She was the most powerful woman on earth. She had nine children. She would outlive three of them. And the first of those three would die on the exact same date to the day as the husband she had spent the previous seventeen years grieving. She ruled an empire that covered a quarter of the planet. She gave birth to nine children in seventeen years.
She arranged their marriages into every reigning house in Europe. And she would, without ever knowing it, carry inside her body a single broken gene that would eventually help destroy the Russian Empire. How does the mother of European royalty end up burying her own children, and then watching from beyond the grave, as the disease she carried killed her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren a thousand miles away? Her name was Queen Victoria, and what happened to her nine children, three of whom would die before she did, one of whom carried a disease no one in 1853 even had a name for, and one of whom would spend the last thirty years of her own life burning her mother’s private diaries, page by page in a courtyard at Osborne House, is the most quietly devastating chapter of the entire nineteenth century. In the next 40 minutes, you’ll discover what her son Bertie did in a tent at the Curragh camp in 1861, a single weekend with a single Irish actress that Victoria would blame for the rest of her own life, for the death of her husband Albert three months later.
Why her youngest son, Leopold, was forbidden from running, from climbing, from playing, from doing anything a child does, and what doctors discovered about her own bloodline only after his body was carried home from Cannes. And what her youngest daughter, Beatrice, spent the final three decades of her life doing in the privacy of a small fire pit at Osborne House, a methodical, daily destruction of evidence that historians today will never recover.
What you’re about to hear isn’t a story about a queen. It’s a story about what happens when a mother who controlled the marriages of every royal house in Europe could not, in the end, control the bodies of the children she had given birth to. And it begins, as so many royal tragedies do, with a date on a calendar.
The 14th of December. Remember that date. It will return. She was eighteen years old when she became Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the morning of the 20th of June, 1837. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain had ridden through the night from Windsor to Kensington Palace.
They had been received in a small drawing room. The young woman they had come to inform, a slight, dark-haired girl, barely five feet tall, dressed in a hastily wrapped white dressing gown, had listened to them in silence. She had thanked them. She had asked for an hour alone. She had used that hour to write, in her diary, three sentences.
She wrote, I am very young, and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced. But I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have. She did not write about her mother. She did not write about her tutor. She did not write about the empire that had just become hers.
She wrote, instead, about the man who had not yet entered her life. And here is the part of Queen Victoria’s life that nearly every biographer races past, because it does not fit the iron, black-clad widow she would become in old age. The young Victoria, in the years before her marriage, was passionately, almost helplessly romantic.
She filled her private journals with sketches of her German cousin Albert. She had met him exactly twice. She had decided, by the age of seventeen, that she would marry him. She had decided it before he had decided anything at all. She married him on the 10th of February, 1840. She was twenty years old, he was twenty-one.
She gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Victoria, called Vicky, exactly nine months and twelve days later, on the 21st of November, 1840. She would give birth to eight more children over the next sixteen years. And in the body of that first newborn baby, a small, dark-haired princess, who would grow up to become Empress of Germany, was already present, dormant and silent, a single broken gene that Victoria had inherited from her own bloodline.
She did not know it was there. She would never, in her entire 81 years of life, fully understand what she had passed on. But by the time her last surviving descendant carrying that gene had died in Spain, in 1938, more than half a century after Victoria’s death, it would have killed at least nine of her great-grandchildren and helped to destroy two royal dynasties.
She did not know. She would not know until it was far too late. The first ten years of her marriage to Albert were, by every public account, the happiest decade of nineteenth-century European royalty. They lived between three houses, Buckingham Palace in London, Windsor Castle on the Thames, and a private estate Albert himself had designed at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
They acquired, in 1852, a fourth Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. They worked side by side every morning at twin desks in Albert’s study. He read her dispatches, he drafted her speeches. He advised her on legislation, on foreign policy, on the management of her own ministers. He was, in everything but name, the co-monarch of an empire that already covered nearly a fifth of the Earth’s surface.
He was also her husband. And by the standards of any 19th century marriage, royal or otherwise, they were extraordinarily, almost embarrassingly in love. Albert had built, at the small private cottage they kept at Osborne House, a set of nine separate bathing huts on the beach, one for each of their children.
He had designed them himself. He had chosen the wood. He had ordered the small brass plaques engraved with each child’s name. The huts faced the Solent. They had glass windows. On summer mornings, The entire family would walk down to them in single-file Victoria leading, Albert behind, the nine children in order of age between them.
The pressure to produce heirs was relentless. Vicky was born in 1840. Bertie the Future, Edward VII in 1841. Alice in 1843. Alfred, called Affie, in 1844. Helena, called Lentgen, in 1846. Louise, in 1848. Arthur, in 1850. Leopold, in 1853. And finally, Beatrice called baby by her mother for the rest of her own long life in 1857.
Nine children in 17 years. By the time Beatrice was born in April 1857, Queen Victoria was 38 years old. She had been pregnant, by any reasonable medical calculation, for more than 72 of the previous 203 months of her marriage. She had nursed none of her own children. She did not believe in it. She would write, in a private letter to her eldest daughter Vicky in 1859, that the act of breastfeeding was the ruin of the most refined and intellectual young lady, and that she herself had always considered infants, particularly very young ones, to be frightful when undressed. And the journal entry Victoria wrote, on the morning after her own wedding night in February 1840, an entry so explicit, so emotionally exposed. So, entirely unbecoming of the Iron Widow she would later become, was an entry her youngest daughter, Beatrice Wood, sixty years later, personally cut from the bound diary and burn in a fire pit at Osborne House.
We will never know what it said. To understand the Victoria, the world saw at her peak. The Victoria who stood on the balcony at Buckingham Palace on the afternoon of the 1st of May, 1851, watching the Great Exhibition open at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, with her four eldest children gathered around her and her husband Albert at her side.
You have to understand what she had already built by the age of thirty-one. She had ruled Britain for 14 years. She had survived seven assassination attempts. She had given birth to seven children, all of whom were, on that May morning in 1851, alive and well. She had made her husband the most influential consort in the history of the English monarchy.
She had, with him, designed a model of the modern royal family that would shape every reigning house in Europe for the next century. She had, in every measurable way, the most successful marriage and the most successful family in the entire Western world. She had everything. Everything. Ten years later, almost to the day, she would be a widow.
Her husband would be dead at forty-two. Her son Bertie would be the man she would publicly blame, in private letters that survived the bonfires, for the death she could not bring herself to attribute to anything as ordinary as illness. Her oldest daughter Vicky would be in Berlin, three months pregnant with a son who would grow up to start a world war.
And the small, perfect family she had assembled on that balcony in 1851 would already be, beneath the surface, breaking apart. There is a photograph from the summer of 1857. It was taken at Osborne House, on the lawn outside Albert’s private cottage, by a royal photographer named Leonida Caldezzi. Victoria is seated in a wicker chair.
She is 38 years old. She is holding the four-month-old Beatrice, the last child she would ever bear in her lap. Albert stands behind her, one hand on her shoulder. Around them, in a careful semicircle arranged by Caldesi himself, are the other eight children. Vicky stands at the back, sixteen years old, already engaged to marry the future German emperor.
Bertie stands beside her, fifteen, smiling at the camera. Alice, fourteen. Affie, twelve. Lenschen, ten. Louise, eight. Arthur, seven. And Leopold’s small, pale, almost translucent, four years old, sits cross-legged on the grass at his mother’s feet. What no biographer of Queen Victoria has ever fully addressed is that the photograph from that afternoon at Osborne House was, by the time Victoria herself died, in January 1901, the only surviving image of all nine of her children together in good health. By the time she lay dying at Osborne 44 years later, three of the children in that photograph were already in their graves. Because something Albert had said to her, in private, on the evening before that photograph was taken, something he would not repeat publicly. Something Victoria would carry to her own grave would explain why she would never, after his death, look at a photograph of her own family without flinching.
Before we go any further, you need to understand one thing about Queen Victoria. She did not believe she would ever survive the loss of her husband. She had said it in her diary. She had said it in her letters. She had said it, repeatedly, to her ladies-in-waiting, and to her own mother before her own mother had died.
The day Albert died, she had said, would be the day Victoria herself effectively ceased to exist. The day was coming. It was four years away. And the man who would, in her view, cause it was her own eldest son. The summer of 1861 was, by every external measure, a summer of celebration in the British royal family.
Princess Alice, eighteen years old, gentle, intellectually serious, the third of Victoria and Albert’s nine children, had been formally engaged in April to Prince Louis of Hesse and by Rhine. The wedding was to take place the following summer at Osborne House. Her trousseau was already being assembled in Paris.
Princess Vicky, by then twenty years old, three years into her own marriage to the future German Emperor Frederick III, And the mother of two small children had returned to Windsor for the summer, with her husband and her infant son, Wilhelm. Prince Albert was forty-one years old. He had been the Prince Consort for twenty-one years.
He was, by the summer of 1861, the most powerful and the most quietly resented German in British public life. He was tired. He was, by his own admission to his wife in private letters, Suffering from chronic stomach pain. He had not slept well in nearly two years. But he was alive. He was working. He was planning the next phase of his beloved son Bertie’s military training.
Albert’s private study at Windsor Castle in the summer of 1861 contained on the wall above his desk a single object that no biographer of Queen Victoria has ever satisfactorily explained. It was a small framed pencil drawing drawn by Albert himself, signed and dated 1859 of his eldest son Bertie, asleep in an armchair.
He had drawn it during one of Bertie’s rare quiet evenings at home. Beneath the drawing, in Albert’s own hand, was a single line in German. Was word aus diesem Jungen? What will become of this boy? He would not live to find out. Because in early September of 1861, three months before Albert’s death, Bertie would do something at a military camp in Ireland that would, in his own mother’s view, kill the man who had drawn that picture of him sleeping.
The military camp was at the Curragh, in County Kildare, Ireland. It was, in the autumn of 1861, the largest army training facility in the British Isles. Albert had personally arranged for his nineteen-year-old son to spend ten weeks there as part of an attachment to the Grenadier Guards. The official goal was to give the future king his first real exposure to military command.
The unofficial goal discussed only between Albert and Victoria, in letters that survived the later bonfires, was to expose Bertie to the discipline, the structure, and the moral seriousness of Barrick’s life. Albert believed that his son was lazy. He believed that Bertie was easily distracted. He believed that Bertie was, in some unspecified but persistent way, unsuitable for the throne.
Bertie arrived at the Currah in late June 1861. He did not enjoy it. He was small for his age. He was uncomfortable in his uniform. He was, by every account from his fellow officers, agreeable but unimpressive. His fellow officers decided to help him. And here is the part of Bertie’s biography that has been documented in extraordinary detail by his own letters, by the official inquiry conducted in November 1861, and by the diaries of three different officers who were stationed at the Currah that autumn. On the night of the 6th of September 1861, three of Bertie’s fellow officers smuggled a young Irish actress named Nellie Clifton into the heir apparent’s tent. She was 22 years old. She was, according to those who had met her in the Dublin theatres, vivacious and quick-witted. She stayed in Bertie’s tent for the night. She returned the following weekend. She returned, in fact, every weekend for the remaining six weeks of his attachment.
Bertie did not tell his father. He did not tell his mother. He returned to Cambridge in late October 1861. He resumed his studies. He attended chapel. He wrote, in a letter to his sister Vicky in Berlin, that the Currah had been more agreeable than I had feared. But the officers at the Currah had told other officers.
Those officers had told their wives. Their wives had told their friends. And by the second week of November, 1861, the story had reached London. By the third week, it had reached Buckingham Palace. By the fourth week, it had reached Albert. Albert was, at the moment he received the report, already physically unwell.
He had been complaining of stomach pain, of headaches, of insomnia since late October. His personal physician, Sir James Clark, had recommended bed rest. Albert had refused. And on the morning of the 25th of November, 1861, three days after the full report on Bertie’s behaviour at the Currah had been placed in his hands, Albert boarded a train, in cold rain, travelled to Cambridge, and confronted his 19-year-old son in person, about the actress in the tent.
He returned to Windsor that evening. He had a fever the next morning. He would never recover. And the Irish actress, who had spent six weekends in the heir apparent’s tent at the Curranelli Clifton, 22 years old, lively and quick-witted, would, by the end of December, 1861, find herself written into Queen Victoria’s private correspondence as the woman who had killed her husband.
Victoria would not name her in public. She would not write her name aloud. But in the letters Victoria wrote to her eldest daughter Vicky in Berlin, in the weeks after Albert’s death, she would refer to Nellie only with three words. That wretched creature. And she would refer to her son Bertie, for the rest of her own life, in the same letters, with three different words.
I never can or shall look at him without a shudder. Prince Albert died at ten, fifty inches the evening on Saturday, the 14th of December, 1861. The official cause of death, recorded by Sir James Clarke and entered into the Royal Family Record Book by the Lord Chamberlain three days later, was typhoid fever.
Modern medical historians have, over the past half-century, proposed several alternative diagnoses, chronic kidney failure, Crohn’s disease, even an undiagnosed abdominal cancer that may have been growing inside him for several years before the Cambridge journey accelerated his decline. The truth has never been fully established.
He was buried before any autopsy was permitted. But what is documented, what was witnessed by every adult member of the royal household present at Windsor Castle on the night of the 14th of December, 1861, was this. Princess Alice was at her father’s bedside. She had been there, almost continuously, for eleven days.
She was eighteen years old. She had nursed him through fever, through delirium, through the long, quiet hours when the doctors had nothing left to offer and Victoria herself had retreated, sobbing, to the next room. Alice had read to him. Alice had bathed his forehead. Alice had held his hand. At approximately 10.30pm, on the evening of the 14th of December, 1861, Albert opened his eyes for the last time.
He looked at his daughter. He could no longer speak. He raised his right hand from the bedclothes slowly, deliberately, and he placed it, palm down, on top of hers. He held it there. He did not move. According to Alice’s own account, given in a private letter to her sister Vicky three days later, he kept his hand on hers for almost twenty minutes before his breathing changed.
She did not move. She did not call her mother. She held still. Victoria entered the room at approximately 10.40 p.m. She had been summoned by her lady-in-waiting. She had run from her own private apartments in her dressing gown. Her hair was unbound. She was 42 years old. She knelt at the side of the bed. She took her husband’s other hand.
He died ten minutes later. He did not speak. He did not, by any account from any person in the room, regain consciousness. And here is what has been documented by every reliable witness to that night, and what Victoria herself would refuse, for the next forty years, to publicly acknowledge. The last person to whom Albert was conscious, the last person whose hand he held, the last face he looked at, the last name he may or may not have whispered, was not his wife.
It was his daughter. Alice was 18 years old. She had nursed him for 11 days. She would never recover, emotionally, from those 11 days. And she would, as we will see, die exactly 17 years later to the day of a disease she contracted while nursing her own dying child. Victoria’s grief was, by every modern psychological standard, pathological.
She did not appear in public for three years. She did not enter Parliament for over a decade. She wore black every day for the remaining 39 years of her life. She slept beside a photograph of Albert on the pillow next to her own. She had his bedclothes laid out, every morning, by his valet. She had hot water brought to his washstand at the same hour, every day, for the next forty years.
And what Albert had said to her, on the evening before that family photograph at Osborne House in 1857 what he had whispered to her in their bedroom, in the privacy of a marriage that the world would never fully see inside, was a single sentence Victoria recorded in her diary that night. The diary entry survived the bonfires.
It read, A. Said to me tonight, looking out at the children on the lawn, that he feared he had been a poor father to them. That he had loved them, but had not understood them. I told him this was not so. He did not answer. The next four years of Queen Victoria’s life were, by her own private admission, the closest she came to ending it.
She did not want to live. She wrote, in letter after letter to her eldest daughter Vicky in Berlin, that she was longing to be with him. She refused to wear colour, she refused to attend public functions. She refused, for the first three years, to even sign official state papers without weeping over them at her desk.
She withdrew, almost completely, to Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. And it was at Balmoral. In the autumn of 1864, almost three years to the day after Albert’s death, that her household physician Sir William Jenner suggested that she might find some psychological benefit in the company of an old highland, servant who had once accompanied Albert on his deerstalking expeditions.
The servant’s name was John Brown. He was 38 years old. He was tall, strongly built, ginger-bearded, and entirely unimpressed by royalty. He addressed the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from their first meeting as woman. She did not correct him. And what John Brown was to Queen Victoria for the next 18 years, until his own death in 1883, has been the single most rumoured, the most denied, the most quietly investigated relationship of 19th century British royal history.
Whether they were lovers, whether they were secretly married, whether their relationship was simply the deepest platonic friendship of Victoria’s adult life, has never been established. We will return to him. Because something John Brown told Victoria at Balmoral, on a single afternoon in the autumn of 1865, a single sentence about her son Bertie, a single observation about the boy she had now publicly blamed for her husband’s death, would change permanently what Victoria allowed herself to feel about her own children. But before we reach Bertie’s story, and before we return to the date that started this video, we have to talk about a small boy named Leopold. He was born on the 7th of April, 1853, at Buckingham Palace. He was the eighth of Victoria and Albert’s nine children. He was the fourth son. He was named Leopold George Duncan Albert, after his godfather, the King of the Belgians.
The birth was, by every account from every member of the medical team present, the most physically difficult labour of all of Victoria’s nine pregnancies. Her own personal physician, Sir John Snow, the same Sir John Snow who had, just two years earlier, identified the source of the London cholera epidemic, was permitted to administer chloroform during the final stages of the delivery.
It was, in 1853, a controversial decision. The Anglican Church had publicly criticized the use of pain relief in childbirth as a violation of the divine instruction in Genesis that women should bring forth children in sorrow. Victoria had ignored them. She had labored for over twelve hours. And the boy who emerged at the end of those twelve hours was, by every external measure, perfectly formed.
He weighed seven pounds. He cried. He nursed. He slept. But within his small body present from the moment of his conception, encoded in a single broken protein his mother had passed to him, without ever knowing she carried it, was a disease that no doctor in 1853 had a name for, that no medical textbook in 1853 had ever fully described, and that would, by the time Leopold was four years old, Have made his entire childhood a slow, careful, grief-soaked education in everything he was forbidden to do.
And here is what the doctors of 1853 did not yet understand. Haemophilia is an X-linked recessive genetic disorder. It prevents the blood from clotting normally. A small bruise, a fall from a chair, a stumble on a staircase, a knee scraped on a garden path, can become, in a haemophiliac child, a bleeding event that will not stop on its own.
It must be controlled by external pressure. It must be controlled by ice. It must be controlled, in the nineteenth century, before any modern treatment existed, by the simple, terrifying expedient of waiting for the body to do what it had been born unable to do. The first severe bleeding episode occurred when Leopold was approximately fourteen months old.
He had fallen from a small chair in the nursery at Buckingham Palace. He had cut his lip on the corner of the chair. The cut was, by any normal child’s standards, minor, perhaps half an inch long, perhaps a quarter of an inch deep. It bled for nearly four hours. The royal physicians were summoned. Pressure was applied.
Cold cloths were brought. Victoria herself, by every account from the household staff present, sat on the nursery floor for the entire four hours, holding her son in her lap, watching him grow paler and paler as the blood soaked through one cloth and then another. The bleeding finally stopped at approximately three o’clock in the morning.
Leopold survived. And the broken gene that Victoria had carried in her own body since the moment of her own conception, in 1818, a gene she had inherited from a parent we will never definitively identify, a gene that had lain silent and undetected in her for 34 years before it expressed itself in her eighth child was, on that night in the nursery, in 1854, finally announced to the world, The doctors did not yet have a name for what was wrong with Leopold.
They would not have a name for nearly another decade. But they knew, by morning, that something was very wrong. And they knew that, whatever it was, it had come from his mother. Leopold was forbidden from running. He was forbidden from climbing trees. He was forbidden from riding horses except at a slow walk.
He was forbidden from swimming. He was forbidden from playing with toy swords. He was forbidden, by his thirteenth year, from any sport that involved physical contact of any kind. He was, however, permitted to read. And he read everything. By the age of fourteen, Leopold spoke fluent French and German. By the age of eighteen, he had been admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, the only one of Victoria’s nine children, to attend a British university.
He studied modern history. He attended lectures by John Ruskin. He befriended the writer Lewis Carroll, who would later dedicate one of his books to Leopold’s memory. He was also, by every account from his university friends, the wittiest of all of Victoria’s children. He was sharp. He was sarcastic. He was uniquely among the royal siblings, willing to say in private what nearly every member of the British aristocracy was thinking, but would never say aloud about Queen Victoria’s public mourning, her refusal to appear at state functions, and her continued, public, unforgiving treatment of her own eldest son Bertie. Leopold kept a private journal during his three years at Oxford. He wrote in it daily. He wrote in it in three different languages, English for routine entries, German for emotional ones, and a particular cipher of his own invention, for entries he did not want any household servant to read.
The journals survive. They are held today in the Royal Archives at Windsor. They have been examined by exactly four scholars in the past century. None of them have published a full transcript. Because what Leopold wrote in his cipher entries, entries written in his own hand, in pencil, in the back third of the third surviving journal volume, was a series of observations about his own mother that, if published in his own lifetime, would have caused a constitutional crisis.
He never intended for them to be read. He died before he was able to destroy them. And the existence of those entries, more than a century later, remains one of the most quietly guarded secrets of the British Royal Archives. He left Oxford in 1876. He requested a position as private secretary to his mother.
She refused she had Beatrice, by then 19 years old, already serving in that role, and she would not displace her. He requested a diplomatic appointment overseas. She refused the climate, she said, would kill him. He requested permission to marry the woman he had been quietly in love with since 1872, a young Englishwoman named Helen of Waldeck-Piermont.
She refused this, too, for nearly six years. She finally relented in 1881. The wedding took place in April 1882. He had three years to live. Princess Alice Victoria’s third child, the daughter who had held Albert’s hand as he died, the daughter who had nursed him for eleven days in December 1861, had married Prince Louis of Hesse in July 1862, seven months after her father’s death.
She had moved to Darmstadt. She had given birth to seven children in fourteen years. She had named her second daughter, born in June 1872, Alex Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, after her mother, after her own grandmother, and after her two living sisters. The little girl would grow up to marry Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
She would become Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. She would carry, in her own body, the same broken gene her grandmother Queen Victoria had carried the gene that had killed her uncle Leopold, the gene that would destroy her own son, the gene that would help bring down the entire Russian Empire. But that is a story for another video.
In November 1878, Alice was 35 years old. She was living at the New Palace in Darmstadt with Louis and their seven children. And in the second week of November, the youngest of those seven children, a four-year-old girl named May, fell ill with what the family doctor at first believed to be a cold. It was diphtheria.
The disease swept through the household with terrifying speed. By the third week of November, six of the seven children were ill. By the end of November, three were critically ill. On the 16th of November, 1878, four-year-old May died. Alice nursed her dying daughter alone, in a small bedroom on the second floor of the new palace, for the final two days of the child’s life.
And here is the part of Princess Alice’s death that has been documented by every reliable witness, by her husband Louis, by the household physician doctor, Eigenbrot, and by Alice herself, in the final letters she wrote in early December 1878. After little May had died, Alice gathered her surviving children to her bedside to break the news.
She had been instructed by the physician not to physically touch them. Diphtheria was, by then, understood to be highly contagious. She had agreed. She had stood at the doorway. She had begun to speak. And then her eldest son, Ernie, aged ten, had begun to cry. He had run to his mother. He had thrown his arms around her neck.
And Alice, exhausted, grieving, unable to push him away, had kissed him on the forehead. She contracted diphtheria within forty-eight hours. She died on the 14th of December, 1878. Seventeen years, to the day after her father had died in her arms. The 14th of December had returned. Victoria at Windsor, sixty miles away from the train station, where her dying daughter’s last letters were received, would write in her diary that night a single line.
This terrible day come round again, Princess Louise Victoria’s sixth child, the fourth daughter, was the most artistically gifted of all the royal siblings. She was a sculptor. She had studied at the National Art Training School in South Kensington, the only one of Victoria’s daughters to receive any formal artistic training.
She had completed, by the age of 22, a marble bust of her mother that still stands today in the entrance hall of Kensington Palace. She had married, in March 1871, the Marquess of Lorne, a Scottish aristocrat, the future 9th Duke of Argyll, the first commoner to marry a British princess in over 300 years.
The marriage produced no children. And here is what has been the most quietly investigated and the most consistently denied chapter of Princess Louise’s life. The marriage to the Marquess of Lorne was, by every reliable account from every household servant who served the couple between 1871 and the Marquess’s death in 1914, never sexually consummated.
Whether this was because of the Marquess’s own preferences there were, throughout his life, persistent rumours about his romantic interests in other men, or because of an injury Louise had sustained in childhood, or because of a private arrangement the two of them had reached together, has never been established.
The household physician who attended Louise from 1871 until her own death in 1939, Dr. Reed, who served the royal family for over 40 years, kept careful notes on every member of the family he treated. The notes survive. They are held today in the Royal Archives. The pages devoted to Princess Louise have, on the orders of the present royal household, been sealed until 2039.
We do not know what Dr. Reed recorded, we know only that he recorded enough that the present royal household has determined we are not yet permitted to read it. But Louise’s silence on her own marriage, and the silence of her doctor, was not the silence that would, in the next decade of Queen Victoria’s life, break her completely.
That silence belonged to her son Leopold. Leopold, by then thirty years old, married for twenty-three months. The father of an eleven-month-old daughter named Alice travelled to the south of France in March 1884 on the recommendation of his physician. The English winter had been hard on him. He had bled, from a minor injury, twice in January, and once in early February.
He needed warmth, he needed quiet. His wife Helen, eight months pregnant with their second child, remained behind at Claremont House in Surrey. Leopold arrived in Cannes on March 22. He took rooms at the Circle Nautique, a small private club on the seafront. He spent his first three days reading, walking slowly along the croissette, dining quietly.
On the morning of March 27, he slipped on a tiled floor at the club. He fell. He hit his head against the corner of a marble step. The cut was small. The bleeding, at first, did not seem severe. He was carried to his bed. He died at 3.30am on the morning of the 28th of March, 1884, of a brain hemorrhage that the local physician, having no understanding of his hereditary condition, was entirely unable to stop.
He was 30 years old. The broken gene Victoria had passed to her son Leopold without ever knowing she carried it. The gene that had made his entire short life a careful negotiation with his own bloodstream had finally killed him. He left behind a daughter who would not remember him. He left behind a wife who would, four months later, give birth to the son he would never see.
And he left behind a mother who, at sixty-four years old, was just beginning to understand what she had given to all of her children. John Brown died on the 27th of March 1883. He had been ill for less than a week. The official cause of death, recorded by the household physician Sir William Jenner, was erycipellas, a bacterial infection of the skin that, in 1883, was almost universally fatal in older patients.
He was 56 years old. He had been at Queen Victoria’s side almost continuously for 19 years, Victoria by then 63 years old, four years past Alice’s death, eleven years before her own was inconsolable. She wrote, in a letter to her eldest daughter Vicky in Berlin, three days after Brown’s death, Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant.
Strength of character as well as power of frame, the most fearless uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence, and unselfishness, combined with a tender, warm heart, made him one of the most remarkable men. The Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs.
She had used the same word deprived only once before in her private correspondence. She had used it on the 15th of December, 1861. The morning after Albert had died, And here is what Queen Victoria did, in the immediate aftermath of John Brown’s death, that no British monarch had ever done before for a Highland servant.
She commissioned a marble statue of him. She had it placed in the gardens at Balmoral, at the spot where he had stood every morning to receive her instructions. She wrote a private memoir of him, a manuscript of approximately three hundred pages, in her own hand which she intended to publish. She was prevented from doing so after a year of escalating private warnings only by the direct and personal intervention of her son Bertie and her private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby.
The manuscript was, on Bertie’s insistence, locked in a cabinet at Windsor Castle. It was, on his orders after her own death in 1901, destroyed. And what John Brown had told her at Balmoral, on a single afternoon in the autumn of 1865, what he had said to her about her son Bertie, the boy she had then publicly blamed for her husband’s death, was a single sentence she recorded in a private letter to Vicky in Berlin two weeks later.
The letter survived the bonfires. Brown had said to her, “‘Woman, that boy is no more guilty of his father’s death than I am. He grieves it as you grieve it. The difference is that you have allowed yourself to say so. He has not.’ Victoria did not respond. She did not, however, ever again refer to Bertie publicly as the cause of Albert’s death.
She did not ever apologize to him in person. She did not ever fully forgive him. But she stopped saying it aloud. Prince Alfred called Afi by his family. The second eldest son and the fourth of Victoria’s nine children had married. In January 1874, the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia. The Grand Duchess was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II.
The marriage united the British and Russian royal families for the first time in over a century. It produced five children. The eldest and the only son was a boy named Alfred Junior, born in October 1874. The boy was, by every account from every member of the household, the most physically beautiful of all Queen Victoria’s grandsons.
He resembled his father. He had his mother’s pale grey eyes. He was, by the age of fourteen, fluent in English, German, French and Russian. He was also, by his early twenties, by every account from his fellow officers in the Prussian army, where he was eventually commissioned quietly and severely depressed.
The exact circumstances of what happened in Meiningen, in central Germany, on the evening of the 22nd of January, 1899, have never been fully documented. The official account given by the Coburg court physicians states that 24-year-old Prince Alfred Jr. had been suffering from chronic respiratory illness, that he had been ordered to bed by his physicians, that his death, on the 6th of February, 1899, was the result of natural causes accelerated by the consumption of alcohol.
The unofficial account given in private letters by three different members of the Coburg household over the next decade states that on the evening of January 22, in his private rooms at Schloss Friedenstein, Prince Alfred Jr. attempted to take his own life with a revolver. He did not succeed in killing himself instantly.
He survived for 14 days. He died on the 6th of February 1899. He was 24 years old. Affie, by then 54 years old, the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the only son Queen Victoria had left in active reign anywhere in Europe, was, by every account from his household staff, never the same after that month.
And the last letter young Alfred had written before that night in January 1899, a letter discovered in the drawer of his writing desk three days after his death, addressed to his mother, but never sent, was a letter. The Coburg household, on the direct orders of Affie himself, did not return to its intended recipient.
Maria Alexandrovna would not see her son’s final words for over a decade. The letter survived. It read in part, Mama, I cannot any longer live in this body. I am sorry. I have tried. Affie was diagnosed with throat cancer in May 1900. The disease had, his physicians believed, been growing inside him for years.
It was, by then, inoperable. He died on the 30th of July, 1900. He was 55 years old. He was the second of Queen Victoria’s nine children to die before her, the first having been Alice, 22 years earlier, on the date that returned. The third would die seven months after Victoria herself. The third was Vicky.
The eldest of Queen Victoria’s nine children. The Princess Royal. Empress Frederick of Germany. The mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the grandson who would, fourteen years after his own mother’s death, lead Germany into a war against the country of his grandmother’s birth. She had married Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in January 1858.
She had been seventeen years old. She had been pregnant within a year. She had given birth, in January 1859, to a son named Wilhelm, whose left arm had been catastrophically damaged during the breach delivery, an injury Wilhelm would conceal, Beneath specially tailored uniforms, for the entire remainder of his own life.
She had given birth, in total, to eight children. She had become Empress of Germany in March 1888 for 99 days, before her husband Frederick III died of throat cancer. Their eldest son, Wilhelm, had then ascended the throne. He was 29 years old, and he had, almost immediately, begun systematically isolating his own mother from German political life, from the German court.
From her own household at Friedrichshof, the small castle she had built outside Frankfurt with the inheritance her father Albert had left her thirty years earlier. She lived at Friedrichshof from 1894 onward. She lived there alone. And in early 1899, at the age of 58, at the same time her brother, Afi’s only son, was dying in Meiningen, at the same time her own mother, Queen Victoria, was beginning her own final decline at Osborne House, Vicky was diagnosed with cancer of the spine.
She was given, by her German physicians, less than three years to live. She did not tell her mother. She did not, for nearly two years, tell anyone in England at all. She continued to write her weekly letters to Victoria, letters she had been writing without interruption since her own marriage in 1858, letters that by 1899 had accumulated into the thousands.
She wrote about the weather, she wrote about her grandchildren, she wrote about the gardens at Friedrichshof. She did not write about the disease that was, by then, slowly destroying her spinal cord vertebra by vertebra. And the way Vicky’s most private letters, the letters that contained her actual condition, her actual pain, Her actual terror of dying alone in a country whose new emperor was her own son, and whose new emperor had forbidden her physicians from giving her the morphine.
The British physicians she trusted had recommended the way those letters. Left Friedrichshof and reached England was through a system her loyal English groom, a man named Frederick Ponsonby, had personally devised. The letters were sewn into the leather lining of horse saddles. The saddles were carried by trusted couriers across the German border.
They were delivered to Windsor Castle in the dead of night. They are held today, two of them in the Royal Archives. The rest never recovered. Queen Victoria died first. She died on the 22nd of January 1901, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She was eighty-one years old. She had reigned for sixty-three years and seven months.
She was attended, in the final hour of her life, by her physician, Sir James Reid, by her son Bertie, by then fifty-nine years old, the man she had spent forty years not forgiving, the man who would within the hour become King Edward VII, and by her grandson Wilhelm, the German Emperor, who had travelled from Berlin to be at her bedside.
She did not, in the final week of her life, ask for her oldest daughter Vicky. Vicky was too ill to travel. She had, by January 1901, lost the use of her legs. She was confined to a wheeled chair at Friedrichshof. Her own son, the Emperor, had given strict instructions that she was not to be informed when her mother’s condition became critical.
He did not want to upset her. He did not, more accurately, want her to make the journey to England against the orders of her German physicians. She learned of her mother’s death by reading it in a German newspaper. And the letter Princess Alice had written to her own mother in November 1878, the letter she had begun on the morning after little May had died, the letter she had been unable to finish before her own diphtheria became too severe to permit further writing, was a letter Victoria did not receive until eight months after Alice’s own death. It had been held by the Hesse household physician. It had been sent through diplomatic channels. It had been opened by Victoria, alone, at Osborne House, on the morning of the 15th of August, 1879. The letter ended in mid-sentence. The final words Alice had written, words Victoria would carry, folded inside the front of her own diary, for the remaining 22 years of her life were these.
Dearest Mama, I have been thinking lately of Papa, and how he held my hand at the end. I have wondered, all these years, whether he meant by it to ask me to… The sentence was never finished. We do not know what Albert had asked her. We do not know what Alice had understood him to ask. We do not know what Victoria, reading the unfinished sentence in 1879, had concluded…
We know only that she folded the letter in half, placed it inside the front cover of her diary, and never spoke of its contents to anyone for the remaining twenty-two years of her life. Vicky outlived her mother by exactly 226 days. She died on the 5th of August 1901, at Friedrichshove, in the small bedroom on the second floor that she had decorated herself in 1894 with English wallpaper imported from her mother’s preferred supplier in London.
She was sixty years old. She had spent her final months in extraordinary pain. Her German physicians, on the orders of her son Kaiser Wilhelm, had refused her morphine in the doses her English physicians had recommended. She had screamed. She had, in the final two weeks, lost consciousness for hours at a time.
She had been visited in those final weeks by her brother Bertie by then King Edward VII, the new sovereign of the British Empire who had travelled to Friedrichshof in secret, against the formal protest of his nephew the Kaiser, in order to be at his sister’s side. He arranged, before he left Germany, for the contents of her private writing desk to be smuggled out of the country.
He used the same system Vicky herself had devised. The letters were sewn into the leather lining of horse saddles, And the letters that left Friedrichshove in those leather saddles, in the second week of August, 1,901 letters Bertie himself would later read. Alone in his private study at Sandringham, in the months after his sister’s funeral, would reveal to him what his mother Victoria had spent forty years either refusing to see or refusing to acknowledge.
Vicky had loved her mother. She had also, in her most private moments, been afraid of her. She had spent her entire adult life writing letters home that Victoria had read, and Victoria had answered letters that Vicky had, for forty years, been quietly editing in real time to remove anything that might displease her mother.
The Vicky her mother had known was, in the end, only one of the two daughters who had lived inside that body. She was buried beside her husband Frederick III at the Friedenskirche in Potsdam. Her son Wilhelm did not, in his entire life thereafter, speak publicly about his mother again. Princess Beatrice Victoria’s youngest child, the small girl who had been called Baby, by her mother for the first 16 years of her own life, was 43 years old when her mother died.
She had married, in July 1885, a German prince named Henry of Battenberg. Victoria had at first violently opposed the marriage. She had, over the course of two years, eventually relented, but only on the condition that Beatrice and Henry would live with her, permanently, at the royal residences. Beatrice had agreed.
She had spent the next sixteen years of her marriage as her mother’s full-time private secretary. Henry had not lasted. He had volunteered, in late 1895, to join a British military expedition against the Ashanti in West Africa. He had wanted, by his own private admission to a fellow officer who survived him, to escape the suffocation of his life inside Queen Victoria’s household.
He had contracted malaria in January 1896. He had died on a hospital ship in the Bight of Benin on the 20th of January, 1896. Beatrice had been 38 years old. She had four children. She had returned immediately to her mother’s side. She had remained there until Victoria’s death five years later. And what Princess Beatrice did over the next thirty years of her own life, in the privacy of her apartments at Osborne House and at Kensington Palace, on the explicit and binding instructions her mother had left her, in a final document signed three weeks before Victoria’s death, was the most systematic and the most determined act of historical destruction ever undertaken by a member of the British royal family. She edited every page of Queen Victoria’s private diaries. The diaries had filled, by January 1901, more than 120 bound volumes.
They had been written, almost daily, for nearly 70 years. They contained, by the most conservative estimate of the historians, who would later attempt to reconstruct them, more than two and a half million words. Beatrice rewrote them. She rewrote, by hand, from the originals. She copied each page into new bound volumes.
She edited as she went removing, on her own judgment, every passage she believed her mother would not have wanted made public. She removed references to John Brown. She removed references to Princess Louise’s marriage. She removed references to Bertie’s behavior at the Currah. She removed references to Albert’s private fears about his children.
She removed references to Leopold’s medical condition before his diagnosis. She removed references to her own father’s final hours that did not match the public account. And every page she finished rewriting, she burned. She burned them in a small fire pit in the courtyard of the King’s Cottage at Osborne House.
She burned them daily. She burned them, by her own private record, for thirty years, from the spring of 1901 until her own physical decline in 1932. And the journal entry Queen Victoria had written on the morning after her own wedding night in February 1840, the entry so explicit, so emotionally exposed, so entirely unbecoming of the Iron Widow, she would later become, was the very first page Beatrice burned.
She burned it on the 14th of April 1901, 82 days after her mother’s death, in the same fire pit she would use for the next thirty years. We will never know what it said. We will never know what Victoria had felt about her husband on the morning after their marriage. We will never know what passed between them in the private hours of the night before.
The single original document that might have answered it became, By mid-morning on the 14th of April, 1901, ash on a small flagstone in a courtyard on the Isle of Wight. And the cipher entries Leopold had written in the back third of his Oxford diary, the entries that contained his observations about his own mother, the entries that would have caused a constitutional crisis, if published in his own lifetime, were the second category of documents Beatrice was instructed to destroy.
She did not, in the end, burn them. She separated them from the rest of the journal. She placed them, alone, in a sealed envelope. She sent them to the Royal Archives at Windsor with a single instruction. These are not to be read in any present generation. They have not been published. They are, today, still sealed.
And what Princess Beatrice burned in her courtyard at Osborne House, the diaries, the letters, the photographs, the documents her mother had instructed her to destroy, was, by the most conservative estimate of the historians who have tried to count what is missing, more than two-thirds of the entire surviving private record of the most documented life of the entire nineteenth century.
We do not know what Queen Victoria thought, in private, about most of the people she most loved. The bonfires in the courtyard at Osborne House saw to it that we never will. Remember the date we asked you to remember at the beginning of this video? The 14th of December. The night Prince Albert died, holding his daughter Alice’s hand, in 1861.
The night his daughter Alice died, of diphtheria contracted from a kiss she gave her own dying child, exactly seventeen years later. Queen Victoria, who had outlived her husband by forty years, who had outlived three of her own nine children, who had ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen, who had carried inside her body a single broken gene that would help destroy the Russian Empire, the Spanish royal line, and the German monarchy, her own grandson would lead into a world war, never wrote, In her surviving diary, about the fact that the two people she had loved most in her entire life had died on the same date, in the same week of the year. Beatrice may have removed it. Or Victoria may, simply, have never been able to bring herself to write it down. She gave birth to nine children in seventeen years. She arranged their marriages into every reigning house in Europe.
She built, with her husband Albert, the model of the modern royal family that every monarchy on the continent would copy for the next century. She controlled, by the time of her death, the political destiny of nearly a third of the human population. And in the end, in a small bedroom at Osborne House, on a January morning in 1901, with her son, the new king, and her grandson, the German emperor, at her bedside, she became exactly what every mother who outlives her own children eventually becomes.
Quiet. Alone. Survived. If Queen Victoria’s story moved you, then you need to hear about her granddaughter, the small German princess, who had been born in the same diphtheria-cursed Hesse household where Victoria’s daughter Alice had died. The young woman who had married into the most powerful dynasty in Eastern Europe, the woman who had carried into her own marriage the same broken gene her grandmother had carried into hers.
Her name was Alex of Hesse. She became Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. And what happened to her in a basement in Yekaterinburg, in the dark hours of the 17th of July, 1918, with her four daughters and her one fragile, bleeding son around her, was the final, terrible act of the genetic prophecy Queen Victoria had passed to her without ever knowing it was hers to give.
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