Obituary: The Duchess of Kent

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.

She was also the oldest member of the family at her death; and (but for the extraordinary requiem and reburial of Edward III in 2015) the first to have a Catholic funeral since Mary I in 1588.

Katharine Lucy Mary was the only daughter of Sir William  Worsley, 4th Baronet, a descendant of Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding and Chairman of the MCC. Her mother, Joyce Brunner, was also the only daughter of a Baronet; granddaughter and heiress of a co-founder of ICI.

Katharine was always happiest at home – the Worsley’s Palladian seat since the 1750s when Thomas Worsley VI, George III’s surveyor general, built Hovingham Hall on land held by his ancestors since 1563. She would always refer to herself as “a Yorkshire lass” and would continue to return home to her parents and the father who adored her.

After the war years as a day scholar at St Margaret’s, Castle Howard, she was sent to board at bleak Runton Hill in Norfolk, following her cousin Isabel Colegate (later the author of The Shooting Party) where she was miserable. After finishing school at Miss Hubler’s at Oxford and a stint at Lady Eden’s nursery in London as an assistant on £12 a month, Katharine retreated to Hovingham.

It was here that she met, at lunch, Edward, Duke of Kent since he was 6 years old. The late Queen’s first cousin was stationed nearby at Catterick with the Royal Scots Greys but it was at a fancy dress ball at Bolton Castle that he was struck by her – dressed as a pink and white Dresden shepherdess.

The young Duke's mother, the widowed Princess Marina, the dazzling granddaughter of a Greek King and a Russian Grand Duke – described by Mary Riddell as, “Impossibly imperious, improbably grand and still possessed of a common touch that endeared her to ordinary people….” – was implacably opposed to this match.

She had hoped for a grander union than one with a baronet's daughter and was not sure Katharine Worsley was suited to the task. Katharine had similar doubts but the smitten duke persisted and her parents, particularly her mother, urged their daughter to commit.

They became engaged on New Year’s Day, 1961. Theirs was the first royal wedding at York Minster in 633 years – after Edward III married Philippa of Hainault. Having processed to Widor Toccata, the ethereal bride insisted on promising to obey but dropped Psalm 45, which read, “Forget also thine own people and thy father’s home.” Interestingly, it was here in York that the Catholic (and by then the exiled) Queen Ena of Spain introduced her grandson, Juan Carlos, to Sofia of Greece.

Although the duke was the eldest of the Queen’s Windsor cousins, the young couple were not at first much called upon to represent the sovereign and were able to live an Army life in Hong Kong and in Germany.

A daughter, Helen – another great beauty – and two sons, George and Nicholas, were born between 1962 and 1970. Until 1972, the family were based at Coppins, the Duke’s parents’ country house in Iver, Buckinghamshire. Then the Queen made York House in St James’s Palace and Anmer Hall, near Sandringham available.

On Princess Marina’s sudden death in 1968, the Duchess was assigned eight of her mother-in-law’s patronages. Resembling a combination of Grace Kelly and Carolina Hererra, she brought majesty, elegance, kindness and warmth to her role as a working member of The Family.

An honorary member of the All England Lawn Tennis Club since 1962, she was a popular figure at Wimbledon. There is an abiding image of the duchess on Centre Court hugging a sobbing Jana Novotná, after her defeat to Steffi Graf in the 1993 women’s singles final.

Longing for a larger family, she was delighted, in 1975, to be carrying her fourth child but contracted Rubella and was advised to terminate. She did so reluctantly after consulting a churchman. Two years later, at the age of 45, she was overjoyed to find herself pregnant again and devastated when her son, Patrick, was still-born. She saw this as punishment for the termination; suffered a nervous collapse; and was hospitalised.

Perhaps intensified by her troubles, her adult life had a distinctly spiritual dimension. Lord Coggan, the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury and an old Worsley family friend, guided her through a number of crises. As Chancellor of the University of Leeds, she had also forged a friendship with that city’s Catholic Bishop, Gordon Wheeler, a Franciscan and a convert.

She had made a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham as early as 1980 and had been reading Thomas Merton for a decade before she was received into the Catholic Church by Basil, Cardinal Hume on 14 January 1994; loyally supported by her husband and three children.

The late Queen had given her consent while the Archbishops of Canterbury and York declared it was the decision “of a devout Christian on a spiritual journey” and noted “the traffic is two-way” between Churches.

In 1997, she told the Daily Telegraph of an inspiring moment during a carol service at Westminster Cathedral, when she thought, “Oh, I’d adore to be in here.” 

The issue of the ordination of women was not an issue. “My conversion was fairly impulsive. I am not going to pretend that it was anything to do with reading the Bible. It had a great deal to do with people I met, mainly a man we all call the boss – the cardinal [Basil Hume].

“I was struck by his humility, his gentleness and his affectionate nature – but above all his humility.”

These qualities played a part in the Queen’s presence, with the duchess, at Vespers at Westminster Cathedral on St Andrew’s Day in 1995, the first official attendance at a Catholic service by a reigning monarch for 400 years.

She regularly worked at the cardinal’s Passage Day Centre and accompanied pilgrimages to Lourdes. According to Mary Riddell, it was there the public and the private duchesses blended into one. She may have flown there with her hairdresser but she tended to the sick and elderly and even cleaned the lavatories.

Her younger son Nicholas and five of her ten grandchildren would follow her into the Church.

Another lifelong passion was music. From 1978 she was a second soprano with the Bach Choir. Her great friend and fellow Catholic, Antonella, Marchioness of Lothian, told Mary Riddell:

“The Catholic discipline gives her an inner framework. So does her music. I remember watching this transfixed face shining out from all the other faces when she sang St Matthew’s Passion. Music and religion are for [her] very related.”

In December 1996 she was diagnosed with ME and yet the following year she still had 102 patronages. However, by the end of the century she had stepped back from royal life and gave up her HRH.

For thirteen years she taught music as Mrs Kent at a school in Hull and co-founded a musical charity, Future Talent.

For a period, the Kents led separate lives but after a few falls in her cottage in Oxfordshire in her late seventies the duchess returned home to Wren House in Kensington Palace and to the Duke, who was with her when she died, aged 92.

She proved true to the Worsley family motto: ‘The greatest good to the greatest number.”

RELATED: Duchess of Kent to have first royal Catholic funeral in the UK since the Reformation

The Duchess of Kent, born 22 February 1933; died 4 September 2025.

Photo: Jana Novotná is consoled by the Duchess of Kent after her defeat in the Women's Singles Final at the 1993 Wimbledon Championships, London, England, 3 July 1993. (Photo by Chris Cole/Getty Images.)

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