granddaughter of her reason, was sufficient to keep Prince Albert in check.
Did he disagree with Gibbs’s plan to allow their sons to fraternize with boys from Eton? He might not have approved, but the main opposition to Gibbs’s scheme certainly came from the Queen. She had ‘a great fear of young and carefully brought up Boys mixing with older Boys and indeed with any Boys in general, for the mischief done by bad boys and the things they may hear and learn from them cannot be overrated.’ 14
Queen Victoria’s youngest son was born on 7 April 1853. The birth was made easier by chloroform, administered by the anaesthetist Dr John Snow of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Sir James Clark, and the Queen recovered rapidly. She decided to call him Leopold, after his great-uncle, King of the Belgians, whom she informed that following childbirth she had never been so well, and that the child was ‘a jolly fat little fellow, but no beauty’.
Unfortunately he did not thrive like the others. The ‘jolly fat little fellow’ quickly became thin, with a feeble cry and a frequent tendency to be sick. The Queen decided he should have a wet-nurse from the Highlands. When Mrs Macintosh arrived, not speaking a word of English, she was sure he would improve. Wet-nurses could be a problem; the one engaged for the Prince of Wales, Mary Ann Brough, had become morose and ‘stupid’, and a year after Prince Leopold’s birth, the Queen was horrified to hear that she had murdered her own six children.
Dr Clark attributed Leopold’s failure to thrive to a weak digestion, and suggested a change of wet-nurse, whose milk was less rich. A shipwright’s wife was found, appropriately, in Cowes. For a few weeks he improved. However when he began to walk, and fell down frequently, it was seen that he bruised much more easily than the others, and cried out in pain. ‘Little Leo’, it was discovered, suffered from haemophilia, the bleeding disease transferred from a female to a male, in which bleeding cannot be stopped.
The source of haemophilia in the royal family was thought to have been a spontaneous mutation in the genes inherited by Queen Victoria from her mother. No instances of it were traced in the Duchess of Kent’s relations. Prince Leopold was the only victim in her family and the only male transmitter. Two of her daughters, Alice and (the as yet unborn) Beatrice, were carriers, and through them it spread to several of the royal houses of Europe, with disastrous consequences for the royal and imperial families of Spain and Russia into which the princesses married.
Queen Victoria tried to protect her ‘child of anxiety’ from accidents by too much care. Not surprisingly, he reacted against this by resisting, behaving recklessly, and wanting to behave as normally as his brothers and sisters.
He made up for being delicate by an unquenchable spirit and an intellect which gave signs of being as marked as that of his eldest sister. He learned to read with ease, and was rarely to be seen with his nose out of a book. Like his eldest sister, he enjoyed confounding his elders with questions of an intellectual nature to which he knew the answers. At the age of five he wanted to know all about the paintings on the walls of his father’s study at Osborne, and showed a precocious knowledge of Italian art.
Prince Albert knew better than anyone else how to treat Leopold. Although just as perplexed and worried as the Queen about his haemophilia, he apparently assumed – or pretended to assume – that the boy would grow out of it, as he would out of the epilepsy which attacked him before he was a year old. He carried ‘little Leo’ in his arms, so he could see what the others were doing, but it was frustrating for both that he could not join in their games. Some days the boy had to lie on a sofa to recover from what would have been a minor accident in the others but a potential crisis in his case. To occupy his mind, Prince Albert
Did he disagree with Gibbs’s plan to allow their sons to fraternize with boys from Eton? He might not have approved, but the main opposition to Gibbs’s scheme certainly came from the Queen. She had ‘a great fear of young and carefully brought up Boys mixing with older Boys and indeed with any Boys in general, for the mischief done by bad boys and the things they may hear and learn from them cannot be overrated.’ 14
Queen Victoria’s youngest son was born on 7 April 1853. The birth was made easier by chloroform, administered by the anaesthetist Dr John Snow of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Sir James Clark, and the Queen recovered rapidly. She decided to call him Leopold, after his great-uncle, King of the Belgians, whom she informed that following childbirth she had never been so well, and that the child was ‘a jolly fat little fellow, but no beauty’.
Unfortunately he did not thrive like the others. The ‘jolly fat little fellow’ quickly became thin, with a feeble cry and a frequent tendency to be sick. The Queen decided he should have a wet-nurse from the Highlands. When Mrs Macintosh arrived, not speaking a word of English, she was sure he would improve. Wet-nurses could be a problem; the one engaged for the Prince of Wales, Mary Ann Brough, had become morose and ‘stupid’, and a year after Prince Leopold’s birth, the Queen was horrified to hear that she had murdered her own six children.
Dr Clark attributed Leopold’s failure to thrive to a weak digestion, and suggested a change of wet-nurse, whose milk was less rich. A shipwright’s wife was found, appropriately, in Cowes. For a few weeks he improved. However when he began to walk, and fell down frequently, it was seen that he bruised much more easily than the others, and cried out in pain. ‘Little Leo’, it was discovered, suffered from haemophilia, the bleeding disease transferred from a female to a male, in which bleeding cannot be stopped.
The source of haemophilia in the royal family was thought to have been a spontaneous mutation in the genes inherited by Queen Victoria from her mother. No instances of it were traced in the Duchess of Kent’s relations. Prince Leopold was the only victim in her family and the only male transmitter. Two of her daughters, Alice and (the as yet unborn) Beatrice, were carriers, and through them it spread to several of the royal houses of Europe, with disastrous consequences for the royal and imperial families of Spain and Russia into which the princesses married.
Queen Victoria tried to protect her ‘child of anxiety’ from accidents by too much care. Not surprisingly, he reacted against this by resisting, behaving recklessly, and wanting to behave as normally as his brothers and sisters.
He made up for being delicate by an unquenchable spirit and an intellect which gave signs of being as marked as that of his eldest sister. He learned to read with ease, and was rarely to be seen with his nose out of a book. Like his eldest sister, he enjoyed confounding his elders with questions of an intellectual nature to which he knew the answers. At the age of five he wanted to know all about the paintings on the walls of his father’s study at Osborne, and showed a precocious knowledge of Italian art.
Prince Albert knew better than anyone else how to treat Leopold. Although just as perplexed and worried as the Queen about his haemophilia, he apparently assumed – or pretended to assume – that the boy would grow out of it, as he would out of the epilepsy which attacked him before he was a year old. He carried ‘little Leo’ in his arms, so he could see what the others were doing, but it was frustrating for both that he could not join in their games. Some days the boy had to lie on a sofa to recover from what would have been a minor accident in the others but a potential crisis in his case. To occupy his mind, Prince Albert
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