The Queen Mother (4 page)

E
LIZABETH
A
NGELA
Marguerite Bowes Lyon, the ninth child and the fourth daughter of Lord and Lady Glamis, was born at the end of the Victorian era, on 4 August 1900. Her family was of distinguished and colourful lineage in both England and Scotland.

Lord Glamis was the son and heir of the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. The Strathmores trace their ancestry back to the fourteenth century. John Lyon of Forteviot, the Chamberlain of Scotland from 1377 to 1382, married the daughter of King Robert II in 1376 and was knighted the following year. He was granted the thaneage of Glamis, a Crown possession in the Vale of Strathmore in eastern Scotland, some twelve miles north of Dundee, and this remained thereafter the principal seat of the family, although the transformation of a hunting lodge on the land into a castle did not begin until the early fifteenth century. Sir John Lyon’s grandson Patrick was created the first Lord of Glamis.

In 1537 Janet, Lady Glamis, a Douglas by birth, wife of the sixth Lord Glamis, was burned at the stake in Edinburgh on charges trumped up by James V of Scotland. Then, having disposed of Lady Glamis and imprisoned her two sons, the King seized the lands and Castle of Glamis. He occupied the Castle and held court there, on and off, between 1537 and 1542.

Their estates for the most part restored after James V’s death, the family continued to play a prominent role in Scottish royal history. The ninth Lord Glamis was created earl of Kinghorne by James VI of Scotland (James I of England) in 1606 and in 1677 Patrick, third Earl of Kinghorne, took the additional title of Strathmore. He became known as Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, the titles held by his successors ever since. Earl Patrick’s
Book of Record
, a diary written between 1684
and 1689, is a treasured item in the family archives at the Castle. In it he wrote that he was four years old when his father died and ‘the debt which my father left behind him was, by inventories whereof some are yet extant, no less than four hundred thousand pounds.’
¹
That this young man not only paid off such enormous sums but was also able to carry out extensive building works and improvements to the Castle says much for his qualities of character.

In 1767 John, the ninth Earl of Strathmore, married Mary Eleanor Bowes. She came from a well-established north of England family which owned the estates of Gibside and Streatlam Castle in County Durham.
^*
As she was the only child and heiress of her parents, the family name was perpetuated through her marriage: the ninth Earl and his Countess by Act of Parliament took the surname of Bowes, to be used ‘next, before, and in addition to, their titles of honour’.
²
Under the eleventh Earl it became Lyon Bowes, and finally, with the accession of the thirteenth Earl in 1865, Bowes Lyon.
^†

The Bowes family had acquired both power and wealth since Sir Adam Bowes, a fourteenth-century lawyer, was granted land at Streatlam, near Barnard Castle. And in 1691 Sir William Bowes married Elizabeth Blakiston, heiress of Gibside, thereby adding a large estate rich in coal to the Bowes possessions.

Mary Eleanor’s father, George Bowes, third son of Sir William, was both a considerable landowner and one of the first to make a fortune from coal. He was said by his daughter in her
Confessions
^‡
to have been ‘a great rake in his youth’, but he was astute too, and ‘a great sportsman with a real appreciation of beauty in art, architecture and nature’.
³
The landscaped gardens at Gibside, created between 1729 and 1760, are testament to his energy and vision.

Mary Eleanor was born in 1749 to George and his second wife, Mary Gilbert, whose father Edward owned St Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire. She inherited her father’s charm, and he imbued her with his own enthusiasm for all kinds of knowledge.
⁴
Her marriage to John Lyon, celebrated on her eighteenth birthday in 1767, produced five children, but it was unhappy. The ninth Earl of Strathmore was known as ‘the beautiful Lord Strathmore’; he was not uncultivated,
^*
but his wife’s biographer, Jesse Foot, characterized him as a bluff, hearty man and ‘a good bottle companion’, who was ‘not exactly calculated to make even a good learned woman a pleasing husband’.
⁵
He believed that Mary Eleanor’s intellect needed to be restrained. She had a serious interest in botany, and in 1769 she published a poetical drama called
The Siege of Jerusalem
. Her husband thought such pursuits frivolous.
⁶

The Earl developed tuberculosis and he died at sea in March 1776 while on a voyage to Lisbon where he had hoped to recover his health. On board ship he wrote a kind last letter to his wife suggesting that she should protect her fortune by placing it in trust. He included another word of advice which perhaps illustrates the differences between the couple. ‘I will say nothing of your extreme rage for literary fame. I think your own understanding, when matured, will convince you of the futility of the pursuit.’
⁷

After his death, Mary Eleanor was left ‘one of the richest widows in Britain’.
⁸
However, her personal life was tumultuous and in autumn 1776 she fell in love with Andrew Robinson Stoney, who became known as Stoney Bowes. One of the chroniclers of the Bowes Lyon family was frank in his description of Stoney Bowes: ‘This man was surely the lowest cad in history … He was the type of seedy, gentlemanly bounder, calling himself “Captain”, which has flourished in every era of society … [He] was cunning, ruthless, sadistic with rat-like
cleverness and a specious Irish charm. He was a fortune hunter of the worst type.’
⁹
He had driven his first wife to death; but he charmed and seduced Mary Eleanor and they married in January 1777.

Shortly afterwards Stoney Bowes discovered to his fury that his bride had taken her first husband’s advice and secured her fortune in trust. Four months after their marriage he managed to force Mary to sign a document revoking her prenuptial deed and he dissipated her wealth as swiftly as he could. When Mary Eleanor’s mother died in 1781 she left her daughter St Paul’s Walden Bury, which Stoney Bowes began to use as a safe house from his creditors in the north. Eventually Mary Eleanor managed to escape from him and file for divorce on grounds of his adultery and cruelty. In May 1786 this was granted, with Bowes being ordered to pay Mary £300 a year in alimony. However, he appealed, and began ‘a ferocious war of propaganda’.
¹⁰

He then had her abducted by force and taken north to Streatlam Castle, where he incarcerated her and tried to compel her at gunpoint both to sign documents suspending the divorce and to cohabit with him again, which would have invalidated her case.
¹¹
She refused and he then dragged her around the north of England in appalling winter conditions while her solicitor searched for her in vain and had warrants issued for Stoney Bowes’s arrest. Eventually, after wild chases which excited wide public interest, she was rescued. Bowes and his accomplices were sentenced to three years in prison and fined £300. He continued a campaign of lawsuits and public vilification of his ex-wife until she died in 1800. Stoney Bowes himself died in 1810.
¹²

Mary Eleanor’s son John had become the tenth Earl of Strathmore on his father’s death in 1776. Unlucky in love, he threw himself into the restoration and improvement of the estates at Streatlam and Gibside, and then fell for Mary Millner, the daughter of George and Ann Millner of Stainton, a village close to Streatlam Castle. She bore his son, John Bowes, on 19 June 1811, and he married her in July 1820, the day before he died.

The earldom of Strathmore and Kinghorne devolved on Mary Eleanor’s second surviving son, Thomas, who won the titles and estates after a lawsuit against his nephew John. He became the eleventh earl. But John Bowes inherited Gibside and Streatlam and, an accomplished man, he founded a great business empire. John Bowes and Partners operated twelve collieries and his income from coal alone
was said to be immense. As MP for South Durham for fifteen years, he was a supporter of electoral reform, the anti-slavery movement and religious toleration. He bred four Derby winners at his Streatlam stud. In 1847 he went to live in Paris, where he met his first wife Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier.
Together they collected works of art and then built the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle, an imposing edifice in elaborate French Renaissance style, which is filled with fine paintings, tapestries, furniture and porcelain and thrives today, a striking monument to its founders.
^13
*

By contrast, the eleventh Earl, although fortunate in his lawsuit against John Bowes, lacked financial acumen and died in the debtors’ sanctuary at Holyroodhouse in 1846. His son Thomas, Lord Glamis, had already died at Honfleur in 1834; he too was in debt and his wife, Lady Glamis, née Charlotte Grinstead, was left with very little money to bring up four young children.
^†
Her son Thomas became the twelfth earl on the death of his grandfather. He too lived beyond his means and died, a ruined man, in 1865. However, he achieved the distinction of riding twice in the Grand National. Later, his great-niece Queen Elizabeth adopted his racing colours of buff and blue stripes, blue sleeves and a black cap.

Thomas was succeeded by his brother Claude, the thirteenth Earl, who finally brought the spendthrift era to an end. Life at Glamis under Earl Claude reflected all that was best in Victorian society, and his diaries
^‡
show that it was neither stiff nor dull.
¹⁴
In his book,
The Days before Yesterday
, published in 1920, Lord Frederick Hamilton looks back fondly on his stays with the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and his family: ‘I like best, though, to think of the Glamis of my young days … when the whole place was vibrant with joyous young life, and the stately, grey-bearded owner of the historic castle, and of many broad
acres in Strathmore besides, found his greatest pleasure in seeing how happy his children and his guests could be under his roof.’
¹⁵

No more charming family could be imagined, according to Lord Frederick. Lord Strathmore’s seven sons and three daughters were all ‘born musicians’, and they were always singing: ‘on the way to a cricket-match; on the road home from shooting; in the middle of dinner, even, this irrepressible family could not help bursting into harmony.’ They sang madrigals and part-songs after dinner, and at services in the family’s private chapel. They were equally good at acting and had a permanent stage at Glamis where they performed highlights from the latest Gilbert and Sullivan operas. All the sons were excellent shots and good at games; one brother was lawn tennis champion of Scotland, and another won the doubles championship of England.
¹⁶

The thirteenth Earl’s life was a continual struggle to repair the damage done to the family by the reckless extravagance of his grandfather, father and brother. In 1853 he married Frances Dora Smith who shared his deep Christian faith. The first of their eleven children, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon’s father Claude George, was born in 1855. He held the courtesy title of Lord Glamis, before succeeding as the fourteenth earl in 1904. Educated at Eton, he served in the Life Guards from 1876 to 1881, the year he married Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck.

Cecilia too came from a well-connected and devout family. She was the great-granddaughter of the third Duke of Portland, who was twice prime minister in George III’s reign. Had she been a boy, she would have succeeded her uncle, the fifth Duke. Cecilia’s father, Charles Cavendish-Bentinck, was a clergyman who died in 1865 aged only forty-seven, when Cecilia was just three. Her mother Caroline
^*
married again in 1870, becoming Mrs Harry Scott of Ancrum; she was widowed again in 1889. In later years she spent a good deal of her time in Italy, first at the Villa Capponi in Florence,
^†
and then in San Remo and Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera west of Genoa.

Cecilia and Claude met in the 1870s. Some of the letters written during their courtship survive; they often corresponded more than once a day between Whitehall, where Claude was stationed with the Life Guards, and Forbes House, Ham, just west of London, where Cecilia lived with her mother. ‘Darling Claudie,’ Cecilia wrote from Ham not long before their marriage, ‘I wish you weren’t on guard – & could come out for a ride with me – do you remember our last ride? in the pelting rain? … I think I will write to you again by the 3 o.c. post – I’m longing for a letter from you dear Claudie – it is the next thing to seeing you.’ ‘My darling Cecilia,’ he responded the same afternoon, ‘I have just received your sweet letter … You ask me if I remember our last ride together? Of course I do, how awfully wet we got, but the ride before that I remember much better. I shall never forget that little corner, after passing the park-keeper’s hut (where I once left my cover-coat) … Hoping to get yr letter all right tomorrow morning and longing to see your sweet face again, I am, my darling Cecilia, Ever your most loving Claudie.’
¹⁷

Their wedding took place at Petersham Church on 16 July 1881. Cecilia was given away by her cousin, the sixth Duke of Portland. After ‘cake and lunch’, as Lord Strathmore described it in his diary, Claude and Cecilia caught the 5.05 train to Hitchin en route to St Paul’s Walden Bury, the Hertfordshire house left to the groom by his paternal grandmother, Charlotte.
¹⁸
Claude resigned his commission and they started their lives together as Lord and Lady Glamis.

Their first child, Violet Hyacinth, was born in April 1882 at St Paul’s Walden Bury, and the second, Mary Frances (May), born in August 1883, was followed by a line of sons – Patrick (September 1884), John (Jock) (April 1886), Alexander (Alec) (April 1887), Fergus (April 1889). Next came another girl, Rose, born in May 1890, and then Michael (October 1893).