Who Were Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, The Queen’s Forgotten Cousins?

With the fourth series of The Crown entering the 1980s, it’s nice to get a glimpse into the more familiar moments in the royal family’s history, like the wedding of Charles and Diana. But amidst the famous moments, we’re also given the keys to locked doors, and we’re hearing about scandals and dramas that we’ve never even heard of. Case in point? The story of Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon.

Nerissa and Katherine were two of the daughters of John Herbert Bowes-Lyon, brother of the Queen Mother and, therefore, first cousins of the Queen. They had been listed as deceased in the 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage, but were actually interred in the Earlswood Hospital for the mentally disabled in 1941. This was, somehow, kept a secret until 1987, following Nerissa’s death in 1987.

Not a single member of the royal family is recorded as having visited the girls in the entirety of their stay. Katherine died in 2014.

For actress Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Princess Margaret, the revelation of her cousins and their sad fate makes her look inward and reflect on the inherent cruelty present in the family.

‘It is an exercise in further loss’, says Helena. ‘It is always about loss with Margaret. She lost her father, she lost her sister to the monarchy, she did get married and that was great but then she lost him and of course her family with that. When she seeks therapy, her feeling of being an outsider, a feeling she has always had which somehow makes her feel inferior, or the odd one out, is exacerbated. When she discovers the true story behind her mother’s cousins, she realises that she is not the only one in the family to have this feeling, although their condition is very different.’

Curiously, life imitated the art which is, of course, already imitating life, with Helena discovering that one of her own ancestors was also affected by a similar case. ‘I found out whilst parallel reading during researching and filming the episode, that a family cousin, Cynthia Asquith’s eldest son, when it became apparent that something wasn’t quite right, he was brought up entirely separately to the rest of the family’, she recalls.

‘At that time there was a huge amount of shame and lack of knowledge associated with brain damage or disability and in a religious sense it was associated with sin.’

The Crown, Season 4 is available on Netflix

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