Royal Members on Queen Mothers Side of the Family
Image Source: Netflix
In episode seven of The Crown season four, "The Hereditary Principle," Princess Margaret makes a horrible discovery during ane of her therapy sessions: two of her offset cousins on her mother's side whom she knew goose egg well-nigh take been institutionalized for decades. Her discovery leads to her confronting the queen mother, who not merely confirms that the cousins were declared expressionless to protect the Windsors' reputation in one case her hubby, King George VI, ascended to the throne but fifty-fifty attempts to justify the role she played in having ii of her brother'southward daughters locked away. It'southward a shocking reveal that does have some basis in fact, just the true story of the queen'southward cousins Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon is total of unanswered questions.
Nerissa and Katherine were the third and fifth daughters of John and Fenella Bowes-Lyon. John was Queen Elizabeth'due south (the queen mother) older blood brother, which fabricated the girls her nieces. While the sisters were born with severe learning disabilities, they did not spend their entire lives in an institution. It wasn't until Nerissa was 22 and Katherine was fifteen that they were separated from their family and committed to Royal Earlswood Hospital in Redhill, Surrey (pictured below). As reported by The Telegraph and seen on the evidence, three of their cousins on their mother'southward side — Idonea, Rosemary, and Ethelreda — were all sent to the same institution.
What's unclear is why the cousins were sent away afterward living with their family for so many years. The Crown serial creator Peter Morgan offers his take on the situation, suggesting that the perceived need to protect the reputation of the royal family's bloodline played a key role in the fate of the sisters. Merely this has never been confirmed by the royal family unit or anyone close to the state of affairs. In fact, the royals haven't spoken nearly the matter at all since the beingness of Nerissa and Katherine was made public in 1987, shortly after Nerissa's death at the age of 66.
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If the queen female parent did play a office in having her nieces institutionalized, the globe may never know, but the 2011 Channel 4 documentary The Queen'south Hidden Cousins pointed out that they were sent abroad in 1941, just a little over five years afterwards King George Vi took the throne. Past 1963, they had been falsely declared dead by 1 of their family unit members, which was recorded in Burke's Peerage, a genealogical record volume for British aristocracy. Information technology seems that by all accounts, the sisters were completely abandoned by their family. In 1987, a hospital representative told Thames News that no one had visited Nerissa since the early '60s.
Even though there's no clear answer every bit to why the cousins were abandoned by their family unit, The Crown'due south delineation of them beingness enlightened that the royals are their family is heartbreakingly accurate, according to Onelle Braithwaite, a former nurse at Royal Earlswood. In the documentary, she revealed that Nerissa and Katherine always best-selling the queen and queen mother when they were on the television. "If the Queen or Queen Mum were ever on television, they'd curtsey — very regal, very depression," she claimed. "Obviously there was some sort of retentiveness. It was and so deplorable. Simply think of the life they might accept had. They were 2 lovely sisters."
Tellingly, even later on the story bankrupt that Katherine was still alive in 1987, in that location were no reports of her beingness visited by any member of the royal family unit. She died in 2014. So while The Crown is presenting a fictionalized account of the royal family'south reaction to the news of the cousins' institutionalization, the series isn't overstating the tragic nature of Nerissa and Katherine's story.
Source: https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/did-queen-mother-have-relatives-committed-to-asylum-47967675
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