The announcement of the death of the 92-year-old Duchess of Kent late on Thursday, September 4 reminded me once again about the royal cycle of life – the intense blaze of attention and popularity bestowed onto young royals slowly diminishes over the years as they move further and further away from the royal centre stage. It happens to all royals, except for the monarch.
The Duke and Duchess of Kent were very popular stars of the royal family at a time when there was a dearth of young royal adults. Their every move was captured by the media, especially as they undertook foreign tours on behalf of the monarchy.
The Duchess of Kent was showing a comforting, sympathetic, and caring side well before Diana or Kate or Meghan crouched down to hug children or offer a sympathetic hug. The most famous example of that warmth occurred in 1993 on centre court at Wimbledon when the royal patron was presenting Jana Novotna with the runner-up prize. As the tennis star crumpled into tears, the duchess pulled her close and put Novotna’s head on her shoulder as she offered words of comfort. “That’s what you do when people are crying,” she said in a later interview.
On Wednesday, March 8, 1961, the engagement of HRH the Duke of Kent to Katharine Worsley was announced by his mother, HRH Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. The next day, the couple posed for photographers as they strolled arm-in-arm through the grounds of Kensington Palace. Katharine showed off her elegant engagement ring – a large oval sapphire, shouldered by two smaller round diamonds, set in platinum.
At the time, the only young royal women available for royal duty were:
-
Queen Elizabeth II (then 34)
-
Princess Margaret (30)
-
Princess Alexandra of Kent (the duke’s sister, 24)
So, the introduction of the first untitled royal bride to marry into the royal family since the Tudor era was an immediate hit. The public couldn’t get enough of Katharine and her future husband, Edward. Souvenirs printed to mark the engagement quickly sold out.
He was a 25-year-old army officer, she was the 28-year-old daughter of a Yorkshire baronet who was the county’s Lord Lieutenant at the time. They’d met at a country house party five years earlier.
There’s even a Canadian connection to their romance, as the Telegraph notes:
Deciding to “think things out”, Miss Worsley flew off to stay with her brother in Toronto, where she worked as an assistant in Birks’ jewellery store before taking a Greyhound bus with a friend to Vancouver, San Francisco and then Mexico City, where she received a bouquet of flowers with the single letter “E”, and made her decision.
Unlike many royal brides, she eschewed the usual wedding venues to be married near her family home in the vast historic York Minster. It was the first royal nuptials in the minster in more than 600 years, when King Edward III and Philippa of Hainault married there in 1328.
It was a massive royal event and the wedding of the year. Two of the bridesmaids were Princess Anne, 10, and one of Diana’s older sisters, then the Hon. Jane Spencer (she’d later marry Robert Fellowes, who would become a private secretary to Elizabeth II.)
The duchess held onto her status as a popular working member of the royal family for years. Huge crowds turned out to see her and her husband, Edward, well before before throngs turned out for Charles and Diana or Andrew and Sarah, and decades before the same numbers greeted William and Kate or Harry and Meghan. She and Edward had three children and 10 grandchildren (she had a stillbirth in 1977).
In 2002, she asked the late Queen Elizabeth II for permission to step back from that role as a working royal. She quietly took on the job of music teacher in the port city of Hull, in her home county of Yorkshire, for two decades. To her students, she was Mrs. Kent.
She retreated from public view as her health deteriorated, though she continued supporting musical education. While she attended the 2018 wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, she didn’t appear with her husband at the 2022 Platinum Jubilee, Elizabeth’s funeral, or the coronation of Charles III. Her last public appearance was with her husband as he marked his 89th birthday in October 2024 outside their home in the Kensington Palace complex.
One of her goddaughters, India Hicks, paid tribute to the duchess on Instagram, recounting the deep involvement of her godmother in her life:
My grandfather’s funeral was held on my 11th Birthday. It took place on 5th September 1979, following his assassination by the IRA. Before the service, on the steps of Westminster Abbey, Princess Grace approached my mother. Seeing me, she caught sight of a gold cross I was wearing and, bending down commented on how lovely it was. “Thank you. It is brand-new today, from my godmother.” I replied childishly.
My Godmother, the Duchess of Kent, had remembered that it would be my birthday. She had organized in a short amount of time to have this small cross engraved with the date.
Tributes have poured in for the duchess, including from tennis great Martina Navratilova, who noted that she had the privilege of calling her “Katharine,” adding, “What she did for me personally was an amazing thing. RIP and thank you so very much for all the good you have done.”
Others have revealed long-held confidences of the many private acts of kindness undertaken by the duchess. In particular, Terry Stacy disclosed on X/Twitter, “I was a governor of the former Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in East London, the #DuchessofKent use [sic] to make “secret” visits to the children’s cancer wards with her jewel box and let the kids wear them.”
The duchess’s moment of compassion at Wimbledon was remembered by the Archbishop of York, in his message of condolences to the Kent family:
Katharine was an advocate for children and young people’s welfare throughout her life. She taught and encouraged generations of young musicians. Millions will remember her comfort and kindness exemplified in her embrace of Jana Novotna in the final at Wimbledon whose Patron she was for many years. In 1994 her own deep and profound faith led her from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism a moment the then Archbishop of Canterbury described as a ‘personal decision of a devout Christian on a spiritual journey’. She was held in high esteem by all who met her and knew her.
My latest Royal Roundup for Global TV’s The Morning Show (August 26, 2025)