EXCLUSIVE: From the pits to the Palace – Kate Middleton’s mining ancestors slaved underground, yet the Princess of Wales is actually related to the QUEEN MOTHER (not to mention husband, William!)
- Revealed: Kate and William share a seventeenth century ancestor
- Kate’s family cut coal in mines owned by Queen Mother’s Bowes-Lyon family
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HER ancestors famously toiled underground for generations, mining coal for slave wages in the north of England.
Yet the pits where Kate Middleton’s forbears cut coal have a curious resonance. For they were owned by the Bowes-Lyons, family of the late Queen Mother.
Stranger still, The Mail’s new Royals section can reveal that some of Kate’s distant relatives had originally owned the mines where less fortunate branches of her family would later work.
And that the Princess of Wales is actually related to the Queen Mother and her descendants – including William, of course.
Kate Middleton’s ancestors both owned and worked in mines from the late Queen Mother’s Bowes-Lyon family. They are connected by the figure of a 17th century nobleman, Sir William Blakiston of Gibside Hall near Newcastle, as this family tree shows
Catherine Middleton leaves Westminster Abbey with husband William after marrying into the Royal Family in 2011
A regal Kate speaks to Buckingham Palace guests in 2022. She is wearing the Lotus Flower Tiara often worn by the Queen Mother
Sir Thomas Conyers is an eighteenth century ancestor of Catherine Middleton. But his side of the family fell on hard times, with some descendants working in the mines his family had once owned
The story begins with a 17th century landowner called Sir William Blakiston, who owned the magnificent Gibside estate, once painted by Turner, in Northumberland’s Derwent Valley.
On what was to become the royal side of the family, elder son Sir Ralph Blakiston, inherited the estate from his father while younger brother Nicholas, who was Kate’s predecessor, was given some of the family’s coal mines.
Yet within only a handful of generations, their fortunes had diverged. One of Sir Ralph’s descendants would be the richest woman in Britain, while one of Nicholas’s heirs ended up in the workhouse.
It was a twist of fate ensuring that, several generations later, Kate’s mother Carole Middleton grew up a very long way from being aristocratic, let alone royal.
It was Sir William Blakiston who had originally created the family fortune: a wealthy landowner, he married his wife Jane at the parish church of Grindon, in County Durham, in 1581, when he was 19 years old, and had seven children including heir Ralph and spare Nicholas.
After inheriting the Gibside estate on the death of his father, George, in 1586, he replaced the old house with a spacious mansion, Gibside Hall, displaying the Royal coat of arms alongside the Blakiston crest over its entrance after being knighted by James I in 1617.
The Blakiston fortunes flourished over the next century. Sir Ralph became 1st Baronet of Gibside on July 30, 1642.
And Gibside heiress Elizabeth, granddaughter of Sir Ralph, married MP and Trinity College Cambridge graduate Sir William Bowes, in 1691, so uniting two of the wealthiest families in Britain.
He owned Streatlam Castle, a Baroque stately home and country pile which stretched 1,190 acres and incorporated 20 farms, in Barnard Castle, County Durham, another of the Queen Mother’s family seats.
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother, came from a family which had owned mines in the north east of England. She is pictured with the Lotus Flower Tiara sometimes worn by Kate today
The Harrison family pictured in Hetton-le-Hole, a mining town near Sunderland in 1919. Left-to-right middle row are: Kate’s great-grandfather Tom Harrison, great-great grandfather John Harrison and great-great grandmother Jane Harrison
Boldon Colliery in Co Durham. Kate Middleton is descended from north east miners – and from north east mine owners!
Elizabeth Blakiston’s granddaughter Mary Eleanor Bowes, born in February 1749 and brought up at Gibside, became the wealthiest heiress in Britain, when her father Sir George Bowes, who controlled a cartel of colliery owners, died when she was 11, leaving her a vast fortune.
Elizabeth was great-great-great-grandmother of the Queen Mother.
On her 18th birthday, she married John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore, who owned Glamis Castle, the childhood home of the Queen Mother and birthplace of Princess Margaret.
To protect her inheritance, her father’s will stipulated that her husband should assume her surname but his son and heir the 11th Earl of Strathmore, chose to style himself Thomas Bowes-Lyon and the name stuck.
The 10th Earl contracted tuberculosis in the early years of their marriage and died at sea on his way to Portugal, in 1776, leaving the woman, who became known as the ‘Unhappy Countess’, a widow and mother of five at the age of 27.
When, she died on April 28, 1800, she was buried in Westminster Abbey. Her tombstone stands in Poets Corner.
But it was the other, less fortunate side of the family that would eventually lead to Kate Middleton.
Initially, both Sir Ralph and Nicholas Blakiston and their descendants could enjoyed the fruits of the family mining fortune, mingling with aristocrats and landowners and marrying heiresses.
When Nicholas’s great-granddaughter Jane Blakiston wed baronet Sir Ralph Conyers at Durham Cathedral on June 11, 1719, it was she who was seen as ‘elevating their position and grandeur’.
The 5th Baronet was landed gentry – his great-grandfather was Sir John Conyers, a Royalist army officer, who was created a baronet by Charles I in 1628 and granted a £100-a-year pension.
The family lived in considerable style during the 17th century.
But, while he inherited the title from his second cousin, Sir Baldwin Conyers, the fourth baronet, in 1731, he did not inherit the family estate, Horden Hall, a Grade II* listed 17th century manor house in County Durham, so was forced to make a living as a glazier.
His four children had to survive on their wits. His oldest son Blakiston, who became the 6th baronet, joined the navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant,.
Through the generous patronage of the Bowes family, he was offered the lucrative post of collector of the port of Newcastle, which enabled him to build a fortune.
When he died in 1791, his brother Nicholas inherited the title but he left his riches to his nephew George, who ‘squandered the whole fortune’ in the space of three years in ‘scenes of the lowest dissipation’.
By the time Kate’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Sir Thomas became the 9th – and final – baronet, there was no money left.
Unlike his older brother, he refused to beg to his rich Bowes-Lyon relatives for help and, at the age of 72, ended up in the parish workhouse of Chester-le-Street.
Genealogist Sir Bernard Burke, who complied Burke’s Peerage, wrote: ‘In that work-house room, among other parish paupers, is poor old Sir Thomas Conyers, the last Baronet of Horden, bearing up manfully and patiently against his bitter adversity.’
Rich benefactors rallied around and found Sir Thomas alternative lodgings but he died two weeks later, on March 15, 1810, leaving his three daughters ‘in inferior situations’, and no son to inherit the title.
So it was that his family ended up working in the very mines owned by their distant relatives: Sir Thomas’ granddaughter Jane Hardy was the first to marry a miner, setting a tradition which would go down through the generations.
She married pitman James Liddell, who was Kate’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and their son Anthony followed in his footsteps, working in the Gibside mines near Gibside Hall.
But, when Anthony’s daughter Jane – Kate’s great-great grandmother – married miner John Harrison, in 1860, they migrated to the pit village of Hetton-Le-Hole, in County Durham.
It was here – in a simple pebbledash bungalow – that Kate’s great-great grandfather John, a deputy at Lyons Colliery, set down roots, marrying wife Jane and having nine children, including Kate’s great-grandfather Thomas, who was born in 1904.
Dorothy and Ronald Goldsmith, Catherine Middleton’s grandparents on her mother’s side. It is Dorothy’s drive and ambition that is often credited for the improvement in the family fortunes
Gibside may only have been 16 miles down the road in distance but it was a world away for the Harrisons. Little did they know that a century later, their descendant would be living in Kensington Palace.
On the death of the last baronet, Burke wrote: ‘A time may yet come, perchance, when a descendant of one of these simple artizans may arise, not unworthy of the Conyers’ ancient renown.
‘And it will be a gratifying discovery to some future genealogist, when he succeeds in tracing in the quarterings of such a descendant the unsullied bearing of Conyers of Durham.’
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