Elizabeth Egerton, Nee Cavendish, Lady Elizabeth Brackley, Later Countess of Bridgewater (1626-1663)

Abstract Daughter of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle by his first wife, Elizabeth Bassett, who was daughter and heir of William Bassett of Blore, Stafford. At the age of 15, she married John Egerton, Viscount Brackley (1622-1686), who became the second Earl of Bridgewater in 1649 (as a child, he had been the Elder Brother in the first performance of Milton’s Comus). She left a fair amount of prose writing, and a very few verses, and collaborated with her sister on The Concealed Fanseys. Her husband was an opponent of the Restoration government, and when she died in childbirth in her thirty-seventh year, it was at Black Rod’s house in Westminster, where she had gone to visit her husband who was in custody there at the time. She is buried in the church of St Peter and St Paul at Little Gaddesden, in a chapel reserved for the Earls of Bridgewater.