Queen Victoria was healthy her whole life, and one wrong letter in her DNA killed her son Leopold, Duke of Albany, her grandson Frittie of Hesse, the Russian heir Alexei and a run of princes in Spain and Prussia. Doctors called it the royal disease. It is hemophilia B, and in 2009 a team led by Evgeny Rogaev read the fault out of the exhumed Romanov bones: one base in the F9 gene, an A swapped for a G, a false stop in the instructions for Factor IX.
It hides in daughters and strikes sons. Victoria had nine children and three of them had it. Leopold fell in Cannes in March 1884 and a hemorrhage in his brain finished him by morning. Her daughters Alice and Beatrice carried it into Hesse, Prussia, Russia and Spain without knowing. Neither of Victoria's parents had it; her father, the Duke of Kent, was fifty-one when she was born; about thirty percent of hemophilia cases arrive fresh.
Alix of Hesse became the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, and her son Alexei bled from the stump of his umbilical cord at six weeks old. Nicholas II made the heir's condition a secret of state. At Spala in 1912 a carriage jolt started a bleed into his groin and the court drafted the announcement of his death. Grigori Rasputin, nowhere near, sent a telegram saying the boy would not die. The boy did not die. The likeliest reason, set out by Helen Rappaport among others: the doctors were dosing Alexei with aspirin, which thins the blood, and Rasputin kept ordering them out of the room. On 17 July 1918 the family and Doctor Eugene Botkin were shot in the cellar of the Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg. Alexei was thirteen.
Beatrice's daughter Ena married King Alfonso XIII on 31 May 1906, and Mateu Morral dropped a bomb hidden in a bouquet onto the wedding procession in the Calle Mayor, killing twenty-four people. Two of Ena's four sons were hemophiliacs, and Alfonso blamed her. Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, walked out of a minor car accident in Miami in 1938 and bled to death in days; Gonzalo went the same way in 1934. In Prussia, Waldemar needed a transfusion on 2 May 1945 in a Bavaria that had no blood left to give him.
Not one of them ever had a treatment that worked. In 1952 Rosemary Biggs and Robert McFarlane at Oxford named the royal version after a Canadian schoolboy, Stephen Christmas: Christmas disease, Factor IX, hemophilia B. The mutation itself is now extinct.
📍 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Queen Victoria, the healthy carrier
0:34 - What hemophilia actually does
1:04 - Frittie's fall from the window: Hesse, May 1873
1:53 - X-linked: why sons bleed and daughters carry
3:38 - Alexei's bones: the A to G swap in the F9 gene
4:24 - The Duke of Kent at fifty-one: where it came from
5:58 - Nine children, one lucky roll, and Leopold's death at Cannes
7:12 - Alice and Beatrice carry it to Hesse, Prussia, Russia and Spain
7:56 - Alexei: the secret heir of Nicholas II
9:01 - Spala, 1912: the last rites and Rasputin's telegram
10:21 - Did Rasputin do anything? The aspirin theory
12:07 - The Ipatiev House cellar, July 1918
13:06 - Beatrice's odds: Leopold of Battenberg, Maurice and Ena
13:48 - Madrid, 1906: Mateu Morral's bomb on the Calle Mayor
14:31 - Alfonso XIII blames Ena; Miami 1938 and Gonzalo 1934
16:31 - Waldemar of Prussia, 2 May 1945: no transfusion left
17:38 - Rupert of Trematon and Alice of Athlone, the last grandchild
19:13 - The menu of nonsense, then Patek, Pavlovsky and Stephen Christmas
22:15 - Extinct: it ended in molecular biology
📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Rogaev_et_al_2009_Science%20326,817.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemophilia_in_European_royaltyhttps://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-royal-disease-spain-prussia-and-haemophilia/https://www.unofficialroyalty.com/royal-illnesses-and-deaths/hemophilia/royal-hemophilia-sufferers-by-susan-flantzer/📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about hemophilia B, the royal disease, and how a spontaneous mutation in Queen Victoria spread through the royal families of Britain, Hesse, Prussia, Russia and Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It covers X-linked recessive inheritance, the F9 gene and Factor IX, the 2009 Science study by Evgeny Rogaev on the Romanov remains, Frittie of Hesse (1873), Leopold, Duke of Albany (Cannes, 1884), Alice and Beatrice as carriers, Alexandra Feodorovna, Nicholas II and Alexei (born 1904), the Spala crisis of 1912, Grigori Rasputin and the aspirin hypothesis, the Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg (17 July 1918), Ena and Alfonso XIII, the Mateu Morral bomb on the Calle Mayor (31 May 1906), Alfonso, Prince of Asturias (Miami, 1938), Gonzalo (1934), Waldemar of Prussia (2 May 1945), Rupert, Viscount Trematon (1928), Alice, Countess of Athlone (1981), Patek and Taylor (1937), Pavlovsky (1947), Stephen Christmas and Christmas disease (Oxford, 1952) and Judith Graham Pool's cryoprecipitate (1964). Victorian era, Romanov dynasty, royal genetics.
#QueenVictoria #Hemophilia #Romanovs #Rasputin #RoyalDisease