slightly inbred given their parents' close blood relationship, this had nothing to do with the appearance of the Haemophiliac gene in at least a third of them. However, as I've said, it also wasn't previously present in the Royal House of Hanover from which Victoria sprang. So where did it come from? There is a theory you'll see trotted out every so often that Queen Victoria was the daughter of her mother's long-term advisor, Sir John Conroy, and that it was through his DNA that she inherited the gene for Haemophilia. However, there is no credible evidence for this. Conroy did not have the disease, yet for him to pass it to her, he would have had to be ill himself, something which could not have been hidden and which would have made him surviving to the age of 67 extremely unlikely. He'd have been a medical marvel actually. I've also never found any evidence of it in his wider family. Equally unlikely is the idea that the Duchess of Kent found some other Haemophiliac to sleep with who had miraculously made it to adulthood and who she thought it would be a good idea to have an affair with. Furthermore, I for one see a family resemblance between Victoria and the Duke of Kent, and though it is true that he produced no children with the long-term mistress he had before his marriage, this may well have been an I see no reason to assume that he wouldn't have been able to get his wife pregnant, and apparently neither did he, otherwise he wouldn't have entered into the royal baby race. So put simply, Victoria was just unlucky. By far the most popular explanation for her having the faulty gene is a spontaneous mutation in her DNA, which accounts for about a third of cases and which was possibly affected by the age of her father at the time she was conceived, as he was then 50 years old, and the necessary mutation is more common in the children of older fathers. There's also a chance that the mutation instead occurred in his wife, and Princess Victoria was the only one of her three children it was passed on to. If you ever see anyone claiming that the Queen had this gene because her mother was unfaithful however and offering no other explanation, steer clear of them, they've either failed to do basic research or they're cherry picking the evidence. So we've established the most likely explanation for Victoria's acquisition of the mutated gene. Now let's look at the havoc it wreaked on some of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and at why the royal houses of Europe don't still have the illness today. We'll start with Prince Leopold, born in 1853 and the only one of her brood who actually had the illness. His condition became obvious when he was two and suffered very bad facial swelling after a fall which took far longer to heal than was normal. It was a while before he was properly diagnosed, remember that the condition is very rare, was only just starting to be understood and had not been seen in the family before, and had she known what was wrong with him his mother would presumably not have suggested he be whipped for misbehaviour when he was a tot as that would have amounted to murder. He continued to suffer bad nosebleeds and swollen joints after only minor bumps and on the 26th of August 1856, when he was just three years old, the Queen told her uncle, Leopold, King of the Belgians that, This unfortunate defect is often not outgrown and no remedy or medicine does it any good. The child was having a pretty miserable life. When he was in Germany the following year, he injured the inside of his mouth with a steel pen and a doctor had to be brought in from Berlin to cauterise the wound. His health was further impeded by the fact that he also had epilepsy, but it was the haemophilia that was the most serious danger. There was a bowel haemorrhage in late 1867 which nearly killed him and soon after, in 1868, his condition became public knowledge when it was reported in the British Medical Journal and in English newspapers. The cycle of internal and external bleeds and horrific pain continued for the rest of his life, often leaving him bedridden for weeks at a time or needing to be carried around and using morphine for pain relief. Several times he was close to death, including in the winter of 1874 into 1875, and in 1880 he slipped and hurt his knee, keeping him off his feet for months. Truly, the fact that he survived as long as he did is a testament to how much care was taken of him, though he found his mother's attentions to be overbearing and often strained against the rules and servants she had put in place to mind him and stop him doing things like riding a horse at any more than walking speed or standing too long. By this point, doctors had long since figured out from looking at other families with the disease that women tended to be carriers while men were sufferers and began to advise them all against marriage and reproduction. Still though, Leopold opted to marry Princess Helen of Valdeck on the 27th of April 1882. She quickly became pregnant, giving birth to their daughter Alice in February 1883 and was pregnant again by the end of the year, but Leopold would never see his second child. He travelled to Cannes in early 1884, hoping that the warmer weather would help his health, only to fall on a staircase and die from the haemorrhage and epileptic fit this injury caused on the 20th of March that year. He was just shy of his 31st birthday. His remains were brought home and interred at St George's Chapel, Windsor, and Helen gave birth to their son Charles on the 19th of July. Both children were healthy, but Alice turned out to be a carrier and she passed the illness on to her son, Prince Rupert of Teck. He died in a car accident at the age of 20 in 1928 and without having had any children of his own. Alice's other surviving child, Princess May, was apparently not a carrier. That then is how haemophilia played out in Prince Leopold's line. Let's turn now to his two known carrier sisters, whose malfunctioning X chromosomes would have a far more drastic impact on world history. Princess Alice married Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse-by-Rhine in 1862 and with him had seven children. Her eldest daughter, Victoria, was not a carrier of haemophilia. Her second, Elizabeth, had no children. Her third, Irene, turned out to be a carrier. Her fourth child was a healthy boy named Ernest, but her fifth was a boy named Friedrich who was born in 1870 and who had haemophilia. Tragically, he died at the age of two after falling out a window. Friedrich was the first child in the family since his uncle Leopold to display symptoms of haemophilia and his birth confirmed that the disease was running in the family and that healthy women were passing it to their offspring. Leopold could no longer be passed off as just a fluke. Alice's sixth child was her daughter Alex, later Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. It would eventually transpire that she too was a carrier of haemophilia, with terrible results. Alice's last child was a born in 1874. She died of diphtheria aged four in November 1878. Princess Alice soon came down with the illness too, whilst comforting her son after she told him of the loss of his sister in early December. She died on the anniversary of her own father's death on the 14th of December 1878, aged only 35. She left behind two daughters who were carrying the haemophilia gene. When they married and had children, it passed into the next generation, the great-grandchildren of Victoria. Alice's third daughter Irene married her maternal first cousin Prince Henry of Prussia, a child of the Princess Royal, and with him had three sons. The oldest, Prince Voldemar, and the youngest, Prince Heinrich, both had haemophilia. Tragically, Heinrich died in 1904 at the age of four, after falling and bumping his head. His big brother Voldemar lived to be 56 and did marry but had no children and died in 1945. Like Prince Leopold's descendants, this haemophiliac line had now gone extinct. Alice's other daughter, Alex, married Tsar Nicholas of Russia and by him had four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and one son. That son, Tsarevich Alexei, was the youngest of the family and was desperately wanted as Russia would not allow a woman to accede to the throne. His birth in 1904 was a source of great joy for the family, but Alex and Nikki's happiness and relief turned to horror within minutes, for when the baby's umbilical cord was cut, his navel bled for hours and he was in considerable pain. The reason was obvious, the long-awaited heir had haemophilia. Of all the descendants of Queen Victoria who had this blood disorder, it was Alexei of Russia's illness which was to have the most serious and world-changing consequences. The Tsar and Tsarina kept the diagnosis completely private for as long as possible, even from other family members, and were obsessive about keeping their son safe, for even a bump or a nosebleed could have killed him. He had to be carried around much of the time, but still there were accidents and near-death experiences for him and the little boy suffered absolutely excruciating pain when he hemorrhaged. It was truly awful for both him and his parents. In her desperation to improve her son's condition or at least ease his suffering, Alex turned to the disreputable mystic Grigori Rasputin. He did seem to have the ability, which we still can't fully explain today, though there are lots of theories about what he did, to make Alexei better, and the Tsarina in particular came to rely on him. He was hated by the Russian elite though, who greatly resented the influence he had over the imperial couple, and the connection between him and the royal family did irreparable damage to Alex's personal reputation and to the Russian monarchy in general. Though Rasputin was assassinated in December 1916, this damage could not be reversed, and the widespread low opinion of the Tsar and Tsarina, which their association with him had partly caused, was one of the many reasons behind the overthrow of the monarchy the following year. The former royals were imprisoned and eventually all were murdered together in July 1918, when Alexei was 13, then ultimately buried in two pits in the nearby forest, having been terribly mutilated, burned and doused in acid. When Alexei's remains were finally rediscovered in 2007 and DNA tested, scientists were finally able to confirm that the haemophilia running through the royal family had been Type B. Had this boy been healthy and the Russian succession secure, it is unlikely that Rasputin would ever have wormed his way into the Romanov royal family, and perhaps things would have turned out very differently for them. As for the Tsarevich's sisters, DNA analysis of their remains indicated that Olga, Tatiana and what is assumed to be Maria were fine, the bones were so damaged that it was hard to tell the difference between Maria and her younger sister, but the remains believed to be those of Grand Duchess Anastasia indicate that she was a carrier. For more on the family's terrible fate, see my video on their deaths, burials and rediscovery, which I'll leave linked for you. Coming back to Queen Victoria's youngest child, Princess Beatrice. She married Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885, and with him had four children. Alexander, who was healthy, Victoria Eugenie, who turned out to be a carrier, Leopold, who was named after his maternal uncle and also had haemophilia, and Maurice, who some secondary sources say had haemophilia, but I couldn't find this confirmed and I doubt he'd have been allowed to join the army in World War One if that had been the case, so I'm going to assume he didn't have it. It was in the line of duty, by the way, that he died in October 1914, having been hit by a shell east of Zonbrek. His older brother Leopold died in 1922 during a knee operation, having not had any children. It was therefore through their sister, Princess Victoria Eugenie, that the illness continued to spread, this time into the Spanish royal family, for she married King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1906 and became the country's queen until 1931 when that monarchy was deposed. It was restored in 1975 with her grandson becoming King Juan Carlos I. She and King Alfonso had seven children, one of whom was stillborn. The oldest and youngest were both boys and they both had haemophilia. The eldest was another Alfonso and he actually renounced his claim to the throne to marry a commoner, who he then divorced, and who he had no children by, nor did he have any with his second wife. He died as the result of a car crash in 1938, aged 31. His youngest sibling, his brother Gonzalo, was the other haemophiliac in the Spanish royal family, but he had already died in 1934, aged 19, also in a car crash. Neither of their two sisters turned out to be carriers of the illness and so it went no further in the Spanish royal family. So let's sum all of this up and then ask why don't the royals of Europe have the illness anymore? Only three of Victoria's nine children were known to be affected by the faulty X chromosome. One had haemophilia, the others were carriers. Two of her 42 grandchildren had the illness, with four more known carriers. Six of her great-grandchildren had it, out of a total of 87. When you look at it like that, you realise that actually only a small percentage of the British Queen's descendants were affected, despite how famous the royal disease has become, and there were a lot of reasons this dodgy X chromosome wasn't able to do any further damage. First and foremost is the fact that the rest of Victoria's children were either definitely unaffected, as in the case of the boys and the Princess Royal, had no children, as in the case of Princess Louise, so even if she was a carrier, the gene stopped with her, or like Princess Helena, had healthy children who then produced no children of their own, bar one illegitimate granddaughter, and that girl came from Helena's healthy son. We have to acknowledge the possibility that Helena was a carrier and passed it to her girls, making them carriers too, but as they didn't have children, the illness was stopped in its tracks on that family line. Second was the deliberate attempt by some members of the family not to procreate with other tainted, in inverted commas, lines. This also helped to stall the illness's spread. The Princess Royal cautioned her eldest son, the future Kaiser Wilhelm for instance, against marrying his first cousin, a daughter of Princess Alice, in case of her passing the illness to their children. This was a wise decision, though sadly not one abided by at other times, for as we've already seen, when Wilhelm's brother Heinrich did marry one of Alice's daughters, Irene, who was indeed a carrier, she gave the illness to two of their children. The final big reason Europe's royals no longer have this illness is one which I hope this video has made clear throughout, and it is that many sufferers and or potential carriers died before they could pass it on any further. The loss of all five of the Romanov children in 1918 is the starkest example of this, as it terminated Zarina Alexandra's infected line in one fell swoop. Had her carrier daughter and haemophiliac son been able to have children of their own, haemophilia might have been perpetuated much wider and for much longer in the There were other women, like Princess Louise though, who may have been carriers, but who didn't have children for one reason or another. As for the actual haemophiliacs in the family, most died as youngsters or young adults before they could procreate. From the time it first appeared in the royal line with Prince Leopold in 1853 to its extinction in the family was only 92 years. Of course, the greatest tragedy of this whole story is that most, if not all, of the nine haemophiliacs we've looked at in this video would likely have survived the injuries which killed them if only they had access to modern medicine. But we have to remember that the last descendant of Queen Victoria to suffer from the illness was her great-grandson, Prince Voldemar of Prussia, who died in 1945, still well before modern treatments were available. It's really only since the 1970s that it's become more and more common for a high percentage of sufferers to live long enough to procreate. The brutal realities of natural selection have likely helped to keep haemophilia rates very low over the course of human history, and the experiences of the royal families of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries are a perfect case study of this phenomenon. I hope you enjoyed that trek through the fallout from the genetic time bomb that Queen Victoria's blood. If you'd like to get more from me, you can become a YouTube member by clicking the join button under videos to get members-only posts and badges next to your name in the comments, or head on over to patreon.com forward slash history calling where I release even more bonus content including extra podcasts and early access to ad-free videos. For those of you with Irish ancestry, there's also my book, Find Your Irish Ancestors Online, available from Amazon as an ebook and paperback and linked below. While you can get free bonuses if you join my mailing list on my website historycallingofficial.com, after which you'll receive my newsletter plus two complimentary downloads. Let me know in the comments if you think the royal families of Europe should have made different decisions about who to marry once it became known that Victoria's descendants had or might carry haemophilia, or were their choices to continue marrying and breeding with such descendants understandable for the time. To learn more about royal DNA, watch one of these videos next, or for more on Victoria, see my episode all about what's in her coffin aside from her. Whatever you choose, please enjoy, and until next time, keep learning.