Aged just 16, the Duke of Kent stepped up and represented his family line when he walked behind the coffin of his uncle, King George VI, as it processed to Westminster Abbey. A year later, at the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, he made a solemn vow to be his cousin’s “liege man of life and limb”—and continues to live by these words today.
The Duke of Kent reflected on the enormity of the occasion in his autobiography, A Royal Life, and confessed that he had been anxious about forgetting his lines. “It was quite daunting,” he wrote, adding: “The whole service was pretty long and it was certainly very impressive.”
Remembering the Late Duchess of Kent’s Tradition-Defying 1961 Royal Wedding
The Duchess of Kent, who died Friday at the age of 92, married into the royal family in 1961. Princess Anne played flower girl, and the wedding broke a 600-year-old royal tradition.
The Duke of Kent served in the military for 21 years, retiring in 1976. It was thanks to the Armed Forces that he met the woman who would become his wife, Katharine Worsley—the only daughter of Sir William Worsley, 4th Baronet, and his wife Joyce Morgan Brunner. The Duke of Kent spent time stationed with his regiment at Catterick Garrison, near the Worsley family seat of Hovington Hall. They announced their engagement in March 1961, with the royal wedding itself taking place that June.
When the couple married, they broke with centuries of royal tradition. Rather than opting for Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace or St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, Katharine insisted that they tie the knot in her home county of Yorkshire, at the historic York Minster, which had not been used as a royal wedding venue for 600 years.
Katharine, Duchess of Kent, and Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, pictured after their wedding ceremony at York Minster. 8 June, 1961.
Evening Standard/Getty Images
