The Queen And The Bowes Lyons

The story of the Queen Mother’s family is sometimes strange, always fascinating and seldom told.

- Jane Dismore

Every summer Her Majesty the Queen loves to escape to Balmoral, feeling at home in the majesty of the Highlands. Queen Victoria may have fallen in love with the area in the 1840s but for her great-great-granddaughter, Scotland is literally in her blood.

The Queen’s mother Elizabeth was born in 1900, the ninth of ten children of Claude and Cecilia Bowes Lyon, then Lord and Lady Glamis (pronounced Glarms). In her youth, the Queen saw much of her mother’s family.

Their story began in 1372, when Robert II of Scotland made his favourite courtier, Sir John Lyon, the Thane of Glamis. On marrying the King’s daughter, John received Glamis Castle as a gift. Vast and brooding, it was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the 17th century the Lyons were made Earls of Kinghorne, then of Strathmore.

In 1923 Elizabeth Bowes Lyon married Prince Albert, the Duke of York (later King George VI). Princess Elizabeth (now the Queen) was born in 1926, by which time her grandparents Claude and Cecilia had become the 14th Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Glamis Castle was their official home. When the Princess was taken there as a baby, the castle still had no electricity, which enhanced its thrillingly chilling reputation for strange happenings arising from centuries of grisly murders and disturbing deaths. Fortunately visitors no longer had to sleep in remote, thick-walled rooms like the Hangman’s Room, so-called from ancient days when the family employed their own executioner.

The Strathmores made the castle as modern and welcoming as they could, although myths still abounded: ‘Its venerable walls enshroud a mysterious something’, wrote the Countess Cecilia.

In 1930 Glamis was the birthplace of Princess Margaret, who kept everyone waiting for well over a week and eventually arrived on the dramatically stormy night of 21 August.