Eleanor Eden

Eleanor Agnes Hobart, Countess of Buckinghamshire (née Eden; 1777 – October 1851) was the eldest child of Lord Auckland. As a young woman, she was rumoured to have been engaged to William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, but he disavowed the connection and never married. Early life Eleanor was born the eldest child of William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland, and his wife, Eleanor Elliot, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, 3rd Baronet, of Minto. Her mother was a sister of Gilbert Eliott, 1st Earl of Minto. Relations with Pitt Pitt and Eleanor met at her father's home at Beckenham, during Pitt's repeated visits there from his own home at nearby Holwood House, near Bromley in Kent, but early in 1797 Pitt quashed spreading rumours that he intended to marry her by writing to Auckland: "My Dear Lord... It can hardly, I think, be necessary to say that the time I have passed among your family has led to my forming sentiments of very real attachment towards them all, and of much more than attachment to one whom I need not name.... Nor should I do justice to my own feelings.... if I did not own that every hour of my acquaintance with the person to whom you will easily conceive I refer... has convinced me that whoever may have the good fortune to be united to her is destined to more than his share of human happiness.