The royals - Kitty Kelley [20]
For years she had shrouded the details surrounding her own birth. She airily dismissed questions about why her father, after eight children, missed the six-week deadline for registering her birth. He then put his historic name as fourteenth heir of the Earl of Strathmore to a lie. In doing so, he risked life imprisonment, which in 1900 was the extreme penalty for falsifying an official document. Instead he paid a fine of seven shillings and sixpence and stated that his daughter was born at St. Paul’s Walden Bury, the family home in Hertfordshire. The Queen Mother maintained she was born in London.
This conflict gave rise to rumors over the years that after producing eight children, her thirty-nine-year-old mother finally had had enough. Some people have suggested that her father may have had an affair with a Welsh maid who worked at Glamis Castle in Scotland, and that this union produced the baby known as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. No evidence has been found to verify the suspicion, which may have arisen because of the unorthodox way her father filed her birth certificate.
“It really doesn’t matter where she was born or if there were inaccuracies,” said a Clarence House spokesman. “Strathmore did the evil deed and he is dead. If he did wrong, it didn’t show.”
The Queen Mother deflected scrutiny of her lineage to hide her family’s hereditary defects. For generations the Strathmores had been haunted by the Monster of Glamis, which according to legend was the misshapen creature born to her great-grandfather. Shaped like an egg with twisted spindly legs, this baby boy supposedly grew into a grotesque monster covered with long black hair. He was locked away in the castle for decades, his existence known only to his brother and three other people. The family covered their shame with secrecy. “We were never allowed to talk about it,” said Elizabeth’s older sister, Rose. “Our parents forbade us ever to discuss the matter or ask any questions.”
This attitude toward physical deformities and mental illness was prevalent around 1920 when Elizabeth’s young nieces were born. Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, both retarded at birth, were secretly locked away in the mental hospital in Redhill, Surrey, where they lived for decades. So great was the disgrace felt by the family that they recorded the two women as dead in 1941 in Burke’s Peerage, the bible of British nobility.
“If this is what the family of the Bowes-Lyon told us, then we would have included it in the book,” said Harold Brooks-Baker, editor of Burke’s Peerage. “It is not normal to doubt the word of members of the royal family. Any information given to us by the royal family is accepted, even if we had evidence to the contrary….”
Such deference to the Crown helped the Queen Mother conceal any secrets that might have shamed the royal family. She hid the alcoholism of her husband and the homosexuality and drug addiction of his brother, Prince George, who eventually married and became the Duke of Kent. After the war she buried an explosive military report to King George VI from Field Marshal Montgomery and two confidential reports from Lord Mountbatten, which he described in a television interview as “too hot and uninhibited” to publish. She knew that these three documents, if ever made public after her husband’s death, would reflect unfavorably on his stewardship during the war.
“The King was told everything,” she admitted to Theo Aronson in 1993, “so, of course, I knew about everything as well. That is when I learned to keep things to myself. One heard so many stories, I became very cagey. And I have been very cagey ever since….”
FOUR
The Yorks, now the King and Queen of England, cultivated important American friendships in hopes of influencing public opinion in the United States. They wanted America to enter the war before it was too late for Great Britain.
In the summer of 1939 the King and Queen had invited Joseph P. Kennedy, the