While modern royal matches are now based entirely upon love, it wasn’t always that way. Typically, they were dictated by foreign alliances, and it was common for royal brides and grooms to only meet on a handful of occasions before they wed, if at all.
Royal brides were often selected based on their performance at court. For example, the future Queen Mary was initially engaged to Prince Albert Victor, who died in 1892, before marrying his younger brother, the future King George V, as she was popular with Queen Victoria.
Therefore, a royal alliance founded on love during that period was very rare — that is, until the union of Prince Albert and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born on August 4, 1900 and she met King George V’s second son, Prince Albert, for the first time at a dance given by Lord and Lady Farquhar at 7 Grosvenor Square in London, in 1920.
The prince quickly became infatuated with the youngest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne and was determined to marry her.
During their courtship, he first proposed to her in 1921 but was rejected as Elizabeth felt she would be “afraid never, never again to be free to think, speak and act as I feel I really ought to”.
The prince is said to have proposed for a second time after Elizabeth took on the role of a bridesmaid at the wedding of his sister, Princess Mary, to Viscount Lascelles at Westminster Abbey in 1922.
Once again, the future Queen turned down the prince’s proposal, and many reports also suggest that there may have been a third that was also rejected.
She finally gave in, and the couple were married 102 years ago at Westminster Abbey on April 26, 1923. They became the Duke and Duchess of York and welcomed their first daughter, Princess Elizabeth, in 1926 and Princess Margaret in 1930.
Following the abdication of Prince Albert’s brother, King Edward VIII, in 1936, the private royal couple were thrust into the spotlight when they became King and Queen Consort.
They were an incredibly popular couple and beloved for their morale-boosting efforts during World War Two. King George VI died at the age of 56 on February 6, 1952 from lung cancer. The Queen Mother lived for a further 50 years before her death at the age of 101 on March 30, 2002.
