Aemilia Lanyer—gentlewoman-in-decline, daughter and wife of court musicians, cast-off mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain, Henry Hunsdon (to whom she bore an illegitimate child)—is the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). These poems are now beginning to accumulate the kind of scholarship and criticism that will enable us to assess and properly value their cultural significance and their often considerable aesthetic merit.¹ My interest here is in Lanyer's appropriation and rewriting, in strikingly oppositional terms, of some dominant cultural discourses and a considerable part of the available generic repertoire, as she introduces a forceful female authorial voice into the Jacobean cultural scene.

Lanyer's volume challenges patriarchal ideology and the discourses supporting it, opposing the construct of women as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate, and displacing the hierarchical authority of fathers and husbands. Her book as a whole is conceived as a Book of Good Women, imagining a female community sharply distinguished from male society and its evils, that reaches from Eve to contemporary Jacobean patronesses. The volume incorporates a wide variety of genres—dedicatory poems of several kinds, a prose polemic in defense of women, a meditative poem on Christ's Passion which contains an apologia, laments, and several encomia (the Salve Deus), and a country-house poem (“A Description of Cooke-ham”). Her dedicatory poems emphasize the legacy of virtue from mothers to daughters—Queen Anne and Princess Elizabeth, Margaret and Anne Clifford, Catherine and Susan Bertie, Katherine Howard and her daughters—a legacy that redounds upon their female poet-client and celebrant, Lanyer. The qualities Lanyer associates with her gallery of good women—heroic virtue, extraordinary learning, devotion to the Muses, and high poetic achievement—implicitly challenge patriarchal constructs of women and help to justify her own poetic undertaking. The challenge to patriarchy is quite explicit in the dedication “To the Ladie Anne [Clifford], Countesse of Dorcet,”² as Lanyer protests in strikingly egalitarian terms the class distinctions and privileges produced by male structures of inheritance:

All sprang but from one woman and one man,
Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?
Or who is he that very rightly can
Distinguish of his birth, or tell at all,
          In what meane state his Ancestors have bin,
          Before some one of worth did honour win?

[ll. 35-40]

The title poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, disrupts our generic expectations for a meditation on, or a narrative of, Christ's Passion, by its sharp focus on the contrast between the good women associated with that event—Pilate's Wife, Mary, Mary Magdalene, the women of Jerusalem, even Eve—and the evil men: the cowardly apostles, the traitor Judas, the wicked Hebrew and Roman judges, the tormenting soldiers, the jeering crowds. The country-house poem, “Cooke-ham,” celebrates an estate without a lord—or indeed any male inhabitants—but with a virtuous mother and daughter as its defining and ordering principle.

Lanyer's multiple dedications to Queen Anne and nine noblewomen rewrite cultural and literary discourses pertaining to courtiership and patronage. They make an overt bid for patronage much as a male poet-client might: Spenser, for example, dedicated The Faerie Queene principally to Queen Elizabeth but secondarily, in seventeen appended sonnets, to powerful (chiefly male) courtiers and patrons. By contrast, Lanyer reaches out only to women, showcasing as principal dedicatee, not Queen Anne but Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, whom she credits with nurturing her talent and commissioning her country-house poem. This is apparently the first English instance of female patron and female literary client.³ Unlike Spenser also, Lanyer both honors her dedicatees as individuals and displays her own poetic talent by devising dedications in different genres: odes in a variety of stanzaic forms for the queen, the Countess of Kent, and the Countess of Suffolk; sonnet-like poems for Princess Elizabeth and Arabella Stuart; a long dream-vision narrative of 224 lines for Mary Sidney (Herbert), Countess of Pembroke; a prose epistle for Margaret Clifford; a verse epistle for Anne Clifford in which Lanyer calls upon the conventions of that genre to sanction her presumption in offering to teach Anne proper moral attitudes and conduct. These dedications construct a female community of patrons to support a female poet who celebrates them and all womankind.

The concluding prose epistle, “To the Vertuous Reader,” reaches beyond the named dedicatees to a general female audience (and to well-disposed male readers as well). This is a polemic, a brief but hard-hitting contribution to the querelle des femmes, that centuries-old controversy over women's inherent worthiness or faultiness, chiefly managed by men as a witty game.⁴ Lanyer's biblical examples were conventional, cited in numerous defenses of women to argue women's natural abilities, their moral goodness (equal or superior to men), and the honors accorded them by God and Christ. Lanyer supplies to the genre heightened passion and rhetorical power:

It pleased our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, without the assistance of man, … to be begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women: yea, even when he was in his greatest agonie and bloodie sweat, going to be crucified, and also in the last houre of his death, tooke care to dispose of a woman: after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent a woman to declare his most glorious Resurrection to the rest of his Disciples.

[pp. 49-50]

Most notably, she argued the God-given call of many “wise and virtuous women” (not merely queens) to exercise military and political power “to bring downe their [men's] pride and arrogancie.” Her examples are Deborah, Jael, Judith, and Hester “with infinite others, which for brevitie sake I will omit” (p. 49). The discourse she here seizes upon, biblical exegesis, is employed even more boldly in her Passion poem.

The title of Lanyer's volume refers only to that Passion poem, and the title page promises, somewhat misleadingly, a collection of religious poetry: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Containing, 1. The Passion of Christ. 2. Eves Apologie in defence of Women. 3. The Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem. 4. The Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgine Marie. With divers other things not unfit to be read. In fact the title poem is a long meditation on the Passion and death of Christ (1,840 lines) in which the other items listed (and more) are incorporated as embedded kinds. The genres of religious and devotional literature were long identified as safe and perhaps even laudable for women writers, but Lanyer reconceived her Passion poem in decidedly unsafe terms that challenge fundamental assumptions of patriarchy. Identifying women with the suffering Christ, she argues their moral and spiritual superiority to men by contrasting the many kinds of female goodness displayed by the women in the Passion narrative with the multiple forms of masculine evil. More daring still, she presents Christ and Christ's passion as subject to female gaze and interpretation—by herself as woman poet, and by the Countess of Cumberland, her patron. The countess is eulogized in framing passages of 776 lines (more than a third of the whole) as chief meditator upon, as well as exemplary image and imitator of, her suffering Savior.

This poem incorporates several kinds. One is the religious lament or complaint—the tears of the Magdalen, of Christ himself, of penitent sinners—usually focussed on Christ's Passion. This was usually, though not exclusively, a Counter-Reformation genre: the best-known English example was probably Robert Southwell's St. Peters Complaynt, in which Peter laments Christ's Passion and his own cowardly denial of Christ.⁵ Lanyer's stanzas on the tears of the daughters of Jerusalem and on the grief of the Virgin are complaints—but voiced by Lanyer as she apostrophizes those personages rather than by the characters themselves. The segment called “Eves Apologie” is a rhetorical apologia or defense. It may even be a direct response to the frequent outbursts of misogyny in Southwell's poem, as when Peter berates the woman who questions him, laying his and all men's sins, at woman's door:

O Women, woe to men: traps for their falls,
Still actors in all tragicall mischances:
Earths Necessarie evils, captivating thralls,
Now murdring with your toungs, now with your glances.(6)

Another important constituent genre is the Passion meditation, often featuring, as in Lanyer's poem, erotic elements from the Song of Songs. This was also a popular Counter-Reformation kind, but the third part of Giles Fletcher's baroque Christs Victorie and Triumph (1610)⁷ provides a suggestive Protestant analogue. Also, Lanyer's very long framing passages eulogizing Margaret Clifford find suggestive analogues in the frames of several meditative poems addressed by poet-clients to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, associating her with Christ and his Passion: for example, Nicholas Breton's The Countesse of Pembrookes Love, and Abraham Fraunce's The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuell.⁸

Lanyer adopts a variety of stances toward her material: sometimes narrating and elaborating upon events, sometimes interpreting them as a biblical exegete, sometimes meditating upon images or scenes, often apostrophizing participants as if she herself were present with them at these events. She also calls upon a variety of stylistic devices. Stanzas 10-18 comprise an embedded psalmic passage, a melange of psalm texts—chiefly from Psalms 18, 84, 89, 97, and 104—that praise God as the strong support of the just and the mighty destroyer of all their enemies.⁹

With Majestie and Honour is He clad,
And deck'd with light, as with a garment faire;
…
He rides upon the wings of all the windes,
And spreads the heav'ns with his all powrefull hand;
Oh! who can loose when the Almightie bindes?
Or in his angry presence dares to stand?
…
He of the watry Cloudes his Chariot frames,
And makes his blessed Angels powrefull Spirits.

[ll. 73-90]

This has application to the much-wronged Countess of Cumberland and may be a gesture of discipleship to the Countess of Pembroke and her psalms.¹⁰ Lanyer uses rhetorical schemes—especially figures of sound, parallelism, and repetition—with considerable skill; her apostrophes often convey strong feeling; she describes and sometimes dramatizes scenes effectively; and the inset rhetorical speeches such as “Eves Apologie” are conducted with force and flair. Also, her baroque descriptions yield nothing to Giles Fletcher:

His joynts dis-joynted, and his legges hang downe,
His alablaster breast, his bloody side,
His members torne, and on his head a Crowne
Of sharpest Thorns, to satisfie for pride:
Anguish and Paine doe all his Sences drowne,
While they his holy garments do divide:
          His bowells drie, his heart full fraught with griefe,
          Crying to him that yeelds him no reliefe.

[ll. 1161-68]

Lanyer manages her surprising fusion of religious meditation and feminism by appropriating the dominant discourse of the age, biblical exegesis. She thereby claims for women the common Protestant privilege of individual interpretation of Scripture, and lays some groundwork for the female preachers and prophets of the Civil War period. Her most daring exegetical move is to rewrite the Adam and Eve story within a narrative of Pilate's wife appealing to her husband for Christ's release. The apologia for Eve pronounces her virtually guiltless by comparison with Adam and Pilate, ascribes to Eve only loving intentions in offering the apple to Adam, and identifies woman as, through that gift, the source of men's knowledge:

Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree,
Giving to Adam what shee held most deare,
Was simply good, and had no powre to see,
The after-comming harme did not appeare:
          The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide,
          Before our fall so sure a plot had laide.
…
If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit being faire perswaded him [Adam] to fall:
          No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
          If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?
Not Eve, whose fault was onely too much love,
Which made her give this present to her Deare,
That what shee tasted, he likewise might prove,
Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;
He never sought her weakenesse to reprove,
With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare:
          Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
          From Eve's faire hand, as from a learned Booke.
If any Evill did in her remaine,
Beeing made of him [Adam], he was the ground of all;
…
          Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay;
          But you [Pilate] in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.
Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit.

[ll. 763-818]

This exegesis underscores the susceptibility of biblical texts to interpretations driven by various interests: the Genesis text had long been pressed to patriarchal interests, so by a neat reversal Lanyer makes it serve feminist ones. Taking Eve and Pilate's wife as representatives of womankind, while Adam and Pilate represent men—who are far more guilty than Eve because responsible for Christ's death—Lanyer concludes with a forthright demand for gender equality:

Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
          If one weake woman simply did offend,
          This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.

[ll. 825-32]

“The Description of Cooke-ham” (210 lines of pentameter couplets) may have been written and was certainly published before Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst.”¹¹ We cannot be sure just when or how long Lanyer was at Cookham with Margaret and Anne Clifford, or just what kind of patronage stands behind her claim that this sojourn led to her religious conversion and confirmed her in her poetic vocation:¹²

Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtain'd
Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain'd;
And where the Muses gave their full consent,
I should have powre the virtuous to content:
Where princely Palace will'd me to indite,
The sacred Storie of the Soules delight.

[ll. 1-6]

At the least she seems to have received some encouragement in learning, piety, and poetry in the bookish and cultivated household of the Countess of Cumberland.

Whichever came first, “Penshurst” and “Cooke-ham” draw upon some of the same generic resources and offer, as it were, a male and a female conception of an idealized social order epitomized in the life of a specific country house. Jonson's poem, an ode, established the genre of the English country-house poem as a celebration of patriarchy: it praises the Sidney estate as a quasi-Edenic place whose beauty and harmony are centered in and preserved by its lord, who “dwells” permanently within it. However false to social reality, the poem constructs a social ideal: a benevolent and virtuous patriarchal governor; a house characterized by simplicity and usefulness; a large extended family with lord, lady, children, servants, and retainers all fulfilling their specific, useful functions; the harmony of man and nature; a working agricultural community of interdependent classes linked together in generosity and love; ready hospitality to guests of all stations, from poets to kings; a fruitful and chaste wife and mother embodying and transmitting the estate's ideal fusion of nature and culture; and stability ensured by the religion and virtue passed on from the lord and lady to their progeny.¹³ Penshurst is imagined as a locus amoenus harmonizing pastoral and providential abundance with georgic cultivation.

Lanyer's country-house poem conceives the genre in very different terms, displacing patriarchy. It is not celebratory but elegiac, a valediction lamenting the loss of an Edenic pastoral place inhabited solely by women: Margaret Clifford, who was the center and sustainer of its beauties and delights, her young unmarried daughter Anne, and Aemilia Lanyer. Lanyer's poem, like Jonson's, draws upon the “beatus ille” tradition originating in Horace and Martial, praising a happy rural retirement from city business or courtly corruption, but Lanyer replaces the male speaker and the virtuous happy man with women. Another strand is classical and Renaissance pastoral and golden-age poetry. Yet Lanyer owes most to poems like Virgil's First Eclogue, based on the classical topos, the valediction to a place. Rewriting that model, Lanyer makes the pastoral departure a matter not of state but of domestic politics—the patriarchal arrangements pertaining to Margaret's widowhood and Anne's subsequent marriage.¹⁴

The generic topics that became conventional after Jonson's “Penshurst” are managed very differently by Lanyer. The house itself (which belonged to the Crown, not the countess)¹⁵ is barely mentioned. The estate is, as we expect, a locus amoenus, but the pastoral pathetic fallacy is exaggerated as all its elements respond to Margaret Clifford's presence and departure as to the seasonal round of summer and winter. The creatures welcome her presence with an obsequiousness like that of the Penshurst fish and game offering themselves to capture, but Lanyer does not, like Jonson, invite us to smile at the exaggeration:

The swelling Bankes deliver'd all their pride,
When such a Phoenix once they had espide.
Each Arbor, Banke, each Seate, each stately Tree,
Thought themselves honor'd in supporting thee.
The pretty Birds would oft come to attend thee,
Yet flie away for feare they should offend thee:
The little creatures in the Burrough by
Would come abroad to sport them in your eye.

[ll. 43-50]

There is no larger society: no extended family, no servants, no villagers, no visitors, no men at all. The only male presences are from nature or the Bible: an oak tree serves the countess as a kind of ideal lover, sheltering her against the too fierce onslaughts of the (also male) sun, and receiving her farewell kiss before she departs. She also enjoys in meditation the spiritual companionship of the psalmist and the apostles. Female aspects of nature, Philomela and Echo, serve as emblems: at first their voices bring praise and delight, but at the ladies' departure they sound their familiar tones of grief and woe, associating their sad stories with this new example of women's wrongs and sorrows. The final passage effectively heightens the pathos of the ladies' departure as all the elements of the locus amoenus transform themselves from summer's beauty to wintry desolation:

Those pretty Birds that wonted were to sing,
Now neither sing, nor chirp, nor use their wing;
But with their tender feet on some bare spray,
Warble forth sorrow, and their owne dismay.
Faire Philomela leaves her mournefull Ditty,
Drownd in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie:
Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree,
Lookes bare and desolate now for want of thee;
Turning greene tresses into frostie gray,
While in cold griefe they wither all away.
The Sunne grew weake, his beames no comfort gave,
While all greene things did make the earth their grave:
Each brier, each bramble, when you went away,
Caught fast your clothes, thinking to make you stay:
Delightfull Eccho wonted to reply
To our last words, did now for sorrow die:
The house cast off each garment that might grace it,
Putting on Dust and Cobwebs to deface it.

[ll. 185-202]

By writing and publishing her poems under her own name, Lanyer also intervened in the era's developing discourse about authorship, claiming authority for herself as a woman writer. At times she invokes the humilitas topos to excuse the “defects” of her sex, but she also boldly claims the poet's eternizing power, promising Margaret Clifford that her poems will endure “many yeares longer than your Honour, or my selfe can live” (p. 35). She authorizes her poetry on several grounds: For one, the excellence of her subject—Christ's Passion, and all the worthy women she celebrates. For another, Nature: though Lanyer's poems display considerable knowledge of classical rhetoric, the Bible, and poetic traditions, she assigns learned poetry to men, and to women a (perhaps superior) poetry based on experience and on “Mother” Nature, source of all the arts:

Not that I Learning to my selfe assume,
Or that I would compare with any man:
          But as they are Scholers, and by Art do write,
          So Nature yeelds my Soule a sad delight.
And since all Arts at first from Nature came,
That goodly Creature, Mother of Perfection,
Whom Joves almighty hand at first did frame,
Taking both her and hers in his protection:
          Why should not She now grace my barren Muse,
          And in a Woman all defects excuse.

[“To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” ll. 147-56]

She also claims divine authorization for her poetry: a postscript recounts that the title of the volume was “delivered unto me in sleepe many yeares before I had any intent to write in this maner;” significantly, she concludes, “that I was appointed to performe this Worke” (p. 139). She finds further sanction by assuming a place in a female poetic line: in her dream-vision poem to the Countess of Pembroke, she invites the countess to accept her as her own poetic heir.

Lanyer's case would seem to indicate that dominant literary and cultural discourses do not define women's place and women's speech with the rigorous determinism seen by some theorists—at least they do not when women take up the pen and write themselves into those discourses. Lanyer's oppositional writing was, it seems, deliberate: the evidence of genre transformation and subversion of dominant discourses argues for considerable authorial intentionality. Lanyer seems to have regarded the several literary genres she uses, as well as biblical exegesis and the discourses relating to patronage and authorship, not as exclusively male preserves but as common human property, now ready to be reclaimed for women. Her little volume delivered a formidable challenge to Jacobean patriarchal ideology as it appropriated and rewrote these genres and discourses, placing women at the center of the fundamental Christian myths—Eden, the Passion, the Community of Saints. Like other early modern women writers, she could do little to change the repressive conditions of her world. But she was able—no small feat—to imagine and represent a better one.

Notes

1. Some important recent studies include: Elaine Beilin, “The Feminization of Praise: Aemilia Lanyer,” in Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Lynette McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Aemilia Lanyer's Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice,” Women's Studies 20 (1992): 331-48; Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristianne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993): 331-48 (reprinted in revised form in this volume as chapter 6); Wendy Wall, “Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship,” in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan E. Sweeney (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 51-71. See also Lewalski, “Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems,” in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

2. Anne Clifford was the only surviving child of the dashing adventurer and privateer George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland, and Margaret (Russell) Clifford. In 1609 she married Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and in 1630 Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. She is remarkable for the sustained lawsuits she carried out with her mother, to claim property denied her by her father's will. That struggle and much else about her domestic life, Court associations, and family are recorded in several autobiographical and biographical works, the most remarkable of which is a Diary of the years 1603, and 1616-19, published in The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Wolfeboro Falls, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1993). See Lewalski, Writing Women, chapter 5.

3. Margaret Clifford's literary and clergy clients include Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Samuel Daniel, Henry Lok, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Hieron, Henry Peacham, William Perkins, Richard Greenham, and Peter Muffett, among others. See Lewalski, Writing Women, chapter 5.

4. For discussion of the English controversy and its gamesmanship, see Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1640 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

5. [Robert Southwell], Saint Peters Complaynt (London, 1595); rpt. with other Southwell poems in 1595, 1597, 1599, 1602, 1607.

6. Ibid. (1607), p. 14.

7. “Christs Triumph over Death” is Part III of Fletcher's Christs victorie and triumph in heaven and earth, over and after death (Cambridge, 1610).

8. Nicholas Breton, The Pilgrimage to Paradise, Joyned with the Countesse of Pembrookes Love (Oxford, 1592); also, A Divine Poem, divided into two Partes: The Ravisht Soule, and the Blessed Weeper (London, 1601). Abraham Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuell (London, 1591).

9. See especially Psalm 104:

   2. Who coverest thy self with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain. 3. Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his charriot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind. 4. Who maketh his angells spirits; his ministers a flaming fire. … 32. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke.

10. First published in 1823, the psalm versions of Sir Philip Sidney (Psalms 1-43) and the Countess of Pembroke (Psalms 44-150) were widely circulated in manuscript; they were especially noteworthy for stanzaic and metrical variety. Margaret Clifford had for some years been estranged from and virtually rejected by her husband, a notorious womanizer.

11. From internal evidence it is clear that “Penshurst” was written sometime before the death of Prince Henry in November, 1612, as a reference to him (l. 77) indicates, but the poem was first published in Jonson's Works (1616). Lanyer's poem was written sometime after Anne Clifford's marriage to Richard Sackville on February 25, 1609, since she is referred to as Dorset, the title her husband inherited two days after the marriage, and before the volume was registered with the Stationers on October 2, 1610. If Jonson's poem was written first, Lanyer might have seen a manuscript copy.

12. None of the extant records or letters identify Lanyer as a client or a member of Margaret Clifford's household, but there are few such records. During the period September-November 1604, Margaret Clifford dated five letters from “Cookham in Berkshire” (Longleat, Portland Papers, vol. 23, ff. 24-28), and this may be the period of residence. Anne Clifford's Diary (p. 15) records one visit to Cookham in 1603, but has nothing before 1603 and then skips to 1616, so has no occasion to mention Lanyer.

13. For an extended comparison, see Lewalski, “The Lady of the Country-House Poem,” in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, et al., (Hanover and London: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 261-75. See also Grossman's essay in the present volume (chapter 7).

14. The valedictory mode of this poem suggests a permanent rather than a seasonal departure, probably related to the countess's permanent departure to her dower residences in Westmoreland after she was widowed in 1605. Anne would have departed with her; she was married to Dorset in 1609.

15. Cookham belonged to the Crown from before the Conquest until 1818; it was annexed to Windsor Castle in 1540. The manor was evidently granted or leased to Margaret's family (the Russells) and occupied by the Countess of Cumberland at some periods during her estrangement from her husband in the years before his death in 1605, and perhaps just after.