Almost despite herself and as an apparently conventional, certainly dutiful Royal, Katharine, Duchess of Kent, nevertheless proved to be a record-breaker.
The first Englishwoman to be Duchess of Kent since 1799; the first commoner to marry a British prince since Maria Walpole wed the Duke of Gloucester & Edinburgh in 1766; the oldest mother since Queen Charlotte gave birth to her last child, Amelia, in 1783; and, apart from Ena of Battenberg’s dynastic conversion in 1906, the first member of the British royal family to be received into the Church of Rome since Charles II in 1685.
