2: Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria is well known as a prolific matriarch who believed that intermarriage between European royalty could guarantee peace. Her matchmaking, first of her nine children then of her grandchild, cross-pollinated nearly every royal family in Europe but greatly contributed to the end of the imperial age. In fact, family relations between the descendants who ruled England, Russia, and Britain were very central to World War I.
Kaiser Wilhelm’s extreme insecurities and anger toward Britain was directly linked to his English mother’s insistence throughout his upbringing thatanything English was superior to Germany. Historians point to the years leading up to World War I as plagued not only by political upheaval butpersonal familial vendettas by Wilhelm against his cousins King Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
Family feuding was not the only calamity that resulted from the royal inbreeding. Queen Victoria and her husband Albert were first cousins. Along with their descendants marrying among themselves, this is likely how the affliction of hemophilia spread: a woman must acquire the gene from both of her parents. Five grandchildren and one child of Victoria’s died due tocomplications of hemophilia.
Her granddaughter Tsarina Alexandra’s treatment for the afflicted Alexis, heir to the Russian throne, was the most disastrous for the world at large. During World War I, the stress of having the Tsar off with his soldiers at war, as well as the constant battle to keep her son from dying, pushed the Tsarina to keep a self-described mystic healer named Rasputin as one of her most trusted confidants. Nobles and laypersons alike grew suspicious of Rasputin’s growing power. The Tsarina’s dependence on the mystic, as well as her German lineage, added spark to an already dangerous powder keg of Russian discontent. The Imperial Family were murdered after the Tsar was forced to abdicate the throne.
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