Elizabeth Killigrew was a daughter of
Sir Robert Killigrew and
Mary Woodhouse, and sister of dramatist
Thomas Killigrew. She was baptised at
St Margaret Lothbury,
London, on 16 May 1622. On 24 October 1639, she married
Francis Boyle (later
Viscount Shannon), son of the Irish landowner
Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. He was a friend of her stepfather,
Thomas Stafford (MP). As the couple was young, there was discussion whether they should live together, or if Francis should depart on a Grand Tour first. Elizabeth 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 Jemima Henrietta Maria FitzRoy was fathered by the exiled Prince Charles in 1650. 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. Charlotte died in 1684. 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),
Robert Boyle, the physicist, and
Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (the latter two siblings-in-law). ==References==