Descendants of Queen Victoria are daughter Victoria. The intertwining of the destinies of the House of Romanov and the Windsor dynasty in England Nicholas 2 and Queen Victoria connections

What Ivan the Terrible did not succeed in in the second half of the 16th century became a reality for the Romanov family in the closing decades of the 19th century. - both monarchies turned out to be connected by fairly close family ties.

The initiative was laid by the daughter of Alexander II, Maria. Having seen a photo of Victoria’s son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in the family castle of the Grand Dukes of Hesse, Heilingberg near Darmstadt, she found him much more attractive than any of the German princes whom she was expected to be her husband.

An energetic supporter of Prince Alfred's marriage to Mary was Queen Victoria's daughter Alice, wife of the Grand Duke of Hesse. On January 28, 1874, she wrote to her mother in London: “Dear Maria makes the same impression on everyone. How glad I am that she is as I thought and hoped. Such a wife will make Alfie happy, bring him goodness and bring joy to you yourself.. "*

*Alice. Princess of Great Britain Duchess of Hesse. L., 1897. P. 231.

The wedding took place on January 11, 1874 in St. Petersburg after a number of attempts by both Victoria and the Russian emperor to prevent such a marriage. The wounds of the Crimean War had not yet been healed, and the threat of a new conflict between England and Russia loomed on the horizon, all because of the same “Eastern Question”. Victoria's wish that Mary should appear before her eyes before a judgment was made on her "suitability" as a bride was considered offensive by the Tsar.

The party would have been upset if the young people had not shown determination to be together no matter what. Victoria, during her stay in London at the beginning of 1874, behaved kindly to this couple and ordered the streets of the capital to be festively decorated. Having read the report in The Time about the reception given to Mary, Alice wrote to her mother: “It should touch Mary and show how attached the English are to their queen and her house.”**

In reality this was not the case. Everything in England was not to the liking of the Tsar’s daughter: the weather, the food, the very appearance of London, and most importantly, the attitude of Victoria’s family members towards her. The Queen and her daughters did not hide their annoyance that the Duchess of Edinburgh shone in such jewelry that they did not have. The most painful period for Maria came during the Russian-Turkish war, when Russia became “enemy number one.” Mary’s experiences were indicated by her determination not to allow any of her daughters to become related to Victoria’s family.

Meanwhile, they equally sympathized with both the “grandmother empress” in St. Petersburg and the “grandmother queen” in London. The militant psychosis in England had passed, the husband was meeting Mary halfway in her desires. In 1893, Alfred became Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and moved to Germany, where the younger Alfred completed his studies. Under pressure from her mother, her daughter - also Mary - refused marriage to Victoria's grandson, the son of her heir, the Prince of Wales * * *. In 1899, the younger Alfred, suffering from a venereal disease, committed suicide. The following year, Mary's husband died. She died in 1920.

*Alice. Princess of Great Britain Duchess of Hesse.P.232.

The second link between the two royal families was Victoria’s granddaughter, daughter of the same Alice of Hesse, Elizabeth. She was born in 1864 and already as a baby attracted attention with her pretty face. Her beauty blossomed. The girl became infatuated with young Wilhelm, the future emperor, the son of Victoria's eldest daughter, also named Victoria, and her husband, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, who occupied the throne in Germany for several months until he died of throat cancer. In June 1884, she married the uncle of the future Nicholas II, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. The father forbade his daughter to change religion before marriage, so the wedding ceremony consisted of two services - Orthodox and Lutheran. Elizaveta Fedorovna converted to Orthodoxy two years later.

The Grand Duchess had a heavy burden. In 1891, Sergei Alexandrovich was appointed Moscow governor-general and quickly alienated many of the tsar's supporters against himself and many of his supporters by intolerance of dissent. Subsequently, the daughter of the English ambassador in St. Petersburg spoke of him as “a reactionary, an autocrat, almost a tyrant” ****. On February 4, 1905, Grand Duke Sergei was killed while leaving the Kremlin by a bomb thrown by the terrorist Socialist Revolutionary I. Kalyaev. Elizaveta Fedorovna visited her husband’s killer in prison, and he begged in tears to understand him, although he did not regret what he had done. Elizaveta Feodorovna's petition to Nikolai Polomilovanija Kalyaev was rejected.

***Maria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, having married the Romanian Prince Ferdinand, later became the Queen of Romania. Note comp.

****Buchanan M. Queen Victoria's relations. L., 1954.R.105.

While in Tsarskoe Selo at the end of 1905, Elizaveta Fedorovna, with the beginning of the armed uprising in Moscow, despite the attempts of Adjutant General Dubasov to restrain her, rushed to Moscow. “I simply consider myself “mean” by staying here,” she wrote to Governor General V.F. Dzhunkovsky in Moscow, “I prefer to be killed by the first random shot from some window than to sit here with folded arms.” The main thing that worried her was helping the “unfortunate victims of the uprising.” “You shouldn’t be afraid of death, you should be afraid of living” *.

Elizaveta Feodorovna dramatically changed her lifestyle, gave up fish and meat, and sold some of her jewelry for charity. In 1910, with her own funds, she founded the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow on Ordynka - a shelter for the poor, sick, and orphans, gave away her clothes and jewelry, retired to the cells of the monastery, cared for the sick of the nearest hospital - and did not part with a large wooden cross on the chest.

The Grand Duchess saw the regime's death throes approaching, and in a desperate attempt to influence the Tsar through her sister, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, she visited her in Tsarskoe Selo in late 1916. The sister didn’t even want to listen to her properly. In the spring of 1917, Elizaveta Fedorovna was visited by a Swedish envoy with an offer of assistance from Wilhelm II in her return to Germany. Her answer was short: my place is here, with my sisters!

*Quoted From: Moscow magazine. 1991. Do 2. pp. 48, 49.

In May 1918, an order was received to expel Elizaveta Fedorovna to Yekaterinburg, from where she, along with some other members of the royal family, was transported to Alapaevsk. In the autumn of the same year, at the bottom of an old mine in the vicinity of Alapaevsk, the bodies of Elizabeth Feodorovna, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, three sons of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich and the son of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich were found. The local priest managed to send the remains of Elizabeth Feodorovna to China, where they were buried with dignity. In 1921, Elizabeth Feodorovna’s sister Lady Milford Haven arranged for her ashes to be transferred to Jerusalem.

No less bizarre is the fate of another granddaughter of Queen Victoria - Princess Victoria Melita, daughter of Maria Alexandrovna and the Duke of Edinburgh, who also linked her fate with the Romanovs. Having no feelings for her first husband, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, she was forced to endure a hateful marriage, realizing how uncompromising her grandmother was about divorce. The heart of Victoria Hammer belonged to the son of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich - Kirill, but only in 1905, when Queen Victoria was not alive, after her divorce from the Grand Duke, she married Kirill, receiving the name Victoria Feodorovna. Nicholas II ordered Kirill to leave Russia within 24 hours, deprived him of the title of aide-de-camp and dismissed him from service.

Kirill's father, using access to the tsar, demanded that his decision be reversed. “Summon Kirill to your place, scold him, but why deprive him of his homeland!” - Vladimir Alexandrovich was indignant. The king was adamant. The prince tore all the awards from his chest, threw them on the table and ran out of the chambers, slamming the door**.

*Buchanan M. Or. cit. R. 99.

Only two years later, Kirill Vladimirovich was forgiven, returned to Russia with his wife and reinstated in service. Victoria Feodorovna shone in the world; it was the zenith of her life’s path. In the near future, the wheel of history will throw her and her husband to a foreign land.

Just like her cousin, she tried through Alexandra Feodorovna to influence the tsar, persuading him to compromise at the top with those who stood for a moderate course. She encountered the empress's inflexibility.

In August 1917, Victoria Fedorovna and her husband fled to Finland. After Finland, Kirill Vladimirovich and Victoria Fedorovna settled in France. In 1924, Grand Duke Kirill proclaimed himself Emperor of All Russia. His wife died in 1936. Two years later, Grand Duke Kirill* also died.

Another daughter of Alice of Hesse, Alix, became Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. She interests us primarily as the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a relative, therefore, of the following English monarchs, especially George V, during whose reign the critical period of the abdication of Nicholas II and the exile of him and members of the royal family fell.

Alix was Victoria's favorite, who closely followed her upbringing after Alice's death from diphtheria in 1878. As a 12-year-old girl, Alix, at the wedding of her sister Elizabeth, met the future Nicholas II, who was averse to new acquaintances, but developed a liking for Alix.

* On March 7, 1995, the remains of Kirill Vladimirovich and Victoria Fedorovna were solemnly reburied in the Grand Ducal Tomb of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, where the remains of Vladimir Alexandrovich and Vladimir Kirillovich rest. Note comp.

It is enough to read the diaries of Nicholas II to be convinced of the strength of his feelings towards Attack. She treated him more restrained, and Victoria from the very beginning opposed such a party, not without reason considering Nikolai to be weak-willed and narrow-minded. Alexander III and his wife opposed such a marriage, seeing “too much German” in Alix.

Nevertheless, in April 1894, the seriously ill tsar agreed to the marriage. Victoria’s attitude towards Nicholas also changed: in strengthening ties with Russia, she saw a means of containing the increasingly warlike Germany of Wilhelm II. Still, it was hard to comprehend in her head that her favorite would be the Russian empress. In the diary, after Nikolai and Alix announced their engagement to her during a meeting in Coburg. Victoria wrote down: “I was struck like thunder by what I heard, because, although I knew how much Inky wanted her, I still believed that Alix was still hesitating.” **

The wedding took place in St. Petersburg on November 14 (26), 1894. And soon after the coronation of Nicholas II in Moscow in May 1896, he and Alexandra Fedorovna paid a visit to Victoria at her Balmoral Palace in Scotland.

Victoria was disappointed by the evasiveness of Nicholas II when she started talking about supporting England’s actions to “pacify” Sudan, influencing France to moderate the anti-English policy in Paris, and other burning issues.

It was not the family ties of both dynasties, but other, more significant factors that determined the rapprochement between England and Russia after the death of Victoria. These ties were subjected to a decisive test after the abdication of Nicholas II from the throne - and did not withstand such a test and were severed.

** Buchanan M. Or. cit. R. 99.

Soon after coming to power, the Provisional Government, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs L.N. Milyukov, who contacted the British Ambassador J. Buchanan, raised the question of granting the royal family asylum in England to London. On March 7, Kerensky announced that he would not be the Marat of the Russian revolution and “in a very short time, Nicholas II, under my personal supervision, will be taken to the harbor and from there will go by steamer to England.”*

But precisely on the day when Kerensky made such a hasty statement in Moscow, the Provisional Government, under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet, decided to imprison Nicholas II and his wife. In his study “The Revolution and the Fate of the Romanovs,” Heinrich Joffe wrote that this did not mean a complete abandonment of the plan to send the Romanovs to England: “It was only postponed, and... until the end of June, the Provisional Government did not stop secret negotiations on its implementation at an appropriate time.” opportune moment..." **

What was happening in London in the meantime? The first reaction of both the governments of Ploil George and George V to the request from Petrograd was positive. On March 10, Buchanan informed Miliukov that George, with the consent of the ministers, offered the Tsar and Tsarina hospitality on British territory, limited only to the assurance that Nicholas would remain in England until the end of the war.

This testimony of P.N. Milyukov in his “Memoirs” suffers from incompleteness. A dispatch sent to Buchanan after a meeting of Lloyd George's cabinet instructed him to find out what private funds Nicholas II had at his disposal. “It is highly desirable,” the dispatch stated, “that His Majesty and family have sufficient funds...” ***

* Miliukov P. N. Memoirs. M., 1991. P. 488.

** Ioffe G. Revolution and the fate of the Romanovs. M., 1992. S. 8E.

And if they weren’t there, what then? However, the matter did not come to a discussion of this important issue. Objections - and insurmountable ones - to the Arrival of the Royal Family arose from the “double of Nicholas II” - George V, almost the spitting image of the Tsar. L. N. Milyukov in the same “Memoirs” described his first impression of George V during his trip to England in the spring of 1916: “King George V and the Queen came out of the door, and I was amazed: Nicholas II stood in front of me ".

On March 30, Foreign Minister A. Balfour received a note from the personal secretary of George V about the inappropriateness of granting asylum to Nicholas II and his relatives. On April 2, Balfour replied that this word could no longer be taken back, and the next day the king seemed to agree with this opinion. But already on April 6, he sent two messages to Balfour with categorical objections. They were motivated by the pressure put on him by public opinion. Documented evidence of this position of George V was made public in the book “Dossier on the Tsar” by two authors - E. Summers and T. Mangold. They also traced in detail the steps taken by Lloyd George's cabinet on the issue of granting asylum to the royal family in England.

The prime minister introduced only a few members of his cabinet to the confidential messages of George V. At a government meeting on April 13, where it was decided to reverse negotiations with Petrograd on asylum, the prime minister did not say a word that the initiative to revise the previously made decision came from the king.

*** Summers A., Mangold T. The File on the tsar. L., 1976. P. 274.

The government meeting was stormy. Everyone remembered the telegram from George V, sent at the very beginning of March to Nicholas II: “I will always remain your faithful and devoted friend.” * Only a few in the government itself knew that the king took these words back.

In the future, it will be seen that in many of his steps during his reign he adhered to the golden mean and tried not to go against the prevailing sentiments in the country. This is the only possible explanation of his position on the issue of providing asylum to the royal family.

A “fatal delay” played a role, according to E. Sammores and T. Mangold: Nicholas II declared it impossible for him to move due to his children’s illness with measles - and this at a time when London had not yet raised objections to arrival of the royal family in England.

Another chance for salvation presented itself in connection with the negotiations of the Bolshevik government on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. George V, apparently, was not mistaken when he asserted in a letter to Alexandra Feodorovna’s sister Lady Milford Haven on September 1, 1918 that it was enough for William II to lift his little finger in defense of the royal family, and it would be saved. Moscow could not refuse Berlin.

In the West, the dispute has not subsided for a long time: who is responsible for leaving the Romanov family to their fate: England or Germany? In the light of indisputable documentary evidence, responsibility should be shared equally between London and Berlin.

* Summers A., Mangold T. Or. cit. R. 244.

Royal disease - this is often called hemophilia, precisely because of its most famous carrier, Queen Victoria. The fact is that hemophilia is a genetic disease associated with a violation of the blood clotting process, and it appears due to a change in one gene in chromosome X. Accordingly, girls practically do not suffer from it, and can only be carriers.
Queen Victoria turned out to be such a carrier. Apparently, this mutation occurred in her genotype, de novo, since there were no cases of hemophilia in her parents' families. Theoretically, this could have happened if Victoria’s father was not actually Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, but some other man (hemophiliac), but there is no historical evidence in favor of this and there is no need to lie here direct.
A queen with an altered X chromosome and a healthy Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha could give birth to healthy boys, healthy girls, carrier girls, and boys with hemophilia.

Which is exactly what happened...

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (Photo ca. 1858)

1. Victoria, Princess Royal, later Empress of Germany and Queen of Prussia, most likely was a carrier hemophilia - her two sons and grandson died with very similar symptoms.

(photo 1875)

2. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, judging by the absolutely healthy offspring, was healthy.

(photo 1861)

3. Alice, later Grand Duchess of Hesse, was definitely a carrier of hemophilia, her son, Prince Frederick and three grandchildren - Henry, Waldemar and Tsarevich Alexei, were hemophiliacs.

(photo approx. 1865)

4. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, later Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, apparently was healthy.

(photo approx. 1866)

5. Princess Helena, apparently she was healthy and was not a carrier.

(photo approx. 1866)

6. Princess Louise, later Duchess of Argyll. It is unknown, there were no children in the marriage.

7. Prince Arthur, later Duke of Connaught and Stracharn, apparently was healthy.

8. Prince Leopold, later Duke of Albany, was has hemophilia and passed the disease on to his grandchildren through his daughter Alice.

9. Princess Beatrice, definitely was a carrier, two sons and two grandsons (through her daughter Victoria Eugenia, who became Queen of Spain) were hemophiliacs.

Here, perhaps, a diagram showing four branches of Victoria's descendants is appropriate - three carrying hemophilia and one healthy, which gave rise to today's ruling dynasty of England.

Let's consider.
Victoria (1840-1901), Princess Royal of Great Britain, the firstborn of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, married in 1858 the Prussian Prince Frederick, who was later proclaimed Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia in 1888. The family had 8 children, but two died in childhood, Prince Sigismund from meningitis, Prince Waldemar from diphtheria.

Prince Sigismund Prince Valdemar

It would seem that these were ordinary childhood diseases, the cause of the depressing child mortality rate in those days. But the death of the princess royal's grandson, the son of Sophia's daughter, Alexander I of Greece, from a monkey bite in 1920, gave scientists pause and their research allegedly showed that Alexander had hemophilia.

Alexander I king of Greece

Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, third child of reigning Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. Princess Alice was a carrier of hemophilia, as was her mother Queen Victoria. Her son Friedrich (Fritti) was a hemophiliac and died in childhood from internal bleeding after falling from a window, he was not even three years old. After Fritti's death, Alice's brother Leopold, who also suffered from hemophilia, sent her a letter with the following words: " I know very well what it means to suffer the way he would suffer. What does it mean to live and not be able to enjoy life... This hardly sounds comforting, but perhaps he was thus spared from the trials to which a person with my illness is subject..."

Prince Friedrich

At least two of her daughters (nothing can be said about Mary, who died in childhood, and the childless Elizabeth) were also carriers, since Irena’s sons, Princes Waldemar and Henry of Prussia, and Alice’s grandson, Russian Tsarevich Alexei, suffered from blood incoagulability. Daughter Victoria and son Ernst Ludwig were not carriers of the hereditary disease.

Irena Hesse-Darmstadt carrier of hemophilia

Her sons:
Prince Henry fell from his chair, as small children often fall, but since he was a hemophiliac, internal bleeding began and he died a few hours later. He was 4 years old.

Prince Valdemar died in a clinic in Tutzing, Bavaria due to lack of blood transfusions. He and his wife fled their home as Soviet troops approached Tutzing, where Waldemar was able to receive his last blood transfusion. The American army captured the area a day later, on May 1, 1945, and took away all medical supplies to treat the wounded. Prince Waldemar died the next day.

Victoria Alice Elena Louise Beatrice of Hesse-Darmstadt (Empress Alexandra Feodorovna), wife of Emperor Nicholas II, a carrier of hemophilia.

Her son Tsarevich Alexey:
His sad fate is known, I will only say that before the execution he was repeatedly ill, since he was an active boy, as a result he often had internal bleeding and inflammation of the joints.

Leopold, Duke of Albany, eighth child and youngest son of Victoria and Albert, himself was a hemophiliac. Moreover, he was the first in the family, it was from him that it became clear that something was wrong. Terrible pain and inflammation with minor bruises, constant care from his mother, he experienced all this in full. But he was careful, so he lived to be 30 years old and even got married.

Leopold's wife, Elena Waldeck-Pyrmontskaya (1861-1922), gave birth to his daughter Alice, and she, of course, became a carrier of the disease. Leopold's wife was pregnant with their second child, and Leopold went to Cannes alone. On March 27, while at the yacht club, the prince slipped and fell, injuring his knee. Leopold died early the next morning. Son Charles, born after his father's death, was healthy.

Young widow with children, Alice and Charles

Alice, Countess of Athlone, a carrier of hemophilia

Alice married Alexander of Teck, Queen Mary's brother. The family had three children: Lady May of Cambridge - was healthy; Rupert Cambridge, Viscount Trematon - was a haemophiliac and, at the age of 21, did not suffer a car accident (doctors concluded that for an ordinary person these would be minor injuries); Prince Maurice (Mauritius) Teck - died in infancy, may also have been ill.

Rupert Cambridge, Viscount Trematon

Beatrice of Great Britain, Victoria and Albert's last child, was a carrier and brought the disease into the Spanish royal family. She married Prince Henry of Battenberg, gave birth to four children, and while the eldest son, Alexander Mountbatten 1st Marquess of Carisbrooke, was healthy, the younger sons Leopold and Moritz were hemophiliacs and died early. Lord Leopold Mountbatten died unmarried and childless during a minor knee operation, and Moritz Battenberg died from a minor wound during the First World War.

Princes Leopold and Moritz, hemophiliacs

The only daughter of Beatrice of Great Britain, a carrier of the disease, Victoria Eugenia, married King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1906.

Victoria Evgenia Battenbergskaya, a carrier of hemophilia

Queen Victoria Eugenie and King Alfonso XIII had seven children: five sons (two of them were hemophiliacs) and two daughters, none of whom carried the gene for the disease. Both hemophiliac sons - Alphonse and Gonzalo - died as a result of minor (for a healthy person) car accidents from internal bleeding.
On September 6, 1938, Alfonso’s companion, who was driving the car in which the prince was riding, was blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car and she lost control. A few hours later, Victoria Eugenia’s eldest son, rushed to the hospital, died. He was 31 years old.
Four years earlier, his younger brother and sister were driving around Austria. Suddenly a cyclist pulled out in front of their car. Beatrice turned the steering wheel, the car skidded and crashed into a fence. Although Gonzalo did not receive any serious injuries, alas... The Prince was only twenty years old.

01.05.2011

Above: Duchess Victoria of Leiningen with her daughter Victoria, the future queen; Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent; Sir John Conroy. Below: Queen Victoria and her Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli
Victoria's uncle Leopold of Saxe-Coburg with his wife Charlotte. Below: Victoria's hemophiliac son Leopold in a wheelchair
George V and Nicholas II
Their coronation ceremonies
Heir to the Russian crown Alexey with his mother Alexandra Fedorovna
Above: Queen Elizabeth with her husband and daughters (1937); bottom: Elizabeth II.
Caroline of Monaco with husband Ernst August of Hanover and daughter

Queen Victoria may have been an illegitimate child, and then all her direct heirs, including Elizabeth II, have no right to the British throne

Blood is a juice with a very special property.

Goethe "Faust"

What beautiful faces
And how hopelessly pale -
Heir, Empress,
Four Grand Duchesses...

Georgy Ivanov

There was a time when the words “European family” had a literal meaning: the monarchs of Christendom were closely related to each other. Kings are people of flesh and blood, and they themselves know this better than any of their subjects. But it happens that blood plays a cruel joke on them, and belonging to the crowned family turns into a curse.

Victoria's Glorious Age
Having been born heir to the throne, Princess Victoria could easily have lost this title. In December 1820, Duchess of Clarence Adelaide gave birth to a daughter, baptized by Elizabeth Georgina Adelaide - as the child of her elder brother, she had priority right of inheritance. But already in March of the following year the girl died from “volvulus.”
Princess Victoria had a harsh upbringing. Deprived of her father, brothers and sisters, she was under constant surveillance and punished for the slightest offense; she was even denied the right to her own bedroom - she slept in the same room with her mother. Victoria's father was largely replaced by Uncle Leopold - she called him solo padre. Already in early childhood, he mentally wooed her to his nephew Albert, expecting to play an important role at court. Victoria's mother, the widow of the Duke of Kent, also cherished ambitious plans - if Victoria had ascended the throne before coming of age, the duchess would have become regent.
A retired Irish Army captain, John Conroy, played an exceptional role in the Duchess's inner circle. He was a friend of the late Edward of Kent, and after Duchess Victoria was widowed, he became the administrator of all her property and, therefore, a special confidant. The Duchess was entirely under the influence of this extraordinary man, who had every reason to have bright hopes for the role of “gray eminence” at the court of Queen Victoria. Conroy actively promoted the marriage of the Duchess's daughter from her first marriage, Princess Theodora (she married Prince Ernst Hohenlohe-Langenburg). Conroy sought to isolate young Victoria and did his best to protect her from acquaintances that threatened his status. He, in particular, desperately tried to disrupt the visit to London of Victoria's cousins ​​Albert and Ernst - being 17 years old, she invited them at the insistence of Uncle Leopold and immediately fell in childish love with both.
Victoria became queen at the age of 18 years and 27 days. Shortly before the coronation, she suffered from typhus, and John Conroy did not leave his sick bed, trying in vain to get her signature on the document appointing him, Conroy, as Victoria’s personal secretary. The first thing she did as a monarch was to order her bed to be moved from her mother’s bedroom to a separate room. To the great disappointment of John Conroy, she received the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, alone, categorically declaring that she would continue to do the same. Victoria managed to defend her independence from Uncle Leopold: she gently but decisively made him understand that she did not need his advice.
However, Leopold did not abandon his intention to marry his nephew and niece. Two years after the coronation, he arranged for Albert's second trip to London. He went to the British Isles with a firm desire to put an end to his uncle's baseless fantasies. Victoria, who was tired of the state of an imaginary engagement, experienced a similar desire. However, their meeting had exactly the opposite effect. Albert matured and grew from a teenager into a seductive young man. On the third day, the young queen proposed to him. (According to court protocol, the monarch cannot offer his hand - this is always done by the monarch himself.) The wedding took place on February 10, 1840. Albert became a prince consort - the queen's husband without the right to inherit the throne.
From the very first days of family life, problems with relatives began. The queen's mother wanted to move in with the newlyweds at Buckingham Palace, and when Victoria refused, she told her son-in-law that her own daughter was driving her out of the house. The father-in-law, the Duke of Coburg, persistently hinted to his daughter-in-law that it would not be bad to pay his numerous creditors from the English treasury in a family-like manner.
Victoria became pregnant a month after the wedding and in November 1840 gave birth to a girl, named Victoria Adelaide Maria Louise, or Vicky at home.
Three months after the birth of her first daughter, the queen became pregnant again. This time a boy was born - the future King Edward VII. The next child was a daughter, Alice, followed by Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold; The ninth and last child in the family was Princess Beatrice, born in 1857. All children, and especially the heir, were brought up with extreme severity and were subjected to flogging at an early age; classes lasted from 8 am to 7 pm six days a week. Their parents selected a match for them ahead of time. The eldest daughter Vicki was introduced to her future husband, Crown Prince Frederick of Germany (future Emperor Frederick III) at the age of 10, was engaged at 17, and at 20 already had two children (the eldest became Emperor Wilhelm II). Three other daughters also got married early, and only the youngest Beatrice remained a girl until she was 28 years old - her mother did not want to part with her and kept her with her as a companion.
One of the nine children, Leopold, suffered from a serious illness - hemophilia. The clergy interpreted the disease as punishment for violating the biblical covenant: during the birth of Leopold, a new product was used for the first time - chloroform anesthesia, but the Lord says to Eve, who knew sin: “I will increase your sorrow in your pregnancy; in sickness you will bear children” (Gen. 3:16). Leopold was also not good-looking and became the unloved child in the family; He did not see his mother for months and early on he felt like an outcast. Victoria was so ashamed of her youngest son that, when she went with the whole family on vacation to the Balmoral country estate, she left him in London in the care of nannies. But, as often happens in such cases, the young sufferer compensated for his physical defects with a brilliant intellect. Victoria began to appreciate Leopold's intelligence when he was six years old. Leopold's oldest friend was the wife of his brother Alfred, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Alexander II, who also felt lonely in a foreign country.
The Prince Consort died in December 1861 after suffering from a severe cold. Queen Victoria was 42 years old at the time of her husband's death. She plunged into indefinite mourning, for five years in a row refused to give the speech from the throne in parliament, every night she put a portrait of her late husband on the pillow next to her and fell asleep with his nightgown in her hands.
Leopold graduated from Oxford, became one of the queen's personal secretaries and, unlike the heir to the throne, had access to secret state papers. In 1880, he visited the USA and Canada and made such a favorable impression there that the Canadians asked the Queen to appoint him Governor-General; but Victoria could not do without the help and advice of her youngest son and refused. While engaged in government affairs, Leopold continued his education - he received a doctorate in civil law. The prince founded the Royal Conservatoire and joined the Freemasons. In 1881, Victoria granted him the title of Duke of Albany and began looking for a bride. In the end, Helena Waldeck-Pyrmont, sister of Queen Emma Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, became the chosen one. From this marriage, a daughter, Alice, was born in February 1883.
A year later, the couple separated for a while: the court doctors recommended that Leopold spend an unusually harsh winter in Cannes; Helena was pregnant and could not accompany him. In March, Leopold fell on the stairs of a Cannes hotel and died of a cerebral hemorrhage several hours later. In July, his widow gave birth to a boy, named Charles. In 1900, Charles inherited the title of Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from his uncle Alfred and moved to Germany. He subsequently played an important role in the rise of Hitler.

Hemophilia, as stated
Hemophilia is a hereditary disease that results in a disorder of the blood clotting mechanism. The patient suffers from bleeding even with minor injuries and spontaneous hemorrhages in internal organs and joints, which leads to their inflammation and destruction. Hemophilia affects almost exclusively men; women act as its carriers, passing on to their children the X chromosome with defective genes that determine the absence or deficiency of clotting factors in the blood plasma - factor VIII, factor IX or factor XI. Accordingly, the first form of the disease is called hemophilia A, the second - hemophilia B, the third - hemophilia C. The disease is still incurable, only supportive measures are used, primarily regular injections of the missing factors obtained from the blood of donors.
What was known about the nature of the disease in Victorian times? They knew how to diagnose and describe it, but they did not know how to help the patient, because they did not understand the nature of his illness. The earliest recorded case dates back to the second century AD: a rabbi allowed a woman not to circumcise her son after his two older brothers bled to death during the operation. However, back in the 19th century, a family of Ukrainian Jews lost ten sons who suffered from hemophilia and died as a result of circumcision. In 1803, the American physician John Otto published a classic description of the disease - the hereditary nature of hemophilia was clear to him, and he traced the roots of a family affected by it almost a century ago. But the mechanism of transmission of hereditary characteristics remained a mystery.
The discoverer of this mechanism is the Moravian Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics. He published the results of his experiments on crossing peas in 1866, and died in 1884, remaining an unrecognized genius. The biochemical structure of the molecule - the way in which it carries genetic information - was discovered only in the middle of the last century by Cambridge University scientists Francis Crick and James Watson, who received the Nobel Prize for this in 1962.
In the 19th century, attempts at treatment often only exacerbated the suffering of hemophiliacs. They were given leeches, cupping, veins were opened, joints were opened in order to turn internal hemorrhage into external. These measures often led to tragic results. Nevertheless, back in 1894, the famous doctor and indisputable authority Sir William Osler, whom Victoria knighted (his services to medicine are truly great), recommended bloodletting for the treatment of hemophilia. Physiologists guessed that the cause of the disease lay in the absence or shortage of some substance in the patient’s blood. Three years after Victoria's coronation and long before the birth of Prince Leopold, London physician Samuel Armstrong Lance used a blood transfusion to treat a 12-year-old hemophiliac. This was an absolutely right step, but the trouble is that the medicine of that time had no idea about the compatibility of different blood groups, and Lance’s method was rehabilitated only in the 30s of the last century. It was only in the 60s that Dr. Kenneth Brinkhouse from the University of North Carolina discovered methods for isolating, concentrating and preserving factor VIII, thanks to which hemophiliacs were able to inject themselves. However, in the 80s, a new scourge befell humanity - AIDS, and along with the life-saving solution, patients received a deadly virus until scientists learned to detect the presence of the immunodeficiency virus in the blood.
Leopold received the defective gene from his mother, Queen Victoria. From whom did the queen receive it? Her father, the Duke of Kent, was not a hemophiliac. The bearer was to be her mother, Duchess Victoria. In this case, we can expect that the ill-fated gene affected her other descendants. In her first marriage, the Duchess had two children, Charles and Theodora, half-brothers and sisters of Queen Victoria. Karl was healthy, therefore he could not pass the disease on to his children. Theodora gave birth to five children, including three boys - none of them had symptoms of hemophilia. However, girls could be carriers. Theodora's eldest daughter Adelaide gave birth to an extensive offspring - four daughters, one of whom died in infancy, and three completely healthy sons; her middle daughter Caroline Matilda gave birth to nine children, but neither they nor their children, that is, the great-great-great-grandchildren of Victoria, the alleged carrier of the disease, showed the slightest sign of hemophilia. Theodora’s youngest daughter, also Theodora, had two sons, who again did not suffer from hemophilia in any way (one of them, by the way, was captured by the Soviets during the Second World War and died in 1946 in a Mordovian camp).
But what if you go up Queen Victoria's family tree? Did any of her male ancestors suffer from hemophilia? Victoria's pedigree has been traced back to the seventeenth generation, and specifically for hemophilia. This painstaking work was done in 1911, after the queen’s death, by members of the British Eugenics Society William Bullock and Paul Fields. The fruit of their labors is preserved in the form of two scrolls in the library of the Royal Society of Medicine; it was never published for a simple reason: researchers could not find, no matter how hard they tried, among the ancestors of Queen Victoria, which included representatives of the most noble European dynasties and royal houses, not a single hemophiliac. One of two things: either the vicious gene mutated when the future queen was still an embryo in her mother’s womb, or she is not the natural daughter of Duke Edward of Kent. The chance of mutation is one in 25 thousand. The likelihood of adultery, given the morals of that time, on the contrary, is very high.

Personal life of the Duke of Kent
The marriage of the Duchess of Leiningen and Edward of Kent was concluded not out of love, but out of convenience - Edward hoped to improve his financial affairs with marriage. The Duke of Kent was already in his sixties in the year of the wedding, he had a fair belly and a bald spot, and the widow was only 32. Before the wedding, they met only once, when Edward came to the bride in Amorbach. For the sake of matrimonial plans, the Duke was forced to part with Madame Saint Laurent, with whom he lived in perfect harmony for 27 years. It was as if they had no children - albeit illegitimate, but recognized by the father, as his illegitimate children were recognized by William IV; and this leads to suspicion: was Edward infertile?
The question is not as simple as it might seem. Queen Victoria did everything to erase the memory of her father's French friend. Based on various indirect evidence, researchers have suggested that the Duke of Kent and Madame Saint Laurent had children, and, according to some estimates, there were at least seven of them. However, historian Molly Gillen, who carefully studied the surviving archival documents, especially financial ones, came to the conclusion that the Duke had no issue with Madame. Which of the two was infertile?
Edward had no children from Madame, but he had an illegitimate daughter from another young French woman, whom he met during his student years in Geneva. The story even made it into the newspapers, and the angry King George III actually exiled his son to Gibraltar for military service. Historians have established the identity of the prince’s young passion and found out that in December 1789 she died in childbirth, giving birth to a female baby, named Adelaide Victoria Augusta and given to the care of the deceased’s sister, to whom Edward then paid a salary until 1832.
Edward was convinced that he was the first man of his passion. However, Molly Gillen has collected convincing evidence that Teresa Bernardin was not a maiden when she met the Duke of Kent. She was a high-class courtesan: the ability to protect herself was one of her professional skills. But it's hard to avoid the temptation to get pregnant when your lover is a member of royal blood. Be that as it may, no information about her pregnancies has been preserved.
“I hope I have the strength to fulfill my duty,” Edward of Kent wrote to a friend on the eve of his wedding to the Duchess of Leiningen. The situation regarding the issue of the heir was acute. The first wedding took place in Coburg on May 29, 1818, after which the newlyweds traveled through Brussels to London, where a repeat ceremony took place on July 11. After this, the couple lived for two months in London, at Kensington Palace, but Victoria could not get pregnant. In September the couple returned to Amorbach. There the Duchess finally conceived. But Edward decided that his child should be born on English soil. Parliament gave him only six thousand pounds out of the promised 25. The Duke had to borrow money for the return journey. Unable to hire a coachman, he himself sat on the box of a carriage filled to capacity. It contained his wife, his stepdaughter, a nurse, a maid, two lap dogs and a cage of canaries. The second carriage carried the servants, the doctor and the midwife Madame Siebold. A certain English traveler could not believe her eyes when she saw somewhere on a European country road this “shabby caravan” with the prince in the coachman’s seat.
The future Queen Victoria was born a completely healthy and probably full-term baby. This means that she was most likely conceived in England in August 1818. This period in the life of the Duke and Duchess of Kent is described in some detail in the Court News. So, for example, from August 6 to 12 they stayed at Clermont House with the Duchess's brother Leopold. It was on the 12th that the pregnancy of the Duchess Augusta of Cambridge was announced - her child could have become the heir to the throne if the marriage of Edward and Victoria had been childless. Interestingly, on the same day the couple returned to their home at Kensington Palace; Leopold went with congratulations to the house of Duke Adolphus of Cambridge, and in the evening he came to the Kents for dinner. It is difficult to imagine that after spending six days together they had a topic of conversation other than a possible heir.
The inconsolable young widower Leopold has not yet given up on his ambitions. Having almost turned, by the will of fate and thanks to his own persistence and avant-garde appearance, from a run-of-the-mill German prince into the father of the heir to the British crown, he now harbored hopes for his sister’s marriage, which he facilitated in every possible way; a wise uncle with a crowned nephew or niece is also a good role and a good chance to get one of the European thrones (this plan was completely justified). What if his sister told him about the Duke's infertility? Would Leopold have accepted the collapse of his rosy hopes? However, Victoria herself was an experienced lady and not known for her special piety. Of course, the likelihood that her extramarital partner was a hemophiliac is small. But it is still much higher than the probability of a gene mutation.

Bastard complex
There was one striking feature in the character of Victoria of Kent, which is mentioned by memoirists. The illegitimate children of Duke William of Clarence by Dorothea Jordan, ten in all, upon their father's accession to the throne received the surname FitzClarence and titles of nobility and, with the full consent and approval of Queen Adelaide, were received at court. So, every time the Duchess of Kent reacted to their appearance with demonstrative condemnation - she immediately left the room and told her acquaintances that she would never allow her daughter to communicate with “bastards,” because in this case how could she be taught to distinguish vice from virtue? Could it be that the Freudian mechanism of moral compensation for one’s own sin was working in this case?
The secular memoirist Charles Greville, the author of many subtle observations, who by birth and duty (he was a clerk of the Privy Council) entered Buckingham Palace under three monarchs, had no doubt that the duchess had a lover and that this lover was Sir John Conroy.
Greville came to this conclusion on the basis of two circumstances: Queen Victoria's well-known hatred of the manager of her mother's estate and the inexplicable and sudden removal in 1829 from Kensington Palace of Baroness Spath, who had served as the Duchess of Kent's companion for a quarter of a century - it looked as if the baroness had divulged some intimate secrets of the house of Kent. The Baroness was in one of the carriages of the “shabby caravan” during the family’s hasty return from Germany to England (Victoria was seven months pregnant). She remained in the house after the Duke's death. But when the future Queen Victoria was 10 years old, the baroness was suddenly sent to the middle of nowhere - to Langenburg: she became the maid of honor of the half-sister of the heir to the British throne, Princess Theodora. There was a lot of talk in the world about this resignation or, if you prefer, exile. The Duke of Wellington, whose commentary was recorded by Greville, suggested that young Victoria found her mother and Conroy in an inappropriate situation, began pestering the Baroness with questions, but she could not stand it and broke her vow of silence.
Wellington assumed that the same fate awaited Louise Lehzen, the heiress’s favorite governess. This hypothesis is indirectly confirmed by Leopold’s letter, in which he writes to Letzen: “If I had not shown firmness, you would have followed Baroness Späf.”
Victoria calls Conroy in her diary a "monster" and a "devil in the flesh." When, in 1839, as queen, she discovered that her mother's lady-in-waiting, Flora Hastings, was apparently pregnant, the first person she accused was John Conroy.
The 32-year-old unmarried Lady Flora underwent a medical examination and proved that she was a maiden - the bulge in her abdomen was the result of abdominal dropsy, from which she died that same year. The queen's reputation suffered a severe blow, the public threw rotten eggs at her carriage; the scandal served as one of the reasons for the resignation of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. Who knows - perhaps Victoria’s ostentatious piety, which left an indelible mark on the entire era of her 62-year reign, was the result, if not of accurate knowledge, then of suspicions of the illegitimacy of her origin?
Unlike the Victorian era, the Regency era that preceded it professed hedonism, easy morals and easy moral standards. The Royal Archives contains a note from Duke William of Clarence to his elder brother, the Prince Regent. “Last night,” writes the future Wilhelm IV, “you saw two whores. I hope I didn’t catch anything.” It has been said about the Duke of Cumberland that he may be the father of the child of his unmarried sister Sophia.
Victoria’s legitimate origin is supported by her portrait resemblance to the Duke of Kent and his father King George III: the same round face with a cut off chin, the same fleshy nose, the same plump lips in a bow, a high convex forehead and blue eyes. In addition, there is no evidence of the presence of a hemophiliac in the circle of the Duchess of Kent, suitable for adultery. Therefore, the version of gene mutation, despite its improbability, remains valid.
The picture is distorted and complicated by another genetic defect - porphyria, which tormented the British royal house for centuries, starting with Mary Stuart. Porphyria, or porphyrin disease (from the Greek porphyreos - purple), is a rare hereditary disease expressed in a violation of the mechanism of synthesis of porphyrins (pigments). Intermediate products of synthesis accumulate in internal organs and tissues, especially in the liver, and cause severe suffering, and are then excreted from the body in urine and feces, turning them purple.
Mary Stuart's son James I and his son Prince Henry suffered from porphyria, whom the disease brought to the grave. This illness was the cause of infertility of Queen Anne, the great-granddaughter of James I, because of which the throne passed to the House of Hanover - James's great-grandson George, Elector of Hanover, who ascended the throne under the name George I; from him, porphyria was transmitted to Sophia's daughter Dorothea, who married King Frederick William I of Hohenzollern of Prussia and became the mother of Frederick II the Great, and in the male line the disease reached George III, Queen Victoria's grandfather. Symptoms of porphyria were also observed in the Prince Regent, later George IV, and possibly also in his wife Queen Caroline, the great-great-granddaughter of Frederick William I. If this is so, then their only daughter Princess Charlotte received the porphyria gene through both lines. Queen Victoria's father Edward of Kent was also sick with Porphyria, but the disease miraculously stopped on him: neither Victoria herself nor any of her numerous offspring suffered from it. True, according to modern research, Victoria’s granddaughter, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister Charlotte, had it, and passed it on to her only daughter Theodora, but she could have inherited the porphyria gene through the male line - from her father Frederick III. Recently there were reports that Vicky, the wife of Frederick III, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, and Victoria’s great-great-grandson, the cousin of the current queen, Prince William of Gloucester, also suffered from porphyria, who crashed in 1972 in a plane he himself was flying. However, this information is unreliable.

The gene that destroyed Russia
Nicholas II's mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, was the daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark and her maiden name was Dagmara. Her older sister Alexandra was married to the British monarch, Queen Victoria's eldest son Edward VII. Thus, the future king and Edward's son, later King George V, were cousins; they looked so similar it was as if they were identical twins rather than cousins. The similarity amused both themselves and all their relatives: Nikolai and Georg wore mustaches and beards of the same style and were often photographed together.
In June 1884, Queen Victoria's second daughter Alice of Hesse married her eldest daughter Elizabeth to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Nicholas's uncle; she accepted Orthodox baptism and began to be called Elizaveta Fedorovna. At their wedding in St. Petersburg, 16-year-old Nikolai saw for the first time the bride’s 12-year-old sister, Alexandra, or Alix, as her family called her.
When Alix was six years old, she, along with her sisters and mother, fell ill with diphtheria; she recovered, but her mother and youngest sister Mary, two years old, died. Alix was not only orphaned, but also remained the youngest child in the family of the Grand Duke of Hesse, Ludwig IV. This event left an indelible imprint on Alix’s character: from an ever-laughing, carefree child, she turned into a withdrawn, stubborn and hot-tempered creature. Queen Victoria took her granddaughter into her care. No one knew that the deceased mother was a carrier of the hemophilia gene, and that Alix became a carrier too.
In April 1894, in Coburg, where on the occasion of the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernest and his cousin Victoria Melita (she was the daughter of Queen Victoria’s second son, Duke Alfred of Edinburgh and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Emperor Alexander II), crowned persons from all over Europe gathered, between heir to the Russian throne and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, an explanation occurred. “They talked until 12 o’clock,” Nikolai wrote in his diary, “but to no avail: she still resisted the change of religion, she, poor thing, cried a lot...” There, in Coburg, the engagement was announced. In preparing for the dynastic marriage, London and St. Petersburg weighed the political consequences. No one thought about the genetic consequences. Only in 1913, when Nicholas decided to marry his eldest daughter Olga to the Romanian Crown Prince Carol, his mother - she was another daughter of Alfred of Edinburgh - resolutely opposed the idea precisely on this basis.
The rest is known: hemophilia overtook the only son of the Emperor, Tsarevich Alexei. And in the whole world there was only one person who could alleviate the suffering of the heir - Grigory Rasputin. No one outside the narrow family circle knew that Alexei was seriously ill or about the power of Rasputin’s spell.
Both he and his family usually learn that a child has hemophilia when he learns to walk, which means he falls and gets bumps. For a hemophiliac, each such fall can end tragically. The queen knew very well what hemophilia was: her brother Frederick William suffered from it. The boy was three years old when he fell out of a first floor window. He did not break a single bone or receive any serious injuries, but that same evening he died, like Uncle Leopold, from a cerebral hemorrhage. Alix's two nephews, the children of her sister Irene, were hemophiliacs.
The need to hide the secret of the Romanov house led to the isolation of the royal family and its forced seclusion. The atmosphere that was created as a result at the imperial court largely stimulated the crisis of power that led to Russia's involvement in the First World War, subsequent revolutions and the collapse of Russian statehood.

Plague on all your houses
Even on the Belgian throne, the lively Uncle Leopold continued, like a real matchmaker, to arrange the fate of his relatives. When the husband of Queen Maria II of Portugal unexpectedly died in 1835, Leopold hastily equipped his nephew Ferdinand on the road. The business burned out - the nephew became king consort. Maria bore him 11 children and died in 1853; Ferdinand became regent for the young king, his son Pedro.
Leopold's other idea was much less successful. He married his daughter Charlotte to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, who was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico in 1864. But the Mexicans did not appreciate the project - they executed the newly-minted monarch; Charlotte returned home and lost her mind; she spent the rest of her life in solitude.
Finally, Leopold took an active part in arranging the marriage of his great-niece and the young king of Spain. We are talking about the offspring of Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria. She was strongly attached to her mother and married only at the age of 28 to Prince Heinrich of Battenberg, but even during her marriage she continued to live with Victoria. When the queen began to go deaf, Beatrice read state papers aloud to her. In 1896, her husband died of fever in West Africa. By this time, Beatrice had given birth to three sons and a daughter from him.
Like her older sister Alice, Beatrice was a carrier of the hemophilia gene. The disease was transmitted to two sons, one of whom bled to death on the operating table, and the other died from wounds received in the battle of Ypres. The carrier of the defective gene was Beatrice's daughter, Victoria Eugenia. She was given in marriage to King Alfonso XIII, who at that time was barely 20 years old. This marriage turned out to be unhappy. Their eldest son Alfonso was born a hemophiliac. The next one, Jaime, was born deaf and mute. The third died at birth - they did not have time to give him a name. The fifth son, Gonzalo, also turned out to be a hemophiliac. The Spaniards are especially sensitive to issues of blood - they are the ones who coin the expression “blue blood”. Ominous rumors circulated among the people that one young soldier was being killed every day in the royal palace in order to keep the sick princes alive with fresh blood.
After the outbreak of the Republican revolt in 1931, Alfonso XIII left the country, but abdicated only in January 1941, a month and a half before his death. His sons, blaming their mother for their illnesses, sought oblivion in a whirlwind of entertainment, constantly changing racing cars and women. Don Alfonso married a Cuban woman without his father's blessing, but divorced four years later; his second marriage, with a Cuban woman, lasted only six months. In September 1938, in Miami, Alfonso was riding in a car with a nightclub singer. A lady was driving. The car crashed into a telegraph pole. Alfonso was not seriously injured, but died from loss of blood. He had no children left - this branch died out during the life of Alfonso III. The second brother, the deaf and dumb Jaime, was also
Authors.

Emperor Alexander II sighed bitterly when he had to reprimand his sons for “inappropriate” loves - he himself was very familiar with this torment; at a young age, he was also madly in love with his mother’s maid of honor Olga Kalinovskaya. And his parents were also worried about the “inappropriate object” of Sasha’s love. Nicholas I wrote to his wife at that time: “ We talked [with H.A. Lieven] about Sasha. He needs to have more strength of character, otherwise he will die... He is too amorous and weak-willed and easily falls under influence. It is absolutely necessary to remove him from St. Petersburg…»
Mother, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna shared her husband’s views. In her diary she wrote: “ What will happen to Russia if the person who will reign over it is not able to control himself and allows his passions to command him and cannot even resist them??»
Parents often feel that their children are unadapted to life, weak and completely unprepared to accept the inheritance carefully saved and multiplied for them by the older generation. How many fathers and mothers sadly ask themselves the question: “What will happen to the country, to the family company, to the estate, to the house, to the shop (etc., depending on the wealth and position of the family) when everything passes into the hands of our heir? ? He can’t handle this burden!” But the day and hour comes when fate, without asking, makes the heir the master and, more often than not, nothing particularly terrible happens - life goes on as usual.
Over time, looking at the results of the reigns of Nicholas I and Alexander II through the prism of history, how can we determine who was the best owner for the Russian land? Alexander the Liberator seems to many to be a much more significant figure... And his father? Let us at least remember Tyutchev’s words about Nicholas I:

You did not serve God and not Russia,
He served only his vanity,
And all your deeds, both good and evil, -
Everything was a lie in you, all the ghosts were empty,
You were not a king, but a performer.

Olga Kalinovskaya

Young Alexander Nikolaevich, in love, tried to explain himself to his father, Nicholas I: “ You probably noticed my relationship with O.K.(Oh yes, the king noticed them, and how he noticed them!) ... My feelings for her are feelings of pure and sincere love, feelings of affection and mutual respect».
Alas, for the heir to the Russian throne, these feelings turned out to be an unnecessary luxury. Sasha was removed from St. Petersburg, sent on a European trip with strict orders - to curb his temper and forget about Mademoiselle Kalinovskaya forever... And if he’s lucky, look abroad for a suitable princess worthy of becoming the bride of the heir to the Russian throne.

Tsarevich Alexander in 1839

Traveling around Europe, Tsarevich Alexander visited the English capital and, naturally, was received at the royal court. This happened back in 1839.
And Queen Victoria, who had been mindful of the interests of the monarchy from a young age, was precisely concerned about choosing a husband. What awaited him, alas, was not the royal crown, but the modest position of prince consort to his crowned wife.

Queen Victoria

Victoria in those years was, of course, not that overweight old woman with an unkind look and a figure hopelessly spoiled by numerous births, a lady who experienced too much in her life to maintain her charm (as she became towards the end of her reign and as she is often represented in popular portraits and memoirs of those submitted).

Queen Victoria

The young twenty-year-old Vicky was considered not just pretty, but also a beautiful girl - slender, stately, with an open look, with an inviting smile showing beautiful “pearly” teeth, with ashen hair elegantly framing her chiseled face...
Alexander Nikolaevich fell in love.
His adjutant, Colonel S.A. Yuryevich, who attended the court ball given by the queen for a distinguished guest from Russia with the prince, wrote in his diary: “ The day after the ball, the heir talked only about the queen... and I am sure that she also found pleasure in his company».
A couple of days later, Colonel Yuryevich comes to even more definite conclusions: “ The Tsarevich admitted to me that he was in love with the queen, and was convinced that she fully shared his feelings...»

Queen Victoria

Victoria, for her part, was also fully aware of her own moods: “ I'm completely in love with the Grand Duke,- she wrote in her diary, - he is a sweet, wonderful young man…” The Queen enjoyed relative freedom and could afford to spend a lot of time with her guest. Social entertainment, joint horseback riding, hunting, tea parties with friendly conversations, visits to ancient castles... Alexander stayed in Britain longer than planned. Memories of the maid of honor Kalinovskaya, as an object of passion, quickly melted away.
Alas, in the opinion of Russian Emperor Nicholas I, this romance was even more unsuitable for his son than his infatuation with his maid of honor.
Is this why they raise heirs to the throne in Russia, so that they can be given over to become prime ministers in someone else’s empire? No, Prince Consort is not a title for the Romanovs! The Tsarevichs themselves are needed in St. Petersburg, even if London does not make any plans for the Grand Dukes...
At the insistence of his father, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich left, leaving Victoria as a souvenir the shepherd dog Kazbek, who spent his entire dog life as the queen’s favorite... The romance of Sasha and Vika never took place. Alas, the interests of the two monarchies took their toll - Alexander married the Hesse-Darmstadt princess, Victoria also found another worthy candidate for the role of prince consort.

Empress Maria Alexandrovna, wife of Alexander II

Years passed, the old love seemed to be forgotten... But the Russian Empress Maria Alexandrovna, who took her place next to Alexander Nikolaevich, and the children she bore seemed so unpleasant to the English queen... Ordinary female jealousy? Without a doubt.
A rare rejected lady will like her happy rival and the children she gave to her unfaithful lover.
Forty years later, in the second half of the 1870s, the political interests of Great Britain and Russia crossed again, and Alexander II, irritated by the actions of the Queen of England, spoke of the former subject of tender passion in the following terms: “ Oh, that stubborn old hag!», « Ah, that old English fool again!»

Alexander II

Aging men often tend to consider their peers as real old women, while themselves as youthful handsome men.
The “old English fool” outlived the object of her youthful love for a long time. Alexander Nikolayevich faced a terrible death - with the tacit approval of the “progressive public” of Russia, the emperor was blown up by “bombers” from “Narodnaya Volya” in 1881...

And Queen Victoria lived to see the turbulent 20th century and left, bitterly mourned by her subjects, leaving her country and the world with the memory of the blessed “Victorian era” and having managed to marry her beloved granddaughter Alix to Niki, the beloved grandson of the unfaithful Alexander, the young man who was destined to become the last emperor of Russia .
Wise Victoria did not extend her jealous dislike for the Romanovs to the third generation of the royal family and graciously accepted her “grandson-in-law.”

Daughter of Alexander II Maria Alexandrovna

But Maria Romanova, the daughter of Alexander II, who became the Duchess of Edinburgh, daughter-in-law of Queen Victoria in 1874, took upon herself the entire burden of her mother-in-law’s difficult relationship with the Russian imperial family. Victoria treated her with a pointed dryness and never missed an opportunity to lecture her or “put her in her place”... (Perhaps Maria Alexandrovna was too similar to her mother, Princess Maria of Hesse-Darmstadt, Victoria’s happy rival on the love front?)
The Duchess of Edinburgh often ran away from her prim English family to her homeland, Russia, to bask in her soul at the family hearth of her older brother. " She came often- recalled the daughter of Alexander III Olga, - she was constantly at odds with her mother-in-law».
And she added: « I loved Aunt Maria; I don't think she was very happy. But in Peterhof she took a break from her worries».

On October 29, 1875, Princess of Great Britain Mary Alexandra Victoria von Saxe-Coburg, or Missy at home, was born in Kent at Eastwell Park Palace, the granddaughter of the Russian Emperor Alexander II and the English Queen Victoria.

She was the second child in the family of Prince Alfred of Great Britain and Duke of Saxe-Coburg, second son of Queen Victoria, and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia.

As you know, Emperor Alexander II and Queen Victoria could not stand each other, although in their youth they had a short affair. All this could not but affect the family where Princess Mary was born.


Her mother, Grand Duchess Maria, while visiting her relatives, the Dukes of Hesse-Darmstadt, accidentally saw a photograph of a young man who turned out to be Prince Alfred. His sister Alice, wife of Duke Leopold of Hesse-Darmstadt, did everything possible to introduce Alfred and Mary to each other, persuading her mother, Queen Victoria.

The young people fell in love with each other, but Maria's future mother-in-law began to oppose their marriage. She ordered Maria Alexandrovna to come to England so that Alfred's bride could be examined by doctors, which caused the quite legitimate indignation of Emperor Alexander II.
But nevertheless, love won - on January 23, 1874, the wedding of Alfred and Maria Alexandrovna took place in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. Emperor Alexander II gave his only daughter a dowry unheard of at that time - 100,000 pounds and, in addition, an annual provision of 20,000 pounds, paid from the Russian budget. Queen Victoria, famous for her stinginess and economy, could not afford anything like this. It got to the point that Victoria and her daughters were jealous of Maria Alexandrovna for her outfits and jewelry. Their envy and dissatisfaction with the daughter-in-law's decoration began to be expressed in the fact that Maria Alexandrovna began to infringe on her rights. It was especially hard for Maria Alexandrovna in 1878-1879. , when in Great Britain, at the official level, with the permission of Victoria, rabid Russophobia was instilled against the backdrop of the Russian-Turkish war.
It is no wonder that the marriage of Mary’s parents was unhappy, although in addition to her five more children were born:
1. Prince Alfred (10/15/1874-02/06/1899)
2. Princess Victoria-Melita (25.11.1876-02.03.1936)
3. Princess Alexandra (09/01/1878-04/16/1942)
4. Stillborn son (10/13/1879-10/13/1879)
5. Princess Beatrice (04/20/1884-07/13/1966)
Mary's father, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg, was addicted to drink and paid little attention to his children. Insulted by Victoria’s family, the mother also paid little attention to her children, preferring balls in Great Britain and Russia, believing that “only men should be taught.”

Therefore, the children were left to their own devices and received a poor education. As Maria herself later recalled, she learned only one history textbook before the start of the French Revolution. Of the sisters, Victoria (“Dakki” - duck) was very close to her - the future wife of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich and the mother of the pretender to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich.
When Maria became an adult, her grandmother Queen Victoria for some reason decided to marry her to the British Crown Prince George Friedrich Ernst Albert (the future King George the Fifth).

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, the Romanian king Carol I died suddenly, unable to withstand the stress.

Thanks to Maria, the authority of the royal house in Romania grew sharply despite the defeats of the Romanian troops on the fronts, which, as Supreme Commander, were led by King Ferdinand.
On November 20, 1916, after fierce fighting, the Romanian army with advancing German troops left Bucharest and the royal court moved to the Moldavian city of Iasi, where it remained until the end of the war. In 1918, an extremely difficult situation developed in Romania - the country stopped receiving help from Russia. In such conditions, Germany began to put pressure on Ferdinand to sign a separate agreement, according to which Dobruja and Romanian Transylvania were torn away from Romania, and Romania transferred the right to develop all state-owned fields and trade in Romanian oil for a period of 90 years to German companies. And only thanks to Maria, who called the agreement being prepared treacherous, Ferdinand refused to sign it. But it was all in vain: the Romanian government of A. Margiloman on May 7, 1918, behind the backs of the monarchs, signed a shameful peace treaty, and the people’s representatives “democratically” ratified it in the country’s parliament. To protect the interests of the country and the Romanian people, Maria selflessly went to the front, where she spoke about freedom, democracy, reforms of the country and the shameful peace concluded with Germany.
As a result, a paradoxical situation arose: Romania, having concluded a peace treaty, continued the war with Germany until the fall of the Kaiser. And this happened only thanks to Maria of Romania.
Maria Romanianskaya took an active life position: she participated in the work of the Red Cross in Romania, wrote the book “My Country,” and donated her royalties to the treatment of wounded soldiers.
On December 1, 1918, Romanian troops, under the command of Ferdinand, solemnly entered Bucharest to the rejoicing of the people.

Maria, dressed in a blue dolman, commanding a squadron of hussars, pranced in a solemn march under the Arc de Triomphe in Bucharest.

In 1919, Maria was a full representative of Romania when signing the Treaty of Versailles, according to which the territories occupied by the Triple Alliance were returned to Romania, including part of the lands that had previously belonged to the Russian Empire.
In the post-war period, Romania was in great ruin, but in 1922, as in Russia, the economy began to rise. Therefore, Ferdinand and Mary were solemnly crowned that same year in Sinai.

To improve her health, Maria went to Northern Italy to Merano, and then continued treatment at the Weisser Hirsch clinic near Dresden. But in vain, cirrhosis of the liver was not cured.

Anticipating death, Mary decided to die in the country where she became queen. And as soon as the train crossed the Romanian border, blood began to flow from the larynx and Maria died.
Mourning was declared in the country; most of its inhabitants sincerely mourned the loss of their queen.
Maria was buried in the town of Curtea de Arges in the family crypt next to her
husband.