When the Duchess of Kent opened up on her grief as a mother and for Princess Diana

Telegraph

24-02-2025

This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by original interviewer Elizabeth Grice. It appears as it was originally published.
Interviews with the royals are generally not assignments to be coveted. Too much mediation, too many off-limits topics, too little time and never any trust. The Duchess of Kent, had every reason to be wary of the press in 1997. She had been characterised as the royal family's bird-with-the-broken wing, a depressive, a woman of fragile health whose marriage was on the rocks and whose conversion to Catholicism was some desperate cry for consolation.
When I was ushered into the poky kitchen of her modest quarters in Kensington Palace, I found a woman of surprising strength and frankness. Easily the most unguarded, empathetic member of the royal family I had met. Later, I spent three days with the duchess as she visited bereaved families in Northern Ireland where those qualities acted on people like a balm. Five years later, Katharine Kent relinquished her HRH title. She founded a charity, Future Talent, to give every child a chance to excel in music and she herself taught music in a primary school in Hull. The children knew her only as 'Mrs Kent.' – Elizabeth Grice
If asked to name two things about the Duchess of Kent, most people would not have to think for long. They would immediately identify her as the compassionate one who wins hearts at Wimbledon by hugging Jana Novotna after yet another defeat on Centre Court. Then they would recall that she is said to be a fragile creature, in need of sympathy herself, who has been beset by personal tragedy and debilitating illnesses.
'If I were to climb Mount Everest, which is unlikely,' she says spiritedly, 'they would inevitably say it was `despite the fact that she suffered from acute depression and permanent ill-health.' She finds it exasperating to be considered the Royal Family's bird-with-the-broken-wing, especially as she regards herself as a robust individual, well able to make arduous trips to Africa or India on behalf of her charities and to help look after sick pilgrims at Lourdes.
Just before her 10-day trip to India last year as patron of Unicef, the Duchess was discovered to have the Epstein Barr virus, whose symptoms can resemble those of ME. The diagnosis was used by the media as the latest opportunity to present her medical and emotional history as a sorry one.It is more than 20 years since she was admitted to hospital suffering from depression, yet that one bleak period of her life, she feels, has served to magnify every successive illness, however minor, and to label her as a sort of tragic heroine.
Her present combative mood is certainly a challenge to rumours of fragility and mental gloom. In photographs, the Duchess usually appears luminously delicate, with fine blonde hair swept off her open features. Face to face, though still parchment-pale, she looks much more substantial – a well-preserved middle-aged woman, you would say, who is lucky with her cheek-bones and her laughter-lines and careful of her figure.
She answers the door herself, as the policeman on duty at Kensington Palace said she probably would, allowing her two dogs to chase about sniffing my ankles, before shooing them out of the back door. Wren House is a pretty, cottagey place with only three bedrooms and its compactness, after her previous residence at St James's Palace, delights her.
The Duchess, 64, is dressed for lunch with a friend and wearing a red Aids ribbon on the right lapel of her navy pinstripe trouser suit. 'Do come through,' she says, beckoning me along the hall and into the kitchen where she is making coffee. 'This is all there is of it.' I notice how large and capable her hands are, and how perfectly at home she seems doing the things a maid would do in other royal households. There is a generous slice of carrot cake for me, but she explains that she cannot have a piece herself because she is allergic to wheat and is on a gluten-free diet. 'I was diagnosed early this year as possibly having coeliac [disease],' she says matter-of-factly. 'It means I may not have been absorbing food properly for perhaps 15 or 20 years. That could account for my sudden exhaustion [before India]. If you aren't able to absorb food – and the doctor thinks I may have had this for ages – the muscles eventually become very weak.'
Since she feels unfairly stigmatised as persistently unwell, it would have been understandable if the Duchess had chosen not to mention her allergy at all, but she seems quite fearless. Being diagnosed with a relatively simple, controllable condition, and one she thinks goes a long way to explaining past problems, seems to be relief. 'It's nothing,' she says. 'Just an allergy.'
She does not, however, seek to minimise the one truly serious setback of her life. In 1977, when she was 44, the Duchess of Kent was delighted to find herself pregnant again. Her two eldest children, George and Helen, were teenagers, but the youngest, Nicholas, was only six and she thought the new baby would be the perfect companion for him. But the child was still-born – not, as reported at the time, a five-month-old foetus, but a full-term baby whom they called Patrick. The Duchess was heartbroken.
'It had the most devastating effect on me,' she says. 'I had no idea how devastating such a thing could be to any woman. It has made me extremely understanding of others who suffer a stillbirth. A couple of months later, I had a bad patch. I suffered from acute depression for a while. I think it would be a fairly rare individual who didn't cave in under those circumstances. The baby was born dead at nine months. It was a horrible thing to happen.'
Caught in a black hole of grief, she remembers telling a friend: 'I don't know why I mind so much; look at so-and-so in a wheelchair.' The friend told her: 'Yes, but at this moment in your life you, too, have a broken back. Don't try to undermine your feelings. You have every reason to feel like this. But you will get better.' The Duchess adds brightly: 'And I did. You don't forget, but you do come to terms.'
After the loss of her baby, she plunged quickly back into royal duties, which she thinks now may have been a mistake. 'It's a fairly natural reaction, isn't it,' she says, 'to want to get back into an ordered pattern of life to stop yourself from thinking too much? You do what you feel is right for you, but I don't think I gave myself time to get over it. Probably I didn't grieve properly.'
In the spring of 1979, she was in hospital for seven weeks of 'treatment and supervised rest' on the advice of the royal physician, Sir Richard Bayliss. 'I am not ashamed of that patch at all,' she says. 'It was not a good period, but once I'd come out and returned to a sense of reality, I quickly realised that, awful as it was, it does happen to a lot of people.'
The loss of her child is like a stab each time she is reminded of it. 'Every woman minds terribly about having the subject of a stillborn child brought up,' she says. 'You are always vulnerable about it. But I have never had depression since. Of course, I have up and down days – I don't know a human being that doesn't – but I am extraordinarily healthy and always have been. I do not have a history of ill-health.'
In 1994, the Duchess of Kent became the first member of the Royal Family to convert to Catholicism since 1685. Inevitably, it was interpreted as the desperate act of a woman seeking spiritual help and consolation in a life veiled by sadness. Her decision, it was said, had been made after more than a decade of intense personal soul-searching. One senior clergyman took it upon himself to remark that she had been 'a Roman Catholic in all but name for many years'.
Her own version of her journey from the established Church of England to the embrace of Rome is rather different. Her first thoughts of joining the Church, she says, were inspired by an uplifting Christmas carol service in Westminster Cathedral during which she found herself standing next to Cardinal Basil Hume. 'It was so beautiful. I thought: Oh, I'd adore to be in here.'
Others in her position might have tried to intellectualise their conversion, but the Duchess is quite happy to admit that she was led by powerful feelings of belonging – or, at any rate, needing to belong. '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. I was struck by his humility, his gentleness and his affectionate nature – but above all his humility.'
The Church also offered her the security and warmth of a close-knit, disciplined spiritual community. 'I do love guidelines,' she says emphatically. 'And the Catholic Church offers you guidelines. I have always wanted that in my life: I like to know what is expected of me. I like being told: `You shall go to church on Sunday and if you don't, you're in for it!' But there's a lot that goes far deeper than that, about which I'm slowly learning.'
The Duchess makes no claim to have mastered the doctrinal aspects of Catholicism; she has responded more to the warmth and camaraderie (a word she uses a lot in different contexts) of her fellow worshippers. 'I have met so many special friends through it,' she says. 'There is a great support system in the Catholic Church.' Nevertheless, her ignorance of canon law must have bothered her because she says she went to see Cardinal Hume a few days before she was received and told him: 'I don't know anything.'
'He said: `It's all in your heart; you can learn afterwards.' And I'm learning very slowly now. I have a long way to go.' Reassured and guided by her spiritual mentor, she says conversion was 'not the big leap' she had thought it would be. 'My reasons were personal and remain private, but it was the security that appealed to me. I didn't in any way mean to hurt anybody in the Church of England. I hope I didn't.'
Though the Duchess's conversion had no direct constitutional significance, and she therefore expected no obstacles, she made a point of telling the Queen face to face. 'I wanted to speak to her personally. She was most understanding. I'm right on the edge of the family, so it wasn't going to affect anyone, but I did want to explain.'
It was a comfort to feel she would have had the endorsement of her late father, Sir William Worsley, if he had been alive. 'I know my dad would not have minded. He was very solid and staunch in his love of the Church of England, but he would have said: `If you believe it and you want to do it, then you jolly well should.' '
Katharine Worsley was the only daughter of Sir William and Lady Worsley, of Hovingham Hall, respectable Yorkshire landowning gentry and High Anglicans. She fell in love with the Queen's cousin, Edward, when – as a young soldier stationed at Catterick – he came to a lunch party at Hovingham in 1957. After a prolonged courtship, they were married in York Minster in 1961 and Katharine seemed to slip effortlessly into royal life.
The new Duchess of Kent was what the French call sympathique, the epitome of elegance, style and dignity, but with an unusual ability to put herself in other people's shoes. At a time when royalty was generally stiffer and stuffier, she seemed astonishingly natural.
But it seems that her poise on tens of thousands of royal engagements has been nothing more than a veneer. 'I can still be very shy walking into a room full of strangers,' she says. 'I know how to do it, but I have never gained confidence. It is one of the reasons why I am always trying to boost other people's self-esteem – because I know what it's like not to have it.'
Can she be serious? Even on good days, I ask, when she is feeling upbeat and the world is smiling on her? 'I know there are days like that,' she says, 'but they're usually the days I'm not doing something, aren't they? I am quite serious. I can't tell you what a lot of nerve it takes sometimes to walk into a room. I don't think I have ever felt extremely confident. It would probably be awful if I did, because I might do what I was required to do extremely badly.'
The Duchess speaks like a woman who wrestles with her perceived shortcomings daily. Even her commitment to work can be a subject for self-criticism. Whatever virus or allergy was responsible for her exhaustion before she left for India, she feels some of the blame lay with her.
'I think I had just burned all my cylinders out,' she says. 'I was working 24 hours a day, possibly thinking I was the only one who could do anything. I am one of these 24-hour people who just go on and on. I am a perfectionist who is very bad at delegating: I think nobody else can do it as well as I can. I learned my lesson.'
She recalls how her energy rose with the excitement of working in India – seeing, for instance, the 'simple joy of the mother at not having to walk 15 kilometres to fetch water' after Unicef fixed guttering to her roof. But when she returned to Western civilisation, she faced a different kind of fatigue and a new bout of self-questioning. Who was the happier: they, with their calm acceptance of life's destiny? Or we, with our restless sufficiency?
'Getting back is very difficult,' she told a reporter who had accompanied her on the tour. 'The first few days are very tough. I'm sad, disorientated and muddled. I dread it.'
She says that, on her return, she couldn't cope with London at all – even seeing bottles of water on the table would upset her because she would remember how much such things would mean to the people she had left. So she caught a plane and went to Norway, where she loves to go cross-country skiing. On the piste, she recalls, laughing, how she poured out her frustration at what she had seen in the slums of India to uncomprehending Norwegian skiers. 'Of course, they didn't understand, but I got it out of my system.'
At first, she tried to cut back on material things but after a time, she admits that her old habits returned – the lure of shops, a new dress, a prettier lipstick.The Duchess, who will be 65 in February, admires the reverence for age shown in the Third World countries, where 'the older you get, the more respected and revered you are, ' but admits she is bothered by signs of her own maturity.
'If I see some beautiful new face cream with a five-star recommendation, I am one of the first to go out and buy it. Pure vanity. I am as vain as anybody else,' she says, laughing.
Some weeks after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Duchess of Kent felt strong enough to re-read some of her letters. The two women had much in common and their friendship dated from Diana's engagement, when she was overwhelmed by the difficulties of adapting to royal life. They wrote to one another regularly. 'What struck me from the letters,' says the Duchess, 'is how happy, how supremely happy, she was in the beginning, when the children were born. There is absolutely no doubt about that.'
In the early days, Katharine Kent became part-mentor, part-older sister to Diana, guiding her on minor matters of protocol and putting her at ease in a milieu where formality was prized above spontaneity. 'She might say: `Do you think I ought to do that?' And I would think back to what I did and advise her in a friendly way. I was lucky: I had an absolutely wonderful mother-in-law [Princess Marina] who supported and advised me up to the day of her death. 'I understood Diana very well, for obvious reasons. I understood the difficulties as well as the advantages, and we kept in touch through thick and thin. That is what friendship means. We shared a lot of laughter. She was great fun. I miss her.'
The Duchess believes that Diana's death may not yet have had its full emotional impact on the Royal Family. 'It is still too early to know what her absence really means. I think it is going to be the gloomy days of February and March when we feel it. It was very hard on William and Harry. I don't think people realise how very tough it is being in the public eye, especially at a time like this.'But these boys have a lot of support and they will cope, as other children who lose their mothers cope. It is wonderful that their privacy is being respected at the moment. That will last – inshalla, God willing.'
The Duchess's friendship both with Diana and with the Prince of Wales remained firm through their separation and divorce without polarising her relations with the rest of the Royal Family. 'If you have friends who are in the process of separating, you love that person and you love that person. So although, sadly, you're completely powerless to help, at least you can understand both sides. When things go terribly wrong, I think so often it can be traced to something that happened in childhood. I cannot see any reason for being judgemental about people.'
In style, compassion and grace, the Duchess of Kent was perhaps the one member of the Royal Family whose star quality faintly approached that of Diana. Each had a way of drawing people out. They were both tactile and openly affectionate. And their work with society's most vulnerable people often overlapped.So when the Princess made her momentous decision to ease out of public life and to concentrate on only a handful of her favourite charities, it was natural for some commentators to suggest that 'Caring Kate' would fill the gap admirably.
This had not crossed the Duchess's mind. 'We had a lot of the same interests, such as the hospice movement,' she says. 'But I wouldn't ever, unless specifically asked, take on something of hers. No one in the world could have highlighted a problem such as landmines as she did. 'She had a very special charisma and I wouldn't dream of thinking I could ever emulate what she did. I think you are born with it. In her, it was a quality that grew.'
Nevertheless, the public gained some insight into the Duchess of Kent's own openness to suffering in 1985 when Martyn Lewis featured her on News at Ten, talking and singing to dying children at the Helen House children's hospice near Oxford. Since then, the Duchess has dramatically redefined her idea of how very sick people should be treated by well-intentioned outsiders like herself. 'It is lovely to visit,' she says. 'But it is a very private time in someone's life if they have a life-threatening illness, and I feel it shows a slight lack of respect, and is possibly wrong, to push your way in. 'I feel more and more that the care and visiting of the sick should be left to the people who are trained to do it, or to close family.'
She admits that it makes her uncomfortable these days to trespass on the privacy of the dying. 'I believe every human being should be treated with respect and dignity.'It is much more in tune with her current thinking to look after sick pilgrims at Lourdes – waking them, washing them, feeding them and helping them to get out and about, as well as taking her turn to wash the floors. Revelling in the camaraderie of voluntary work and in the sense of common purpose Roman Catholicism has brought her, the Duchess sounds as though she is now happiest when she is actively unroyal.
'People always think that going to Lourdes is very serious. But we do have the most enormous fun.' Once, she says, they set children a competition to find 'the grottiest piece of junk' sold as a souvenir. 'I don't mind the tackiness one bit. It's part and parcel of it all. 'She enjoys the same feelings of liberation and fellowship when she sings with the Bach Choir where, like everyone else, she is subjected to an audition every three years. 'Music is my passion,' she says, and her many patronages reflect it. She began learning the organ as a child, conquering the manuals before her feet reached the pedals.
At the age of 13, when she had polished a piece to perfection, she was allowed to make her public debut in York Minster. 'When you make a building that size vibrate with noise, it gives you a great sense of power but also a feeling of extraordinary smallness,' she says. 'I passionately wanted to have a career in music but I wasn't good enough. I failed to get into the Royal Academy of Music – my own fault entirely.' She went on to study music in Oxford for five years – even trying her hand at conducting – but after her marriage, 'the hope of continuing music went slowly downhill; I didn't have time.'
From then on, she sublimated her own musical ambition in encouraging other young musicians, and it is transparently obvious that when she watches young players at the Yehudi Menuhin School or listens to impoverished students at the Royal Northern School of Music (of which she is active president), she is living their lives and dreaming their dreams. 'It is very hard for them,' she says. 'I've seen them performing in white tie and tails in the evening, and the next morning in the refectory in sweat shirts and jeans, sitting over a steaming cup of coffee and wondering how the hell they are going to pay for their diploma.'
In the same spirit, she makes regular trips to a run-down council estate in Humberside to see the work being done to combat crime, unemployment and vandalism. 'I was both appalled and fascinated by the problems,' she says. 'So I decided I would learn more about it. I don't pretend that the youngsters who cause a lot of the problems are going to talk to me, but we are slowly learning to trust each other.'
It is typical of her that she should be grateful for their welcome and that she claims to be the one lacking in confidence. 'The more I go, the more they're opening up to me,' she says, proud to have got beyond their initial curiosity: 'Are you the sister of the Queen?' and 'Do you know Eric Cantona?' She says: 'I have never liked barriers. I find it very hard to arrive somewhere and be thought different and perhaps formal.'
Once a month, she decamps with her paperwork to a tiny two-bedroom semi-detached cottage which she and her husband rent in Oxfordshire. 'I love the silence.' The joy of it, she says, is that it presents no organisational challenges. 'When I leave, I just make sure I've got enough coffee or whatever's necessary for the next time. I shop like everybody else, and in the same places. I do all the cooking. I lead a pretty normal existence. In fact, I don't see my life as being vastly different from that of my friends. But I mind being thought different. Is that silly?'
The Duchess's dislike of formality, her almost ascetic pleasure in paring away the trappings of royalty and her wholehearted embrace of Catholicism's lay ministry have made her an easy target for rumour-mongers. Where, it is asked, does her husband – one of the world's leading Freemasons – fit into this pattern? Why do they carry out so many engagements alone? 'For years,' reported the Sunday Mirror in June, 'the couple have been living separate lives in all but name.'
'I didn't read the piece but I heard about it,' says the Duchess. When she asked her friend Geoffrey Crawford, a Buckingham Palace spokesman, for his opinion, he called it 'hogwash' and advised her not to read it.
'Anybody who has had as long a marriage as we've had,' she says, 'has their ups and downs. But we live very happily in this house and we have no problems.
She says no couple of their age and varied interests live in one another's pockets. 'My husband was brought up one way and I was brought up another, and I think, as you get older, you do branch out in your interests. My passions are music, children, Ulster [she is patron of the RUC Benevolent Fund] and cancer charities – and his are not. We do have very different existences but we also share a lot.' As an example, she compares her love of cross-country ski-ing in Norway with the Duke's more adventurous taste for the ski slopes of Switzerland.
'Get me on top of one of those mountains, and I'm in tears,' she says. 'That's why I prefer to cross-country.' They and their three children and five grandchildren will be spending Christmas in a friend's house in Aberdeenshire. 'We would all love to see each other more than we do, and this is a lovely opportunity,' she says.
'I love Christmas. So many people have a tragedy or a problem associated with this time of year – when one is so particularly vulnerable to tragedy – but that hasn't happened to us.'