Figure 4. Alices famiy Alice Louis of Hesse Irene Henry Fred Alix Nikolas II of Russia Waldemar Prince Sigmund of Prussia Henry Olga Tatiana Marie Anastasia Alexis
Queen Victoria’s third child, Alice, passed hemophilia to the German and Russian imperial families.
Of Alice’s six children, three were afflicted with hemophilia. At the age of three, her son Frederick bled for three agonizing days from a cut on the ear. Eventually, the flow of blood was stanched. But a few months later, while playing boisterously in his mother’s room, the boy charged headlong through an open window and fell to the terrace below. By the evening he was dead from the internal bleeding.
Alice’s daughter Irene, a carrier, married her first cousin, Prince Henry of Prussia, and gave birth to two hemophilic sons. Every attempt was made to conceal the fact that the dreaded disease had shown itself in the German imperial family, but, at the age of four, Waldemar, the youngest of the princes, bled to death. The other prince, Henry, died at the age of fifty-six.
Alice’s other daughter, Alix, was also a carrier. Had she accepted the offer of marriage from Prince Eddy, or his
brother George, hemophilia would have been re-introduced into the reigning branch of the British royal family. But
Alexandra (Alix) married Tsar Nikolas II instead and carried the disease into the Russian imperial family. She had
four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia, before giving birth to the long-awaited son, Alexis, heir to the
Russian throne. These children, along with their parents, were eventually murdered during the Russian Revolution.
Within a few months of his birth, his parents realized that their precious and only son, Alexis, had hemophilia. The first sign had been some unexpected bleeding from the navel, which had stopped after a few days. Much more serious, however, were the dark swellings that appeared each time the child bumped an arm or a leg. And worst of all was the bleeding into the joints. This meant a crippling of the affected limbs in addition to excruciating pain. As the boy grew older, he was obliged to spend weeks in bed, and after he was up, to wear a heavy iron brace.
Neither well-experienced doctors nor numerous prayers to God by desperate parents seemed to help the suffering child. Distressed over their son’s condition, his parents, the Tsar and Tsarina, turned to the monk Rasputin, a spiritualist who claimed he could help Alexis. Rasputin received an unlimited trust from Alexandra because he was the only person who was able to relieve her son’s sufferings. How he managed to do this is uncertain. “A likely explanation is that Rasputin, with his hypnotic eyes and his self-confident presence, was able to create the aura of tranquility necessary to slow the flow of blood through the boys veins. Where the demented mother and the dithering doctors merely increased the tenseness of the atmosphere around the suffering child, Rasputin calmed him and sent him to sleep.” While Tsar and Tsarina were preoccupied with the health of their son, the affairs of state deteriorated, culminating in the Russian revolution.
**Supposing Alexis had lived and married a woman who is a carrier, what are the chances that his daughters would be a carrier*
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