On a more earthy note she also descended from one George
On a more earthy note she also descended from one George Carpenter, who in 1779, at the age of 60, married the 18-year-old daughter of a plumber who had come to repair his roof.Queen Elizabeth's father, Lord Glamis, succeeded as 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne in February 1904. Her mother, Nina, was a Cavendish-Bentinck, cousin to the Duke of Portland and Lady Ottoline Morrell. It was said that the Queen Mother's longevity came from Bentinck blood, her second cousin Lady Victoria Wemyss living to 104.The ninth of a family of 10, the Hon Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (Lady Elizabeth after 1904) was born in London on 4 August 1900 and christened Elizabeth Angela Marguerite. Most of her first 14 years were spent at St Paul's, Waldenbury, in Hertfordshire, known locally as “The Bury”, another house inherited from the Bowes family.
She was christened in the local church and grew up playing country games beside walls covered with magnolias and honeysuckle. With her favourite brother, David, she roamed the grounds and woods, accompanied by dogs, cats and tortoises. There was a Shetland pony which followed her into the house, and even upstairs. Here too, they were educated, simply but sensibly, under the creative influence of her mother.From an early age Lady Elizabeth impressed the grown-ups favourably. One such described her as “the most astonishing child for knowing the right thing to say. Had she been consciously rehearsing for her future she could scarcely have practised her manners more assiduously.” Even as a child Lady Elizabeth strove to put others at their ease.The family paid only occasional visits to Streatlam, but long summers were spent in the romantic and mysterious Glamis Castle, which of all her homes is the one most usually associated with her.Glamis was an inspiration to Shakespeare as the setting for Duncan's murder in Macbeth.
When Sir Walter Scott stayed there in 1814, he was conducted to a remote wing. No doubt with the mythological Glamis monster in mind, he wrote: “I began to consider myself as too far from the living and somewhat too near the dead.” Stephen Tennant, the aesthete and a contemporary of the Queen Mother, used to talk of childhood visits there with his mother, Lady Grey of Falloden, recalling the “spinachy green and sour yellow tapestries” that adorned the castle, and relating curious tales of footmen dipping under cords and disappearing up forbidden staircases, bearing plates of steaming food, evidently on their way to sustain the lonely monster.The celebrated monster is not mentioned by the guides at Glamis, nor did Queen Elizabeth brook any question on the subject. More plausible ghosts have included the wretched Lady Glamis, who was “horribly” burnt as a witch in Edinburgh in 1537, and who makes friendly visits to the chapel in the guise of the “grey lady”. There is also the sad tale of a disobedient page, who was told to sit immobile on a stone seat outside the room which became the Duchess of York's sitting-room He sat there all night and froze to death.
Evidently he makes his presence known by sticking out a ghostly leg and sending the occasional tourist headlong into the room.Glamis was where the Strathmores and those of their brood too young to fight spent the years of the First World War. The particular consideration for others that had developed in Lady Elizabeth found an outlet during the war when she comforted the wounded who recuperated at Glamis, briefly translated into a military hospital. It was surely there and at that time that her skill with people was honed. One sergeant said that his three weeks at Glamis were the happiest he ever knew.The war brought anguish to the family as to so many others. Fergus Bowes- Lyon was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and another of her brothers, Michael, was a captive in Germany for two years.