Debrett, Peerage, under 'Earl of Airlie'), and by her had a family.
Fitzgerald, who some short time before had been received into the Roman catholic communion, died at Tours on 24 March 1877, being at the time the oldest officer in the British army. By order of the French minister of war, the garrison of Tours paid him the funeral honours prescribed for a marshal of France.
[Foster's Baronetage, under 'Fitzgerald of Carrigoran ;' Debrett's Peerage, under 'Cunningham' and 'Airlie;' Wallace's Chronicle King's Royal Rifles (London, 1879); Times, 4 April 1877. The records of the old 5th or Jäger battalion, 60th, with which Fitzgerald served in the Peninsula, were arranged by the late Major-general Gibbes Rigaud, and have been published in the 'Maltese Cross,' the regimental newspaper of the 1st battalion king's royal rifles, in 1886-7.]
FITZGERALD, KATHERINE (d. 1604), the 'old' Countess of Desmond, was
daughter of Sir John Fitzgerald, lord of
Decies, and became the second wife of Thomas Fitzgerald, twelfth earl of Desmond,
some time after 1505. The first wife of the
earl was Sheela, daughter of Cormac MacCarthy. To her (under the equivalent name
of Gilis ny Cormyk), as 'wife to Sir Thomas
of Desmond,' on 9 June 20 Henry VII, i.e.
1505, Gerald (son of Thomas) Fitzgerald,
eighth earl of Kildare, granted a lease of
lands for five years, a copy of which is preserved in the rental-book of the ninth earl,
now in the possession of the Duke of Leinster. On its first discovery it was supposed by
some to be dated 20 Henry VIII, i.e. 1528 ;
but the earlier date is shown to be correct
not only by a facsimile given in the 'Journal
of the Kilkenny Archæological Society,' but
also by the fact (unnoticed by those who
have commented on the document) that
the Earl of Kildare who granted it died in
1513. The Earl of Desmond who was the
husband of Sheela and Katherine died in
1534, at the age of eighty. As he left a
daughter by his second wife, it may safely
be assumed that 1524 is the latest date at
which his marriage to her could have taken
place, while, as we have seen, 1506 is the
earliest. The tradition, therefore, preserved
by Sir Walter Raleigh, to which Horace
Walpole gave its popular currency, that this
second wife was married in the time of Edward IV, is at once disposed of; but it may
very probably be true of her predecessor.
In the same way the further tradition of her
having danced with Richard III may be
accounted for. Mr. Sainthill, in his 'Inquiry,'
referred to at the end of this article, endeavoured to support these traditions by the
theory that Thomas of Desmond might have
divorced his first wife and married his second
long before 1505, but this was a mere suggestion, opposed to such evidence as exists.
That the 'old countess' was living in 1589,
'and many years since,' is asserted by Sir W.
Raleigh in his 'History of the World' (bk. i.
ch. 5, § 5) ; and he had good reason for knowing the truth of this, inasmuch as in that year
and in the year preceding he granted leases
of lands in Cork at a reduced rent pending the
life of 'the ladie Cattelyn, old countess dowager of Desmond,' who had some life-interest in
them. It appears from the terms of these leases that her life was not supposed to be likely
to last more than five years from their date.
That her death occurred in 1604 is stated in a
manuscript of Sir George Carew's, preserved
in Lambeth Library (No. 626). From these
data it follows that, at the lowest computation, she can hardly have been less than 104
years old at the time of her decease ; and it
has been thought by some that the traditional
140 may possibly have had its rise in an
accidental transposition of these figures. It
is in Fynes Morison's 'Itinerary,' published
in 1617, that the number 140 is first given.
He visited Youghal, near which the Castle
of Inchiquin, in which the countess resided,
is situated, in 1613, and states that 'in our
time' she had lived to the age of 'about'
140 years, and was able in her last years to
go on foot three or four miles weekly to the
market town, and that only a few years
before her death all her teeth were renewed.
From him Bacon appears to have derived
the notices which he gives in his 'Hist. Vitæ
et Mortis' and his 'Sylva ;' and from Bacon
and Raleigh, and a Desmond pedigree, Archbishop Ussher makes mention of the countess
in his 'Chronologia Sacra,' where he says
that 'meo tempore' she was both living and
lively. A diary kept by the Earl of Leicester
some thirty years later also records the stories
which he had heard. One additional and
original witness has, however, been recently
found, not known to previous writers on the
subject, whose evidence corroborates the
general account. Sir John Harington, who
was twice for some time in Ireland, for the
first time soon after 1584, and for the second
time in 1599, speaking in 1605 of the wholesomeness of the country, says: 'Where a
man hath lived above 140 year, a woman,
and she a countess, above 120, the country is
like to be helthy.' Of the case of the man
whom he mentions nothing is known, but
his allusion to the case of the countess evidently implies that her story, as well as that
of the former, was then a familiar one. On