Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

It’s unlikely that Queen Victoria read it. If she had, and understood what she read, if she had read there that life expectancy for a haemophiliac was eight years , would she have made its author Physician-in-Ordinary to her haemophiliac son? By the eighteen seventies the theory of haemophilia and its inheritance was well-known and thoroughly documented in publications of Elsaesser, Davis, Coates, Rieken, Hughes, Wachsmuth and many others. The late Prince Albert, always fascinated by anything scientific, and with German as his native tongue, would have been acquainted with some of them and would surely have passed information on to the Queen. Leopold’s haemophilia was known to his parents but the truth is that Queen Victoria didn’t want to know. Least of all did she want to believe that it was through her agency that the disease was passed. We can be sure she didn’t read Henry’s book, nor probably its successor, Haemorrhagic Disposition in Families , and equally certain Henry never passed on to her the current medical opinion, that marriage should be banned for the sisters of haemophiliacs. Taking that advice to heart would have prohibited the dynastic alliances made by at least three of Prince Leopold’s sisters.

Henry himself must have had something of the courtier about him to find his way into Victoria’s favour. We know he was handsome from his photographs, that he had a beautiful voice, ‘low, rich and mellifluous’, from a letter Olivia Batho’s sister Constance wrote to her friend Lucy Rice. Henry was learned, with probably a charming bedside manner, and can we doubt that he had the assurance and confidence which come from excelling at the job one is good at and most wants to do? Did he perhaps tell the Queen what we now know to be true but which he himself believed not to be the case, that haemophilia may occur at random, no one knows why? An irony if he did. It was not until well into this century the discovery was made that the disease may begin through spontaneous mutation.

Whatever Henry said or did, the fact was that he was appointed physician to the Prince, at that time nineteen years old. Leopold had been the most unruly of Victoria’s children. Boys with haemophilia are often daredevils, playing the sort of games most dangerous to them, just as their mothers are over-protective. The kind of minor injuries which all children encounter, bruised knees, small cuts and grazes, resulted in Leopold’s case in prolonged blood loss. Almost worse were the internal bleeding and bleeding into the joints and from the gums.

He was also, some say, the nicest of the Queen’s four sons and the most intellectual and he insisted on being allowed to go up to Oxford. That Henry was sometimes in attendance on him there is mentioned in the Queen’s letters to her eldest daughter, the Crown Princess Frederick. In 1881 Leopold was made Duke of Albany and eventually decided to marry, in spite of his mother’s terrors and warnings. Perhaps Henry was able to calm her fears. Many years later, while on holiday with his own family in the Lake District, he wrote the following to Barnabus Couch, a propos of his attendance on the haemophilic son of Princess Beatrice of Battenberg:

I very well remember Her Majesty the Queen’s distress when HRH the Duke of Albany proposed to marry. She had determined HRH was far too great an invalid to consider matrimony. Her opinion was that he should remain quietly at Court, pursuing if he wished to do so his scholarly interests. Even she, with her fervid imagination, could not conceive of a haemophiliac subject injuring himself with writing and reading materials, though in fact HRH did once cause a violent and protracted bleed through piercing the roof of his mouth with a steel pen! Then, when he proposed to the Princess Helene and was accepted, there came first shock and grief but this was swiftly followed by assertions on HM’s part that she, and none but she, had arranged the alliance and nothing could be more proper. I was anxious not to tell her falsehoods but there was one question I avoided. Fortunately, she did not ask it. I could not tell her the truth, that any daughters HRH might beget would inevitably be conductors of haemophilia.

It was extraordinary how coarse HM could be. She told me without a blush and with not the least diffidence that she doubted if the Prince was capable of fatherhood. There, of course, she was wrong, for the Duchess of Albany had produced a daughter – certainly a conductor – and was soon to produce a son when her husband met his untimely death. As HM and I discussed Prince Leopold’s future, making reference principally to the various treatments (the application of ice, cauterization, rest) I had in mind for his incurable condition – she believed, if you please, that he would ‘grow out of it’ – she turned suddenly upon me and remarked that it was time I considered matrimony myself. I must be approaching forty, she said, flattering me greatly by lopping some five years off my age. She then astonished me more than I can say by quoting Shakespeare! She looked at me and declared I must not take such ‘graces to the grave and leave the world no copy’. You, my dear Couch, are the only man (or, come to that, woman) to whom I have related these extraordinary events. As you know, I did marry three years later, though my decision and my choice of wife had little to do with Her Majesty’s counsel.

That is. the single reference in letter or diary that Henry makes to his wife with the exception of noting at the appropriate time in the diary, ‘E. delivered of a daughter’ or later on, ‘E. delivered of a son.’ Of course that means very little. Henry was a Victorian and, like most Victorian men out of the upper middle class, kept his domestic life distinct from his professional life, even to the extent of regarding his diaries as the repository of professional engagements and his letters as purely man-to-man confidences. None of that indicates that he married Edith Henderson for any reason but personal choice, because, in fact, he was in love with her.

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But, at the time of Prince Leopold’s marriage to Princess Helene of Waldeck-Pyrmont, Henry was in love with Olivia Florence Charlotte Batho, or he was giving a very good imitation of being so. She also is never mentioned by name in the diaries or letters but her father and mother are, along with their London house and their country home, Grassingham Hall in Norfolk. He seems to have met the Bathos some time before but the first diary entry is in March 1882. Henry notes, ‘Dined with Sir John Batho in Grosvenor Square.’ There is something else on that page of the diary, for the same day: a pentagram, indicating an afternoon with Jimmy Ashworth.

Henry dines with the Bathos again in April and again in May, two days before taking a two-week walking holiday in Switzerland, and one week after his return goes riding in Hyde Park with ‘Lady Batho and her daughters’. There is nothing, anywhere, to tell us how he met the Bathos, still less how he felt about them. But in the early October of that same year he ‘went down to Norfolk for the shooting’ and, although he doesn’t say where he’s staying, the entry ends with the words, ‘Grassingham Hall very fine’. In September he had given a dinner party at his rooms in Wimpole Street, having apparently nipped back from Chalcot Road, for there’s a five-pointed star on this page too. The dinner party is the first ever recorded in the diaries, and he lists the guests in strict alphabetical order: Mr and Mrs Annerley, Sir John and Lady Batho and – there it is again – ‘their daughters’, Dr Barnabus Couch and Dr and Mrs Vickersley. Who were the Annerleys and the Vickersleys? They occasionally have a place in the diaries, but without a clue as to their identity. Henry had very correctly invited an equal number of men and women. Who sat where? No record of that exists either. The one significant fact to emerge is that, by Victorian standards, Henry was seeing a lot of Olivia.