Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess of Devonshire
Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess of Devonshire was the wife of William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire.
She was one of the twelve children of William Cecil, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, and his wife, the former Lady Catherine Howard.
On 4 March 1639, she married the Earl of Devonshire. The couple had three children:
They lived at Chatsworth, then an Elizabethan house. A Royalist, the earl left the country during the English Civil War in order to protect his family, and moved to his mother's house at Latimer, Buckinghamshire, returning to Chatsworth only after the Restoration.
The countess died at the age of about seventy, and is buried at the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. A drawing of her by Pierre Lombart is held by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
