Newly-Uncovered Details About Queen Elizabeth's 'Banished' Cousins Have Us Shaken

When Princess Margaret visits a therapist in an episode of The Crown, her counselor isn’t surprised that the royal has appeared in her office. She alludes to a pair of sisters who were associated with Margaret. The Princess was shocked.

In the show, Margaret and her older sister Elizabeth find that their family lied about their cousins Katherine and Nerissa being dead. Instead, they were sent to Royal Earlswood Hospital, a state-funded mental institution. Could such a deception have happened in real life?

Well, the actual royal family was a little more clued in. In reality, both women knew that Katherine and Nerissa were in the sanatorium once known as, “The Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles.” Of course, that doesn't sound like a place fit for royalty.

They weren’t the only ones with royal blood at Royal Earlswood Hospital. The Queen Mother's cousins, Rosemary, Etheldreda, and Ideona, were committed to the facility on the same day as the others.

Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon were Fenella and John Herbert Bowes-Lyon’s third and fifth daughters who were born in 1926 and 1919, respectively. John was one of the Queen Mother’s older brothers.

The family was besotted with health issues: Katherine and Nerissa both had mental ages of about three and weren’t verbal. Their father died in 1930, leaving Fenella to provide full-time care for the girls, alone.

Soon after his death, Fenella resorted to sending her daughters to Redhill, outside of Surrey. In 1941 they were shipped to the Royal Earlswood Hospital — Nerissa was 15 and Katherine was 22.

The facility wasn’t known for its cleanliness. Patients were overcrowded, and the care team was often understaffed. For years the royals lived a quiet and lonely life at their institution. And in 1987, the public learned about their existence.

This was because Nerissa passed away that year and was buried at a grave that was only marked with her serial number and plastic name tag. “We have no comment about it at all,” Buckingham Palace said. “It is a matter for the Bowes-Lyon family.”

Katherine outlived her sister, dying in 2014 at the age of 87. The rest of the royal family never visited any of their relations in the institution, though there are some sources who claim Fenella did visit her daughters until she died in 1966.

There aren’t any official records of these visits. And the family even secretly declared Nerissa and Katherine dead in the mid-1900s. Though their family wasn’t acknowledging them, the women seemed to recall their royal roots.

If Katherine and Nerissa saw the royal family on TV, they would salute or curtsy to them. The poor girls existed at a time where mental disabilities threatened a family’s reputation — influenced by eugenics, the genetic belief system the Nazis loved.

“The belief was if you had a child with a learning disability, there was something in your family that was suspect and wrong,” Jan Walmsley, an Open University professor and expert in the history of learning disabilities, said. However, John and Fenella didn't give up on all their children.

The Bowes-Lyons had one daughter, Anne, who would become a princess of Denmark. Fenella was likely concerned with Anne’s prospects if her suitors learned about her other sisters and decided to hide them.

The sisters lived in England’s first asylum for the mentally challenged. When Nerissa was admitted she was described as, “Very affectionate … can say a few babyish words,” by one of the hospital’s practitioners. The staff did have questions about the duo.

Though the women were generally liked among the staff, their care team noticed that they never had visitors. “I never saw anybody come,” Dot Penfold, another person in the ward, said. “The impression I had was that they’d been forgotten.” Could that be true?

Though the Queen Mother states she learned about the sisters in 1982, someone in the royal family definitely knew about them. They were sending the two 125 pound payments yearly. Once she knew they were actually alive, the Queen Mother sent them another check.

With the money, Nerissa and Katherine were able to purchase candy and toys, but Elizabeth herself never appeared, even after their monetary gift. She also didn’t correct the girls’ public records.

The Royal Earlswood eventually closed in 1997 after former staff members came forward with abuse allegations. One nurse claimed that patients were being abused at the hospital. Now, the building has been converted into luxury apartments.

We’re not sure where Katherine was living between the institution’s closing in ’97 and her death in 2014, but we do know that Queen Elizabeth II wasn't a part of the planning process once the palace received news about the asylum’s closing. While the royal family may appear callous in this situation, the truth is that nobility has a historical connection to strange and often debilitating mental illnesses.

As Princess Alexandra Amelie wandered through her castle in her all-white ensemble, she knew she had to be careful. She crept through doorways and halls, not allowing any part of herself to graze against the walls. When her concerned family questioned her, she explained she’d swallowed a glass piano as a little girl, and now she was afraid it would shatter inside of her stomach. And she wasn’t the only royal with this worry. Welcome to the glass delusion.

Though it sounds like fantasy, the glass delusion was a mental disorder born in the Middle Ages. It afflicted high-ranking figures, such as royals, nobles, and scholars, who were certain they were made of fragile glass and were in constant danger of shattering.

One of the first known glass delusion cases was King Charles VI. He became the leader of France at 11, and at first, his subjects loved him — he was called Charles “the Beloved” for decreasing bureaucracy and employing excellent advisors.

Unfortunately, that changed when Charles turned 24 and killed one of his knights while hunting. This was the start of his descent into madness. Eventually, he’d have times where he’d hide because he was concerned he was made from glass.

Charles would hide in his room and wrap himself in thick blankets to keep from cracking. When he absolutely had to leave his sanctuary, he wore a special outfit with metal ribs that would support his “delicate” organs.

After Charles, the glass delusion expanded to people in royal courts, monasteries, and European colleges. Some sufferers were convinced they had glass hearts or heads and others believed they were a type of glass vessel, like a vase.

For some reason, many males with glass delusion thought they had glass butts and attached pillows to their pants to protect themselves. Nicole du Plessis, who was related to Cardinal Richelieu, had this, for instance.

Medieval doctors were confounded by the madness. One physician’s solution for treatment was spanking another glass bottom believer to show him that he was made from flesh. Seems about right for a doctor from the Middle Age.

What’s also quite interesting is many who had this illness were known to be smart and inventive. This link was so pervasive, it appeared in plays and other stories. The most famous example is from author Miguel de Cervantes.

In 1613, Miguel published the short story "El licenciado Vidriera," which translates to "The Glass Graduate" or "The Glass Lawyer." The protagonist, Tomás Rodaja, is given a love potion, which tricks him into believing he metamorphosed into glass.

Tomás embodies his new life by changing his name to Vidriera, or window. His glass body makes him more insightful, which makes a lot of sense because he believed he and everyone else could literally see through him.

Tomás condition makes him a national celebrity whom many ask for advice. As Cervantes wrote, “He asked people to address him from a distance [...] since glass is of subtle and delicate matter, the soul works through it with more speed and efficiency than through the material of the normal body.”

This story helped the delusion become a well-spread phenomenon. But, why? Medieval researchers attempted to link it to melancholy, a now-debunked form of deep royal depression. This was close, but not quite it.

Modern scientists suggest the glass delusion was more linked to royal and other high-ranking officials in the public eye because it was a way for them to express feeling vulnerable, fragile, and exposed from holding a public office.

Similar to when a celebrity succumbs to public pressure and has a freak-out, this was likely a way for royals to show they were real people with real feelings who really only wanted to be left alone. 

Another passage from "El licenciado Vidriera" illustrates this well, describing the hero as “begging and pleading with predetermined words and expressions that no one come near because they would break him, that he really and truly was not like other men.”

This wasn’t the only reason. Glass had been around since 3500 B.C., but clear, thin glass was still rather new to society. Across history, there’s been a link with how mental illness is expressed based on what era the person is from.

The glass delusion was only one example in a long line of mental confusion. Earlier peoples suffered from “the earthenware delusion,” and in the 1800s, citizens started being convinced they were actually concrete.

You can even take this to the modern era. Those with severe mental illness now generally believe in the government sticking some kind of a microchip in their brains to monitor them.

No matter the material, persons with these illnesses had something in common — feelings of insecurity. For instance, critics made fun of another author Giovanni Boccaccio, calling him a “man of glass.”

Giovanni had an excellent retort to this: “We are all glass men, subjected to innumerable dangers. The slightest touch would break us, and we would return to nothing.” Granted, there were all kinds of madness in the royal courts of Europe.