Royal Babylon (7 page)

There were many such occasions when George IV convinced himself that he was dying. He would fake a terminal illness over the most trivial ailment, and intermittently threatened suicide. He regaled Maria Fitzherbert with forty-page suicide notes to get her to agree to marry him. When he became Prince Regent in February 1811 he suffered three epileptic fits; he was almost exactly the same age George III was when he had his first mysterious “attack.” In fact, many of his symptoms were uncannily similar to those experienced by his father, but he was always very careful to keep quiet about them. When he was given news of victory at Waterloo in 1815, he became hysterical and had to be tranquilized with a large quantity of brandy.

Although he had never set foot abroad throughout the war with Napoleon and spent most of it cowering in his Brighton Pavilion, years later he would embarrass his ministers by claiming he had fought at Waterloo. He would also describe how he had helped to win the Battle of Salamanca by leading a charge of dragoons disguised as General Bock. A favorite anecdote was
how he had ridden the horse Fleur-de-Lys in the Goodwood Cup, an astonishing claim given that he was so obese that he was incapable of mounting a horse at all without being lifted into the saddle with a complicated mechanism involving cranks, winches, platforms and rollers. Were these fantastic stories the lies of a drunken braggart, or were they, as Wellington and others believed, the fantasies of a madman?

George IV was an incredibly thick-skinned individual. Most of the time his powers of self-delusion served him well because it helped him avoid the painful truth about his own massive unpopularity. He was, however, like Bavaria's mad Ludwig II, uncharacteristically sensitive about speculation that he might be insane. When
The Sunday Times
speculated that he might be suffering from a hereditary mental illness, George went berserk. He demanded that the Attorney General prosecute them immediately and pressed the Home Secretary to treble the duty on all Sunday newspapers. He became increasingly paranoid about rumors that his father's condition was hereditary.

We can make informed guesses about the nature of George III's illness because his medical history was written down in great detail, but this was not the case with George IV. Although he consistently feigned illness to get his own way, whenever he became genuinely ill the details were always deliberately hidden from the public. He banned royal health bulletins because, he said, they only led to gossip.

At best, George IV's brother King William IV, the former Duke of Clarence, was a transient eccentric who left no mark on the monarchy. Many of his contemporaries, however, were privately convinced that he was as mad as his father. He frequently made a fool of himself in the House of Lords with
rambling, muddled speeches in defense of slavery and, perversely for a man with at least ten bastards, pious attacks on adulterers. Most of the politicians who had dealings with the ill-educated and boorish “Sailor King” were of the opinion that he was an inadequate and embarrassing old man who was completely out of his depth and should have been left at sea. A large minority, however, took the more serious view that his confused behavior was another sign of the hereditary family insanity.

         

William's niece Queen Victoria displayed obvious signs of manic-depressive illness after the death of Prince Albert. Her mourning was so intense and her behavior so erratic that some of her ministers thought her ghoulish cult of Prince Albert was a sign of something more sinister and that she, like George III, had lost her mind. The widowed Queen contemplated suicide and then spent the best part of forty years wearing black mourning clothes. She once scolded her eldest son for writing to her on paper that had insufficiently thick black borders. The Queen retained all of Albert's personal equerries and grooms to keep his rooms exactly as he had left them. Every evening hot water was taken to his chambers and fresh clothes were laid out on his bed. She commissioned a portrait of her daughter Alice painted as a nun in the presence of a vision of the recently deceased Albert.

Her closest adviser and mentor, Baron Stockmar, was convinced that Victoria had become mentally unhinged. He recalled that on the death of her own mother the Queen's reaction had been similarly intense, albeit more briefly. The Queen was also a
hypochondriac—a classic symptom of a manic-depressive personality. She would summon her personal physician up to half a dozen times a day with various imaginary complaints, usually concerning her digestive system. When her doctor was on his honeymoon he was surprised to receive a note from his Queen informing him “the bowels are acting fully.”

Queen Victoria was known to have been highly sensitive about her grandfather George III. Both she and Prince Albert lived in perpetual dread that the hereditary illness would strike against their own children. When they had their eldest son's bumps felt by a leading “expert” in phrenology, it appeared to confirm their worst fears. Sir George Combe examined the Prince's cranium and gravely pronounced that their poor boy had inherited the shape of his brain from the “mad” King George III “and all that this implied.”

         

No one has yet suggested that Edward VII was insane, although considering the disastrous education he received it is a wonder that he wasn't driven mad. Quite what modern psychoanalysis would have made of his compulsive-obsessive behavior, including his record of sleeping with over 1,500 women, or his shooting or his eating habits, not to mention his lifelong hobby of recording the weight of everyone who visited Sandringham, is another question.

Edward VII and his wife, Alexandra, raised lackluster children whose general educational standard was well below average. The eldest, Prince Eddie, was by any standards a half-wit. The royal family were desperate to conceal the fact that the heir to the
throne was mentally infirm, but recognized that he couldn't be hidden from the world forever and went to great lengths to prepare him for Cambridge. England's finest tutors were hired and quickly concurred that a university education would be a complete waste of effort. Their report concluded damningly: “He hardly knows the meaning of the words ‘to read.'         ”

After a predictably disastrous spell at Cambridge, Eddie was made a lieutenant in the Tenth Hussars, where his stupidity quickly became all too apparent. One day, while he was in dinner conversation seated next to his great-uncle the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British army, Prince Eddie casually revealed that the Crimean War was something of a mystery to him and that he had never actually heard of the battle of Alma. His brief military career was, like his academic training had been, in the words of his father, “simply a waste of time.”

Queen Elizabeth II's uncles all grew up to be either physically or psychologically challenged. The youngest, Prince John, showed signs of mental infirmity from an early age and was isolated from the rest of the royal family until his death at the age of fourteen. Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, also had diminished mental faculties. He was neurotic, physically very frail and knock-kneed, had a squeaky voice and was prone to giggling fits or bursting into tears for no apparent reason. Known in family circles as “Poor Harry,” he was politely described as “slow.” In old age the Duke took refuge in his favorite pastime, watching children's television. He once kept King Olav of Norway waiting for half an hour because he couldn't be torn away from an episode of
Popeye
.

The Prince of Wales, later the Duke of Windsor, was in appearance like a slightly more neurotic version of Buster Keaton. The Prince was a heavy drinker, moody, bad-tempered and
liable to fits of depression. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin noted that he appeared to be in a permanent state of arrested development. His Private Secretary, Alan Lascelles, agreed with Baldwin: “For some hereditary or physiological reason,” Lascelles wrote in the 1940s, “his mental and spiritual growth stopped dead in his adolescence.” Edward's character defects were attributed by some members of his family to childhood mumps.

The Queen's father, George VI, was the most psychologically damaged of George V's sons. He was born on what was cheerfully known in the family as “Mausoleum Day,” the anniversary of the death of Prince Albert and coincidentally the death of Albert's third child, Princess Alice, some seventeen years later. He was a cripplingly shy neurotic, and suffered from facial twitches. From childhood to the age of thirty, George suffered with a pronounced stammer in his speech, which exacerbated his natural shyness. The stammer was possibly the result of his father's attempts to “cure” him of left-handedness and knock-knees. (The old King had forced him to wear iron braces on his legs, from the age of eight, for several hours a day and all night, although the young boy had begged his parents to be allowed to sleep without them.)

According to one of his biographers, George VI had a secret drinking problem which grew steadily worse with age. When he became King by default, he probably had a nervous breakdown. It was so widely doubted that he would even turn up for his own coronation that London bookmakers took odds against it. At times he appeared to be dangerously out of touch with reality. In 1939 he astonished his Prime Minister by twice offering to write to Hitler “as one ex-serviceman to another” in an attempt to avert war. The letters he wrote to his family
showed that he alone believed that conflict with Hitler was avoidable even days before war broke out. On April 20, 1939, he sent congratulations to Hitler on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.

In September 1940, Buckingham Palace was bombed. Although large chunks of London had already been blitzed by German bombers, the King took this bomb very personally. He claimed it had been deliberately dropped on his house by a distant Spanish cousin, the fifth Duke of Galliera. This Duke, claimed the King, was involved in a German plot to restore his brother on the throne. Only a close relative of the family, he explained, could have known exactly where to drop it. It hadn't occurred to him that German intelligence might have been clever enough to acquire a map of central London. The King practiced firing his revolver, vowing that he would defend the palace to the death. Fortunately, no such defense was necessary.

Unfortunately, some of the precious little new blood that has been introduced to the royal line also came from tainted stock. The mostly German-and-Danish bloodline of Queen Elizabeth II's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, is shot through with mental instability. When his father deserted him and his family for the nightlife of Paris and Monaco, Prince Philip's eccentric mother, Princess Alice, became mad, believing herself to be a nun, and gave away the little money they had to Greek refugees.

The Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, represented the first ever injection of truly non-royal blood into the family. Ominously, in 1941, five members of the Bowes-Lyon family were confined to a Surrey mental hospital on the same day. They were forgotten by the world until 1985, when the British press revealed that two of the Queen Mother's nieces,
Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, had been left to rot for more than forty years in an NHS ward of the Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital in Redhill. Nerissa, a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, died in 1986 aged sixty-seven and was buried in a pauper's grave marked only with a cheap plastic cross. Equally disturbing were the royal family's attempts to hush up the facts. The Palace had lied to
Burke's Peerage
, leading them to print that Katherine Bowes-Lyon had died in 1940. Her sister was listed as having died in 1961, yet was still alive in 1985. Two other close female relatives of theirs were also in the hospital; also mentally handicapped. The editor of
Burke's Peerage
told journalists that their condition was undoubtedly the result of inbreeding.

A Lesson in Royal Inbreeding

         

         

THE FAMILY CREST
of the Habsburgs, the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a double-headed eagle. According to legend, one day the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I shot an eagle and, when the dead bird was brought to him, he was puzzled and inquired why it had only one head. The remarkable thing about Ferdinand I, considering the extent of inbreeding in his family, was that he was the only Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who can be positively identified as mentally handicapped.

Long before genetics became a science, common sense dictated that incest was not a good idea. People could see for themselves that the children of related couples were less likely to grow up healthy and normal. Europe's royal families, however, are exceptions to the rules of common sense or even good taste. Kings and queens exist to breed, whether they are
genetically flawed or not. Being a prince meant going to the family reunion to meet women.

One of George V's courtiers once observed that as far as the King was concerned “there are only three kinds of people in the world: blacks, whites and royals.” Royalty has always considered itself to be quite literally a breed apart. When Princess Diana was described in the press as a “commoner” in the early 1980s it caused some public confusion, as her relatives, the Spencers, had great hereditary wealth and a direct lineage going back at least as far as the present Queen's. This is because royalty does not acknowledge any gradation between non-royals; any distinction between a waitress and a non-royal duchess. As far as they are concerned, the rest of us exist in an equal but separate parallel dimension. British non-royal aristocrats have always been looked down upon by European royalty as being quite inferior to even the most minor of continental princes, even though the British aristocrat may have considerably more wealth. In matters of precedence, emperors came first, kings second, princes third, and the rest nowhere.

The remaining royal families of Europe today are a concentration of centuries of inbreeding and congenital deficiencies. All too often, the royal way of improving the breeding stock was to import some new blood from someone else's inbred royal family. Thus the great hereditary monarchies of Europe were doomed to slowly drown in their own gene pool. By the start of the twentieth century, every ruling sovereign of Europe, apart from Albania, including the deposed monarchs of Germany, Russia and Spain, could trace descent from Britain's King James I. By the beginning of World War I, the major royal families of Europe and even some of the new Balkan monarchs were all intimately related to each other
either by blood or by marriage. The British royal family, through Queen Victoria and her nine children, was related to the German Emperor, the Czar of Russia, and the kings of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria and Romania; and via Edward VII's wife, Alexandra, they were linked to the royal families of Greece, Denmark and Norway.

In normal circumstances, hereditary diseases are quite rare because people who exhibit obvious physical signs of genetic deficiency are less likely to find a mate, reproduce and thus pass on the defect to their children. In a closed society, however, there is always much more risk of a married couple each receiving copies of harmful genes from their common ancestors. The biggest danger comes from marrying cousins, because their children can inherit a double dose of a recessive gene. The dangers of royal inbreeding are greatest where there is the highest frequency of repeated ancestry. The present-day Count of Paris, for example, is related to his ancestor the sixteenth-century French King Henry IV in 108 different ways.

As the royal families of Europe rigidly excluded outsiders, the effects of social isolation were just as great as if they were living in some remote ancient village. The blue-bloods may have lived hundreds, even thousands, of miles apart, but they were still in effect marrying the girl next door. In fact, the choice of marital partners was even more exclusive, thanks to the taboo of religion. After the Reformation and the religious wars which followed, the royal houses of Europe tended to divide themselves into two camps: the Catholic south and the Protestant north. The kings and queens of England, Holland, Russia and Scandinavia married among themselves or from the pool of Protestant German dynasties. The French, Austrian, Spanish and Italians bred among themselves or with German Catholics.
Marriages between Catholics and Protestants did take place, but very rarely.

The British royal family has a few genetic skeletons in its cupboard. Queen Victoria was worried about the quality of the British royal-family bloodstock. Her concerns for what she called the “lymphatic” blood of her royal house were voiced in her letter to her daughter Vicky:

         

I do wish one could find some more black eyed Princes and Princesses for our children! I can't help thinking what dear Papa said—that it was in fact when there was some little imperfection in the pure Royal descent that some fresh blood was infused .  .  . For that constant fair hair and blue eyes makes the blood so lymphatic .  .  . it is not as trivial as you may think, for darling Papa—often with vehemence said: “We must have some strong blood.”

         

It is unlikely that at the time of writing this letter the Queen had any idea precisely what was wrong with her family's blood. In fact, the woman whom history reveres as the Matriarch of Europe was its unwitting scourge.

         

Through repeated intermarrying, Victoria bequeathed the potentially lethal affliction hemophilia, a recessive genetic disorder that causes failure of the normal blood-clotting mechanism. Until recently it was untreatable and few hemophiliacs survived to reproductive age because any small cut or internal
hemorrhaging after even a minor bruise was fatal. Hemophilia affects males much more frequently than females.

The “Royal Disease”—as it became known, due to the fact that it spread to the royal families of Europe through Victoria's descendants—first became apparent in the British royal family in Victoria's eighth child, Prince Leopold the Duke of Albany. Leopold was the least known, the brightest and the most unfortunate of the Queen's four sons. As a hemophiliac, every trivial bruise or scratch in the routine rough-and-tumble of the nursery would have given him acute pain and exposed him to mortal danger. When he was six his mother recorded in her diary, somewhat cruelly: “He walks shockingly and is dreadfully awkward—holds himself as badly as ever.” Throughout his relatively short life Leopold suffered severe hemorrhages and was always described as “very delicate.” In spite of all the usual precautions, he bled to death aged thirty-one in Cannes in 1884 after slipping on a polished tile floor and cutting his knee.

The appearance of hemophilia in one of her sons was both upsetting and confusing for Queen Victoria, and she protested that the disease could not have originated on her side of the family. Yet the legend of the “curse of the Coburgs,” from whom she was directly descended, was well known to her. This curse was supposed to have dated from the early nineteenth century, when a Coburg prince married the Hungarian Princess Antoinette de Kohary. A monk, a member of the Kohary family, was jealous of the wealth inherited by the couple from the bride's father, and cursed future generations of Coburgs with the disease. The scientific view, however, is that there was a mutant gene in Queen Victoria herself, or in the genes of her father, Edward the Duke of Kent.

Victoria also transmitted it to three of her daughters, the Princess Royal and Princesses Alice and Beatrice. Queen Victoria's third child, Alice, passed hemophilia to the German and Russian imperial families. Of Alice's six children, two were carriers and one was a victim. Her three-year-old son Frederick suffered a minor cut to his ear and very nearly bled to death before the flow of blood was stanched. A few months later, while playing in his mother's room, he charged headlong through an open window and died later that evening from massive internal bleeding. Alice's daughter Irene married her first cousin Prince Henry of Prussia and gave birth to two hemophilic sons. Desperate attempts were made to conceal the fact that the dread disease had manifested itself in the German imperial family, but, at the age of four, Waldemar, the youngest of the Princes, bled to death.

Alice's daughter Alix was also a carrier. She declined offers of marriage from two of Edward VII's sons, the Duke of Clarence and his brother George, thus preventing hemophilia from reintroducing itself into the reigning branch of the British royal family. Alix, however, married Czar Nicholas II and carried hemophilia into the Russian imperial family instead. Within a few months of the birth of their son Alexis, his parents realized that he had hemophilia. The first sign was some unexpected bleeding from the navel. Much more serious was the bleeding into his joints, which caused terrible pain and crippled the affected limbs. As Alexis grew older he was obliged to spend weeks in bed or to wear a heavy iron brace. Alexis did not die from hemophilia: at the age of fourteen he was executed with the rest of the family.

Victoria's youngest daughter, Beatrice, had two hemophilic sons, and a daughter, Ena, who was a carrier. When Ena married
King Alphonso XIII of Spain, the disease spread to the Spanish royal family. They stumbled upon the fact that their firstborn and heir to the Spanish throne was a hemophiliac when the old Spanish court custom of circumcising the royal children almost caused him to bleed to death. From then on the Spanish royal family padded the tree trunks in the royal gardens to stop the heir from bruising himself. He survived childhood, but years later was involved in a car crash and bled to death.

Of Queen Victoria's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, thirty-six were either sufferers, carriers or suspected carriers of the disease. The disease was never mentioned because official royal policy was to hush it up. Nor was Victoria ever aware that she was the source of the disease, and she went to her grave blaming her husband's Coburg side of the family. There are still hemophiliacs among Queen Victoria's 300 living descendants today.

         

One of the most common congenital disorders, caused by the wrong number of sex chromosomes, produces unfortunate physical defects that can result in exceptionally ugly women. We know from contemporary descriptions that many princesses of central and northern Europe were very ugly. Ordinarily such a woman would probably not marry and have children, but if she was a royal princess in the eighteenth or nineteenth century she was quite likely to find herself the next Queen of England.

The Hanoverian kings of England were renowned for their own ugliness, and also for the plainness of their wives and their
mistresses. Thomas Lawrence was commissioned to paint the portrait of George III's exceptionally ugly wife, Queen Charlotte, but because the results were more honest than flattering the King refused to pay him and he in fact never received his fee. George IV was less than fussy about whom he slept with, preferring quantity to quality, but he nearly fainted when he first clapped eyes on his squat fiancée, Princess Caroline of Brunswick.

Congenital plainness was not exclusively a problem of the German courts. The male members of the Spanish royal family were notoriously ugly; the female line mostly obese and dwarfish. The royal family of Sardinia also produced a high proportion of female dwarfs. The Austrian royal family with their “Habsburg Lip,” the Bourbons with their huge noses, the squat Hanoverians with their slack chins and protuberant pale-blue eyes, all looked as though they came from different sections of a horse-breeder's stud book.

In the nineteenth century the British royal family, like nearly all of the great royal houses of Europe, was slowly choking to death in ever tightening spirals of royal DNA, but until quite recent times consideration of genetic problems and the need for outbreeding rarely influenced their marriages. King George III's Royal Marriages Act of 1772 was an exercise in royal eugenics. The objective was to make the British royal family a closed caste which would never again be polluted by inferior local stock. It was a remarkable success. In the three centuries that have passed since the Hanoverians came to Britain, the bloodline of this almost exclusively German royal family has only twice been breached by commoners—George VI's wife Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and by Diana Spencer. In genetic terms it is too little too late because, although new genes
dilute the effects of recessive genes, the bad effects of inbreeding can resurface in the descendants of mixed marriages many generations later. The present heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, is every inch the Frankenstein creation of a European monarchical system that has been in place for a thousand years. At least, some might say, the policy of more or less hermetically sealed royal pond life prevented their genes from leaching out into the community at large.