Royal Watch News
Mar 4, 2009, 10:55 GMT
Britain's Queen Victoria was illegitimate, her biographer has claimed.
A. N. Wilson says his research has confirmed 19th century rumours about the parentage of Britain's longest-serving monarch.
He claims even Victoria knew "evil genius" Sir John Conroy, Comptroller of the royal household, was her father and hated him for it.
He wrote in Britain's The Daily Mail newspaper: "In later life Queen Victoria told the Duke of Wellington that one reason she hated Sir John was that she had witnessed 'some familiarities' between the Irish soldier and her mother.
"Victoria was an intelligent - if maddening - woman. Surely she guessed, or feared, that she was Conroy's "The old Duke of Kent, her supposed father, was well 'past it' by the time Victoria was conceived. Moreover, there is the family's curious medical history which we now know, and which surely requires some explanation."
Victoria's grandfather George III suffered from porphyria, a condition causing madness, flatulence, itchy skin and discoloured urine. It is a hereditary condition that none of Victoria's have suffered from.
Wilson said: "There is another curious medical fact. We know Queen Victoria passed on haemophilia to her descendants. Seventeen generations of the family on Queen Victoria's mother's side have been investigated by scientists at the Royal Society of Medicine. Not one has haemophilia.
"Nor was there any haemophilia in the Royal Family before Victoria, so the finger really does point to Queen Victoria's father having been someone other than the Duke of Kent. It must have been the awful Sir John Conroy with that haemophiliac gene."
Medical inconsistencies also suggest Prince Albert - the German cousin Queen Victoria - was also illegitimate.
Wilson said: "His mother had been dismissed from the court of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for having an affair with the Jewish chamberlain, the Baron von Mayern, a cultivated, musical, intelligent man.
"Both Albert's stupid, lecherous, drunken and supposed father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his brother Ernst had hereditary syphilis, but there is no trace of this in the life of Albert who, like the Baron von Mayern, was intelligent, musical and cultivated.
"Unlike his own Saxe-Coburg relations, he was also a pillar of family rectitude and marital loyalty."