RICHARD KAY on the Duchess of Kent: The reluctant royal whose luminous public face masked a troubled marriage – and a private world of tragedy and torment

As a young man, the Duke of Kent was one of the most popular members of the Royal Family, whose daring escapades on the ski slopes, appetite for fast cars and carousing in nightclubs were front-page news.

These days the old soldier can walk from his palace home to nearby Kensington High Street barely recognised.

While Edward has coped easily with the fickleness of fame, however, his wife Katharine, the Duchess of Kent, whose death aged 92 was announced yesterday, did not. 

With her unmistakable silvery blonde bob, she was an ethereal beauty, elegant and stylish who, long before Princess Diana, was the royals’ queen of compassion.

Not for her the easy, passive stance of royal life, cutting ribbons, shaking hands or bestowing smiles with warm words.

She relished the practical side of what she called ‘field work’. The duchess’s working week would often see her mopping floors in a children’s home, mending clothes with needle and thread or sweeping out the cinders of fireplaces.

And in far-flung corners of the world as an ambassador for Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, Katharine sought to help the sick, the deprived and abandoned.

When she became patron of the Samaritans, the movement to help the suicidal and despairing, she was not content to be a mere name on a letterhead but undertook its 12-week training course alongside a group of ten volunteers from all walks of life.

 She then settled in as one of the charity’s anonymous ‘listeners’ for a weekly four-hour shift at a central London branch, waiting for the telephone to ring.

It made the duchess acutely aware of the misery, suffering and unhappiness that lay outside the enclosed world of royal privilege. 

At a time when the House of Windsor was governed by stiff formality, she not only broke down barriers but wore her royalty lightly.

Who can forget the duchess consoling a tearful Jana Novotna, the losing ladies’ finalist in the Wimbledon tennis championships of 1993? 

More than 30 years later, the picture of the Czech tennis player weeping in her arms remains an iconic image, one of the tournament’s most human and empathetic moments.

The limelight, however, did not suit the woman who never lost her love for the rugged beauty and simplicity of her horse-riding childhood in Yorkshire. She chafed at the politesse of protocol.

Her decision, late in life, to give up the royal style HRH, which she had received on marrying the duke in 1961, raised eyebrows. 

She asked to be known as ‘Lady Katharine’, ‘Mrs Kent’ or even plain ‘Kate’ – anything but ‘your royal highness’.

 Soon after, it emerged the duchess had not just been giving private music tuition at a flat she’d bought in Notting Hill, west London, but had, for a decade, been secretly working as a supply teacher under the name ‘Miss Katharine’ in state schools in both London and Hull, travelling by train and bus rather than limousine.

Inevitably she was dubbed a reluctant royal, even a recluse.

In fact, she was neither of those. But behind this detachment from the goldfish-bowl reality of palace life and her embrace of, and conversion to Roman Catholicism, lay a tragic story of ill-health, great personal loss and loneliness that for some years imperilled what was once seen as one of the Royal Family’s most stable marriages. 

At times the strains were as intolerable as they were to prove for her Kensington Palace neighbour Princess Diana.

But unlike Diana, whom she counted as a friend when virtually all the princess’s other royal allies had abandoned her, the duchess never complained.

There were, of course, the waspish asides and gossip about ‘poor Eddie’ (her husband the duke) having to put up with ‘mad Kate’ and so-called ‘fits of the vapours.’

As Katharine’s biographer Mary Riddell noted, both the duchess and Diana suffered from low self-esteem and a lack of understanding from a royal family who – in those days – never ‘got’ mental anguish.

‘I understood Diana very well, for obvious reasons,’ the duchess recalled after the princess’s death in 1997. ‘We kept in touch through thick and thin.’

 In many ways, Diana’s fate and the story of the Duchess of Kent provide an object lesson in how the royals treat their recruits.

Both were moderately educated, beautiful, well-born daughters of ancient English families. Both allowed expectation to overrule their doubts about marrying into the Royal Family. 

They outshone their husbands in the popularity stakes and, with their heart-on-the-sleeve approach to royal duty, both women endeared themselves to the British public.

And there were doubts to contend with. For Diana, there were the gnawing suspicions about Prince Charles’s enduring love for Camilla Parker Bowles.

The duchess, meanwhile, was unsure whether her affection for the duke would survive the rigours of royal duty.

And there the similarities end. While Diana and Charles divorced, Prince Edward – as the duke was born – and his luminous duchess soldiered on. 

Neither wanted to succumb to failure and, with the support of the late Queen, the marriage survived.

There were other compromises: the duchess withdrew from royal life leaving her husband to perform official duties alone, as he continues to do to this day. 

 Friends say that, in time, the couple – who celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary in June – reached an amicable understanding.

But Katharine’s increasing infirmity saw the relationship change once again.

Even though professional help was available, the duke had been determined to be by her side, returning as soon as he completed royal engagements. Until recently, Edward had made a point of driving his wife to her weekly hairdresser’s appointment.

For many, those Centre Court appearances in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, and her enthusiastic support for numerous charities, epitomised the Duchess of Kent – graceful, untroubled and charming.

Her public face gave no hint of the anxiety and turmoil that affected her from the earliest days of her marriage.

Katharine was the much-loved daughter of a rich Yorkshire landowner, Sir William Worsley, whom she worshipped.

Hers was an idyllic and secure childhood. Her husband to be, almost three years her junior, had lost his own father, the libidinous younger brother of King George VI, in a wartime flying accident when he was six. 

The duke’s prep school days at Ludgrove – where William and Harry were later pupils – were miserable.

 As the nephew of one king and grandson of another, George V, a 41-gun salute sounded Edward’s birth and huge crowds gathered near the Kents’ Belgravia home, craning to catch a glimpse of the infant, the first royal prince for 30 years. 

But if Edward was a catch, so too was Katharine, who was in no hurry to marry.

They first met at a hunt ball at Blenheim Palace in 1956. Then, when the duke was posted to Catterick barracks in North Yorkshire with the Royal Scots Greys, he was invited to lunch with other young officers at Hovingham Hall, the Worsleys’ Palladian-style country home.

The young duke was smitten and after four years of courtship, despite the objections of his widowed mother, Marina, who did not want her son to marry a mere commoner, and despite Katharine’s own reservations, the two were engaged.

It was billed as a great royal romance. The truth, however, was slightly different. Years later, the former ambassador Lord Bridges, a friend of the duke, offered a more nuanced and diplomatic explanation of Katharine’s decision to accept the proposal.

‘I suspect she undertook the marriage partly out of a sense of duty,’ he told Mary Riddell.

‘In other words, it wasn’t a romantic, overwhelming thing that most people have.

‘I suspect she had no wish to enter the royal world of protocol. She would have been happier with a good country marriage.’

 They were married on June 8, 1961, in York Minster – the first royal wedding to be held there for 633 years.

The occasion drew a crowd of thousands and was televised, with Richard Dimbleby providing the commentary. Among the 1,500 guests were Noel Coward and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Then there was a brief honeymoon at Birkhall on the royal Deeside estate and in Majorca.

Within months, the duchess was pregnant with their first child, George, Earl of St Andrews, born in 1962.

While stationed in Hong Kong, which the duchess described as ‘the best year of our lives’, Katharine became pregnant with their daughter Lady Helen.

The duchess’s slow recovery from the birth, however, hinted at post-natal depression. Meanwhile her diary was filling up with royal engagements, opening schools, presenting awards and naming ships, including a Scottish ferry, the first to be launched sideways down a slipway.

On the royal stage she was not yet a natural performer, with a chronic fear of speaking in public. Two months before their third child, Lord Nicholas, was due in 1970, the duke was posted to Cyprus and missed the birth.

And the duchess’s happy family life with their children, rewarding charity work and the music which always filled their home, was soon overshadowed by what at first looked to be a blessing.

 In 1975 the duchess became pregnant for the fourth time, but after contracting German measles – which is almost guaranteed to cause severe damage to an unborn child – she was advised to have an abortion.

Torn by her longing for another baby and her belief in the sanctity of life, she turned to the church.

According to the late Lord (Donald) Coggan, the former archbishop of Canterbury and a family friend, the termination ‘quite probably troubled her throughout her life’.

Then two years later, at the age of 44, she discovered to her great joy that she was pregnant again. 

This was the child she hoped would resurrect a marriage that had gone stale.

In October that year, however, she began to feel ill. Her husband, by then out of the Army and on an official visit to Iran, rushed home while the duchess drove herself to the King Edward VII hospital in Marylebone for an emergency operation.

Physicians battled for 36 hours to save her unborn baby, but it was in vain.

Officially, she was said to have suffered a miscarriage. In fact, her third son was stillborn. She asked to see him and, cradling his body, named him Patrick.

The duke, bereft, stayed with his wife in hospital until she was well enough to leave. Only once did he leave her bedside, to summon Archbishop Coggan, who came and prayed.

 Losing a child is traumatic for any woman. Losing one so cruelly at an age when further pregnancy was highly unlikely was a savage blow.

She believed it was God’s punishment for her earlier termination. The duchess tried to recover, carrying out her royal programme as dutifully as ever, but her joie de vivre was missing.

Not long after her mother died, Katharine began to slide into clinical depression and a desolate mid-life crisis, which resulted in a full-scale nervous break-down, and she was readmitted to the Edward VII hospital.

It was seven weeks before she could escape the feeling of total wretchedness. Although devoted to her, Edward was emotionally distant and ill-equipped to help his lonely wife’s deep-seated problems. 

Later, it was claimed that she had contemplated a separation.

Certainly, the duke discussed his future with the Queen, his first cousin, once it became apparent his marriage was in difficulty. 

It subsequently emerged that apact had been struck, with the Queen’s full knowledge, that the Kents’ marriage must survive.

But while the marital crisis was averted for now, there were other troubling developments on the horizon. 

In 1981, the duchess attended Wimbledon in a surgical collar to correct a misplaced disc in her spine. The following year she underwent an operation for obstruction of the bile duct. A year after that, she had an ovarian cyst removed.

 Then came reports – officially denied –that she was to undergo electroconvulsive therapy for depression.

Later still, in 1996, she contracted the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes glandular fever and is a precursor to the debilitating ME – so-called ‘yuppie flu’. It was another devastating blow.

Work was a therapeutic diversion. The duchess agreed to be filmed at Helen House, near Oxford, the world’s first hospice for dying children, where she was a volunteer. 

Just how much these acts of great tenderness took out of her can only be guessed.

In 1988 came a worrying episode when her youngest son, Lord Nicholas was stopped by police near St James’s Palace, where the Kents then lived. They found in his possession a small amount of cannabis. 

It was the first time a member of the Royal Family had been held for a drugs offence. 

All this was taking its toll. Lord Coggan described her devotion as ‘draining.’ Faith was holding her together.

Yet when she appeared on the cover of Tatler magazine in spring 1992 in a stylish Armani suit, many were struck by how vital she now looked.

 The reason? She was edging towards becoming a Catholic.

With its long record of appealing to those who have known turbulence in their private lives, through its structures, rituals and moral certainties, Catholicism seemed to be calling her. 

It still took time before she converted, however.

She needed the permission of the Queen – who readily granted it – and, after, a long period of instruction led by Cardinal Basil Hume, the late Archbishop of Westminster she was accepted into the Roman Church. 

Twice she went on pilgrimages to Lourdes where she looked after the sick and even cleaned the lavatories.

The duke and their children were at her side when she received the sacraments for the first time in 1994.

Another area of her life was about to undergo a radical upheaval, meanwhile: her attendance at Wimbledon. For 30 years she had been a symbol of the spirit of the tennis championships.

When a young Martina Navratilova was struggling to get her family out of the Czech Republic, the duchess was a source of comfort and help.

But it ended bitterly in 1999 when the club refused to allow her to bring Lucien Lawrence, the 12-year-old son of murdered headmaster Philip Lawrence, to sit beside her in the Royal Box. 

 Officials cited rules stating that only royal children can sit in the box.

The duchess, who had become close to Mr Lawrence’s widow, Frances, was upset by the snobbish decision after all her years of patronage. 

Two years later she chose to snub the club and sit with friends in a private capacity on the Centre Court.

At the time of her death, the duchess, who had captivated a prince only to embark on a long and painful journey of self-fulfilment, was the oldest royal in the land, a figure of admiration and wisdom.

Like Diana she found royal life far from easy. Both women flouted convention, but thanks to her faith – and, sadly, unlike the princess – the Duchess of Kent found a kind of peace.