Looking Back: The Minister’s Wife in the Ancestry of Our Queen

From May 1953

The Minister’s Wife in the Ancestry of Our Queen

One sunny wintry morning Mrs Muir was standing in a busy city street, lost in contemplation of the most famous Manse in Scotland.

Was it, wondered Mrs Muir, gazing up at its ancient outside stair, was it the house to which John Knox had brought his gentle little wife and their two small sons? Marjorie Bowes was her name: a pretty name for one whom Calvin called the most delightful of wives.

One of the very first manse wives, this, for ministers didn’t have wives before that date. But she wasn’t a minister’s wife for long, little Marjorie Bowes. Eight years of it she had, married to the fierce bearded reformer, that formidable wrestler with principalities and powers, with spiritual wickedness in high places. Then she died, leaving her two little boys and slipping away out of sight, and almost out of mind.

But – here was a thing. Alison Muir had found it in a book only this morning and she was still tingling with the excitement of discovery. That early minister’s wife had a relative, years later, who married a member of the Lyon family of Strathmore, and founded the family of Bowes-Lyon. And thus across four centuries, our own young Queen is linked with young mistress John Knox.

-        B.M.S

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