Who have been the Bowes Lyonses? Endlessly loyal and enmeshed with royalty for greater than a century, the Queen Mom’s household was marked with unhappiness and controversy. Immediately there’s solely ONE cousin remaining, writes IAN LLOYD

Shortly earlier than King Charles III boarded the plane which might take him to Kenya to assist mark the sixtieth anniversary of its independence from Britain, the King acquired a bit of unhappy information.

The Honourable Michael Albemarle Bowes Lyon – ‘Alby’ as he was affectionately identified to family and friends – had handed away on the age of 83.

His dying signifies that right now, solely one of many late monarch’s 23 maternal cousins survives: 91-year-old Sir Simon Bowes Lyon, son of the Queen Mom’s youngest brother, David.

In contrast to Queen Elizabeth’s paternal cousins – the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester, Princess Alexandra and Prince Michael of Kent – the Bowes Lyon cousins stay nearly unknown to most people.

Some got positions at courtroom. 

The Hon Margaret Rhodes was a girl in ready to the Queen Mom, whereas her sister Jean Wills held the identical place to Princess Margaret. Alby’s sister Girl Mary Colman was an additional girl in ready to Princess Alexandra.

The surviving cousin, Simon Bowes Lyon, was Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire from 1986 to 2007, (the Lord Lieutenant is the monarch’s consultant in lieutenancies throughout the UK, initially accountable for organising the native militia).

Sir Simon lives at St Paul’s Walden Bury, the Queen Mom’s childhood dwelling close to Hitchin, Hertfordshire.

Final 12 months he allowed BBC cameras in to movie his photograph albums containing snaps of the longer term queen. The cameras additionally filmed the wall the place his cousins, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, have been measured throughout every go to.

The final mark on the wall, got here shortly 5 months after Elizabeth’s accession and towards her peak she had written merely: ‘The Queen, July 21, 1952’.

Such intimacy and belief are the legacy of a household relationship stretching again greater than a century. The Queen Mom was then the nine-year-old Elizabeth Bowes Lyon when she famous in her diary the arrival of the primary of the subsequent technology of her clan in 1910.

‘I had my first nevew [sic] nice pleasure,’ she wrote. Her ascension to the function of Aunt had come courtesy of her older brother Patrick, who had introduced the beginning of his first-born son John in January of that 12 months.

The Bowes Lyon household introduced collectively the coal wealth of the mine-owning Bowes household from the north east of England (to which Catherine, Princess of Wales is distantly associated, albeit by means of a poverty-stricken department) and the Anglo-Norman Lyons household, part of which established itself at Glamis Fort on the east coast of Scotland.

Regardless of its privilege, nonetheless, the household can be scarred by successive wars. Elizabeth, later the Queen Mom, misplaced her elder brother Fergus on the battle of Loos in 1915.

Her nephew John, generally known as the ‘Grasp of Glamis’, John had been destined to turn into sixteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne however was killed in Libya’s Halfaya Move – nicknamed ‘Hellfire Move’ – in 1941.

Each males have been serving with the Black Watch.

The title fell as a substitute to his brother Timothy, who turned the sixteenth Earl in 1949 and lived on the ancestral seat, Glamis Fort till his dying in 1972.

Sadly, Timothy died a reclusive alcoholic with out an inheritor grieving the lack of his solely daughter Girl Caroline Bowes Lyon – born to Mary Brennan, an Irish lady who had been his nurse – who died in January 1960 at lower than a month previous.

Alby, who has simply died, was one other nephew of the late Queen Mom and had remained near the Windsors all through the course of his life, attending each Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 Coronation and her Platinum Jubilee Live performance final 12 months in addition to her funeral in September.

Alby was some 14 years youthful than the late Queen, the youngest of her maternal cousins, in order that they have been by no means as shut as these in her age group.

He was nonetheless an everyday and standard visitor of his aunt, the Queen Mom, on the Royal Lodge, her dwelling in Windsor Nice Park and at Birkhall on the Balmoral property.

Aged 13 he was additionally a web page to his cousin Princess Margaret on the 1953 Coronation, carrying her coronet in her procession by means of Westminster Abbey. This got here only a month after the dying of his father Michael, the Queen Mom’s older brother.

Educated at Eton and Magdalen Faculty, Oxford, Alby spoke fluent German and had a life-long love of opera, particularly of Wagner.

He turned a director of Coutts Financial institution in 1969 a place held for nearly 1 / 4 of a century. 

He spent a lot of his childhood at Glamis and is buried there – pipers performed at his funeral. He by no means married.

The late queen by no means met two of her first cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes Lyon, who had for a few years been listed within the society bible Burke’s Peerage as having handed away in 1940 and 1961, respectively.

In 1987 nonetheless, it was revealed that the sisters have been alive, and had been positioned in Earlswood Hospital for mentally disabled folks in 1941, the place, within the terminology of the period, each have been labeled as ‘imbeciles’.

Recommendations of a canopy up have been robustly rejected by household, and a subsequent 2011 documentary by Channel 4 documentary known as The Queen’s Hidden Sisters, was labelled as ‘merciless’ and ‘intrusive’ by their niece, Girl Elizabeth Shakerley, who as occasion planner to the Queen was near the late monarch.

Removed from being a taboo topic, she insisted, Katherine and Nerissa have been ‘very a lot a part of the household as sisters of her mom, the late Princess Anne of Denmark.’

This sentiment was underlined by the Queen Mom’s official biographer, William Shawcross, who wrote that the Queen Mom had despatched her nieces presents yearly. The Queen herself, in the meantime, was stated to be ‘massively distressed’ by the published.

Whereas not near all their cousins younger Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth had as ladies loved spending time at Glamis with their maternal grandparents, Claude, 14th Earl of Strathmore and his spouse Cecilia.

In 2022 members of the Bowes Lyon household and others with connections to the Glamis property have been requested to pick a treasure from the fort for a ebook marking the 650th anniversary of Sir John Lyon turning into Thane of Glamis. His descendant Queen Elizabeth II selected, as her treasure, a much-loved {photograph} of your entire household gathered to mark her grandparents’ golden marriage ceremony.

Of all of the cousins, it was the Elphinstones, youngsters of the Queen Mom’s older sister Mary, to whom the late Queen and her mom have been closest.

In 1910, Mary had married Sidney, sixteenth Lord Elphinstone, and as a baby, every summer season, the longer term Elizabeth II would stick with the Elphinstones at their Carberry Tower mansion close to Edinburgh.

As they bought older, their daughters Jean (later Jean Wills) and Margaret turned shut associates with their royal cousins: Margaret and the princesses have been collectively on the Balmoral property when battle was declared and 6 years later they have been collectively, this time dancing arm in arm by means of the streets of London, on VE Evening.

Carefree pictures from after the battle present the 2 younger princesses eating at a London membership together with her Elphinstone cousins, whereas the bond between the princesses and their cousins was cemented when Jean was appointed girl in ready to Margaret and Elizabeth was turned Godmother to Margaret’s first daughter Victoria Rhodes, born in in 1953 after Margaret married author Denys Rhodes.

The late queen was additionally godmother to different Bowes Lyon descendants, amongst them Rosemary, daughter of Andrew Elphinstone and Fergus Leveson-Gower, the son of the Queen Mom’s sister Rose.

Margaret Rhodes, together with Diana Bowes Lyon, daughter of the Queen Mom’s brother John, had additionally been bridesmaid on the then Princess Elizabeth’s November 1947 marriage ceremony to Prince Philip.

The Queen commonly corresponded with each cousins. In a single early letter to Diana from 1945, Elizabeth had touchingly revealed that she had a crush on one of many royal safety officers, a devastatingly good-looking younger large known as Roddy Macleod and that he had precipitated her sister Margaret’s coronary heart to flutter a bit too.

Inevitably, contact between the Windsors and Bowes Lyon branches of the household has lessened with the passage of time.

But there isn’t a doubt that the love stays. As one royal supply put it.

‘By way of loyalty to the crown the Bowes Lyon cousins have by no means out a foot improper. That, and the numerous shared reminiscences, signifies that the bond will at all times be there.’