In the summer of 1881, Gertrude Elizabeth Blood married Lord Colin Campbell, a member of Parliament and the younger son of the 8th Duke of Argyll. It seemed a brilliant match. Gertrude’s mother had brought her to Scotland specifically to find a titled husband, and in Lord Colin she had secured not only an aristocrat but a man whose own brother was married to Princess Louise, a daughter of Queen Victoria. Three days after they met, he proposed, and Gertrude’s family believed they had entered the highest circles of British society.

But Gertrude’s father had heard the rumors. London society whispered that Colin was a regular visitor to the city’s brothels and that he had picked up the disease no one dared name aloud. When Colin postponed the wedding twice, citing problems with his health, Edmund Blood asked him directly whether he was in good health. Colin replied that he was perfectly healthy, though he was currently suffering from a minor ailment.

He was lying. At her father’s insistence, the couple signed a marriage agreement before the wedding. They would not share a bed until Colin had fully recovered. Three months later, Colin handed Gertrude a letter from his doctor stating that he had been cured and that cohabitation would help complete his recovery.

He had not recovered at all. Within months, Gertrude contracted syphilis. For nearly a year, she did not know what was wrong with her. Then came the first attack of internal inflammation, leaving her incapacitated.

When she finally learned her true diagnosis, she was furious. She barred her husband from her bedroom at once. In response, Colin accused her of having had an abortion and claimed that all her symptoms were the result of it. Many Victorian women in her position would have stayed silent.

A scandal could destroy a woman’s reputation beyond repair. But Gertrude decided she wanted nothing more to do with the man who had knowingly infected her. In 1883, she applied for a judicial separation on the grounds of extreme cruelty. The court accepted her claim and allowed the couple to live apart.

Gertrude left Colin and moved to Paris with her mother. Colin was furious. He tried repeatedly to have the court order overturned and sent Gertrude letters warning that if she refused to return, he would do everything in his power to leave her penniless. So, later that same year, she filed for divorce.

Colin filed his own divorce petition in response, setting off one of the most scandalous legal battles of the nineteenth century. The hearings began in November 1886 and ran for several weeks. The courtroom was packed, with spectators standing in the aisles. Reporters worked in shifts, and newspapers printed special editions to cover the case.

Everything was discussed in open court: bedroom details, medical examinations, and the testimony of servants who had peered through keyholes and dutifully reported what they saw. Gertrude was questioned about every man she had spoken to for more than ten minutes. Lord Colin was asked about his illness, when he had learned of it, and what he had told his wife before the wedding. The jury deliberated at length.

Their verdict was a judgment worthy of Solomon in the worst possible sense. They concluded that no one was to blame for Gertrude’s illness. If no one was to blame, there had been no cruelty, and without cruelty there could be no divorce. The court had effectively decided that Gertrude could not leave a man who had ruined her health and her life.

Then came what Gertrude herself later described as a second verdict, the one delivered by society. Lord Colin Campbell started a new life abroad in Bombay, where he received an officer’s commission in a rifle regiment and continued living as a true aristocrat. For Gertrude, the consequences were far worse. She became practically persona non grata in the very circles that had once welcomed her.

She was finished in society. She decided not to despair. She built a new life from the ruins of the old one. She had been passionate about literature since childhood, and now she turned to journalism, writing articles under pseudonyms about painting, fashion, travel, and music.

She wrote about the need for bicycle lanes and argued for cremation as an alternative to burial. She advocated for women’s equal right to smoke. In 1903, she published a collection of her essays under the title A Woman’s Walks. Years earlier, she had contributed a chapter on fencing to the Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports, a well-known publication that helped popularize sports among women.

She was not short of male attention. Despite her illness, she had a relationship with George Charles Spencer-Churchill, the 8th Duke of Marlborough, an uncle of Winston Churchill. He even included her in his will, which became yet another public scandal. But like so many women infected with syphilis, Gertrude never became pregnant.

The disease had robbed her of the chance to become a mother. She was finally freed from her marriage in 1895, when Colin Campbell died of syphilis. By then, her own symptoms were growing increasingly severe. She soon had to use a wheelchair, unable to walk.

She outlived the man who had ruined her life and destroyed her health by fifteen years, dying in 1911 at the age of 54 from complications of the same disease he had given her as a wedding gift thirty years earlier. Gertrude’s story echoes that of another woman connected to Queen Victoria’s family. Princess Alexandrine of Baden married Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, on May 13, 1842. Ernest was the elder brother of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband.

Their father had taken both boys to the most debauched establishments in Paris and Berlin so they could gain experience with women before marriage. Albert found these visits horrifying and shameful. Ernest embraced them. By 1839, when he accompanied his brother to discuss arrangements for Albert’s wedding to Victoria, Ernest was already showing signs of illness.

One of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting described him as very thin, hollow-cheeked, pale, and with no likeness to his brother. Albert urged Ernest to recover before looking for a wife. But the nineteenth-century treatments, which relied mostly on mercury, could not rid him of the disease for good. Still, he decided to marry Alexandrine.

She had originally been expected to marry the future Russian emperor Alexander II, but their first meeting made it clear they were completely indifferent to each other. When Ernest proposed in January 1842, he did so in the form of an ultimatum: she should say yes, or turn him down with a single word. She said yes. The couple were expected to produce heirs, but no children came.

Alexandrine blamed herself, believing she was infertile. She had no idea that the cause of her infertility was the syphilis she had contracted from her husband. Ernest, meanwhile, had at least three illegitimate children with his mistresses. Knowing about them only convinced Alexandrine that she was the one to blame.

When the couple arrived at Windsor in 1844, everyone was shocked by their appearance. Lady Eleanor Stanley, one of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, wrote to her mother that the Duke looked terribly ill, and that Alexandrine looked very frail, as pale as a sheet, far more fit for bed than for a long journey. Seeing his wife as useless to him because she could not give him a child, Ernest began to distance himself from her. At one point he had two mistresses and made no attempt to hide either relationship, turning the marriage into a laughingstock among the royal houses.

Queen Victoria described the situation as utterly monstrous. She could not understand how Alexandrine could put up with it, and as a fellow woman, she always took Alexandrine’s side, showing her warmth and support. Over the years, Victoria came to openly dislike Ernest, especially when he began writing his memoirs and revealing secrets about her family life with Albert. Alexandrine did not want to spend her life simply as a suffering wife.

She devoted herself to good causes. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, she worked with the Red Cross and was awarded the Bavarian Order of Teresa and the Prussian Order of Louise. She funded a girls’ school, the Alexandrinum, named in her honor, and donated money for the town’s first public baths. She filled her life with meaning by helping others.

Despite the disease that proved fatal for many, both Ernest and Alexandrine lived long lives. Ernest died on August 22, 1893, at the age of 75. Alexandrine outlived him by eleven years, dying on December 20, 1904, at the age of 84. In her will, she left 620,000 marks from her personal estate to the people of Coburg.

Her subjects showed their gratitude, and she became the only duchess to have a monument erected in her honor there. It still stands to this day. Both women had received little from their husbands but humiliation and a shameful disease.

Yet both found a way to live with meaning, to keep working, to remain kind, and to be remembered not only as victims of the men who infected them, but as women of considerable strength.