Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne
British aristocrat (1855-1944); father of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother; maternal grandfather of Elizabeth II
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.
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".
“Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne” enters the record as british aristocrat (1855-1944); father of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother; maternal grandfather of Elizabeth II. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Claude, Bowes-Lyon and 14th can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Claude, Bowes-Lyon and 14th provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q335159. VIAF identifies the subject as 316738324. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1855, 1944, 1865 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.