250 DESMOND vived him nearly 70 years, and d. s.p.m., 1604, aged 140 years as generally reported, but more probably about gj-C) [Maurice FitzThomas (FitzGerald), only s. and h. ap. by ist wife. He m. his ist cousin, Joan, da. of John FitzMaurice FitzGibbon, (*) From a review in the Her. and Gtn.y vol. viii, pp. 269-280, of an exhaustive work on Human Longevity, by William J. Thorns, F.S.A., 1872, it appears that the greatest number of years assigned to anyone in our own country is as under, vit.. (i) 169 years to Henry Jenkins who d. 1670, (2) 152 years to "Old Parr" who d. 1635, and (3) 140 years to the Countess of Desmond who d. 1604. Of the Countess there is " a portrait now at Muckross claiming (in its inscription) to have been painted in 1614 (really nine years after her death)." She was, however, "first made famous from a passage in Sir Walter Raleigh's Hhtory of the World (16 1 4)," who states that he himself knew her and that she " wai married in Edivard IV' i time " and ^Uived in I 589 and many yean sina;" and " again in the Itinerary of Fynes Moryson ( 1 6 1 7) it is stated that ' in our time, the Irish Count eae of Desmond lived to the age of about 1^0 yearef, being able to go on foote four or five miles to the market towne and using weekly so to do in her last yeares; and not many yeares before she died she had all her teeth renewed. Upon these two passages all subsequent accounts of the old Countess from Lord Bacon and Archbishop Usher down to the days of Pinnock's Catechisms and Penny Cyclopjedias have been founded, with various imaginary embellishments of which the most ornamental are derived from the Historic Doubts of Horace Walpole and the poetry of Thomas Moore." The date of her marriage is unknown, but as her husband's former wife was living in I 505* it " did not take place till long after the death of King Edward IV nor perhaps her birth either; her dancing with Richard, Duke of Gloucester, being nothing but an imaginative embellishment given by Horace Walpole." In his first state- ment Sir Walter Raleigh was wrong, but as her husband died in 1534 she might well be called the old Countess in 1589, having been a widow for 55 years. Her death took place in 1 604, according to Sir George Carew, but not, upon any good evidence, by falling from a cherry tree as was sung by Tom Moore, in his " Fudge Letters," where he relates " That she lived to much more than a hundred and ten And was killed by a fall from a cherry tree then ; What a frisky old girl !" In the Earl of Leicester's Table Book, it is stated that " shee must needs climb a nut- tree to gather nuts, see falling down, ^c." See Sir B. Burke's Vicissitudes of Families, 2nd series, p. 416. The date of her marriage may have been any time between 1505 and 1 534. She was, however, young enough to bear children or, at all events, one child Katherine, wife of Philip Barry Oge. If, indeed, she did marry as early as 1505, and was then 41! she would have been 140 in 1604, but if the marriage took place in, say, 1531, at her much more probable age of 21 she would at her death have been but 94 years of age, and if in 1521 at the same age (21), she would have died at the age of 104, possibly a date transformed into 140. No additional information on this point is furnished by R. Sainthill in his book upon her. Sir John Harington mentions her age as "above 120" when writing in 1605 of Ireland. The story of her having come up to London in 1587 to supplicate for a pension relates (not to her, but) to Eleanor, widow of the rebel Earl. G.E.C. Her claims and those of "Old Parr" and others to have been centenarians are disposed of by Sir George Cornewall Lewis in two ponderous volumes. V.G.
- i.e. 20 Hen. VII, not (1528) 20 Hen. VIII, as sometimes (incorrectly) stated.
