ABSTRACT
In April 1859, Notes and Queries published a letter on a question which had been vigorously debated in the journal’s pages some years earlier. Exactly how old was the famously long-lived Countess of Desmond? Francis Bacon recorded that she expired in 1612 at the age of 140 having renewed her teeth three times;1 other accounts had it that she lived to be 145 or even 162.2 A writer to Notes and Queries in its second year of publication, 1850, had been puzzled at the existence of so many conflicting versions, and asked for clarification.3 Over the next two years no fewer than sixteen readers wrote in, some urging the accuracy of one or other of the stories, some pouring scorn on the absurdity of the whole matter, others being content to add further footnotes to the historical confusion.4 The new correspondent in 1859 revived the subject cautiously, providing a transcription of a letter from the late Marquis of Bristol in the hope that it might shed a little anecdotal light. While unable to offer ‘any very precise and satisfactory information’ on the subject of the Countess of Desmond’s age, the 83year-old Marquis was in a position to supply a personal reminiscence:
when I was a young man, the Dowager Lady Stanhope…used to say that she knew a lady who had known a lady who had seen the Countess of Desmond, who had danced at court with Richard the Third when Duke of Gloucester.5
