Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th and 1st Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, KG, KT, GCVO, TD (14 March 1855 – 7 November 1944), styled as Lord Glamis from 1865 to 1904, was a British peer and landowner who was the father of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and the maternal grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II.
After being educated at Eton College, the Earl received a commission in the 2nd Life Guards in 1876 and served for six years until the year after his marriage.[2] He was an active member of the Territorial Army and served as honorary colonel of the 4th/5th Battalion of the Black Watch.[2]
Upon succeeding his father to the Earldom on 16 February 1904, he inherited large estates in Scotland and England, including Glamis Castle, St Paul's Walden Bury, Gibside Hall and Streatlam Castle in County Durham and Woolmers Park, near Hertford.[2] He was made Lord Lieutenant of Angus,[nb 1] an office he resigned when his daughter became queen. He had a keen interest in forestry and was one of the first to grow larch from seed in Britain. His estates had a large number of smallholders, and he had a reputation for being unusually kind to his tenants.[3] His contemporaries described him as an unpretentious man, often seen in "an old macintosh tied with a piece of twine".[4] He worked his own land and enjoyed physical labour on the grounds of his estates; visitors often mistook him for a common labourer.[5] He made his own cocoa for breakfast, and always had a jug of water by his place at dinner so he could dilute his own wine.[6]
In 1936, his son-in-law became king and assumed the name George VI. As the father of the new queen, he was created a Knight Companion of the Garter and the 1st Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, a United Kingdom peerage in the Coronation Honours of 1937 (although he was the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne which was a Scottish title). This enabled him to sit in the House of Lords as an earl (because members of the peerage of Scotland did not automatically sit in the House of Lords, he had previously sat only as a baron through the Barony of Bowes created for his father).[8] At the coronation of his daughter and son-in-law, the Earl and Countess sat in the royal box with Queen Mary and their shared granddaughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.
He married Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck on 16 July 1881 in Petersham, Surrey.[1][10] The couple had ten children. The Earl would part his moustache in a theatrical, but courteous gesture, before kissing them:[11]
Name
Birth
Death
Age
Notes
The Hon. Violet Hyacinth Bowes-Lyon
17 April 1882
17 October 1893
11 years
She died from diphtheria and was buried at St Andrew's Church, Ham.[12] She was never styled 'Lady' because she died before her father succeeded to the Earldom.
He married Lady Dorothy Osborne (daughter of George Osborne, 10th Duke of Leeds) in 1908, and had issue. In 1944, he became 15th and 2nd Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
In 1923, she married the Duke of York, the future King George VI, and had issue, including Queen Elizabeth II. She became queen consort in 1936, and in later life, after the death of her husband, she was known as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
Coat of arms of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne
Coronet
An Earl's Coronet
Crest
Within two branches of laurel a lady to the girdle habited and holding in her right hand the royal thistle all proper.
Escutcheon
Quarterly 1 and 4 argent a lion rampant azure, armed and langued gules within a double tressure flory counter-flory of the second (for Lyon); 2 and 3 ermine three bows stringed palewise in fess proper (for Bowes).
Supporters
Dexter, a unicorn argent armed and unguled or; Sinister, a lion per fess or and gules.
Motto
In Te, Domine, Speravi
Symbolism
The Arms of the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne are famous for being canting as they represent the name of the holders of the title: Bowes-Lyon in that they feature bows and lions.
^ abWhite, Geoffrey and Cokayne, G. E., The Complete Peerage, St Catherine's Press, London, 1953; vol. XII, pp. 402–3.
^ abcdThe Times (London), Wednesday, 8 November 1944, p. 7, col. C.
^Grant, F.J., revised by K.D. Reynolds, "Lyon, Claude George Bowes-, fourteenth earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne in the peerage of Scotland, and first earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne in the peerage of the United Kingdom (1855–1944)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
