Countess of Shaftesbury
(1810-1872)
1 August 1861

Volume 4, page 320, sitting number 5350.

Lady Shaftesbury was the wife of the politician and great social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.

Lady Emily Caroline Catherine Frances Cowper was born on 6 November 1810. Ostensibly, she was the daughter of Peter Leopold Cowper, 5th Earl Cowper, but her mother Emily Mary Lamb was for many years the mistress of Lord Palmerston, and in all likelihood Palmerston was her father, not Cowper. After Cowper's death in 1837, his widow married her lover, so Emily's putative natural father became her step-father. She was also related to another Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who was her mother's brother.

On 10 June 1830 she married Anthony Ashley-Cooper, then Lord Ashley, who became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury on the death of his father in 1851. The marriage produced ten children.

Lady Shaftesbury died unexpectedly, aged 61, on 15 October 1872 at the family residence in Grosvenor Square.

[From an album probably compiled by either George Charles Pratt (1799-1866), 2nd Marquess Camden or by his son, John Charles Pratt (1840-1872), from 1866 3rd Marquess Camden.]