Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon

Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon (baptized 16 May 1622, St Margaret Lothbury, London – died 1680) was an English courtier, the daughter of Sir Robert Killigrew and sister of dramatist Thomas Killigrew. In 1639^[1]

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;^[2]

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).

References

1. Whitney, Charles (2006). Early Responses to Renaissance Drama at Google Books, p. 232
2. Hilliam, David (2000). Monarchs, Murders and Mistresses. Sutton Publishing. p. 239.