When Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was born in the summer of 1900, Queen Victoria was the British monarch. Elizabeth’s childhood would be one of wealth, comfort and love, as the youngest daughter in a large family of the Scottish aristocracy. Her first memory was of sitting on her grandfather’s knee at the castle of Glamis (pronounced “Glams”) on the east coast of Scotland. She was four years old when her grandfather died and his earldom—and three homes—passed to his eldest son Claude, Elizabeth’s father and the possessor of a truly fantastic moustache.I Claude was also a superb cricketeer, who liked to maintain his skills out of season through unorthodox means such as bowling Christmas puddings down the Dining Room table to his English wife, Nina “Cecelia” Cavendish-Bentinck, a great-granddaughter of a former British Prime Minister. Had women been permitted to inherit the dukedom, Cecilia would have become the Duchess of Portland. Instead, the title passed to a cousin, who walked her up the aisle at her wedding to Claude in 1881. Cecilia could not have known that her youngest daughter would one day become a duchess with the added sparkle of an HRH.
Elizabeth did not seem to mourn her mother’s lack of ducal status. She took great pride instead in the fact that her father became the fourteenth successive member of their family to hold the title Earl—of Strathmore and Kinghorne—since it was bestowed upon them by King James VI in 1606; indeed, there were stories tying their clan to the castle of Glamis since the adventures of their medieval ancestor, Sir John Lyon, who received it in the 1300s from his father-in-law, King Robert II.1 From 1606, the earldom’s heir has carried the title Lord Glamis.
Set in 65,000 acres of land, many-turreted Glamis was described in Elizabeth’s lifetime as “a castle not of this world, but… a castle of ghosts, and Queens, reaching to the stars. The air of ethereal unreality impresses one instantly.”2 It had once belonged to Macbeth, a Scottish king who ruled from 1040 to 1057, and it became the setting for Macbeth’s assassination of his cousin, guest and monarch, King Duncan, when Shakespeare wrote his play centuries later. In truth, Duncan was almost certainly killed in battle nearby.
There had been plenty of kings, queens, pretenders and rebels at Glamis in the centuries between Macbeth and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who liked to amuse herself by recreating scenes from the castle’s dramatic past. These included dousing her youngest brother with a pot of cold water from the ramparts, pretending it was boiling oil and her little brother a medieval knight besieging Glamis.
Glamis’s traditions were maintained by the Bowes-Lyons. They extended to the absence of electricity until 1929, the wearing of lace caps by the women during daily chapel services and Cecilia’s ordering of bespoke seventeenth-century outfits for Elizabeth and her youngest brother. To their youthful chagrin, the pair were taught the minuet; they were encouraged to perform, in costume, this stately seventeenth-century dance before dinner parties for the endless stream of guests who came to shoot, hunt and socialise. One visitor thought that, as their mother accompanied the children on the piano, it was as if a Velázquez or Van Dyck painting had come to life. Another wrote of Glamis as a place where there was “no aloofness anywhere, no formality except the beautiful old custom of having two pipers marching round the table at the close of dinner, followed by a momentary silence as the sound of their bagpipes died away gradually in the distance of the castle. It was all so friendly and so kind.”3 The Bowes-Lyons’ staff was headed by the butler, Arthur Barson, whom a young Lady Elizabeth introduced with, “Nothing would go on without him—he keeps everything going!” Barson’s fondness for a tipple, or three, of wine and whisky did not count against him, nor did the occasional liquor-induced whoops when he spilled food on the family or their guests.
The Victorian era came to an end a few months after Elizabeth’s birth, when Queen Victoria died and was succeeded by her son, King Edward VII. Initially, there was no perceptible change in the way the aristocracy lived as they entered the Edwardian age. Modernity was not welcomed, certainly not by Elizabeth’s grandmother, the Dowager Countess, after she broke both of her arms during an enthusiastic jaunt in her first motor car.
Claude and Cecilia, Lord and Lady Strathmore, with their children and fourteen servants (including boozy but devoted Barson), moved between their homes by overnight train and horse-drawn carriage to and from the local station. Theirs was a large family, ranging in 1900 from sixteen-year-old Mary to six-year-old Michael. The heir to the earldom was the eldest son, Patrick, named after a Bowes-Lyon uncle who became a Wimbledon tennis champion. Excepting Patrick and Fergus, the siblings were often given nicknames—Mary was “May,” John was “Jock,” Alexander “Alec” and Rose “Rosie,” while Michael got “Mick” or “Mickie.” Elizabeth got “Buffy,” after mispronouncing her name “Elizabuff” as she learned to speak. There were occasional holidays to Italy to visit Elizabeth’s widowed grandmothers, both of whom unsurprisingly found grief more manageable in their respective villas overlooking Florence and the Mediterranean, but by and large, Elizabeth’s childhood passed shuttling between England and Scotland.
With her tribe of siblings, Elizabeth spent a great deal of time at their parents’ English country estate of St. Paul’s Walden Bury in the county of Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth developed a liberal attitude towards the concept of “owner’s discount” as it pertained to anything that took her fancy in the larder. She was frequently caught clambering on a stool, trying to break in to get her hands on the clotted cream. Like most aristocratic families at the time, the Bowes-Lyons also had a London residence. They rented Number 20 St. James’s Square, an eighteenth-century townhouse designed by the famous Adam brothers.4
The home at which they spent the least amount of their time was Streatlam Castle, a Georgian-era residence in north-eastern England that had come into their possession when it was left to Elizabeth’s father after the death of his childless cousin, the art collector and former Member of Parliament John Bowes.5 When Elizabeth’s eldest brother married the Duke of Leeds’s daughter in 1908, they were given Streatlam as their marital home.
Her parents’ happiness, their social privileges and their large family combined to create what Elizabeth called “a marvellous sense of security” and a contentment that “I suppose one took for granted as a child.” Their homes were decorated with inherited antiques and art, alongside stitched Victorian equivalents of Live, Laugh, Love signs, bearing sayings like East or West, Home is Best.
Born as the twentieth century dawned, Elizabeth was, in many ways, for good and ill, to carry the attitudes of her Edwardian childhood with her for the rest of her life.
Elizabeth was not noted for her punctuality. She was habitually late, a trait she shared with her father Claude, who was so lackadaisical about timekeeping that he did not file the proper forms for Elizabeth’s birth with the local authorities until six weeks after the event. Faintly contemptuous towards the bureaucracy of modern life, Claude only went to get the forms when the vicar punctiliously insisted on them being in proper order for his own baptismal records. Claude was fined for this tardiness, a mild punishment that nonetheless solidified his view that the whole thing was ridiculous. On September 21, 1900, he recorded Elizabeth’s August 4 birth in the parish of St. Paul’s Walden Bury.6 The vicar’s daughter, Margaret Valentine, noted that her piano lesson on that day had been interrupted by the news, brought over by a maid, “to say that Lady Glamis had given birth to a baby girl.” Elizabeth’s biographer Hugo Vickers has plausibly suggested that the family had relocated nearer to London for the birth to be within easy reach of the capital’s superior medical services.7 There were some nerves over this pregnancy, as it was Cecilia’s first since the birth of her son Michael six years earlier.
When it comes to royalty—or the famous of any variety—very little in their lives is allowed to have a banal, accidental or commonplace explanation. Intrigue or conspiracy must play their part. In Elizabeth’s case, her father’s lack of interest in the paperwork led, in the 2010s, to a theory that Elizabeth must have been a changeling. Perhaps her father’s child with somebody else. Maybe the illegitimate daughter of a French cook or a Welsh servant. Elizabeth was allegedly secretly adopted and passed off as a Bowes-Lyon to assuage Cecilia’s grief at the death some years earlier of her eldest daughter, Violet. If the delayed paperwork was not enough, supporters of this theory point to the suspicious timings of the pregnancies, separated as they were by six to seven years. Cecilia was allegedly “too old” at the time she conceived Elizabeth. She was thirty-seven.
A Scottish Dr. Ayles, who allegedly attended Claude Bowes-Lyon on his deathbed when he confessed the whole deception, has also been identified as a primary source for this story. There is, however, no doctor registered with that surname for the year of Claude’s death. Some proponents have even utilised Elizabeth’s physical appearance later in her life to support their argument, since, as she gained weight, “she did look like the daughter of a cook. You can hardly say she looked aristocratic.” For those who looked for further proof, Elizabeth’s ability to talk comfortably with “ordinary” people when she was queen was proffered absurdly to suggest her real mother was one of “the servant class.”
Using Claude’s slapdash paperwork and Violet’s death as evidence that Elizabeth was a cook’s surrogate changeling is the historical equivalent of adding two to two and getting 375. Violet Bowes-Lyon’s death as a motivation is also questionable, since although it is true that Elizabeth’s eldest sister had died of diphtheria at the age of eleven, she did so seven years before Elizabeth’s birth. Moreover, had they been trying to cover up a secret adoption, the Bowes-Lyons would likely have been more rather than less careful with the paperwork. Even if the evidence for this theory was not already a cocktail of the improbable and the bizarre, it would be weakened further by comparing photographs of Elizabeth to her mother Cecilia, particularly as they aged, and noting the clear similarities between the two.
On May 2, 1902, Cecilia gave birth to her tenth and final child, a boy christened David. With less than two years between them, Elizabeth and David occupied the Nursery together, where they often put on plays for their parents. Cecilia nicknamed them “my Benjamins,” an affectionate term for children born slightly later than their siblings. When David was older and home from boarding school, a guest repeatedly made sly insinuations about him by calling him a “pretty boy.” After this visitor said it one too many times to be politely ignored, Lady Strathmore turned to her and said firmly, “Yes, and he’s a very nice one, too, which is better!”
Elizabeth described her mother as “the pivot of the family.” A devout Christian—her late father had been a Protestant clergyman—Cecilia taught the children to say their prayers at the foot of their beds every evening, a habit that Elizabeth maintained for the rest of her life. The practice came with pieces of motherly advice such as, “Say your prayers properly and don’t mumble. You’re talking to God.”
Among the portraits at Glamis is one of Elizabeth’s ancestor Mary-Eleanor Bowes, for ever captured in an enormous gown and a wig twice the size of her head. Born in London in 1749, she had been sole heiress to a vast fortune that included the estate and house of St. Paul’s Walden Bury. She married John Lyon, the handsome 9th Earl, described in high society as “the beautiful Lord Strathmore.” To preserve the Bowes name, Mary-Eleanor’s father stipulated that whoever married his daughter would have to take her surname if they wanted to have any access to her money. Beautiful Lord Strathmore, described as “innocent and without the smallest guile, a sincere friend, a hearty Scotchman,” and a good drinking companion, was happy to accept this arrangement and the requisite petitions were submitted to Parliament. Since the Lyon name was one of the oldest in the British nobilities, various double-barrelled combinations were tried by Mary-Eleanor and John’s descendants over the next century until they settled on Bowes-Lyon in 1865. However, Elizabeth signed herself “Elizabeth Lyon,” preferring, like most of her relatives, to use the older name rather than the double-barrelled.
In the summer of 1537, King James V of Scots had Elizabeth’s ancestor Janet, Lady Glamis, executed as a witch. The King extracted the legally required evidence after authorising that her servants be tortured and then forced Janet’s teenage son, John Lyon, to watch as his mother was burned to death outside Edinburgh Castle. Although she did not die at Glamis, Janet was one of many ghosts claimed by her former home. Cecilia and her friend, the Countess of Glasgow, reported sightings of Janet, as did Elizabeth’s sister, Lady Rose, who believed she had seen Janet’s ghost, “the Grey Lady,” near the castle chapel where the family met daily for prayers. Elizabeth’s decision to dress up as the Grey Lady and jump out at her siblings may not, therefore, have been particularly well received on all occasions by Rose.
The novelist Sir Walter Scott, a guest at the castle in the late eighteenth century, described Glamis after sunset as being “far too far from the living, and somewhat too near the dead.” Elizabeth’s youngest brother claimed to have seen proof throughout his childhood that Glamis was haunted, as did their great-aunt, Lady Frances Trevanion. Glamis was allegedly one of the most haunted buildings in the British Isles. Its dead but not departed residents included a spectral drummer boy, possibly a remnant of the Ogilvy clan who had been butchered at Glamis during a fifteenth-century feud, and the blood-soaked “Tongueless Woman,” silenced then slaughtered in the Middle Ages to carry some since-forgotten secret into the grave. The castle has a haunted Hangman’s Chamber, built centuries earlier when the thanesII of Glamis had been tasked with administering the King’s justice in that part of Scotland. Again, Elizabeth’s sister Rose was a believer, telling a friend years later, “When I lived at Glamis, children often woke up at night in those upper rooms screaming for their mamas because a huge, bearded man had leant over their beds and looked at them. All the furniture was cleared out a dozen years ago. No-one sleeps there today.”
Guests reported strange occurrences like clocks smashing to the ground at four in the morning, sheets being pulled off beds, or seeing figures looming over them from the shadows or by the fireplaces. An avid believer in the supernatural, Charles Lindley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, reported numerous hauntings during his sojourns at Glamis, and the Archbishop of York’s wife was so perturbed during her stay that she suggested to Claude that they arrange for an exorcism of the house. She was particularly unsettled by stories of the 4th Earl of Crawford, a medieval nobleman nicknamed “the Bearded Earl” or “the Tiger Earl” for his ferocity in life and who had been a regular guest at Glamis in the fifteenth century. He had overstayed his welcome by half a millennium, trapped there in punishment for having sold his soul to the Devil in a room of the castle following a quarrel with one of Elizabeth’s ancestors. An Australian cook in the Bowes-Lyons’ service swore she could still hear the Bearded Earl rolling dice with the Devil in the turret where he made the bargain: “I’ve heard them rattle the dice, stamp and swear. I’ve heard three knocks on my bedroom door and no one there. And I’ve lain in bed and shaken with fright.”
The most famous spectre at Glamis haunted it in life rather than death and, if he existed, may still have been alive when Elizabeth was playing in its Nursery. The legend goes that sometime around 1821—on a night which was cold, dark and storm-swept, as they must be in such stories—a child was born at Glamis, so severely disabled that the family pretended he had died at birth. A room was constructed in the castle in which the child could be kept safe but secret. Cruelly nicknamed either the Monster, or the Horror, of Glamis, he lived an unusually long life, during which he left his secret chamber only at night for walks and exercise. A visitor to Glamis in the 1960s was reportedly told, “the Monster was immense. His chest an enormous barrel, hairy as a doormat, but it is said that his head ran straight into his shoulders and his arms and legs were toy-like. Shaped like an egg, he was immensely strong. He was the heir—a creature fearful to behold.”
Only four people knew the truth. The first was the Earl and the second was the Factor (estate manager) of Glamis. The other two were their respective eldest sons. The position of Factor at Glamis was almost as hereditary as the earldom and was held by only two local families between the 1760s and 1940s, while an initiation into the secret was a traumatic rite of passage for every heir to the earldom on his twenty-first birthday, when the Earl took him to wherever the Horror was kept behind Glamis’s sixteen-foot-thick stone walls. As they entered the locked chamber, the Earl introduced his son to the Horror with the words, “This, my boy, is your great-great-uncle. The rightful Earl.” The description of the relationship changed; the ritual did not. The same family friend from the 1960s continued, “Silence, a horror-filled silence, as the young Lord Glamis recoils from the dull-eyed, uncomprehending creature behind the bars. The oaken door shuts behind them and the Monster goes back to his animal sleep. Before their twenty-first birthdays, several heirs lightheartedly promised their friends that they would reveal the secret as soon as they knew it. None of them did.”
This conspiracy of silence extended even to their relatives. Elizabeth’s mother Cecilia asked their Factor, Andrew Ralston, if the legends of the Horror were true, to which he replied, “Lady Strathmore, it is fortunate you do not know it and will never know it, for if you did you would never be happy.” Ralston, despite serving the Bowes-Lyon family loyally for half a century, refused to sleep at Glamis. Even when the region was enveloped in a snowstorm, he preferred to chance the one-mile journey home rather than spend the night at the castle. And, while the Strathmores allowed their children to tell stories about the castle’s ghosts, Lady Rose said that when it came to the Monster, “We were never allowed to talk about it when we were children. Our parents forbade us to discuss the matter or ask any questions about it. My father and grandfather absolutely refused to discuss it.”
Perhaps needless to say, all of this is hearsay, as is the frequently cited testament of an unnamed admiral who, at a dinner party table, insisted that the Horror of Glamis had lived to nearly his one-hundredth year, dying in 1921.8 Who the Horror was is also contested. One version of the story states that his parents were Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather, the 11th Earl, and his third wife, Marianna. Another has it that the father might have been the 11th Earl’s adult son from his first marriage, whose wife gave birth at Glamis to a son, Thomas; the boy tragically died at Glamis on the same day, October 18, 1821. Most stories identify this infant Thomas as the child who became the Horror. To complicate things further, there is a third possible timeline, based on alterations made to Glamis in the early 1680s and described in its accounts as “things of considerable trouble,” on the orders of Patrick Lyon, the 3rd Earl. This gave rise to the argument that the tragedy of the Monster in fact dates from the seventeenth, rather than the nineteenth, century and that whispers of it persisted, to be revived by the Victorians’ fascination with Gothic mysteries.
There is a surprising amount of circumstantial evidence about just how many people linked to Glamis believed that the Monster had existed. It is very possible that the gossip was self-engendering, that it grew over the years until even various members of the Bowes-Lyon family believed in some variation of the legend, while the truth was that the poor man nicknamed the Monster of Glamis never existed or died as a baby in 1821, and that a myth mushroomed from that. Elizabeth’s youngest brother, David, certainly thought so. Unlike their sister Rose, he dismissed the whole thing as a product of the nineteenth-century’s obsessive love of melodrama: “A frightful lot of rot was written about Glamis in Victorian days,” he told a friend in the 1950s. “Most of them seized on the Monster as a peg and then thought up the most unutterable bosh.” Lending credence to David’s scepticism is the fact that, during a fire at Glamis in 1916, no mention was made of trying to find, evacuate, or secure the secret chamber.
We do not know what Elizabeth truly thought about the legends of the Horror, since according to several of her friends (and several of her critics) she refused to discuss it. She was certainly a lifelong believer in ghosts, after spending much of her childhood in homes that she and her family believed to be full of them.III One of the oldest parts of Glamis is the stone-floored medieval room called Duncan’s Hall, watched over by portraits of King James IV, the Scottish monarch who was killed leading an invasion of England in 1513, and his granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots, who had spent the night at Glamis in the summer of 1562. While the hall’s name alludes to the death of King Duncan I, it is more probable that it was Duncan’s father, King Malcolm II, who expired while staying at Glamis in November 1034, an event commemorated by a chamber there called King Malcolm’s Room.
As a child, Elizabeth always felt uneasy in Duncan’s Hall. It was the only room at Glamis through which she ran or “scuttled at top speed.” Lady Rose remembered, “When my sister the Queen Mother and I were children, we would sometimes be sent downstairs to fetch something. We always raced through Duncan’s Hall and the Banqueting Room. As for King Malcolm’s Room, where Malcolm was murdered, there was a bloodstain on the floor which would never wash out. So my mother had the whole floor boarded over. The bedroom next to it had a door which always opened of its own accord at night. You could bolt it, lock it and even stick a chest of drawers against it—it was still open in the morning! So my parents took the wall down and put the door upstairs in another room.”
In October 1905, David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford, and his wife Constance trundled towards Glamis in the novel conveyance of a motor car, in which they had driven from their home at Balcarres House. According to a family friend—although given what he said about them, that designation might be stretching the word “friend” to its limits—“Lady Crawford looms like Medusa and is vast. She wears unsuccessful frocks of dullish colours, which are a bad background for her heavy massive jewels. She always looks untidy, if not dirty, which Lord Crawford, the most charming of men, frankly is.”
The Lindsays and the Lyons had been neighbours for generations. One of Crawford’s ancestors, the aforementioned “Tiger Earl,” was among the Glamis ghosts. Lord Crawford suspected that when the subject of the hauntings came up at the dinner table, the Bowes-Lyons downplayed the satanic handshake that had trapped his predecessor’s soul there, as they worried that discussing a deal with the Devil might have an impolite ring to the spectre’s descendants.
The Crawfords arrived at Glamis just after the start of the pheasant and woodcock shooting seasons; grouse was also in season until early December. In pursuit of the latter, Elizabeth’s father accidentally wounded Lord Crawford—although, as a supporter and collector of the arts,IV Crawford was more stung by the family’s “phenomenal ignorance of the castle and its contents.” He heard Elizabeth’s 19-year-old brother Jock ask his mother “about the identity of a portrait which turned out to be a portrait of his own grandmother. They are nice boys, and Strathmore is a delightful man: by the way, he put two pellets in my wrist while we were driving some grouse this afternoon.”