Thus, in the space of three short generations Queen Victoria through her daughters had unwittingly transmitted a potentially fatal disorder to three of the most powerful royal families of Europe, thereby almost certainly contributing to their ultimate downfall. As well as having two affected sons, Leopold and Maurice, she had a daughter, Eugenie, who married King Alfonso of Spain and in turn had two affected sons, the older of whom, also called Alfonso, was the heir to the doomed Spanish throne.įigure 1 Modified version of Queen Victoria’s family tree showing haemophilia amongst her descendants. Meanwhile Beatrice’s carrier status proved to have equally tragic and devastating consequences for the Spanish royal family. Alexis proved to be affected and his severe bleeding prompted his mother to seek help from unconventional sources, most notably, and with tragic consequences, the ‘mad monk’ Rasputin, whose influence with the Czar’s wife contributed to the royal family’s decreasing popularity and eventual mass murder at Ekaterinberg in 1917. Alix married the Russian Czar, Nicholas II, with whom she had four daughters and a single son, Alexis. Irene married into the Prussian royal family and had two affected sons, Waldemar and Heinreich.

Alice married the Duke of Hesse (in Germany) and had one affected son, Frederick, and two carrier daughters, Irene and Alix. Of much greater importance for European politics, two of Victoria’s daughters, Alice and Beatrice, proved to be carriers of haemophilia. Leopold, through his daughter Alice, had an affected grandson, Rupert, who died at age 20 years. One of her sons, Leopold, was affected with haemophilia and died at the age of 31 years as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage following a fall. Victoria had a total of nine children, four sons and five daughters. Her monarchy was associated with a period of unparalleled prosperity for Britain as the industrial revolution heralded the establishment of a Commonwealth which straddled the entire globe.Īlthough she herself enjoyed good general health, her genetic legacy proved to be disastrous for several of the royal houses of Europe (Fig 1). 218), reigned as British sovereign from 1837 until her death at the age of 81 years in 1901. Queen Victoria, the grand-daughter of George the Third (p. Following a scientific approach combining current genetic experimentation tools and the development of biological information technology, researchers were able to identify each body, allowing them to obtain precious genetic material from the young Czar Alexis, who was stricken by the disease, which revealed a causal substitution in the splice acceptor site of exon 4 in the F9 gene.Photo of Queen Victoria at the time of her Golden Jubilee (1887) A second tomb was discovered in 2007, allowing Russian and American scientists to fill in this gap in medical history. In 1991, a tomb containing the remains of Czar Nicolas II's entire family was discovered. Because of this, the characterization of haemophilia (deficit of either factor VIII or XI) and the identification of the causal mutation are rendered impossible.

Today, none of Queen Victoria's living descendents carry haemophilia. Haemophilia is an illustration of this, as this congenital hereditary coagulation disorder, passed through the majority of royal European families at the beginning of the 20th century by Queen Victoria of England and Empress of the Indies, had indisputable political consequences, which led to one of the most defining moments of contemporary history: the Bolshevik Revolution. And blood can change the course of history'.

Queen victoria hemophilia family tree