Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th and 1st Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne (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.
Contents
Biography
Early life
Claude George Bowes-Lyon was born on 14 March 1855 in Lowndes Square, London, the son of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and the former Frances Smith. His younger brother, Patrick Bowes-Lyon, was a tennis player who won the 1887 Wimbledon doubles.
After being educated at Eton College, he received a commission in the 2nd Life Guards in 1876 and served for six years until the year after his marriage. He was an active member of the Territorial Army and served as honorary colonel of the 4th/5th Battalion of the Black Watch.
Estates and inheritance
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. The valuation of the entailed Strathmore Estates was £716,150 for the assessment of death duties following his father's death in 1904.
He was made Lord Lieutenant of Angus, 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. His contemporaries described him as an unpretentious man, often seen in "an old macintosh tied with a piece of twine". He worked his own land and enjoyed physical labour on the grounds of his estates; visitors often mistook him for a common labourer. 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.
In 1922 The Daily Telegraph reported that Lord Strathmore was selling the Streatlam Castle estate on the Yorkshire and Durham borders; the asking price for the Castle and 1,198 surrounding acres was reportedly £37,500, with an option to purchase the remaining 4,806 acres.
Prior to 1906 Lord Strathmore and his family used a flat in Grosvenor Gardens as their London residence; following his succession to the Earldom in 1904, in 1906 he acquired the lease of a large townhouse at No. 20 St James's Square from Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 7th Baronet, which remained as the family's London residence until 1920. Strathmore was elected as one of the Trustees of St James's Square in 1908. A temporary lease was then taken over a house in Eaton Square, and by April 1921 a lease of 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, had been acquired and renovations were underway in preparation for the Bowes-Lyon family's occupation of the house. The family were residing at Bruton Street when in London by March 1922. Strathmore sold the lease of 17 Bruton Street in early 1929; the Evening Standard reported on 26 March that the Strathmores would vacate the property in mid-April of that year, and that the reported purchase price of the house's freehold was £26,000.
By January 1930 Lord and Lady Strathmore had taken a new London residence at No. 84 Eaton Square, which they continued to occupy until Lady Strathmore's death in 1938. During the late 1930s Lord Strathmore also leased an apartment in Cumberland Mansions, Marylebone.
Marriage and family
He married Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck on 16 July 1881 in Petersham, Surrey. The couple had ten children. The Earl would part his moustache in a theatrical, but courteous gesture, before kissing them:
Despite the Earl's reservations about royalty, in April 1923, his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, married Prince Albert, Duke of York, the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. Lord Strathmore was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order to mark the marriage. His granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II), was born at his home, 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair in April 1926. In 1928, he was made a Knight of the Thistle.
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). 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.
Later life and death
He was created a Companion of the Roll of Honour of the Memorial of Merit of King Charles the Martyr in 1911. Later in life, the Earl became extremely deaf. Lord Strathmore died of bronchitis on 7 November 1944, aged 89, at Glamis Castle. (Lady Strathmore had died in 1938.) His will was proved for probate in August 1945, with a personal estate valued at £75,955.
He outlived four of his ten children and was succeeded by his son, Patrick Bowes-Lyon, Lord Glamis.