Princess Irene of Hesse and By Rhine/Comments - Family Relationships

Family Relationships

Irene transmitted the haemophilia gene to her elder and younger sons, Waldemar and Heinrich. Waldemar's health worried her from early childhood. She was later devastated when the youngest child, four-year-old Heinrich, died after he fell and bumped his head in February 1904. Six months after little Heinrich's death, Alix gave birth to a haemophiliac son, Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia. Her first cousin, Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, also had two haempohiliac sons. Her other first cousin, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, also had a haemophiliac son.

Irene, raised to believe in a proper Victorian code of behaviour, was easily shocked by what she saw as immorality. When her sister Elizabeth left the German Lutheran religion they had been raised in and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1891, Irene was deeply upset. She wrote to her father that she "cried terribly" over Elizabeth's decision. Later her sister Alix also converted to the Russian Orthodox Church when she married Nicholas II of Russia. Despite her disagreement with their choice of religion, she remained close to all of her siblings. In 1907, Irene helped arrange what later turned out to be a disastrous marriage between Elizabeth's ward, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia to Prince Vilhelm, Duke of Södermanland. Wilhelm's mother, the Queen of Sweden was an old friend of both Irene and Elizabeth. Grand Duchess Maria later wrote that Irene pressured her to go through with the marriage when she had doubts. She told Maria that ending the engagement would "kill" Elizabeth. In 1912, Irene was a source of support to her sister Alix when Alexei nearly died of complications of haemophilia at the Imperial Family's hunting lodge in Poland.