William Henry Lawrence Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, DSO (31 December 1910 – 13 May 1948), styled Viscount Milton before 1943, was a British soldier, nobleman, and peer, with a seat in the House of Lords.
In Lord Fitzwilliam's later years his marriage was in disarray, partly due to Olive's alcoholism,[2] and at the time of his death he was seeking a divorce in order to marry someone else.[3] From 1946 he had been romantically linked with the widowed Kathleen Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington, sister of the future U.S. President John F. Kennedy. She was killed with him in an air crash on 13 May 1948, although the nature of their relationship was not made clear in the newspaper accounts at the time.[3]
On his death, leaving no son, Fitzwilliam's peerages passed to his second cousin once removed, Eric Spencer Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, but his fortune, then estimated at £45 million, including half of the Wentworth Woodhouse estate, the Coolattin estate in County Wicklow, Ireland, and a large part of the Fitzwilliam art collection, were inherited by his thirteen-year-old daughter, the present Lady Juliet Tadgell.