Kathleen Kennedy

Kathleen Kennedy married the heir to a dukedom against her mother's religion, was widowed in four months, and died in a mountainside four years later. She was the fourth of nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, and came to London as a teenager when her father was appointed ambassador in 1938 - a season she enjoyed more thoroughly than any of them. She returned to England in 1943 with the Red Cross, against her family's wishes, to run a club for American servicemen. In May 1944 she married William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire, in a register office - an Anglican family and a Catholic one, and neither church would perform it. Her mother refused to attend and would not speak of it; her brother Joseph Jr was the only Kennedy present, and was killed on a flying mission three months later. Her husband was shot by a sniper in Belgium in September, four months after the wedding. She stayed in England as a widow, working and living among her husband's family, and became attached to Peter Fitzwilliam, a married earl - which her father was flying to Europe to prevent. Their chartered aircraft flew into a ridge in the Ardèche in May 1948 in a storm the pilot had been advised against. Her father was the only member of the family at the funeral. She is buried at Chatsworth among the Cavendishes, the only Kennedy of that generation buried abroad, under a stone reading that joy she gave and joy she has found. Of the nine children, four died violently before their mother, who outlived her by forty-seven years.

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