Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [83]
Signed, “Your wretched brother, Leopold.”
If humor helped him rise above the pain, an intense pursuit of academics also provided an escape. By this point in his life, the Scholar Prince, as he would be known, had become well versed in Shakespeare and fluent in several languages. Over his mother’s objections, Leo attended Oxford University, the first in the family to do so. His gumption is all the more remarkable when you factor in that he also had epilepsy. After graduation he became one of the queen’s most trusted political advisers, gaining the title Duke of Albany. At the same time, he wanted to establish a life for himself apart from his mother and longed to marry. In 1882, at age twenty-nine, Leopold made both himself and the queen happy by wedding Princess Helena of Waldeck, sister of the Dutch queen. The happiness would last just two years. Shortly before the birth of his second child, Leopold took a spill—what for a healthy person would’ve merely meant a bump on the head. He died a few hours later from a brain hemorrhage. Upon receiving the news of her son’s loss to hemophilia, Queen Victoria, now sixty-five, set down in her journal three devastated words, “Am utterly crushed.”
At this stage of her reign, Victoria was becoming known to the world as “the Grandmama of Europe,” so called because so many of her children and grandchildren had married heirs to thrones throughout the Continent. The Grandmama of Europe was also the hands-on grandmama of six grandchildren, in whose raising she’d taken an active role since her daughter Alice’s passing from diphtheria in 1878. When these children approached marrying age, she did more than matchmake. As with many of the other royal marriages she’d helped broker, these unions would expand the family power base. They would also spread hemophilia geographically. In 1888 granddaughter Irene was married to a first cousin, Prince Henry, thus bringing hemophilia into Prussia. In 1894 granddaughter Alexandra was married to Czar Nicholas II, tainting the Russian imperial family, the Romanovs. The 1885 marriage of Victoria’s youngest child, Beatrice, also bears noting here, for it brought the stain into the German royal bloodline. A daughter of this union would then go on to introduce hemophilia into the blue blood of Spain. Closest to home, Leopold’s daughter would perpetuate the family legacy in her marriage to a British nobleman.
From a medical historian’s perspective, the damage wrought by Queen Victoria’s gene was grim: three affected children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. Ten male sufferers and six known female carriers. Only late in life were her eyes opening to the depth of the devastation. “Our poor family,” she wrote privately, “seems persecuted by this awful disease, the worst I know.”
As disease names go, I have to wonder what in the world Dr. Johann Schönlein was thinking when he came up with hemophilia back in the early 1800s, a term translating from the Greek as “love of blood.” I have it on good authority that affection has nothing to do with it. Aggravation is more like it, according to Christine Pullum, a dry-humored Louisianan who