Of course, most people dismiss this story as being just that- a story. After all, the trope of a baby being carried off by an eagle was an old one, even then. For example, in Greek mythology, Zeus becomes infatuated with Ganymede, an adolescent shepherd of Troy who is insanely good looking. Zeus, who is apparently an equal opportunity assaulter, has an eagle grab the lad and carry him to Mount Olympus to serve as his, er, cupbearer.
the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus' wine-pourer,
for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.
— Homer, Iliad, Book XX, lines 233–235.
In any case, many people believe that the story of Sir Thomas pawning his illegitimate son off on his unsuspecting wife by way of an eagle's nest is just a retelling of that old tale, repackaged for a new generation. Others believe that Thomas Lathom knew those stories and made use of them for his own ends, specifically pulling a fast one on his wife. However, those who keep track of these things say that Sir Thomas Lathom actually had three sons as well as a daughter, so would have no need of making an illegitimate son his heir, real or not. It should be noted, though, that the original Church of St Wilfrid- it's largely been rebuilt now- which was constructed in Northenden, Manchester in the 1400's had a stained glass window containing the eagle and child crest along with the name Oskatel de Lathom. Make of that what you will.
Amanda McKittrick Ros (really just McKittrick; the Ros was an affectation, the de Ros family being Irish aristocrats) had a long literary career, spanning the 1890's to the 1950's which was distinguished by what is genuinely some of the worst writing that I've ever read. It's impressive really... the term "purple prose" could have been coined just for her, though I doubt even Horace himself could have imagined anything so awful. The Inklings weren't alone in finding her novels- and, heaven help us, poetry- almost beyond belief; Mark Twain termed her earliest work, Irene Iddesleigh, "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time." The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye described her writing style as "... pathological, a kind of literary diabetes". Aldous Huxley actually attempted a semi-serious examination of her writing, declaring her to be an Elizabethan era Euphuist born a few centuries too late: "...the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic." I'm not suggesting that it was directly after this that Huxley started experimenting with LSD, but I'm not not suggesting it either.
Mark O'Connell in his book Epic Fail gives a pretty good summary of McKittrick's travesties: "...Ros’ writing is not just bad, in other words; its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature..."
I realize that I've rather lost track of this post about The Eagle & Child and the Inklings, but I kind of went down a rabbit hole with Amanda McKittrick Ros and couldn't stop reading in fascinated horror- or horrified fascination, one or the other. I also realize that I forgot to mention that the reason Tolkien Reading Day is on March 25th is that it's the date upon which Sauron was defeated. I'm not enough of a Tolkien nerd to know that, but I looked it up. On a sad note, the Eagle and Child was closed during the COVID lockdowns and has not reopened. The present owners are making noise about renovating it again, making the upstairs into a hotel, but last I heard it hadn't got beyond the planning stage.
I'm going to end this post with some quotes from various works of Amanda McKittrick Ros because they're so hilariously terrible, and because it delights me to think of Tolkien, Lewis, and the others leaning back in their chairs in the Rabbit Room, howling with laughter at her hideous phrases. If those walls could talk, eh?