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Notes -
A tiny tweak to history that changed everything.
Queen Victoria was quite likely a bastard. She was a carrier of hemophilia, but her mother's side of the family had no history of hemophilia, and her father was not a hemophiliac. (The hemophilia gene lives in the X chromosome. As women have two copies, they can carry hemophilia without expressing it. Men cannot).
This little quirk in history changed everything.
Victoria had 34 surviving grandchildren, many of whom sat on the thrones of Europe: including Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Alexandra, the wife of the last tsar of Russia. It was this connection that would have lasting affects since Alexandra passed on her hemophilia to her son Alexei, the heir to the Russian throne.
Alexei's hemophilia caused him to almost die many times and caused Alexandra to seek out the help of Rasputin, a charismatic cult leader type from Siberia. At one point, Rasputin was banished, but then Alexei almost died again, and Rasputin was recalled. The boy miraculously improved. Rasputin's presence at court was toxic, as he seduced the wives of many high ranking people. Eventually, some noblemen were able to off him by poisoning him, shooting him, then wrapping him in a carpet and drowning him in the Neva River. But the damage to the reputation of the imperial family was done. In this weakened state (and of course due to WWI) Nicolas was forced to resign, creating the opening for the Bolsheviks to take power.
If Queen Victoria's mother didn't cheat then... no hemophilia, no Rasputin, no Bolsheviks, and probably no Mao either. Who knows what the world would look like if China hadn't been mired in communism for 40 years post WWII.
Wikipedia has a whole page on the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimacy_of_Queen_Victoria
De novo mutations do happen. Your idea would require her mother (who was in her early 30s at the time) to cheat with a hemophiliac man for whatever reason, but life expectancy for hemophiliac men in the early XIX century was abysmal, and guy she was rumored to have an affair with was quite healthy. If anything, her cheating with a younger guy would actually lower the chances.
It looks like we'd need to compare odds of
Denovo mutation
Cheating with an unknown hemophiliac man
Her mother was a carrier despite no family history (also perhaps the result of a denovo mutation or infidelity herself or in recent generations).
We could plug it all into a Bayes calculator but I think the math gets wonky when comparing 0.0001% on one side vs 0.0001% on the other.
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What makes you think Victoria wasn't really Prince Edward's daughter?
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That was the thing about Rasputin - I've heard it said he could preach the bible like a preacher, full of ecstasy and fire. But he also was the kind of teacher females would desire.
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I think Rasputin's role in the demise of Russian monarchy is greatly exaggerated. Russian monarchs have been entrenched in the idea that any change or modernization in Russia are extremely dangerous and should not be attempted in any form, and yet that Russia must play a prominent role in the world affairs. This led to both internal opposition that grew more and more violent as they grew convinced nothing is going to change unless extremely drastic measures are taken, and to the series of humiliating defeats abroad. It pretty much painted itself into a corner, and Rasputin episode, while colorful, was just a footnote to much greater and more fundamental problems which led to Russian monarchy collapsing. It still could go the less bloody road if the following democratic government could govern efficiently and not being eaten by the Leftists, but they been proved incapable, the Left took over, then the Bolsheviks massacred all the rest of the left fractions, and the rest you can read in any textbook. Nothing of it has much to do with hemophilia, though the general atmosphere of everything going wrong and nothing being able to stop the collapse, probably, contributed to being open to weird stuff, out of desperation. But it was the symptom rather than the cause.
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Ehhhh this seems pretty dubious. Firstly because type-B hemophilia has been known to occur as a spontaneous mutation in the children of older fathers. Victoria’s presumptive father, the Duke of Kent, was 51 at the time of her conception. She’s also a spitting image of him, and of his father George III. Among plausible proposed alternatives for her paternity, such as John Conroy, I’m not aware that we have any record of hemophilia in their ancestry.
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