Trying to view this from Alexandra's point of view, even allowing for the fact that she knew haemophilia was the cause of death of her uncle and brother (she was already pregnant with Alexei by the time that her nephew died) I still believe that she remained hopeful that her child would be free of the condition.
Now I'm confused. I read that it was Waldemar, born in 1889, who died at age four (and I rechecked that source). By that reckoning, Alix would have certainly known of his condition before her marriage. But when I saw your post, I researched further and found a source that says it was Henry that died at age four in 1904 and that Waldemar lived into adulthood. Even if that's the case, though, wouldn't Waldemar's condition have been diagnosed during his infancy or youth and likely have been known to Alexandra?
Either way, though, I think your larger analysis and Tsaria's assessment of motives are very apt.
Royal dynasties took bloodlines and their duty to produce viable heirs for their own dynasty and those into which they married very seriously. I have never been able to accept that something such as hemophilia -- which was a
known, direct, and deadly threat to that central duty -- would not have been central to the thinking of Victoria's family once its presence was known.
They, and the people they married, might have arrived at different answers to the calculations they made of the risks involved (driven by a misunderstanding of how genetics worked and by the differences in which different people weigh risk and reward) -- but I am convinced they all made the calculations. And it has never surprised me to find very little of these in the written record.
As Tsaria said, so much of the Alexandra puzzle falls better into place once grappling with hemophilia is taken into account:
- her exaggerated reliance on converting faith as an argument against the marriage
- the later, equally exaggerated reliance of an intelligent, educated woman on mysticism and its more unsavory proponents (Phillipe and Rasputin)
- the specious reasons Alexander and Marie gave for resisting Nicholas' marriage to an otherwise thoroughly suitable candidate
- the precipitous decline in Alexandra's mental stability after Alexei was diagnosed, despite her having long known it was a possibility
- the taking of huge political risks to pretend that Alexei would rule, despite the charade's becoming almost ludicrously obvious after Spala.
In my view, if there is fault to be assigned in all this, it falls largely to Nicholas. I think Alexandra, though in love with him, had braced herself to say no and would have stood by her resolve had his suit not been so unrelenting.
I firmly believe Nicholas was warned by his parents in no uncertain terms of the risks hemophilia posed to the dynasty. But, as at so many junctures in his life when confronted with a critical choice, he made the wrong one.
Alexandra was a very intelligent woman whose mental rudder was eventually broken by the unrelenting weight of a secretly-made life-and-death bet gone bad.
Nicholas was a man who had trouble figuring out the right answer on a calm, clear day.
The pity is that it was Alexandra who bore the brunt of the family's ire for an algae bloom at their end of the gene pool.
