Quick Facts
Biography
Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish (5 August 1905 – 23 March 1944) was the second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire and his wife, Lady Evelyn Emily Mary Petty-FitzMaurice.
He was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Eton, and Cambridge University. He joined the Royal Tank Regiment where he became a lieutenant.
In 1932, he married the dancer Adele Astaire (1896–1981), a star of Broadway theatre and the London stage and sister of Fred Astaire, at his family seat of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. He had met Adele in London in 1927 and courted her when he worked for the bank J.P. Morgan & Co. in New York City. Adele proposed to Lord Charles at the 21 Club in Manhattan. Their children – a daughter born in 1933 and twin sons born in 1935 – lived only for a few hours. The couple lived at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Ireland, which had been given to them as a wedding present by Lord Charles's father, the 9th Duke of Devonshire. A clause in Lord Charles's will stipulated that Lismore Castle was to go to his nephew, Lord Andrew Cavendish, if Adele remarried, which she did in 1947, to Kingman Douglass.
Cavendish died at Lismore Castle, aged 38, of long-term acute alcoholism and was buried at Lismore Cathedral.
Ancestry
