Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Henry would have brought his Writ of Summons with him to his Introduction and worn his own robe. The one he had made, trimmed in those days with real ermine, not rabbit which is used today, is the robe I still wear at State Openings of Parliament, though of course will wear no longer. He was introduced ‘between’, as it’s still put, a junior and a senior supporter, two of his soon-to-be fellow Peers. How did he come to choose them? Did they offer their services? Did he know them previously? Were they perhaps his patients?

The procession, as it enters the Chamber after prayers have been said, consists of the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod in black tail coat and knee breeches, Garter King of Arms dressed like the Knave of Hearts, then should come the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, but mostly they don’t come, the Junior Supporter, the new peer carrying his Writ of Summons, and the Senior Supporter, the last three all in their robes and carrying black cocked hats. At the Bar each member of the procession makes a court bow – that’s a nod of the head – to the Cloth of Estate. Henry and company would have proceeded up the Temporal side of the House and gone towards the Woolsack, bowing again and again – but I can’t go on with this, it’s really a bit tedious and can be ludicrous if anyone makes a mistake or loses his voice or stumbles. In Henry’s day, and up to a couple of years ago, new peers had to kneel before the Lord Chancellor to present their Writs of Summons. But many of them were too old for this and too stiff in the joints. They could kneel but they couldn’t always get up again.

Henry would have knelt. Slender Henry. Agile Henry. He’d have taken the Oath of Allegiance. Whether the watching peers in those days graded new ones according to their performance I don’t know but I’ve no doubt it was in a ringing voice that Henry uttered, ‘I, Henry Alexander, Baron Nanther, do swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, her Heirs and Successors, according to law, so help me God.’

After a lot more bowing and cap-doffing, as much as fifteen minutes for the whole thing, Henry had become Lord Nanther amid the congratulations of his peers. In the following year, he records in his diary for the end of June and early July how he took part in some of the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. These entries, perhaps needless to say, are more fulsome than anything he wrote about his wife and children.

On 23 June he joined the procession out of the House of Lords’ Chamber to the Peers’ Entrance in Old Palace Yard where the Lord Chancellor entered his state carriage and the peers followed in their private carriages. Henry mentions the gold lace and cocked hats, the Levee dress worn by Privy Counsellors, and I detect a wistful note as if he wished he too might have been privileged to wear it. They proceeded to Buckingham Palace, hardly a novelty to Henry, to present an Address to the Queen. Nothing is said by him as to the weather but according to Her Majesty in her journal, ‘the heat was dreadful’.

The Houses of Parliament must be almost alone today in still giving the name Whitsun to the Sunday and Monday seven weeks after Easter. The Church calls it Pentecost and the country the Spring Bank Holiday but we still call it Whitsun. Parliament has a week off and after that, when we go back, tea is served on the terrace. Not before, no matter how warm it may be, but always after Whitsun. Visitors usually ask if they can ‘have tea on the terrace’, a request that puzzles me because this embankment above the Thames is set about with grimly functional tables and hard chairs, is complicated of access and when you get there by a cold winding staircase and through kitchen regions, has one of the least attractive views on the river. Facing you is St Thomas’s Hospital, the old part and the new, reminding MPs and peers that this is where they’ll take you if you have a heart attack climbing the stairs. I much prefer the Peers’ Guest Dining Room, Puginesque red and gold, carpet on the floor and a lofty ceiling. But the food at teatime is delicious wherever you have it, smoked salmon sandwiches and strawberries with the largest portions of thick golden clotted cream, positively slabs of it, you’ll get anywhere.

Coming out of the Chamber I encounter Lachlan Hamilton in the Peers’ Lobby and he suggests tea on the terrace. We make our way down the staircase that probably has a name but I don’t know what it is. Bright hot sunshine meets us and blazing light coming off the river. Lachlan is humming a tune. I don’t recognize it but a Viscount sitting at the nearest table to the door does. He says, ‘You need not be quite so sickeningly appropriate, Lachlan,’ and manages a hollow sort of laugh. The woman with him, probably the Viscountess, is as puzzled as I am. She looks up from her strawberries and gives us the sort of long-nosed icy look you only get from a certain kind of peeress.

‘The Götterdämmerung ,’ says Lachlan as we sit down.

Are we gods? I’m sure they didn’t have glorious summer days like this in Valhalla but a kind of perpetual twilight. I order strawberries and sugar and cream and therefore, according to Lachlan, am like the young lady who sewed a fine seam.

‘Must have been a bloody good doctor, your great-grandpapa,’ he says, ‘to get a peerage out of Victoria.’

‘He was a courtier.’

‘Must have been. Did he cure any of that lot of anything?’

I say that I believe the Queen thought he could cure her grandsons’ haemophilia. Of course he couldn’t, no one could. ‘Perhaps today they can do it by transplanting a gene but this was over a hundred years ago.’

‘Who were these grandsons? The Tsarevich would be one, right?’

‘He was a great-grandson. His mother was the Tsarina, Princess Alice’s daughter. Her sister Irene was a carrier, one of her sons bled to death aged four and another, Waldemar, was also a haemophiliac. There were two Battenberg grandsons. Princess Beatrice’s sons. They both lived into their twenties. Leopold died in a car crash and Maurice in the retreat from Mons. Beatrice’s daughter Ena married the King of Spain, Alfonso the XIIIth. Two of her sons had it.’

Lachlan looks thoughtful and even gloomier than usual. ‘And now it’s just died out? Of the royal family, I mean.’

I say that considering Queen Victoria had five daughters and all but one of them had a daughter or daughters, it was astonishing how few males of the family had haemophilia and how relatively quickly it-had simply disappeared. ‘One or more of the Russian grand duchesses would almost certainly have been a carrier but we’ll never know because they died in the cellar in Ekaterinburg. Princess Helena’s sons were free of it. Of her daughters, one had her marriage annulled because her husband was homosexual and the other never married. They may have been carriers. By the end of the nineteen forties all the haemophiliacs were dead and all the carriers either childless or daughterless or dead or past childbearing. Queen Victoria brought it in or a mutation in her genes or her mother’s did and within forty-five years of her death it had gone.’

‘Your great-grandpapa,’ says Lachlan, ‘did he do anything to make those Battenberg boys live long enough to be cannon fodder or drive cars?’

‘I don’t see what he could have done apart from telling the parents to be careful they didn’t fall or cut themselves.’

‘What happened if haemophiliacs had to have their appendixes out?’

‘They died.’

He gives his dry laugh that has no hint of humour in it. It’s a signal with him that the subject is to be changed. His walrus face settles into bags and pouches. ‘You realize, do you, that if you and I want to come here next year we’ll have to come as Lord or Lady Life Peer’s guests?’