Katherine FitzGerald, remembered as the Old Countess of Desmond, was a widow of the great Munster dynasty of the Geraldines who lived at Inchiquin castle, near Youghal in County Cork, and died, by the usual account, in 1604. By the nineteenth century she was one of the most quoted examples of extreme old age in the English-speaking world, credited with 140 years and sometimes many more. The evidence for that figure turns out to rest on two sentences written by men who did not know her birth date.
The legend
The story in its full form ran like this. Her birthplace was Dromana, in County Waterford, sometime in the 1460s; she became a bride while Edward IV was king and partnered the future Richard III in a dance at the English court. Her husband, Thomas FitzGerald, succeeded as earl of Desmond in his old age and died in 1534, after which she lived on at Inchiquin for another seventy years. Ruined by the confiscation of the Desmond lands, she walked to London to petition the crown, pulling her elderly daughter in a cart. She grew new teeth more than once, walked several miles to market each week, and finally died after falling from a cherry tree she had climbed, a tree some versions said Sir Walter Raleigh had planted. A portrait inscription claimed she had appeared at the court of James I in 1614, in her 140th year.
The two witnesses
As the antiquary William Thoms showed in 1873, nearly all of this descends from two early sources. Raleigh, who held former Desmond lands in Munster, wrote in his History of the World of 1614 that he had personally known the old countess, that she was alive in 1589 and for many years after, and that she had been married in the time of Edward IV. Fynes Moryson, in his travel book of 1617, wrote that she lived to about 140, still walked to market in her last years and had grown new teeth. Raleigh was the only writer who claimed to have met her, and neither man gave a birth date or any document for one.
The investigation
Victorian antiquaries began checking. The historian Clodagh Tait, writing in History Ireland, summarizes what they found. John Gough Nichols discovered that Earl Thomas’s earlier wife was living as late as 1505, so Katherine could not have married him under Edward IV, who died in 1483. Thoms argued that the marriage came at least forty-five years after that king’s death. Tait points to a 1529 agreement between the earl and Katherine’s father, John FitzGerald, lord of the Decies, which makes a marriage in the late 1520s most likely. The walk to London turned out to belong to Eleanor, another widowed countess of Desmond, whose husband had been the rebel earl and who made the journey to petition Elizabeth I. And several portraits long sold as images of the old countess were shown not to have been painted from life; one of them is the anonymous portrait now cataloged by the National Portrait Gallery in London as an unknown woman.
Thoms concluded that she could not have been more than about a hundred at her death. More recently the historian Anthony McCormack has suggested a birth year of about 1514, which would make her around ninety. In 1881 the Kerry antiquarian Mary Agnes Hickson went further, arguing that the countess had died well before 1604 and that the old lady Raleigh met may have been part of a scheme to keep control of Inchiquin. Tait finds that theory partly built on a mistranscribed lease and hard to accept in full, though she agrees the 1604 date itself has no firm source.
Where it stands
There was a real Countess of Desmond who outlived her husband by many decades and was famously old by the standards of her time. The 140 years, the marriage under Edward IV, the dance with Richard III, the march to London and the fatal cherry tree are the product of hearsay repeated and embellished long after her death. The best documentary estimates put her somewhere between about 90 and 100 when she died.