Opinion | King Charles rewrote the royal script

Desperate and frankly strange attempts were made to make the limb work. Wilhelm's working arm was strapped to his body when he was learning to walk in an attempt to force him to use the other; predictably, he capsized a lot. Tasers were passed through it. The hand was placed inside the carcass of a freshly killed hare, believing that the warmth of the dead animal would heal the child's hand. At the age of 4, while his mother cried, he was regularly tied to a car to try to stretch his muscles. Nothing happened. Wilhelm grew up difficult, anxious and resentful, although ironically he adapted very well to having only one arm.

William's cousin Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, went to extreme lengths to hide his son and heir Alexei's hemophilia, and refused to explain the presence of the infamous doctor Rasputin, whose exploits became a metaphor for the corruption of the Russian state. .

Such repression almost always came at a personal, emotional, and political cost. The source of Alexei's hemophilia gene is believed to be none other than Charles' great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. She passed the gene on to her son Leopold, who died aged 30 in 1884 of a brain haemorrhage following a fall, and to her two daughters. As a result of Victoria's vigorous royal matchmaking, the gene passed to the royal family of Russia through her granddaughter, Tsarina Alexandra, and to some of the royal families of Germany through her daughter Alice. After the queen's death, it passed into the Spanish royal family through her granddaughter Victoria Eugenia, known as Anna, who married King Alfonso XIII in 1906. Her husband's discovery that she was a carrier helped destroy their marriage, and her eldest and younger sons died young of bleeding after minor car accidents.

Victoria may also have been a carrier of porphyria, a disease that some historians attribute to George III's insanity and which causes physical symptoms such as excruciating abdominal pain, skin rashes and purple urine. The queen's eldest daughter (also named Victoria, mother of William II) may also have had porphyria; A DNA test on her daughter Charlotte's exhumed body revealed a gene mutation linked to the disease.

The fact that both diseases could be present in the British royal family was a closely guarded secret at the time, and the monarchy has never publicly acknowledged the issue until now.