Edward Henry Lee, 1st Earl of Lichfield (4 February 1663 – 14 July 1716) was an English peer, the son of a baronet, who at 14 years of age married one of the illegitimate daughters of King Charles II, Charlotte Lee, prior to which he was made Earl of Lichfield. They had a large family; Lady Lichfield bore him 18 children. He was a staunch Tory and followed James II to Rochester, Kent after the king's escape from Whitehall in December 1688.[1] His subsidiary titles were Viscount Quarendon and Baron Spelsbury.
In his youth, he was considered to be kind, charming, strong, intelligent as well as arrogant because of his position in the peerage.
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Marriage
King Charles II contracted his daughter, Charlotte Lee (pictured), to Edward Lee when she was ten and he was eleven, and the two married at the ages of thirteen and fourteen in 1677
Lee was created Earl of Lichfield in 1674 at the age of eleven, a result of his betrothal to the daughter of King Charles II. The Lady Charlotte Fitzroy was the fourth of six children born to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland. Sweet-natured and strikingly beautiful, Charlotte was adored by her father the king. She was contracted at the age of nine to Lee, who was sixteen months older than his bride-to-be. Nearly three years later, having reached puberty, the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were married on 6 February 1677.
Francis Henry Fitzroy Lee (10 September 1692 – died 1730).
Elizabeth Lee (26 May 1693 – 29 January 1741). Married:
(1) Francis Lee, a cousin. Had one son and two daughters, the eldest of whom, Elisabeth (d. 1736 at Lyon) married Henry Temple, son of the 1st Viscount Palmerston.
(2) Edward Young, in 1731, author of the Night Thoughts, by whom she had one son. It is said that he never recovered from Elizabeth's death.
Barbara Lee (3 March 1695 – d. aft. 1729), married Sir George Browne, 3rd Baronet of Kiddington.
Mary Isabella Lee (6 September 1697 – 28 December 1697).
Fitzroy Lee (10 May 1698 – died young).
Vice Admiral FitzRoy Henry Lee (2 January 1700 – April 1751), Commodore Governor of Newfoundland.
Lichfield died two years before his wife, on 14 July 1716, aged 53.
Ancestry
References
^K. Laughton, 'Lee, Fitzroy Henry (1699–1750)’, rev. Philip Carter, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
^She was living on 11 November 1714, when King George I paid a bounty of £100 to Lady Anne Morgan: Journals of the House of Commons, Volume 18 (House of Commons, 1803), p. 111; and in June 1716, when she received another £200: Calendar of Treasury Books: Jan.-Dec. 1716, p. ccviii