There was something of a dynastic crisis in England in the early nineteenth century. George III had a large number of children, but relatively few (legitimate) grandchildren, partly due to the fact that his sons seemed to prefer to shack up rather than marry. And, when they did marry, the marriages had an unfortunate tendency to be disastrous.
By 1817 George III was nearing 80, and was suffering from madness, believed now to have been the result of porphyria. He was expected to be succeeded by his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who was already ruling as Prince Regent. The Prince Regent was separated from his wife Caroline of Brunswick (and loathed her) and had an on-again off-again relationship with his mistress, Mrs Fitzhberbert, so there was no prospect of his having further legitimate children. But he had one legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, who was married to a German prince. The succession was expected to be secured by her descendants.
However, in 1817 Charlotte died giving birth to her first child. The child also died. The urgent need to secure the succession by producing heirs within the wider family was recognised
Next in line after the Prince Regent was his brother the Duke of York - separated from his wife, and no legitimate children and, in 1817, already 54 years old. (He died in 1827.) After him came the next brother, the Duke of Clarence. Clarence was unmarried, but already had ten children with his socially unacceptable mistress, Mrs Jordan, and an eleventh with somebody else so there was no doubt about his fertility. Recognising his dynastic duty, he married a German princess in 1818 and set about producing an heir. The two children of the marriage, however, both died in infancy, in 1819 and 1821. (Clarence did eventually succeed George IV, in 1830, as William IV.)
Next after Clarence was the Duke of Kent. He had had a succession of mistresses but was unmarried; he, too, made haste to marry a suitable princess. He married Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield in 1818 and they gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, in 1819. Kent died in 1820.
Other royals also did their bit for England after 1817. The Duke of Cambridge married Augusta of Hesse in June 1818 (Clarence having turned her down just two months previously); she gave birth to a son in March 1819. The Duke of Cumberland was married, but childless. He set about his marital duties with renewed determination and a son was born in 1819. But we need not concern ourselves with them, because Victoria eventually succeeded to the throne in 1837, and so it was through her that the succession was assured.
The point, though, is that George III’s presumed illness, porphyria, is heritable. Several of his descendants developed it, but apparently neither Victoria nor any of her descendants had it. On the other hand, many of Victoria’s descendants did have, or carry, haemophilia, another heritable disease, but one not previously occurring in the British royal family. While this is not conclusive, it does raise the issue of whether Victoria was quite so closely genetically connected to George III as she should have been. Could it be, the theory goes, that with the urgency to produce an heir, the rather cavalier attitude of George III’s sons to the sanctity of matrimony, and the generally loveless nature of their official marriages, nobody was too bothered if the wives of the Dukes were, um, over-enthusiastic in their efforts to produce the heirs that they understood were demanded of them?
