Name Claude 14th | ||
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Full Name Claude George Bowes-Lyon Title 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne Died November 7, 1944, Glamis, United Kingdom Spouse Cecilia Bowes-Lyon, Countess of Strath and Kinghorne (m. 1881–1938) Children Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Parents Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strath and Kinghorne Similar People Queen Elizabeth The Quee, Cecilia Bowes‑Lyon - Countess, Elizabeth II, Fergus Bowes‑Lyon, David Bowes‑Lyon | ||
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.
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From 1937 he was known as 14th and 1st Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, as he was the 14th Earl in the peerage of Scotland but the 1st Earl in the peerage of the United Kingdom.
Life and family
Claude was born in Lowndes Square, London, the son of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and his wife, the former Frances Dora 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.
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, and Woolmers Park, near Hertford. 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 in the grounds of his estates. Visitors 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.
Despite the Earl's reservations about royalty, in 1923 his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, married George V's second son, Prince Albert, Duke of York, and Lord Strathmore was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order to mark the marriage. Five years later he was made a Knight of the Thistle.
In 1936 his son-in-law's brother, Edward VIII, abdicated and his son-in-law became King. As the queen consort's father, he was created a Knight of the Garter and Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in the Coronation Honours of 1937. 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).
Later in life he became extremely deaf. Lord Strathmore died of bronchitis on 7 November 1944, aged 89, at Glamis Castle. (Lady Strathmore had died in 1938.) He was succeeded by his son, Patrick Bowes-Lyon, Lord Glamis.
Marriage and issue
He married Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck on 16 July 1881 in Petersham, Surrey. The couple had ten children, of whom they were very fond. The Earl would part his moustache in a theatrical but courteous gesture before kissing them: