Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon

British viscountess
The basics

Quick Facts

IntroBritish viscountess
PlacesUnited Kingdom Great Britain
wasNoble
Work fieldRoyals
Gender
Female
Birth1622
Death1680 (aged 58 years)
Family
Mother:Mary Wodehouse
Father:Robert Killigrew
Siblings:Thomas Killigrew William Killigrew
Spouse:Francis Boyle, 1st Viscount Shannon
Children:Charlotte Jemima FitzRoy Richard Boyle Francis Boyle Elizabeth Boyle
The details

Biography

Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon (16 May 1622 (baptised) – December 1680) was an English courtier, the daughter of Sir Robert Killigrew and Mary Woodhouse, and sister of dramatist Thomas Killigrew.

Elizabeth was baptised at St Margaret Lothbury, London. In 1639 she married Francis Boyle (later Viscount Shannon), son of the Irish landowner Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork (himself a friend of her stepfather), and later joined the royalist court-in-exile of Queen Henrietta Maria as a maid of honour — where she became one of the many mistresses of the queen's son, the future King Charles II;

Her daughter Charlotte was fathered by the exiled Prince Charles. In 1660, the year Charles was restored to the throne as Charles II, Elizabeth Killigrew's husband was raised to the Irish peerage as Viscount Shannon. Her daughter Charlotte married firstly the playwright James Howard and in 1672 remarried William Paston, son of the Earl of Yarmouth. Poet Anne Killigrew was Elizabeth's niece; among her relatives Lady Shannon also numbered the politicians and playwrights Sir William Killigrew (her brother) and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (a brother-in-law), and such luminaries as Robert Boyle, the physicist, and Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (both siblings-in-law).

The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 21 May 2020. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.