Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon

Who was Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon?

Elizabeth, Viscountess Shannon was an English courtier, the daughter of Sir Robert Killigrew and sister of dramatist Thomas Killigrew. In 1639

She married Francis Boyle, son of the Irish landowner Lord Cork, 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 Boyle's husband was raised to the Irish peerage as Viscount Shannon. 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 and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, and such luminaries as Robert Boyle, the physicist, and Lady Ranelagh.