In the spring of 1963, a form arrived at the home of Fenella Bowes-Lyon, wife of the late John Bowes-Lyon and daughter-in-law of one of Britain’s most senior noble families. It was from Burke’s Peerage, the genealogical register that tracked the lineages of the British aristocracy. Fenella was asked to update the details of her family. She listed her daughter Nerissa as having died in 1940, and her daughter Katherine as having died in 1961.
Both entries were lies. At that moment, Nerissa was 44 years old and living in a hospital for the mentally disabled in Surrey. Katherine was 36, in the same institution. Neither woman would die for decades.
Nerissa passed away in 1986, and Katherine in 2014. The two sisters were first cousins of Queen Elizabeth II, and their story only became public long after the family had done everything in its power to erase them. The Bowes-Lyon family traced its lineage back to the fourteenth century, when John Lyon, Lord of Glamis, served as Chamberlain of Scotland. By the early twentieth century, the head of the family was Claude Bowes-Lyon, the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, one of the most senior nobles in the British peerage.
His second eldest son, John, born in 1886, married Fenella Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, a younger daughter of the 21st Baron Clinton. The marriage produced five daughters. The first, Patricia, was born in July 1916 and died before her first birthday. A second daughter, Anne, was born months later and enjoyed a long and healthy life.
Diana followed in 1923. Then came Nerissa, born on 18 February 1919, and Katherine, the youngest of all, born on 4 July 1926. Both Nerissa and Katherine were born with severe mental disabilities. The exact nature of their condition remains unclear to this day.
What is known is that neither girl ever learned to speak properly or communicate effectively. In the terminology of the time, they were classed as “imbeciles. ” Such afflictions were not uncommon among European noble families by the early twentieth century, the result of generations of marriages between close cousins. Medical understanding of these conditions was minimal, and the social stigma attached to mental disability was severe.
In 1941, when Nerissa was 22 and Katherine was 15, the family placed them in the Royal Earlswood Hospital in Surrey. The institution had opened in 1855 as an asylum for the mentally ill, and by the mid-twentieth century it functioned as a home for patients with severe mental handicaps. After that, the family largely acted as though the two girls had never existed. Their mother never visited.
Neither did other extended family members. Their father was already dead, having succumbed to pneumonia in 1930 at the age of 44. One of the most persistent questions surrounding the case is why the family waited until 1941 to place the sisters in institutional care, when Nerissa was already in her twenties. The sisters’ plight might never have attracted public attention had their family not become entangled with the British monarchy.
On 26 April 1923, when Nerissa was four years old and Katherine not yet born, their father John’s younger sister Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married Albert, the Duke of York, a younger son of King George V. From that point, the Bowes-Lyons were connected by marriage to the royal family. The link grew stronger with time. King George V died in January 1936 and was succeeded by his son Edward VIII, whose reign lasted less than a year.
His determination to marry Wallis Simpson, an American twice divorced, was deemed unacceptable to the British political establishment, and Edward abdicated. The Duke of York became King George VI, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon became Queen Consort. In April 1926, weeks before Katherine was born, Elizabeth had given birth to a daughter named Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II. Nerissa and Katherine shared the same grandparents as the future queen: Claude, the 14th Earl, and his wife Cecilia.
While the royal family flourished, Nerissa and Katherine remained at Earlswood, largely forgotten. King George VI died in 1952, a casualty of the chain smoking that plagued his family, and was succeeded by his daughter, the first cousin of the two hidden sisters. Queen Elizabeth II would reign for seventy years. The controversy that erupted around Nerissa and Katherine focused on that 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage.
When the Bowes-Lyon family received the genealogical form, Fenella filled it in herself. She listed Nerissa as having died in 1940 and Katherine as having died recently in 1961, even though both were still alive and residing at Earlswood. The family continued to pay 125 pounds a year to the hospital for their maintenance, which made the claim of ignorance difficult to accept. At the time, little was made of the matter.
But in 1986, the truth emerged: the sisters had been recorded as dead more than two decades earlier while both were still very much alive. A nephew of Fenella tried to explain it away by describing his aunt, who had died in the interim, as a vague person who might well have filled out such a form incorrectly. The explanation satisfied few. Fenella had provided specific dates of death for both daughters.
She had quite clearly attempted to cover up the fact that the family had placed its two daughters in an institution and then tried to pretend they did not exist. Nerissa and Katherine remained at Earlswood for decades. Nerissa died there in 1986, at the age of 66, forty-five years after being admitted. No member of her extended family attended her funeral.
Hospital staff were the only mourners. Her grave at Redstone Cemetery was unmarked except for a plastic tag and a serial number. It was only later, after her two nieces and a nephew arranged for it, that a headstone was erected over the grave. Katherine outlived her sister by nearly three decades.
She stayed at Earlswood until the hospital closed in 1997. She was then moved, along with several other relatives who had been placed there over the years suffering from the same genetic illness, to Ketwyn House, a care home nearby in Surrey. When that facility closed in 2001, she was moved again. Katherine died in February 2014, approaching her ninetieth year, after more than seventy years in institutional care.
Neither she nor Nerissa had ever learned to communicate with others. The story became a matter of public controversy in 1986, when the Sun newspaper broke the account of the Queen’s hidden cousins. Further investigation revealed Fenella’s false death records, deepening the scandal. Here was evidence that the Bowes-Lyon family had not only placed two of its children in a hospital and ignored them ever after, but had then pretended they had died years earlier.
The details of Nerissa’s unmarked grave and her funeral unattended by family compounded the outrage. The story has resurfaced periodically since. In 2011, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary titled The Queen’s Hidden Cousins, which argued that the sisters had been ignored and mistreated while the wider Bowes-Lyon family lived lives of esteem and luxury. The program was believed to have greatly upset Queen Elizabeth II, who was almost entirely unaware of what had happened to her cousins and had played no part in the decision to place them in Earlswood in 1941.
The story later featured in the popular Netflix drama The Crown, as part of the episode titled The Hereditary Principle, prompting publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire to revisit the case. The treatment of Nerissa and Katherine points to callous behavior on the part of the Bowes-Lyon family. But their story also reflects how a supposedly enlightened society such as mid-twentieth century Britain treated people with severe intellectual disabilities.
The sisters were hidden away, written out of the family record, and in every meaningful way erased from the world, until the truth finally caught up with those who had tried so hard to bury it.