has led to the persistent belief that the Duchess and Conroy were lovers. Later, as an aged Queen, Victoria was aghast to discover that many people did indeed believe that her mother and Conroy were intimate and stated that the Duchess' piety would have prevented this. Rumour that Conroy was Queen Victoria's father During Victoria's lifetime and after her death in 1901, there have been rumours that Conroy or someone else, and not the Duke of Kent, was her biological father. Historians have continued to debate the accuracy and validity of these claims. In his 2003 work The Victorians, biographer A. N. Wilson suggests that Victoria was not actually descended from George III because several of her descendants had haemophilia, which was unknown among her recognised ancestors. Haemophilia is a disease that impairs the body's ability to control blood clotting. The most common cause of haemophilia is genetic, and is passed on by X-linked recessive inheritance; in other words, it can be passed on by both males and females, while the symptoms manifest mostly in males. Wilson proposes that the Duchess of Kent took a lover (not necessarily Conroy) to ensure that a Coburg would sit on the British throne. Likewise, medical historian W. T. W. Potts considers it a possibility that the Duchess took a lover under pressure from her brother Leopold. He cites the rarity of genetic mutations as evidence, as well as the "remarkable" circumstances surrounding Victoria's conception. Potts makes no mention of Conroy specifically, only that the father would have been a haemophiliac himself or would have had a mutated gene. Haemophilia B has been known to arise spontaneously in the children of older fathers, and the Duke of Kent was fifty-one when Victoria was born. Nicholas Wright Gillham proposes that the haemophilia mutation could have first occurred with either Victoria or the Duke of Kent. Gillian Gill and her son Christopher, an infectious disease specialist, also view a genetic mutation as the most likely possibility; Gillian Gill writes that "a few historians in recent years have found it seductive" to doubt Victoria's stated paternity because a random mutation is "an unexciting solution". Helen Rappaport concurs, remarking that "the best and most logical" explanation is that haemophilia first appeared in Victoria as a mutation. Alan Rushton adds that no one in the household of the newly married Duchess of Kent, including Conroy, is known to have