We Two: Victoria and Albert (88 page)

274
One crucial source of information
The Hampshire property of William Nightingale, Florence Nightingale’s father, abutted on Broadlands, Lord Palmerston’s country estate. The two men were allies in local politics and went hunting together. On one occasion, Florence was invited to spend the weekend at Broadlands and met Lady Palmerston and her daughters. Florence Nightingale had strong ties to Palmerston’s stepson-in-law, the reforming Tory politician Lord Shaftesbury who, like Nightingale herself and Palmerston, was a convinced sanitarian—in other words, supporter of public health policy.

274
When the Queen asked specifically
In my book
Nightingales
, I give a thorough account of the origins and conduct of the Crimean War. For the condition of the troops during the winter of 1854–1855 and Nightingale’s correspondence on the soldiers’ needs, see especially chapter 16.

275
Two more such tassels decorated
My Mistress the Queen
, p. 19.

275
In April 1856, the Queen
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, ed. Hibbert, p. 135.

276
His struggle with Prince Albert
Attempts have been made by historians, especially in Germany, to establish Prince Albert’s importance as a statesman. Kurt Jagow, who edited the major collection of Prince Albert’s letters, wrote: “When all is considered, it is in essence due to the merits of the German prince, who for less than two decades sat upon, or rather stood by, the throne of England as a faithful guardian of the Crown, that today the British monarchy is able to command the power, prestige, and internal strength, required by the British Empire to hold together its self-governing members, and to take rank as a World Power.” Unfortunately, Jagow was writing this in 1938, as an adherent of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

276
That the new prime minister
In their biography of the prince, Queen Victoria and Theodore Martin offer detailed evidence of what they regard as Lord Palmerston’s sins at the foreign office and of Prince Albert’s strenuous efforts to get him sacked. They then choose to interpret the subsequent cooperation between the Crown and Lord Palmerston as prime minister not to Palmerston’s graciousness in victory but to Albert’s greatness. Albert, as Victoria sees it, could not be wrong. “In the discussions which ensued in the public journals and in society upon Lord Palmerston’s removal from office [in 1851], it was often broadly hinted by his supporters that the Prince Consort had been the chief instrument of his fall.
Whether Lord Palmerston encouraged this view, or not, is now of little moment. This much is certain, however, that in after years no man spoke more warmly of the Prince, or was readier to acknowledge his services to this country” (Martin, vol. ii, p. 348–349).

277
The Queen recorded in her journal
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, ed. Hibbert, p. 134.

Chapter 22:
BLUE BLOOD AND RED

278
The Queen was due to give
Longford p. 315, quoting the Queen’s journal of 1855.

278
They then communicated
See Cecil Woodham-Smith, chapter 11, for the most detailed and insightful account of the evolving relationship between the Queen and the prince.

278
She claimed that, like most men
“Oh! If those selfish men—who are the cause of all one’s misery, only knew what their poor slaves go through! What suffering—what humiliation to the delicate feelings of a poor woman, above all a young one—especially with those nasty doctors” (Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, p. 115).

278
Pregnant, Victoria felt less like
Queen Victoria to Vicky, expecting her first child: “What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that. I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments.”
(Dearest Child
, p. 115).

279
There is no doubt that Queen Victoria
In deciding whether husband or wife had the most to bear in the royal marriage, the Queen’s many biographers have been swayed more by their personal experience and the period they lived in than by the available documentation. Writing around the time of the First World War, Lytton Strachey, a gay man in hot rebellion against the Victoria era, sympathizes deeply with Albert and implies that Victoria harried her husband into an early grave. Fifty years later, Elizabeth Longford, herself a devoted wife and mother to a large family, assumes that Victoria was right to fulfill the traditional female role and obey her husband. Monica Charlot, writing in the 1990s, sees Victoria as a woman struggling against a misogynist society and a repressive husband.

280
In fact, the pregnancy proceeded
This is the same John Snow famous in the annals of epidemiology for disconnecting the Broad Street pump in London and thus proving that cholera was caused by infected water.

280
Her fourth son
“Leopold” was in affectionate remembrance of “dearest uncle,” and “Duncan” a gracious gesture toward the royal couple’s increasingly beloved Scotland. Queen Victoria gave all her sons the name Albert. Two of the five daughters received the name Victoria, and the fourth was called Louise Alberta. She gave her name to the Canadian province of Alberta and to Lake Louise.

280
Remembering the recent fire
Longford,
Victoria R.I
., p. 294.

280
Thus when Albert went to Ipswich
Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. II, p. 310.

281
“Du, du liegst mir im Herzen
Ibid, p. 495.

281
As Victoria once told her friend
Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, p. 100. 281
To her daughter Vicky, Queen Victoria
Dearest Child
p. 112.

281
Deprived of Albert, her ideal companion
This point emerges clearly from Queen Victoria’s letters to her daughter Vicky, as editor Roger Fulford points out in his introduction to
Dearest Child
, p. 10.

282
To convey just how busy
Martin and
Dearest Child
p. 386.

283
She was unhappy about this
See
Dearest Child
p. 104.

283
“Abstractedly, I have no tender for them
Dearest Child
p. 191.

283
She told Princess Augusta of Prussia
Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, pp. 99–100.

283
Albert, to the contrary, reveled
When her daughter Vicky wrote about how enchanted her husband Fritz was by their first baby, Queen Victoria remarked that Prince Albert “cannot enter into [Fritz’s] ecstasy about him [baby Willy]; he has never felt it himself. After a certain
age if they are nice (and not like Bertie and Leopold were) he is very fond of playing with them”
(Dearest Child
, p. 191).

284
She made their father’s perfection
Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky soon after Vicky’s wedding: “You know my dearest, that I will never admit any other wife can be as happy as I am—so I can admit no comparison for I maintain Papa is unlike anyone who lives or ever lived or will live … Dear Papa has always been my oracle”
(Dearest Child
, pp. 45–46).

284
A full understanding of hemophilia
Hemophilia is a genetic disease that afflicts males. Today it can be treated effectively through blood transfusions and can be eliminated by genetic counseling, but it is still incurable. Hemophiliac patients have a defective copy of the gene that codes a key component in blood coagulation, usually factor VIII, rarely factor IX. This defective gene is carried on the X chromosome, and so boys inherit it from their mothers. Each woman has two X chromosomes, receiving an X from each parent. Even if one X has the factor VIII defect, a woman’s blood will clot normally. There are almost no cases of hemophilia in women, as a girl would need to inherit a defective chromosome from both parents. The few hemophiliac girls known in medical literature died when they began to menstruate. When she reproduces, a woman passes one of her two X chromosomes to her child. Each male child receives an X from his mother and a Y from his father. Thus the male child of a woman carrying the genetic defect has a 50 percent chance of receiving her defective X chromosome and suffering from hemophilia. Each female child of a woman carrying the genetic defect also has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the defective X chromosome. Like her mother, she will be symptom free, but each male child she has will run a 50 percent risk of being hemophiliac and each daughter a 50 percent risk for being a carrier. On average, one in two of the sons of a female carrier will get the disease, and one in two of the daughters of a carrier will become carriers in their turn.

The science of hemophilia has advanced enormously since 1950, and certain advances in genetic testing date only from the last decade or so. Information on the disease in books written before 1990 is incomplete and often incorrect. Even Robert K. Massie’s deservedly famous
Nicholas and Alexandra
(1967) does not have the facts on hemophilia quite right.

284
However, even in 1854
Jewish doctors who practiced ritual male circumcision were among the first to report on the phenomenon of baby boys whose blood kept flowing and occasionally bled to death. Before the second half of the twentieth century, the ravages on male children ensured that families afflicted by the disease tended to disappear within two or three generations. However, the disease did not die out. New cases of hemophilia occur regularly because clotting factor VIII is on a large, complex gene, highly subject to random mutation. One-third of all cases of hemophilia are the result of new mutations—that is to say there is no previous history of the disease in the family—contributing to an incidence of 1 in 5,000 males born with hemophilia worldwide, or approximately 1 in 10,000 persons overall.

286
Even a suggestion that
Historians of the British royal family have been intrigued by the question of how Queen Victoria became a carrier for hemophilia. Her father was certainly not hemophiliac, and all available evidence shows that her mother was not a carrier. The overwhelming probability is that hemophilia entered the British royal family as a result of a spontaneously mutated gene. But random mutation is an unexciting solution to a famous historical puzzle and a few historians in recent years have found it seductive to suggest that Leopold’s hemophilia proved that Queen Victoria was not her father’s daughter. This is a recent and apparently more scientific counterpart to the old rumor that, since Prince Albert bore no resemblance either to his “father,” or to his elder brother, he must have been a bastard (see chapter 9). In 1997 two eminent British doctors, the brothers D. M. and W.T.W. Potts, published a sensational book called
Queen Victoria’s Gene: Haemophilia in the Royal Family
(Alan Sutton, 1995), in which they purport to examine all the possible explanations
for how the hemophilia gene came into the royal family. Potts and Potts unearthed an unpublished study that traced both the Hanoverians and the Coburgs back for many generations and found no evidence that there had ever been a bleeder in the family before Leopold, Duke of Albany. Could it be, then, they hypothesize, that Queen Victoria was a bastard, foisted on the English people by her mother, an unscrupulous and immoral intrigant who despaired of ever conceiving a child with the aging duke she had just been persuaded to marry? For this theory to work, the unknown lover selected within weeks of marriage by the Duchess of Kent to father the royal baby would most probably be a hemophiliac who had survived to reproductive age. Every daughter of a hemophiliac carries the defective gene, inherited from her father. Unfortunately, the duchess’s phantom lover has never been glimpsed, much less identified. In the end, Potts and Potts admit that a spontaneously occurring genetic mutation in one of her parents is most probably how Queen Victoria came to carry the gene for hemophilia. However, they spend so many pages working through the more interesting (and wildly improbable) theories that historians such as Jerrold M. Packer in his book
Queen Victoria’s Daughters
have failed to follow the medical argument to its conclusion. They cite the worthy doctors as authorities for the hypothesis that Queen Victoria’s gene for hemophilia proves that she was not the granddaughter of George III. It is ironic that so much respectable historiographic ink has been spilled arguing that the great dynasts Victoria and Albert were, in fact—both of them—illegitimate.

286
What doctor, or indeed what husband
Before genetic analysis, it was impossible for a woman or her doctor to know for sure that she was
not
a carrier. The birth of a hemophiliac son proved that she was. Had Queen Victoria decided to stop having babies after the birth of three “normal” sons, the presumption would have been that she was not a carrier.