[In the following essay, Lewalski argues that Clifford's Diary reveals the relation between writing and resistance, between authoring a text and authoring a self.]

Anne Clifford (1589-1676) provides an instance of sustained public opposition to patriarchal authority and property settlements. Her struggle is recorded in several autobiographical works, among them a fascinating though fragmentary Diary covering the years when she felt herself most embattled (1616-1619).¹ While lawsuits over women's claims to property and inheritance were very common in the era, as the cases described in that curious tract The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights makes clear,² Anne Clifford's Diary offers a rare reading of one such situation by the women involved (Anne Clifford and her mother, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland). It thereby provides an intriguing insight into their construction of self and world as they contested Jacobean patriarchal ideology, supported on the one hand by a sense of female community, and on the other by the firm conviction that God the Divine Patriarch was on their side against the many earthly patriarchs who oppressed them. Anne Clifford's Diary shows her struggling for some limited self-realization within a field of highly complex familial and social forces and constraints which she only partially understands. It offers a most unusual representation (for the period) of a developing sense of self, evidently promoted in part by the struggle itself and in part by the challenge of interpreting it that diary writing posed. In writing down her res gestae, Anne Clifford asserted the significance of her female life.

By her first marriage in 1609 to Richard Sackville, Lady Anne Clifford became Countess of Dorset; by her second in 1630 to Philip Herbert, she became Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery. But she did not define herself or her place in society through these marriages and these illustrious titles. Rather, she claimed her true identity from her own family, as the “sole Daughter and Heir to my Illustrious Father,” George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, and Margaret (Russell), her adored mother and model. That identity was forged through decades of legal and personal battles in which Lady Anne and her mother set themselves against the Jacobean male establishment—their husbands, their Clifford relatives, powerful courtiers, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the King himself—to maintain Lady Anne's legal claim by ancient entail to a large inheritance which her father's will left to his brother. Anne Clifford did not intend to challenge the patriarchal order as such, but rather to take full advantage of the exceptional legal circumstances that in this instance gave her a claim to offices and properties which would normally descend to a son or other male relative. Yet her struggle implied such a challenge by her emphasis upon a matrilineal heritage, and her assumption that a daughter is worthy and competent to hold such offices and properties in her own right. That struggle served as stimulus and focal point for Lady Anne's several projects in research and writing. The legal titles she sought and at long last obtained name the roles through which she defined herself: “Baroness Clifford, Westmoreland and Vesey, High Sheriffess of Westmoreland, and Lady of the Honor of Skipton in Craven.”³

The social conditions constructing Anne Clifford's life, and her response to them, can be read from several kinds of contemporary records: letters, memoirs, court gossip, personal letters, a few dedications, Lady Anne's funeral sermon, her own collections and writings.⁴ Anne and her mother compiled massive tomes of records and family papers (called “The Chronicles” in implicit analogy to chronicle histories of the life and times of princes), in part from pride in the family's illustrious history, but chiefly to reinforce Anne's own legal claims as sole heir.⁵ About 1653 Anne Clifford wrote memoirs of her father and mother in the vein of Plutarch's moralized Lives but incorporating as well vignettes in the tradition of the literary “character”; at about the same time she wrote a lively and occasionally reflective secular autobiography.⁶ These resources allow us to contextualize Anne's Jacobean Diary, the narrative it encodes, and the issues it raises.

Anne Clifford records on her mother's authority the date and place of her conception—May 1, 1589, “in the Lord Wharton's house in Channell Row in Westminster”—the curious detail serving to reinforce her claim as her father's only surviving legitimate child (Life of Me, 33). She was born in Skipton Castle in Craven, Yorkshire, January 30, 1590, when her father was at sea. George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland (1558-1605), was Queen Elizabeth's official Champion in the tilt yard and a dashing adventurer and privateer who engaged in twelve sea voyages (including the Armada and Cádiz); he captured and despoiled Spanish and Portuguese merchant ships, helped launch the East India Company, and ran up enormous debts. In 1577 he married Margaret Russell, youngest daughter of his guardian, Francis, Second Earl of Bedford; in later years he had notorious affairs with other women and “parted houses” with his wife, though they reconciled when he begged her forgiveness on his deathbed.⁷ Two sons died in childhood, leaving Anne the sole survivor. Anne's various memoirs record early and happy associations with the court, but this promising situation changed with the accession of James I, the open rift between her parents, and her father's death.

At George Clifford's death the title and properties pertaining to the Cumberland earldom legally reverted to his brother Francis, the nearest male relative. But Anne claimed other castles, estates, titles, and country offices—in Yorkshire the Barony of Clifford and the castle and estates of Skipton in Craven; in Westmoreland the castles and estates of Appleby, Brougham, Brough, and Pendragon, as well as the office of Sheriff. By writ of 4th Edward II (1310-1311) these lands were entailed to the “heirs of the body, lawfully begotten,” of Robert de Clifford—that is, to the heirs general (daughters as well as sons). Some of the Westmoreland properties also constituted Margaret Clifford's jointure. Without breaking the entail (as he might have done), George Clifford willed those properties and offices to his brother, making a monetary provision of £15,000 for his daughter out of those estates, and giving her the reversion of the properties should his brother's male line fail. Anne's claim was sound according to two precepts enunciated in The Lawes Resolutions:

A female may be preferred in succession before a male by the time wherein she commeth: as a daughter or daughters daughter in the right line is preferred before a brother in the transversall line, and that aswell in the common generall taile, as in fee simple … also a woman shall bee preferred propter jus sanguinis … land discended must alwaies goe to heires of the blood of the first purchaser, and the case may bee such that a female shall cary away inheritance from a male.⁸

Anne accounts for her father's actions and motives in terms of patriarchal values: “the love he bore his brother, and the advancement of the heirs male of his house” (Life of Me, 36).⁹

Margaret Clifford had herself appointed Anne's guardian, to protect her from the lucrative court traffic in wards and their fortunes, and specifically from her Cumberland uncle. She then sued out a writ of livery for the lands in the Court of Wards, and both traveled north to visit (and claim) the Westmoreland properties of Margaret Clifford's jointure.¹⁰ Anne's marriage to Richard Sackville, under discussion for some time, was concluded in some haste on February 25, 1609, when his father's imminent death made it expedient to protect Sackville from the dangers of wardship; two days later the newlyweds (both aged nineteen) became Earl and Countess of Dorset.¹¹ In 1609-10 Anne took her place in the Queen's entourage and danced in three court masques: as one of the Queen's attendants in Jonson's Masque of Beautie (January 14, 1609); as Berenice of Egypt (noted for her “magnanimity” and her beautiful hair) in the Masque of Queenes (February 2, 1610); and as the river Ayr (near her birthplace, Skipton) in Samuel Daniel's Tethys Festival, celebrating the creation of Henry as Prince of Wales (June 5, 1610).¹²

Subsequently, though she attended court occasionally, Anne spent much of her time at the Dorset country house in Knole, Sevenoaks, Kent, occupied with reading, writing, needlework, and domestic oversight. Dorset gave himself increasingly to lavish expenditures, costly dress, cockfighting, gambling, and a profligate life, including liasons with Lady Venetia Stanley and Lady Penniston, as well as a close (perhaps a homosexual) relationship with his gentleman-servant Matthew Caldicott.¹³ As Anne's lawsuits dragged on for twelve years, Dorset, having many debts and his way to make at court, tried to force her to relinquish her claims in return for a cash settlement along the lines of her father's will, which was upheld in an initial legal ruling. He tried banishment to the country, rage, threats of separation, taking her daughter away from her—all to no avail. Early in 1617 King James handed down a settlement to which Dorset, George Clifford's brother Francis (now Earl of Cumberland), and his son and heir, Henry, all agreed. It gave the estates to the Cliffords, with reversion to Anne if the male line failed, and £20,000 in installments to Anne—that is, to Dorset, for as a married woman she was a “Feme Covert” with no power or control over her money or goods.¹⁴ Payment of the final £3,000 depended, however, on her signing this agreement as a just settlement of all her claims, and she persistently refused to do so, though Dorset continued the personal and financial pressure. He kept her short of cash and even canceled her jointure in June 1617, restoring it only in 1623, the year before he died at age thirty-five—according to Chamberlain of a “surfeit of [sweet] potatoes,” a supposed aphrodisiac which seems to have brought on dysentery.¹⁵ Anne bore Dorset five children: three sons who died in infancy and two daughters, Margaret (1614) and Isabella (1622), who survived to adulthood. Clients' descriptions of her in the last years of her marriage to Dorset emphasize the expected female qualities—virtue and resolute patience in affliction.¹⁶

With its usual numerical precision, Anne's Life of Me reports that she lived a widow “sixe yeares, two monthes, and fower or five daies over,” a period she finds replete with trials, enemies, new legal claims, and providential deliverances (46-48). Both Anne and her daughter Margaret nearly died of smallpox, which, she notes wryly, “did so martyr my face, that it confirmed more and more my mind never to marry againe, though the Providence of God caused me after to alter that resolution.” In April 1629 she gave her daughter Margaret in marriage at age fourteen to John, Lord Tufton (soon to become Earl of Thanet). In June 1630, at age forty, and despite her martyred face, Anne remarried: her new husband was Philip Herbert, second son of Henry, second Earl of Pembroke, and Mary (Sidney). Philip was fourth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, Lord Chamberlain of the household to James I and Charles I, and a great favorite of both.¹⁷ He was physically attractive, extravagant, and a passionate hunter, but also coarse, foul-mouthed, quarrelsome, a notorious libertine, and barely literate, though a sound judge of pictures and architecture.¹⁸ In his Memoirs George Sedgwick, who served Pembroke and (later) Anne as clerk and secretary, raises the obvious question as to why this strong-minded woman chose to marry again and so unsuitably after she had achieved a widow's independence and full control of her own affairs. She credits Providence, while he invokes ironical fortune;¹⁹ a more adequate explanation might be Anne's sense of vulnerability (without husband, son, or brother) and desire for an influential protector in dealing with the male power structure. Her uncle Cumberland's heir, Henry Clifford, having no son, was trying to break the revisionary clause in the settlement so as to bequeath the estates to his daughter; and her brother-in-law, the new Lord Dorset (“my extreme enemy”), had designs on the lands of her jointure.²⁰

Anne bore Herbert two sons who died in infancy; after about two years they lived apart, Anne chiefly at Wilton, where the large-scale renovations in progress probably proved instructive for her own later architectural projects.²¹ They cooperated in some matters of business. Herbert made her a generous jointure, joined her in making formal legal claims for her properties in 1632 and 1637, and relinquished his rights in the Westmoreland property and Skipton in favor of her daughter Isabella (whose hand he sought for his son against Anne's resolute and successful opposition). She aided him by remaining in Baynard's Castle during the Civil War years, in part to protect his property.²² A staunch Royalist, she was wholly out of sympathy with Herbert's adherence to Parliament, but because of it she did not have to compound for her estates when she gained them at last, in 1643, after the death of her uncle Cumberland followed by that of his son Henry without a male heir. In 1647 she married her daughter Isabella to the Earl of Northampton, and despite the Interregnum turmoil went north in 1649 to take over her properties. In 1650 Pembroke died, leaving her again a widow but now fearing and beholding to none, and ready to enjoy the independence, status, and authority pertaining to that condition, as The Lawes Resolutions describes it: “Consider how long you have beene in subjection under the predominance of parents, of your husbands, now you be free in libertie, a free proprietris of your own Law … [your] estate [is now] … free from controlment.”²³

For more than thirty years Anne Clifford ruled her little domain as a (usually) benevolent autocrat, combining public and private roles—Lord of the Manor and Lady Bountiful, Sheriff of the County and grandmother, patriarch and matriarch. She began rebuilding her castles and ordering her estates immediately, defying the authority of Cromwell's occupying forces.²⁴ She held Common Prayer services in her chapels and defended her loyalty to King and established Church before General Thomas Harrison himself and committees of Puritan ministers, displaying what her funeral eulogist Bishop Edward Rainbowe termed “Heroick” courage “not so often to be found … in that Sex.”²⁵ After the Restoration she rebuilt seven churches, six castles, and two almshouses for impoverished widows. She ran her estates herself, buying supplies locally to foster the economy of the region and often suing her tenants to recover contested rights. She dispensed patronage and largess to worthy divines, old servants, tenants, friends, even Dorset's bastard daughters.²⁶ She often entertained and kept prideful account of her numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren (Margaret had ten living children and Isabella, who died in 1661, had one daughter). In the public realm she exercised the duties of the High Sheriffwick: overseeing and returning writs of election for Parliament, handpicking the MPs for Appleby and Westmoreland, convening and summoning the jury for the annual assizes courts.²⁷ Rainbowe found his interpretive key to Anne Clifford in the extraordinary completeness and autonomy of her life—qualities he found especially remarkable in a woman: “She was absolute Mistris of her Self, her Resolutions, Actions, and Time.”²⁸ She died in 1676 at the age of eighty-six.

EMPOWERING INFLUENCES

Anne Clifford's memoirs of 1653 represent her as a strong-minded, self-assured woman with a firm sense of personal worth, sitting in confident authorial judgment on all the men who held familial authority over her—father, uncle, husbands—and penning perceptive, fair-minded, and judicious evaluations of them. That representation invites the question, how was such an identity constituted within the institution and ideology of patriarchy? Her later writings emphasize several factors.

For one thing, she characteristically ranged the various patriarchal authorities against one another, thus opening space for subversion. She both accepted and challenged the patriarchal family structure as she sought to rewrite her place within it. Her constant emphasis on the web of Clifford family connections is dictated by family pride, but much more by the desire to substantiate her claims as her father's rightful heir. Even her physical appearance is made an argument for true descent from her father, but she also insists, significantly, on an equal inheritance from her mother:

I was very happy in my first constitution both in mind and body, both for internal and external endowments, for never was there child more equally resembling both father and mother than myself. The color of mine eyes were black like my father, and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my mother's; the hair of my head was brown and very thick, and so long that it reached to the calf of my legs when I stood upright, with a peak of hair on my forehead, and a dimple in my chin, like my father, full cheeks and round face like my mother, and an exquisite shape of body resembling my father. But now time and age hath long since ended all those beauties, which are to be compared to the grass of the field.

(Life of Me, 34-35)

These attitudes inform her collection, annotation, and writing of family history. The title pages of her three massive volumes of records and biographical sketches, tracing the Veteriponts and the Cliffords back to the early thirteenth century, proclaim their primary purpose, to prove Anne's “right title … to the inheritance of her father and his ancestors.”²⁹ Her memoir of her father has the same subtext, identifying him as the “last heir male of the Cliffords that was rightfully possessor of those ancient lands and honors”—thereby setting aside with a word those unrightful possessors, her uncle and cousin—and identifying herself as “his only daughter and sole heir that lived, the Lady Anne Clifford, now Countess Dowager of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery.”³⁰ In 1646, just after she came into her inheritance but before she could take possession of it, she commissioned a family picture … as a visual compendium of that history, complete with lengthy commentaries. Probably executed by Jan van Belcamp, who copied and adapted several extant portraits, the triptych's center panel presents Anne's mother and father with their two young sons (the presumptive heirs, now deceased), together with inset portraits of Clifford and Russell relatives; labels and coats of arms along either side trace the history, respectively, of the Clifford family and of Margaret Clifford's jointure lands in Westmoreland. The wings of the triptych show Anne—on the left as the young Clifford daughter at about age fifteen, on the right at age fifty-three, when the inheritance at long last fell to her.³¹

Anne was able to maintain great pride in, and a primary identification with, her father by persuading herself on the basis of the deathbed reconciliation that he expected and indeed intended the property to revert ultimately to her: “A little before his death he expressed with much affection to my mother and me a great belief that he had, that his brother's son would dye without issue male, and thereby all his lands would come to be mine; which accordingly befell.”³² Her memoir of Clifford exudes pride in his sea adventures, his intellectual qualities, and his general knowledge of all the arts, especially mathematics and navigation, “wherein he became the most knowing and eminent man, of a Lord, in his time.”³³ While at Knole she also had the contemporary records and eyewitness accounts of all Clifford's sea voyages collected in a beautiful manuscript which is still a major source for them.³⁴ But she also subjects his character to judgment—balancing virtues and faults, noble and less-than-noble reasons for his financial straits—in the authoritative manner of a Plutarch:

This Earl George was endowed with many perfections of nature befitting so noble a personage, as an excellent quickness of witt and apprehension, an active and strong body, and an affable disposition and behaviour. But, as good natures through humane frailty are often times misled, so he fell to love a lady of quality, which did by degrees draw and alienate his love and affection from his so virtuous and well deserving wife; so that at the length, for two or three years together before his death, they parted houses, to her extream grief and sorrow and also to his extream sorrow at the time of his death, for he dyed a very penitant man … He consumed more of his estate than ever any of his ancestors did by much. To which his continual building of ships, and his many sea voyages, gave great occasion to those vast expenses of his. And that which did contribute the more to the consuming of his estate was his extream love to horse-races, tiltings, bowling matches, shooting, and all such expensive sports.³⁵

She erected a superb tomb for him at Skipton, with her own claims carved prominently on the stone.³⁶

This identification strengthened her to resist the authority and claims of uncles, husbands, courtiers, and kings. It also enabled her, as she asserts with some pride and a deft quotation from Sidney's Arcadia, to detach herself from her two husbands' families and concerns:

The marble pillars of Knowle in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me often times but the gay arbour of anguish. Insomuch that a wise man that knew the insides of my fortune [perhaps her cousin and friend Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford] would often say that I lived in both these my lords' great familys as the river of Roan or Rodamus runs through the lake of Geneva, without minging any part of its streams with that lake; for I gave myself wholly to retiredness, as much as I could, in both those great families, and made good books and virtuous thoughts my companions, which can never discern affliction, nor be daunted when it unjustly happens.³⁷

Though she took some pride in the greatness of her two husbands, these striking metaphors proclaim her stoic detachment and her internal and external resistance to the patriarchal authority her society vested in husbands.³⁸

Another factor empowering her resistance to the patriarchs ranged against her was her firm conviction that Providence was directing all the courses of her life, and doing so in accordance with her father's true wishes. By her reading, the Divine Patriarch himself frustrated the machinations of the various earthly patriarchs, at every juncture thwarting “the sinister practices of my Enemies” in defense of her rights. She notes that her “long contention” with Dorset about her lands “brought many troubles upon me, the most part of the time after that I lived his wife,” but concludes, typically, that “God protected and inabled me to pass through them all.”³⁹ Her second marriage, to Philip Herbert, “was wonderfullie brought to pass by the providence of God for the Crossing and disappoynting the envie Malice and sinister practices of my Enemyes,” despite the “anger and falling out” over his desire to marry Isabella to his son.⁴⁰ All the male issue of her uncle Francis Clifford and his son Henry died “by the providence of God,” thus clearing the way for her to inherit.⁴¹ This firm conviction that God himself supported her claims because she was in the right enabled her to oppose the patriarchal power structure at every point while at the same time demanding that it make a place for her as a species of female paterfamilias.

Another factor of primary importance to Anne Clifford's self-definition and sense of empowerment was her close identification with her mother, and her emphasis on a matrilineal heritage and kinship network. If she derived her social role and property rights from the patriarchy, through identification with her father, she claimed her moral and spiritual heritage from her beloved mother, whom she consciously took as model: “By the bringing up of my said dear mother, I did, as it were, even suck the milk of goodness, which made my mind strong against the storms of fortune.”⁴² Anne's memoir of her “saint-like” mother mingles hagiographic reverence with some precise description of her person and character—her “high spirit” bridled only by grace and civility, her good intellect and education, her interest in alchemy, the love she inspired from the worthy:

She was naturally of an high spirit, though she tempered it well by grace, having a very well favoured face with sweet and quick grey eyes, and of a comely personage. She was of a gracefull behaviour, which she increased the more by her being civil and courteous to all sorts of people. She had a discerning spirit, both into the disposition of humane creatures and natural causes, and into the affairs of the world. She had a great sharp natural wit, so as there was few worthy knowledge but she had some insight into them. For though she had no language but her own, yet was there few books of worth translated into English but she read them, whereby that excellent mind of hers was much enriched, which even by nature was endowed with the seeds of the four moral virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. She was a lover of the study and practice of alchimy, by which she found out excellent medicines, that did much good to many … She was dearly beloved by those of her freinds and acquaintance that had excellent witts and were worthy and good folks … [She] was truly religious, devout and conscientious, even from her very childhood, and did spend much time in reading the Scriptures and other good books, and in heavenly meditations and in prayers, fastings, and deeds of charity.⁴³

Anne was profoundly grateful to her mother for beginning and carrying forward the lawsuits in her behalf, and admired her enormously for her “quiet mind in the midst of all her griefs and troubles” and her exemplary courage and firmness in opposing the patriarchal power structure in her daughter's cause:

In which suit she met with great oppositions, even from King James himself, who then reigned, and professed himself to be against her, and from some of the greatest men of power of that time in the kingdom; in which business she shewed she had a spirit too great to yeild to fortune or opposition, further than necessity compelled her to it; and so much constancy, wisdom, and resolution did she shew in that business that the like can hardly be paralleled by any woman.⁴⁴

An exchange of letters between them in 1614-1616, when Margaret Clifford was in Westmoreland living on her jointure estates, reveals Margaret's role as primary strategist, comrade in arms, and emotional support for her daughter. Margaret's long letter of September 22, 1615, is typical:

You writ wisely and I fear too truly for the king and queen, whom you might have had in a more favorable sort, but it was one of your Lord and his friends strategems … I have written another [letter] to be delivered to them [the judges] … it were best by yourself, if my Lord's [Dorset's] tyranny let it not. Well it seems he hath not tasted of true spiritual comforts that so much forgets that saying of the apostle, he is worse than an infidel that provides not for his wife and family. Then he that hath not a heart to defend their rights, wants the true spirit of God … Lay all on me and neither cross him in words but keep your resolutions with silence and what gentle persuasion you can, but alter not from your own wise course … You have written to Masters Crackenthorpe which letter was opened by chance, that whether my Lord would let you or not, if I would have you come [to visit her in the North] you would come against his will. Dear heart be very wary what you say but most wary what you write for they desire to have advantage and to sever my Lord and you, as they let me from my Lord, for you are too near me in resemblance, not of faces but of fortune, which God make better, and me thankful that hath and does overcome in God, which he in mercy grant that you may do in the end.⁴⁵

Anne's letters to her mother mingle filial reverence with conspiratorial address, often registering as well Anne's anxiety and emotional travail. In early 1615 she pleads her emotional state to excuse her failure to send a New Year's gift of handiwork to her mother: “I had nether lesuer to worke, or doe aney thing ellse, but weepe and greeve.” In November of that year she reports that Dorset is pressing her hard, “but by the power of God I will continue resolout and constant”; later that month she complains of sore eyes from her constant griefs and terrors. Caught between loyalties, she urges her mother to a better opinion of Dorset, assuring her that he is a “very kind loving and deare father, and in every thing will I commende him, saving in this busnis of my Land, wher in I thinke some evil speret workes for in this he is as vialent as is possable.” In late January 1616 she is clearly desperate: “I beecich [beseech] you sende me an annser with as much speede as you can, for I shall bee earnestly prest to doe it [accept the terms of the will] or else absolutley to denie it, which will make cich [such] a breche betwin my Lorde and mee, as will not esely be mended. I will doe nothing without your Ladyship's knolledge.”⁴⁶ A letter of April 26, 1616, to her mother agonizes over the conflict of loyalties:

What so ever you think of my Lorde, yet I have founde him, doe finde him, and thinke shall find him, the best and most worthest man that ever brethed, therfore, if it bee possible I beecich you have a beter opinion of him, if you knew all I doe, I am shuer you would beeleve this that I writ; but I durst not impart my mind when I was with you, bicause I found you so biter against him; or ellse I coud have tolld you so many arguments of his goodnis and worthe, that you should have seene it planley your selfe.⁴⁷

But she seems now to have attained some emotional equilibrium by recognizing the limits of possible resistance: “Bee assured that I will stande as constantley to my berthe right, as is possable for mee; but I can doe no more than I can, ther fore I can promes you no sortinty [certainty] of thes maters.”⁴⁸

Reinforcing Anne Clifford's sense of a matrilineal heritage was her perception of uncanny parallels between her mother's life and her own: their childhood residence in Northamptonshire, “which caused that mother and daughter ever after to love a country life”;⁴⁹ their childlessness in early marriage; their joint projects—the family chronicles, the lawsuits, the almshouses. She also saw her elder daughter, Margaret, as a near-replica of Margaret Clifford “[She] grose [grows] every day more like your Ladyship”; “My chillde your Litell selfe, is well I thanke God.”⁵⁰ She had great confidence in Margaret's maternal protection, manifested in her prayers and prophetic powers. An example was Margaret's “divining dream” predicting that her as-yet-unborn daughter Anne would outlive her two brothers to inherit the ancestral lands—evidence, Anne thought, that her mother “had more converse with heaven … than with terrene and earthly matters,” though the matter of the dream was the very earthly business of Anne's inheritance.⁵¹

Anne's efforts in autobiography and diary keeping may also have been fostered by Margaret Clifford, who herself wrote a brief introspective autobiography in a letter to her chaplain, Dr. Layfield.⁵² Organized into seven decades, this poignant and melancholy “Seven Ages of Woman” represents Margaret Clifford's life under two metaphors—a dance (with backward and forward movements) and a pilgrimage of grief, inexplicably breaking off after the fifth decade, in 1589. The clerical addressee may partially explain Margaret's passive stance, as one buffeted by and patiently enduring the chances and changes of fortune; there is little sign here of the high spirits Anne attributes to her. Anne celebrated her matrilineal heritage by erecting several splendid monuments to Margaret Clifford: a statue in Appleby town, an octagonal obelisk by the side of the highway near Brougham Castle marking the place Anne said her last farewell to her mother in 1616; and a magnificent alabaster tomb in Appleby Church with a beautifully executed, life-size effigy.⁵³

Anne also found some maternal protection and example in a larger female community. She spent some part of her childhood in the country (Lillford, Northamptonshire) with her great-aunt, Mrs. Alice Elmes, but had her “chief breeding” under her maternal aunt Anne (Russell) Dudley, Countess of Warwick, who was, she notes, “more beloved and in greater favour with the said Queen [Elizabeth] than any other lady or woman of the kingdom.” This Countess, her other Russell aunt, Elizabeth, Countess of Bath, and her mother were, she observes with obvious pride, “the most remarkable ladys for their greatness and goodness of any three sisters in the kingdom.”⁵⁴ In this female protective network Anne includes Queen Elizabeth, by whom she was “much beloved” as a child owing to her aunt's patronage. She also includes Queen Anne, who, she claims, “was ever inclyneing to our part, and very gratious and favourable to us” in the controversies over the lands, thanks to early associations: “In my youth I was much in the Courte with her, and in Maskes attended her, though I never served her.”⁵⁵

Books and learning were also of primary importance to Anne Clifford's self-definition and her resistance. Anne's childhood governess was Mrs. Anne Taylor, and her tutor was the poet Samuel Daniel, who evidently joined the household sometimes between 1595 and 1599. Account books indicate that she had a dancing master, that she was taught French and music, and that she participated in the craze for raising silkworms.⁵⁶ Her good education in “true religion and moral virtue and all other qualities befitting her birth” she attributes to her mother and to her mother's “chief agent” Daniel—“that religious and honest poet who composed the Civil Wars of England.” Summarizing, she comments that she “was not admitted to learn any language, because her father would not permit it; but for all other knowledge fit for her sex none was bred up to greater perfection than she.”⁵⁷ This evidently meant no Latin, since records show that she studied French, at least for a time. Her comment contains no open protest, yet in ascribing that prohibition so pointedly to her father, she invites the inference that she herself, her mother (whose education was similarly restricted), and perhaps Daniel did not share the prevalent notion that Latin was inappropriate for women.

It is not clear what other limitations she (apparently) accepted as “fit for her sex,” but the Clifford “Great Picture” offers some indication of both the scope and the emphases of her reading—the best such record we have from a noblewoman of the period.⁵⁸ The left-hand panel depicts her at age fifteen with her lute and a considerable library of neatly arranged books, evidently texts she studied and valued as a young girl. Religion, philosophy, and science are represented by the Bible, Augustine's City of God, John Downame's Christian Warfare, the Works of Joseph Hall, the Manual of Epictetus, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Gerard's Herball, Cornelius Agrippa's Vanity of Sciences, and Loys de Roy's Variety of Things. Several works of history and geography may reflect Daniel's influence: Eusebius' History of the Church, Camden's Britannia, Daniel's prose Chronicle of England, and Abraham Ortelius' Maps of the World. The rest is literature, especially romance and fiction: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Castiglione's Courtier, Montaigne's Essays, Cervantes's Don Quixote, the three parts of the French Academy, all of Chaucer's and Spenser's works, and Sidney's Arcadia. The right-hand panel depicts Anne at fifty-three with the books evidently important to her then, depicted in considerable disarray as if in constant use. Religion and moral philosophy predominate: the Bible, Henry More's Map of Mortalitie, Henry Cuff's Age of Man's Life, Bishop Henry King's Sermons, William Astin's meditations and devotions, Donne's Sermons, George Stroude's Book of Death, George Hakewell's Apologie of the Providence and Power of God. The moral philosophy is Stoic: Antonius' Meditations, Plutarch's Morals, and a translation of Pierre Charron's Book of Wisdom. Her interest in history is now represented by Guicciardini (in French translation) and an English translation of Philippe de Comines's History; her new interest in biography by Plutarch's Lives; and her great concern with building by Henry Wotton's Book of Architecture. The literary works reflect both current tastes and good judgment: Donne's Poems, Jonson's Workes, Herbert's Temple, Fulke Greville's Works, John Barclay's Argenis, George Sandys's poetic version of the Psalms and other biblical poems.

Neither circumstance nor (apparently) inclination led Anne to become a major literary patron, though in her youth her mother's clients designate her Margaret Clifford's heir as paragon of virtue and patron of serious literary and theological works. Margaret's chief literary clients included Spenser, Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Henry Lok, and the female poet Aemilia Lanyer, who attributed her religious conversion and poetic vocation to some period spent with Margaret and Anne at the country estate of Cookham in Berkshire.⁵⁹ Among her theologian clients were William Perkins, Richard Greenham, Thomas Saville, Samuel Hieron, and Peter Muffett.⁶⁰ Samuel Daniel's verse epistle (1603) to his erstwhile pupil Anne emphasizes the complexity of the role she has inherited and challenges her to learn how to balance the virtuous actions belonging to greatness with the limitations imposed by female nature and the fallen state:

Nor may you build on your sufficiency,
For in our strongest partes we are but weake,
Nor yet may over-much distrust the same,
Lest that you come to checke it so thereby,
As silence may become worse then to speake;
Though silence women never ill became.(61)

Daniel's dedicatory sonnet of 1607 invites Anne to take up the role of literary patroness, “I know you love the Muses, and you will / Be a most faithfull Guardian and a just.” So does Lanyer's long dedicatory poem in Salve Deus, which emphasizes Anne's maternal legacy of virtue, beauty, delight in the Word of God, and especially bounty (of which Lanyer not very subtly proposes herself as recipient).⁶² In the same year the young theologian Anthony Stafford prefixed his contemptus mundi treatise Staffords Niobe with a wildly effusive dedication to Anne, professing such “astonishment” at her seeming perfection and sinlessness (surpassing Eve) that he almost commits the blasphemy of giving “as much honour and praise, to the Architecture as to the Architect.”⁶³ The hyperbole in this bid for patronage from Dorset or from Anne does not surpass what we find in some of Donne's or Drayton's praises, but someone (perhaps Dorset) evidently thought it smacked of scandal or bad taste and had the dedication excised from all but one of the extant copies. If Anne did not imitate her mother as literary patron, she did pay special tribute to writers closely associated with the family. She honored her old tutor Daniel by introducing a portrait of him into the Great Picture, terming him “a man of Upright and excellent Spirit, as appeared by his Works.” She also erected a tomb for him in Beckington Church (Somersetshire) with an inscription to “that Excellent Poett and Historian.” In 1620 she erected a monument in Westminster Abbey for her mother's literary client Spenser, proclaiming him “The Prince of Poets in his Tyme / Whose Divine Spirit / Needs Noe Othir Witnesse / Then the Works Which he Left Behind him.”⁶⁴

Several associates testify to Anne Clifford's lively wit and broad intellectual interests. Donne, a client of Dorset's, who met her at Knole when visiting his benefice at nearby Sevenoaks, reportedly observed “that she knew well how to discourse of all things, from Predestination to Sleasilk”—evidently meaning that her learning and conversation ranged freely from female domestic matters to complex theological doctrine.⁶⁵ Sedgwick and Rainbowe emphasize her “great sharpness of Wit, a faithful Memory, and deep Judgment”; her “ability to discourse in all Commendable Arts and Sciences … with Virtuoso's, Travellers, Scholars, Merchants, Divines, States-men, and with Good Housewives in any kind”; her “library stored with very choise books”; and her “indefatigable” reading, especially in vernacular history and Scripture.⁶⁶ Rainbowe describes her rather amusing transformation of her bedchamber into a species of commonplace book, to serve as subjects of discourse for herself and her servants:

She would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their discants on them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library.⁶⁷

Unfortunately, she does not comment on the books she read. But we can infer something of what they meant to her from a remarkable letter of 1649 to the Dowager Countess of Kent, in which she associates herself with Selden in a common love of Chaucer and perhaps acknowledges the loan of his works, which she had read earlier at Knole:

My love and service to worthy Mr. Selden, and tell him if I hade nott exelent Chacor's booke heere to comfortt mee I wer in a pitifull case, having so manny trubles as I have, butt when I rede in that I scorne and make litte of tham alle, and a little partt of his devine sperett infusses itt selfe in mee.⁶⁸

It would be fascinating to know what she found so inspiriting in Chaucer: the Legend of Good Women? patient Griselda? the Wife of Bath? Whatever it was, she here appropriates her literary patrimony as boldly as she did her ancestral lands, echoing Spenser as she claims empowerment through the infusion of Chaucer's spirit.⁶⁹

THE DIARY

Anne Clifford's Diary evidently served as a primary means of self-definition for her. She seems to have kept some kind of journal throughout her life, though most of the originals have been lost or destroyed except for a few entries for the last months of her life. The Jacobean Diary exists in two later copies, with entries for the years 1603, 1616-1617, and 1619 (the year 1618 is omitted). When its implications are teased out, this work offers an illuminating female perspective on Jacobean society, as well as on the development of one Jacobean woman's sense of self as she confronted and reflected on her own experience.

Recent theoretical and historical investigation has underscored the blurred generic boundaries between such forms as diary, memoir, letters, and formal autobiography in early modern England, and the emergence of self-conscious introspection in the spiritual diaries and autobiographies which flourished chiefly after the Restoration.⁷⁰ In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries diary keeping was common enough, but most extant diaries record the external duties and activities pertaining to men's public roles—travel diaries, military diaries, sea logs, astrologers' diaries, political records. The few domestic diaries, notably by Lady Margaret Hoby and Lady Grace (Sherrington) Mildmay, record women's household and family activities.⁷¹ Such diaries focus on personal experience, but almost never contain intimate self-revelation. While Anne Clifford's Diary in some respects conforms to this norm, it also offers analytic comments and descriptions of her emotions, motives, and judgments of people and events. Except for Simon Forman's diary,⁷² hers is the only English secular diary I know that does so at this early date.

By definition the diary is a private genre, yet it seems likely from the format that Anne intended hers ultimately for the Clifford chronicles; she may have decided to preserve the segment we have as a record for posterity of her most momentous years in the struggle over her lands. Although we do not have her original, the distinctive layout in the two manuscript copies is not likely to be the copyists' invention.⁷³ The text of the Diary is a running account focused chiefly on her own doings and family affairs, with very sporadic reference to public matters. In the wide margins surrounding that text on both sides is another running commentary (in the same voice though clearly added later) which partly expands upon the personal story, but also interweaves many more events from the larger social and public worlds—births, deaths, marriages, separations, court appointments, major scandals, public affairs—often introduced by the formula “About this time.”⁷⁴

The margins record, but do not expand upon, such events as these: Buckingham sworn of the Bedchamber; the Countess of Somerset sent prisoner to the Tower; the appointment of Sir John Digby as Vice-Chamberlain and Sir John Oliver as Lord Deputy of Ireland; the birth of Lady Montgomery's first son; Prince Charles created Prince of Wales; the death of Lord Chancellor Egerton; Marquis Damse slain in France, “which bred great alterations there”; expectations (in 1617) of a match for Prince Charles with Spain; Queen Anne at Greenwich and Oatlands during King James's trip to Scotland; “a great stir about my Lady Hatton's daughter—my Brother Sackville undertaking to carry her away with men and horses”; Sir John Digby on a long-expected journey to Spain; Lady Rich brought to bed of her first son and afterwards afflicted with smallpox; the death of Lord Cobham, “the last of the three that was condemned for the first conspiracy against the King at his first coming into England”; the Countess of Suffolk stricken with smallpox “which spoiled that good face of hers, which had brought to others much misery and to herself greatness which ended with much unhappiness”; the King's “fit of the stone” while the court ladies watched by the Queen's corpse; Barnwelt beheaded at the Hague, “which is like to breed alteration for the best for this man hath long been a secret friend to the Spaniards and an enemy to the English”; Lord Doncaster's mission to Germany to mediate the Bohemian crisis; Star Chamber proceedings against Lord and Lady Suffolk.

By adding the marginalia at some later stage, Anne Clifford seems to have sought to locate and position her own story more firmly within the larger drama of events. At the same time, the format asserts the significance of the personal narrative: it holds the center while the public and social world are (quite literally) marginalized. Anne Clifford's Diary provides an intriguing perspective on the engagement of personal experience with patriarchal ideology, and on the relation between authoring a text and authoring a self. While her later writings represent Anne as an assured, stable woman with a firm sense of personal worth, her Jacobean Diary presents that identity in process, constrained by powerful and complex social forces but struggling toward some limited redefinition of her female self, rights, and place in the world.

The year 1603 is presented in retrospect. The entries capture the wide-eyed thirteen-year-old girl's impressions of the flurry of court activity surrounding Queen Elizabeth's funeral and James I's coronation, at the same time supplying a more mature perspective on the changes these events brought about for her and her family. They highlight Anne's excitement and her personal disappointments, great and small. By Queen Elizabeth's death she missed her chance of preferment to the Privy Chamber through her aunt Warwick's good offices, “for at that time there was as much hope and expectation of me as of any other young lady whatsoever” (Diary, 3). She was held “too young” to join her mother and aunt and “a great company of lords and ladies” in the nocturnal watches by the Queen's corpse; and she was not allowed to be a mourner, “because I was not high enough, which did much trouble me then” (4-5). She was admitted to the church at Westminster for the splendid funeral, but forbidden to attend James I's coronation “because the plague was hot in London.”⁷⁵ Her graphic description of the universal jockeying for position in those weeks highlights the Russell sisters' fears of their declining influence at court: “My Mother being all full of hopes, every man expecting mountains and finding molehills, excepting Sir R. Cecil and the house of the Howards, who hated my Mother and did not much love my Aunt Warwick” (5). She herself joined her mother, her aunt, and the other court ladies in rushing to Berwick-upon-Tweed to meet Queen Anne en route from Scotland, killing “three horses that one day with extremity of heat” (7). She observes, however, that the Countess of Bedford got there first, and that her star was in the ascendant: “[She] was so great a woman with the Queen as everybody much respected her, she having attended the Queen out of Scotland” (8).

Anne's account registers her delight in assuming a role among the court women—recording court gossip, visiting various palaces and country houses in attendance upon the Queen and the Princess Elizabeth.⁷⁶ But these great affairs play off against the strained domestic situation: Cumberland “had at this time as it were wholly left my Mother.” She reports Margaret's presence at the magnificent entertainment he laid on at Grafton for the King and court, though she was “not held as mistress of the house, by reason of the difference between my Lord and her, which was grown to a great height” (10). She notes that when her parents met by chance in their roles as courtiers, “their countenance did show the dislike they had one of the other,” and comments rather plaintively on her own uncomfortable situation: “Yet he would speak to me in a slight fashion and give me his blessing” (14). One remarkable entry proudly describes George Clifford exercising at York his hereditary right to carry the sword before the King, culminating with Anne's quite astonishing claim to the same privilege: “Because it was an office by inheritance … it lineally descended to me” (6). Whenever these events were written up, they are viewed through the prism of Anne's property claims.

The Diary resumes again in January 1616 with the intervening years and the year 1618 lost, or never written, or excised. These entries are contemporaneous with the events recorded; they set forth periodically though not daily Anne's activities and her relations with her husband and child, her mother, her Russell and Clifford relatives, her society, and the court. The controlling motif throughout is her protracted struggle, sustained only by her own determination, a few allies, and the help of God, against the demands from all sides (and especially from Dorset) that she relinquish her claims to the lands. She sees herself holding out against the entire power structure—though without the certitude of providential care and ultimate victory so prominent in her later memoirs.

Entries for early 1616 report several scenes of high drama as well as private encounters with well-intentioned advisers whose kindness made them especially difficult to withstand. On February 16 her Russell kinsman Francis, afterwards fourth Earl of Bedford, who was “exceedingly careful and kind to me” throughout the troubles, “came to me … and chid me and told me of all my faults and errors in this business; he made me weep bitterly.”⁷⁷ On February 17 she reports a formal scene staged to intimidate, a visit from a phalanx of male kinsmen on both sides reinforced by the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Upon the 17th my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, my Lord William Howard, my Lord Rous, my Coz. Russell, my Brother Sackville and a great company of men … were all in the Gallery of Dorset House where the Archbishop took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and half and persuaded me both by Divine and human means to set my hand to their arguments. But my answer to his Lordship was that I would do nothing till my Lady and I had conferred together. Much persuasion was used by him and all the company, sometimes terrifying me and sometimes flattering me, but at length it was concluded that I should have leave to go to my Mother and send an answer by the 22nd of March next, whether I will agree to this business or not.

Next day was a marvellous day to me through the mercy of God, for it was generally thought that I must either have sealed to the argument or else have parted with my Lord.

(19-20)

That entry registers her belief that she had managed to escape total surrender or the break-up of her marriage only by pleading the necessity to confer with her mother, then resident in Westmoreland.

Entries during that visit in March and April point up Margaret's vital role as adviser, and the strategies the two ladies developed to cope with exigencies. On March 20 they sent back a direct refusal of the judges' award, to which Dorset responded by commanding that his servants return to London without Anne. The ladies then drafted a letter to the effect that Anne was obeying Dorset rather than her own wishes in staying, lest she be charged with deserting her husband;⁷⁸ but after “much talk” for two nights, they determined that she should return anyway, to avoid if possible an open separation. As a further delaying tactic, Anne left with her mother the papers she was supposed to sign. She records her “grevious and heavy parting” with Margaret Clifford, and when she returned had but a “cold welcome” from Dorset (23).

Diary entries for the following months recount Dorset's escalating persecution of his wife to force her to accept the proposed monetary settlement. At the beginning of May he threatened to leave her forever and banish her from his residences. Then he ordered that their child be sent to him in London; Anne thought of refusing, “but when I considered that it would both make my Lord more angry with me and be worse for the Child, I resolved to let her go … and wept bitterly” (25-26). But there was worse to come: on May 9 Dorset wrote that “the Child should go live at Horseley [with her Dorset aunts], and not come hither any more so as this was a very grievous and sorrowful day to me.” She wrote begging that she might go to Horsely also, and not “to the Little House that was appointed for me,” but this was refused (26-31). The Diary also records her mounting anxiety during May over conflicting reports regarding her mother's health, and finally, on May 29, reports “the heavy news of my Mother's death which I held as the greatest and most lamentable cross that could have befallen me” (29-32). The emotional pressure of April and May must have been nearly unbearable, but these entries do not suggest desperation or nervous collapse.

Margaret Clifford's death made for a temporary rapproachment of interests between husband and wife, as Dorset sought to enhance their bargaining position vis-à-vis the Cliffords by taking possession of the Westmoreland properties in Anne's name. He urged Anne to designate him as her heir, assuring her “how kind and good a husband he would be to me”; she agreed but stipulated the clause “if I had no heirs of my own body”—thus ensuring her daughter's rights (33-35). She traveled north to take possession; Dorset followed soon after; and the child was restored to her, “so that my Lord and I were never greater friends than at this time.” Dorset also promised that he would make her “a jointure of the full thirds of his living,” and showed her a new will leaving virtually everything to the child—“a matter I little expected” (37-39).

Anne reports graphically the crisis of Christmastide 1616-17, as the King determined to settle the matter between Anne and the Clifford heirs. Dorset saw his interest in accepting the proposed financial settlement, and Anne reports pressure from all sides to give over: “All this time of my being at London I was much sent to, and visited by many, being unexpected that ever matters should have gone so well with me and my Lord, everybody persuading me to hear and make an end.”⁷⁹ She thankfully takes note, however, of a few female partisans, some limited female solidarity.⁸⁰ Among them she counts the Queen, carefully recording her surprisingly frank counsel: “[The Queen] promised me she would do all the good in it she could … [and] gave me warning not to trust my matters absolutely to the King lest he should deceive me” (48-49).

Whether or not the Queen exercised herself any further in this matter, Anne Clifford acted on her shrewd advice in her meetings with James. The entry of January 18 reports a dramatic private meeting with him:

My Lord Buckingham … brought us into the King, being in the Drawing Chamber. He put out all that were there and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair sides when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands, which my Lord consented to, but I beseech't His Majesty to pardon me for that I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever. Sometimes he used fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul means but I was resolved before so as nothing would move me … All this time I was much bound to my Lord for he was far kinder to me in all these businesses than I expected, and was very unwilling that the King should do me any public disgrace.

(48-49)

On the twentieth, the formal session with the King went forward. Anne's lively description of the scene registers her sense of being confronted with an awesome assemblage of powerful men: the King, the Chief Justice, several peers holding court office, lawyers, the Cliffords, and Dorset. It also intimates some female support (or at least comfort) from the Countess of Bedford and Lady Ruthven:

I went to my aunt Bedford in her lodging where I stay'd in Lady Ruthven's chamber till towards 8 o'clock about which time I was sent for up to the King into his Drawing Chamber when the door was lock'd and nobody suffered to stay here but my Lord and I, my Uncle Cumberland, my Coz. Clifford, my Lords Arundel, Pembroke Montgomery, Sir John Digby. For lawyers there were my Lord Chief Justice Montague and Hobart Yelverton the King's Solicitor, Sir Randal Crewe that was to speak for my Lord and I. The King asked us all if we would submit to his judgment in this case. My Uncle Cumberland, my Coz. Clifford, and my Lord answered that they would, but I would never agree to it without Westmoreland at which the King grew in a great chaff. My lord of Pembroke and the King's Solicitor speaking much against me, at last when they saw there was no remedy, my Lord fearing the King would do me some public disgrace, desired Sir John Digby would open the door, who went out with me and persuaded me much to yield to the King … Presently after my Lord came from the King when it was resolved that if I would not come to an agreement there should be an agreement made without me.

(50-51)

Anne read this outcome as a victory—“Neither I nor anybody else thought I should have passed over this day so well as I have done”—for which she gives credit to those other patriarchs, God and her husband. She had managed to maintain her cause “led miraculously by God's Providence”; and she was saved from public disgrace at the King's hands when Dorset orchestrated her timely departure.

During the next several months as the matter hung fire, Anne records great emotional distress: she often found her soul “much troubled and afflicted” upon hearing “how much I was condemned in the world and what strange censures most folks made of my courses”; but she sought comfort from God “that always helped me,” and from history—reading the family chronicles and comparing “things past with things present” (52-56). Dorset intensified his pressure to get her signature to the agreement (upon which his receipt of the full financial settlement depended). Anne often reports “a falling out about the land,”⁸¹ but on April 17 she records with relief, “My Lord told me he was resolved never to move me more in these businesses, because he saw how fully I was bent” (64). That resolution broke down by Easter, when there was again a “great falling out,” leading to strained marital relations: “This night my Lord should have lain with me, but he and I fell out about matters” (65). In May she felt especially beleaguered, hearing that Dorset had canceled her jointure and that “all Westmoreland was surrender'd to my Uncle Cumberland,” with her Russell relatives agreeing to the settlement. In June she reports herself “extremely melancholy and sad” when Dorset proposed to leave all his land to his brother, “away from the Child” (68-72). July 3 she spent “weeping the most part of the day seeing my enemies had the upper hand of me”; and on July 9 she received the King's award, which was “as ill for me as possible” (72). Though the settlement was taken to be final, Anne preserved her legal claim (especially to the rights of reversion) by steadfastly refusing her signature. The following November she notes with some relief the King's “gracious” reception, removing the threat his continued enmity would pose to her social standing.⁸²

In her Diary Anne sees herself as a loving wife who is forced to endure great suffering at the hands of her husband and much of society, but takes considerable pride in resisting the compliance demanded. She justifies her resistance in terms of the paradigm provided by Foxe's female martyrs, enacting a secular and self-interested version of their patient endurance and firm adherence to the right. The entry of April 5, 1617, shows her self-conscious adoption of this stance: “Sometimes I had fair words from him and sometimes foul, but I took all patiently, and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of my love as I could possibly, yet I told him I would never part with Westmoreland upon any condition whatever” (62).

Several cryptic diary entries suggest that her distress was exacerbated by the continued enmity of Matthew Caldicott, Dorset's favorite retainer: her note that they once lived privately at Buckhurst for several days probably implies a homosexual relationship (82). On Whitsunday, June 8, 1617, the matter reached a crisis: “My eyes were so blubbered with weeping I could scarce look up, and in the afternoon we fell out about Mathew”; the next day she took the extraordinary step of writing “to the Bishop of London against Matthew” (70-72). She seems to have won that round: some weeks later Matthew was suing for her forgiveness through Dr. Rann, the chaplain, and after complaining that she had received “so many injuries from him that I could hardly forget them,” she sent word that “as I was a Christian I would forgive him” (73-76).

Another crisis occurred at Easter 1619, when she evidently felt herself so far out of charity with her husband and “so troubled as I held not myself fit to receive the Communion.” She saw it as a special kindness that Dorset postponed the communion for the entire household, and responded to her concern about her financial insecurity after the cancellation of her jointure by “protesting to me that he would be a very good husband to me and that I should receive no prejudice by releasing my thirds.”⁸³ Her anxiety was probably exacerbated by Dorset's increasingly public relationship with Lady Penniston, which was “much talked of abroad and my Lord was condemned for it.”⁸⁴ In these weeks she often reports being “sad and melancholy,” complaining to Dorset “how good he was to everybody else and how unkind to me.”⁸⁵ After falling ill in late October 1619, she makes a point of the fact that she never left her own bedchamber until the following March—a gesture that seems to have been motivated by a wish to define in this small way the terms of her own life and to force Dorset to come to her. On December 18, after another “great falling out,” he “came and supped with me in my chamber … for I determined to keep my chamber and did not so much as go over the threshold of the door” (108-109).

She obviously accepts as a fact of life that Dorset's interests, needs, and concerns are quite different from her own, that he will have affairs, that his wife and daughter are a relatively small part of his life—no doubt finding here some reprise of her own parents' domestic situation. While she laments his behavior to her, she does not question that it is authorized by his place as her husband and lord. She also seems to care for him—rejoicing in the occasions when he “came to lie in my chamber,” keeping her tenth anniversary “as a day of jubilee”—and this attachment heightens the emotional cost of resisting his wishes (58, 65, 88). Remarkably, these attitudes subsist with a clear perception that she cannot trust Dorset to look out for her interests and those of her child—and a dogged determination to do this herself as best she can. The effort to confront and express these complex feelings in the Diary was surely a major factor in developing her sense of identity and self-worth.

The Diary also shows how Anne's relationship with her daughter contributed to her emerging sense of herself as positioned in a female line reaching from her mother to herself to the young Margaret. She certainly recognized that her status would be enhanced as the mother of a son and heir to Dorset, but she never expresses such a desire, though she reports possible pregnancies.⁸⁶ Instead, she seems to take on her own mother's role, concerned to raise an only daughter and secure her inheritance.⁸⁷ She refers to her daughter as “the Child” until her fifth birthday (July 2, 1619), and after that always by name and title, “my lady Margaret,” apparently recognizing that day as marking the end of infancy.⁸⁸ Diary entries record Anne's grief when Dorset takes the child from her, and her joy at the girl's return (25-27, 36). They also register anxieties over the child's illnesses. During her bitter fits of “the ague” in 1617 Anne “could hardly sleep all night”; and in 1619 she worried about “some distemper in her head” which produced alarming effects: “My Lady Margaret's speech was very ill so as strangers cannot understand her, besides she was so apt to take cold and so out of temper that it grieved me to think of it” (51-54, 82, 110). Anne also records carefully the small milestones in her daughter's life: her visits to London in December 1616, “where my Lord Treasurer and all the company commended her”; the days (January 23 and April 28, 1617) when she first “put on her red baize coats” and “a pair of whalebone bodice”; the falls she had when her leading strings were cut (May 1); the day (June 22) that she had her hair trimmed by Adam the barber (51, 66, 72). Unfortunately, Anne does not indicate what arrangements she made for the child's education.

The Diary also offers some insight into the activities and interests important to Anne in these years—her sense of her place in the larger culture. When in London (at Dorset House) she reports her enjoyment of social functions, music, masques, plays, and art, though she seldom mentions particular works (17-20, 43-51, 78-85). She notes the burning of the Banqueting House at Whitehall and gives several entries to the death of Queen Anne, at whose funeral occasions she was a chief mourner (84, 93-102). But there is little of the lively reportage of 1603: her interpretive powers are engaged almost entirely by her own concerns, revealing, perhaps, the psychic cost of her constant struggle. Though she took part in a few mixed gatherings, her social activities chiefly revolved around a female court circle—the ladies Ralegh, Carr, Rich, Grey, Arundel, Derby, and Carey—with whom she exchanged visits, went to masques and dinners, played Glecko and other card games, and attended upon the Queen (43-51, 78-85). Following her mother's direction, she tried to play the politics of the female court: cultivating ladies in places of influence and sending the expected New Year's gifts and other lavish presents to the Queen, on one occasion “the skirts of a white satin gown all pearled and embroidered with colours which cost me four score pounds without the satin.”⁸⁹

While in exile at Knole, she recorded her quotidian domestic activities: small exercises of local patronage; occasional visits from and to the Sackville and Russell relations and various friends, including the Sidneys from nearby Penshurst;⁹⁰ the card games, especially Glecko, which she played with the household staff when aristocratic company was unavailable; the occasional new gown worn “because I was found fault with for wearing such ill clothes”; the constant needlework, always executed while one of her staff read aloud. She does not indicate whether she thought as well of Donne as he of her, but she made special note of the week (July 20-27, 1617) he preached at Sevenoaks and dined with her.⁹¹ Occasionally the disparity between Dorset's situation and her own elicits poignant complaint:

All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cocking, to Bowling Alleys, to Plays and Horse Races, and commended by all the world. I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements, so as I may truly say, I am like an owl in the desert.

(28)

Her careful record of the books she read or had read to her during these hard years indicates how important they were to her self-realization and resistance, though she does not comment on them. No reading is reported during the stressful early months of 1616, but from September of that year she read steadily: “a great part of the History of the Netherlands,” Montaigne's Essays, the Faerie Queene, Sidney's Arcadia, as well as Sandys's Government of the Turks, and Chaucer. In March 1617 she began reading the Bible with the chaplain, Mr. Rann, but Dorset interrupted this project when he claimed Rann's services, telling her “it would hinder his study so as I must leave off reading the Old Testament till I can get somebody to read it with me” (60-61). It is not clear whether Anne, Rann, or Dorset thought these Old Testament books too difficult for a woman to read without help, or whether Anne simply wanted the benefit of Rann's learned commentary. On Good Friday she chose a book of preparation for the Sacrament, and in 1619 (the year of the Easter spiritual crisis) she was deep in religious literature: Saint Augustine's City of God, Parsons' Resolutions, “my Lady's Book of Praise of a solitary life” (a treatise by John Harington dedicated to Margaret Clifford),⁹² and Saragol's Supplication of the Saints “which my Lord gave me” (91). But by late June she was ready for Ovid's Metamorphoses, and in December for Josephus (90-91, 104, 111). Diary entries of these years also reveal her continuous attention to the family history projects: her father's sea voyages, and “the Chronicles.” These intellectual pursuits probably offered Anne some escape from her troubles, and perhaps also some vicarious imaginative experience of female resistance and power.

Anne Clifford's life and writings deliver a remarkable challenge to contemporary patriarchal ideology as she presses vigorously for her legal rights. The Diary presents a self in process, constrained by powerful social forces but struggling toward definition. In it Anne claims the importance of her own life and highlights the factors that (increasingly) empower her: an abiding belief in the rights and privileges of family and class; a strong maternal model and some sense of female community; a firm conviction that Divine Providence is engaged on her behalf; a stimulus to self-awareness and imagination through reading; and the act of writing itself, constructing self and world in language. The catalyst seems to have been struggle: she seems to see herself engaged in an almost mythic battle, against mighty odds and against every social pressure—a kind of female David taking on the Goliath of the patriarchal power structure to claim the rights of a daughter to certain patriarchal titles, privileges, and property, and to preserve the interests of a female line. Her later exercise of these rights was due largely to her good luck in outlasting all the men who stood in her way. But the Diary records the emergence of a female self able to resist existing social norms and to struggle for those rights. We find here not overt rebellion against patriarchy but a subversive re-writing in which Anne Clifford laid stubborn claim to a place of power within it.

Notes

1. I cite Vita Sackville-West's edition of the Diary (1923). It is based on what is probably a nineteenth-century copy of the lost original (MS Sackville of Knole, U269/F48, now at the Center for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Kent); the manuscript is in three volumes, without pagination, folio, or signature numbers. D. J. H. Clifford, ed., The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Wolfeboro Falls, NH: Alan Sutton, 1991) contains the Knole Diary and also Anne's later memoirs; this edition appeared too late for me to use. An eighteenth-century copy of the lost Diary, made by Elizabeth Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715-1785), contains some additional material; it is in the Portland Papers (vol. 23, ff. 74-118v), at Longleat House, Wiltshire. I am indebted to Katherine Acheson for a description of this manuscript, which forms the basis of her edition of the Diary, now in preparation.

2. The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: or, The Lawes Provision for Women. A Methodicall Collection of Such Statutes and Customes, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments and points of Learning in the Law, as doe properly concerne Women (London, 1632), 30. This work, by one T. E., revises and updates an earlier (anonymous) Elizabethan text.

3. The major biographical accounts of Anne Clifford are George C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke & Montgomery, 1590-1676: Her Life, Letters, and Work (Kendal: T. Wilson, 1922), which supplies generous extracts from letters and other documents; and Martin Holmes, Proud Northern Lady: Lady Anne Clifford, 1590-1676 (Chichester: Phillimore, 1975). Other studies include Wallace Notestein, Four Worthies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 123-166; and R. T. Spence, “Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery (1590-1676): A Reappraisal,” Northern History, 15-16 (1979-1980), 43-65. For Margaret Clifford, the best account remains chapter 21 in George Williamson's George, Third Earl of Cumberland (1558-1605): His Life and His Voyages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920).

4. For documents or references to legal proceedings, see Oxford, Clifford MS; Lincoln's Inn, Hales MSS 83 and 94; also SP 14 (James I) 17/85, May 30, 1608; 89/405, November 14, 1616; Grant Book, March 14, 1617, March 21, 1620, December 10, 1620, March 29, 1624; SP 14 (James I) 162/212, April 10, 1624; SP 16 (Charles I) 169/4, June 17, 1630. Many personal letters of Anne and Margaret Clifford are at Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/Hoth/Box 44; other letters and papers are in WD/Hoth/Box 71/6; WD/Hoth/Boxes 33, 46, 47, 49; WD/Hoth/Additional Records 6, 7, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21. Cf. Appendix, Williamson, Anne Clifford, 456-520; and Collectanea Cliffordiana, ed. Arthur Clifford (Paris, 1819). Contemporary references are in John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, Chamberlain, I, 214, 280, 287, 446 (November 7, 1605, January 10, 1609, March 3, 1609, April 29, 1613); Chamberlain, II, 63, 198, 288 (March 15, 1617, January 2, 1619, February 12, 1620).

5. Three large volumes, called the “Great Books of the Records of Skipton Castle,” were compiled under Lady Anne's direction; a copy of the entire set is at Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/Hoth/Great Books.

6. An eighteenth-century copy of Anne's lives of her parents and herself (from the third volume of the “Great Books”) is in BL, Harleian MS 6177; it is the basis of an edition by J. P. Gilson, Lives of Lady Anne Clifford and of Her Parents (London: Roxburghe Club, 1916). Her own autobiographical account is entitled A Summary of the Records and a true memorial of the life of me the Lady Anne Clifford … ; hereafter cited as Life of Me, with page number. The memoir of her father is entitled A Summary of the Records of George, Lord and Baron of Clifford … 3rd Earl of Cumberland; the memoir of her mother is called A Summary of Records and also a memorial of that religious and blessed lady, Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland. I cite them from the Roxburghe edition (Records of George, Memorial of Margaret), with page number.

7. Life of Me, 33-34; Records of George; Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland.

8. Lawes Resolutions, 9-10.

9. He may also have thought that his brother could best manage the estate and arrange for the payment of his massive debts. See Williamson, Anne Clifford, 31-36, 456-457; Holmes, Proud Northern Lady, 1-20; Spence, “Reappraisal,” 43-47.

10. Jointure properties were ceded by the husband to the wife, to guarantee her a fixed income in widowhood. The author of the Lawes Resolutions strongly urges this arrangement as far preferable to the common-law guarantee of dower (one-third of the income for her lifetime), as that right was subject to many contingencies and might have to be sought through litigation (182-192).

11. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 79-83; Life of Me, 37-41. A letter of Richard, Archbishop of Canterbury, to Dorset on March 14, 1608, certifies that the marriage took place “in the private house of the Dowager” in London on February 25, 1608, between 8 and 11 a.m., “without banns and without faculty or license obtained by the said Geoffrey Amherst, clerk”; it absolves all participants from danger of excommunication for these irregularities. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Fourth Report and Appendix (London, 1874), 310.

12. See chapter 1; Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, 146. The Berenice role may have paid tribute to Anne's long hair (to midcalf), in which she took great pride.

13. See John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Ann Arbor: University of Michgan Press, 1962), 100; Clifford, Diary.

14. Lawes Resolutions, 125, 139: “A woman as soone as she is married is called covert, in Latine nupta, that is, veiled, as it were clouded and over shadowed … she is continually sub potestate viri. Bracton terms her under the scepter of her husband … Every Feme Covert is quodammodo an infant … even in that which is most her owne.”

15. Clifford, Life of Me; Diary. Chamberlain to Carleton, March 29, 1624; April 10, 1624, Chamberlain, II, 288.

16. A consolatory letter from her old tutor Samuel Daniel refers to her many afflictions as trials sent by God “that you may be numbred amongst the examples of patience and substancy to other ages.” Whole Works, sig. N 1. Henry Peacham's funeral elegy for Dorset called for her soul, like the emblematic palm tree, to grow stronger under its many burdens—“Father, Mother, Sonne, now Husbands losse,”—in An Aprill Shower, Shed in Abundance of Teares, for … Richard Sacville (London, 1624).

17. Philip Herbert's first wife was Lady Susan Vere, the Countess of Montgomery, to whom Lady Mary Wroth dedicated her Urania (see chapter 9). He engaged King James's interest by his good looks and his passion for hunting.

18. For Philip's character, see Williamson, Anne Clifford, 160-185; DNB, IX, 659-660; Tresham Lever, The Herberts of Wilton (London: John Murray, 1967), 76-117. John Aubrey (Brief Lives, 146) credits him with aesthetic judgment, based on his commissions to Inigo Jones and other artists for the remodeling of Wilton.

19. George Sedgwick, Memoirs, reprinted in Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmoreland and Cumberland, 2 vols. (London, 1777), 294-303. Sedgwick's original is not extant, except for the segments published here. Sedgwick records Anne's resolution “if God ordained a second marriage for her, never to have one that had children, and was a courtier, a curser and swearer (I, 299). And it was her fortune to light on one with all these qualifications in the extreme.” He also underscores the irony of Philip's appointment as Chancellor of Oxford University since “[he] could scarce either write or read” (I, 297).

20. Life of Me, 47-49; Williamson, Anne Clifford, 162-163.

21. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 160-197; Life of Me, 49-55. While at Wilton, Anne received one letter from George Herbert (December 10, 1631) expressing gratitude for some “goodness” from her. George Herbert, Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 376-377. Aubrey (Brief Lives, 157) states that Herbert was chaplain to his kinsman Philip Herbert, and Arthur Woodnoth claims that Herbert paid Anne an hour's visit at Wilton in October 1631. The Ferrar Papers, ed. B. Blackstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 267. If she had further contacts with the poet, no records survive.

22. Anne notes that her cousin and friend Francis, Earl of Bedford (who assumed the duties of her nearest male relative), was instrumental in drawing up the jointure arrangements. She comments that Baynard's Castle was “full of riches, and was the more secured by my lying there,” while recognizing as well that it was “a place of refuge for me to hide myself in, till those troubles were over passed.” Her six-years' stay there was “the longest time that ever I continwed to lye in one Howse in all my Life.” Life of Me, 51.

23. Lawes Resolutions, 232.

24. Sedgwick may exaggerate the boldness of her reply to Cromwell's offer of help in resolving disputes with her tenants over rents, but the appeal to law rather than the judgment of rulers is quite in her style: “She … told them plainly she would never refer any of her concerns in that kind to the protector or any other person living, but leave it wholly to the discretion of the law; adding further, that she had refused to submit to king James on the like account, and would never do it to the protector, whatever hazard or danger she incurred thereby.” Memoirs, 301.

25. Edward Rainbowe, A Sermon Preached at the Interrment of Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (London, [1676]), 47-49.

26. Rainbowe, Sermon, 13, 23-28. Anne Clifford restored the almshouse at Beamsley founded by her mother, and founded another herself, at Appleby; both are designed for thirteen impoverished widows. Sedgwick notes (Memoirs, 300-301) that she was willing to incur a “vast charge in law-suits to vindicate her rights” vis-à-vis her tenants—rights thrown into confusion by some of Francis Clifford's arrangements. To illustrate, he tells the possibly apocryphal story that she spent £200 for the recovery of a single tributary hen, and then invited the tenant to dine upon it with her. Sedgwick insists that her building and local purchases were “a great help and support for those parts” (Memoirs, 302) in stimulating the local economy, though Spence in “Reappraisal” argues that the high rents her tenants paid to support those policies may have outweighed the benefits.

27. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 226-284, 393-403. Anne's “Day by Day Book” for January 1 to March 21, 1676, is the only extant diary from the later years. It is printed verbatim in Williamson, Anne Clifford, 265-284, 226-284, 393-403.

28. Rainbowe, Sermon, 51. Rainbowe reads her later life against the paradigm provided by Proverbs 14:1, “Every wise Woman buildeth her House,” expanding the metaphor of house building from the very appropriate architectural to the intellectual and spiritual realm. After asserting the spiritual equality of women and men (“Souls know no Sexes”), he details how Anne Clifford fulfilled women's special responsibility for house building by her numerous material edifices but also her nonmaterial ones: a prudent and well-governed family; free and open hospitality to friends, clients, and “all of Quality”; personal oversight of her estates and exact accounts kept weekly “in Books of her own Method”; and a soul furnished with “all Virtues belonging to her Sex and Condition,” notably humility, modesty, temperance, justice, courage, courtesy, beneficence, and piety.

29. Anne directed the enterprise (notable among family histories for its completeness and accuracy), annotated the volumes, and wrote the memorials of her immediate family and herself. The project had its origin (the title pages proclaim) in Margaret Clifford's “great and painful industry” in collecting records “out of the several offices and courts of this kingdom” to begin the lawsuits in Anne's behalf.

30. Records of George, 1.

31. See discussion and record of inscriptions in Williamson, Anne Clifford, 334-345, 489-507.

32. Life of Me, 36.

33. Records of George, 6.

34. Anne's collection of his voyages is entitled “A Brief Relation of the Severall Voyages undertaken and performed by the Right Honourable George, Earle of Cumberland in his own person and at his owne charge … faithfully collected out of the Relations Observations and Journals of Several Credible and Worthie Persons Actors and Commanders under the said Noble Earle.” The original is at Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/Hoth/Additional Records, 70; the Lambeth Palace Library has a copy, MS 2688.

35. Records of George, 7-8.

36. The tombstone identifies George Clifford as the “last heir male of the Cliffords that rightfully enjoyed those ancient lands of inheritance in Westmoreland and in Craven, with the Baronies and Honours appertaining to them,” and herself as his only surviving “legitimate” child. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 405.

37. Life of Me, 40. Cf. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [The Old Arcadia], ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1973), 85. The passage echoes verses sung by Dorus in “The First Eclogues”: “Come from marble bowers, many times the gay harbour of anguish.” In the Van Dyke painting at Wilton of Philip Herbert, his first and second wives, and his children, Anne is shown curiously detached from the rest of the family, in a sober black dress, gazing straight forward.

38. In retrospect she counts Dorset and Pembroke (for their nobility) among the many blessings Providence bestowed on her (Life of Me, 39): “I must confess with unexpressible thankfullness, that … I was born a happy creature in mind, body, and fortune, and that those two lords of mine, to whom I was afterwards by the Divine providence marryed, were in their several kinds worthy noblemen as any then were in this kingdom; yet was it my misfortune to have contradictions and crosses with them both.” She says nothing about the profligacy of either.

39. Life of Me, 44. Her “character” of Dorset portrayed him as “of a just mynde, of a sweete Disposition, and verie valiant in his own person”; as “so good a scholar in all manner of learning” that he surpassed all the young nobility at Oxford; and as a generous patron “to scholars, soldiers, and all worthy men.” His chief fault was diminishing his estate through “excessive bounty” and “excessive prodigality in house-keeping, and other noble ways at court, as tilting, masquing, and the like.” To Dorset's brother Edward, who succeeded to the title, she ascribed “malitious hatred” and constant machinations, deflected by the usual providential protection: “By the cuningness of his witt he was a great practiser against me, from the time that I marryed his brother till his own death … but I, whose destiny was guided by a mercyfull and divine Providence, escaped the subtilty of all his practices, and the evils which he plotted against me.” Life of Me, 45-46.

40. Life of Me, 49. Her “character” of Pembroke (Philip Herbert) points with pride to his heritage—his mother was “only sister to the renowned Sir Philip Sidney.” But she implies his failure to live up to it: he was “no scholar at all,” having left the university after only a few months to become a courtier, “as judging himself fit for that kind of life when he was not passing fifteen or sixteen years of age.” Again she sits in judgment, offering a balanced evaluation of his qualities: “He was of a very quick apprehension, a sharp understanding, very crafty withal, and of a discerning spirit, but extreamly cholerick by nature” and “generally throughout the realm very well beloved.” Life of Me, 55. Anne evidently wanted (and achieved with Northampton) a much better match for her daughter, but she describes herself simply as supporting her daughter's wishes and interests against her stepfather. The terms again suggest mother and daughter united in opposition to the patriarchy: “A great cause of anger and falling out between my lord and me, because he desired to have one of his younger sons marryed with my daughter Isabella, which I could no way remedie, my daughter being herself extreamly averse from that match, though he believed it was in my power to have brought it to pass.” Life of Me, 52.

41. See “A Summary by way of digression, concerning Francis Clifford, who came to be 4th Earl of Cumberland” (Gilson, Lives, 11-14), and “A Summary, by way of digression, concerning Henry, Lord Clifford, fifth and last heir male of the Cliffords that were Earls of Cumberland” (Gilson, Lives, 15-17). She describes her usurping uncle Francis as “an honorable gentleman, and of a good, noble, sweet, and courteous nature,” displacing her resentment onto his son and heir, Henry, whom she identifies as the prime mover against her in that he “did absolutely govern both him [Francis] and his estate.” She also claims (improbably) that his marriage to the daughter of Robert Cecil, “the greatest man of power then in the kingdom … was made purposely on his side to maintain those suits of law more powerfully” against her. Gilson, Lives, 15.

42. Life of Me, 36. She reaffirmed this point in her Memorial of Margaret Clifford (30), citing a “great divine” who said that Margaret was like a seraph in her “ardent love and affection toward the most Divine Trinity, towards all goodness and good folks, and that she had the virtue of the bowells of compassion in her in more perfection than any he ever knew; and therefore he thought it much more happiness to be descended from so blessed a woman, than to be born heir to a great kingdom.”

43. Memorial of Margaret, 19-23. Her interests are underscored in the Great Picture, which depicts Margaret holding the Psalms of David; the Bible, an English translation of Seneca, and (her own) handwritten book of alchemical distillations and medicines are on a shelf over her head. See the illustration at the beginning of this chapter, and Williamson, Anne Clifford, 339. Her “high spirit” is both alluded to and demonstrated in several letters from Margaret to her husband in 1603-4 protesting his account of their separation as owing to her “extreme high spiritt, that your Lordshipp cannot endure to live withall, nor to afford such allowance, as in honour you have promised.” Portland Papers, vol. 23, ff. 25-26; cf. ff. 17, 35.

44. Memorial of Margaret, 26.

45. These letters between Anne Clifford and her mother are from the period June 16, 1614-April 26, 1616, and are in Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/Hoth/Box 44. I have modernized orthography in Margaret's letters, as it is very eccentric and marked with northern dialect elements. A copy by Anne in the Portland Papers, vol. 23, ff. 65-66, is much condensed.

46. Ibid. Cf. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 146, 151-153.

47. WD/Hoth/Box 44. Cf. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 154.

48. WD/Hoth/Box 44.

49. Memorial of Margaret, 18.

50. Anne Clifford's letters of May 3, 1615, and April 26, 1616, to her mother, WD/Hoth/Box 44. See also Williamson, Anne Clifford, 149, 154.

51. Memorial of Margaret, 23-24. She also found a quasi-typological meaning in the “remarkable” destiny whereby “those countries where my mother lived a stranger and a pilgrim and in some discontents are now the setled abode and habitation of both her [married] grandchildren.” Life of Me, 53.

52. Reprinted in Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland, 285-288.

53. The monument, known locally as “The Countess's Pillar,” is inscribed:

    This Pillar was erected in Anno Domini January, 1654 by ye right honoble Anne, Countess Dowager of Pembroke, etc. daughter and sole heire of ye right honoble George Earl of Cumberland, etc. for a memorial of her last parting in this place with her good and pious mother, ye right honoble Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, ye 2nd of April 1616, in memorial whereof she also left an annuity of four pounds to be distributed to ye poor within this parish of brougham every 2nd day of April for ever, upon ye stone table here hard by. Laus Deo.

    The epitaph inscribed on the tomb was possibly written by Anne:

    Who, fayth, love, mercy, noble constancie,
    To god, to virtue, to distress, to right,
    Observ'd, express't, show'd, held religiouslie
    Hath here the monument thou seest in sight.
    The cover of her earthly part, but, passenger,
    Know heaven and fame contayn the best of her.

54. Memorial of Margaret, 24. She made large claims for her aunt's influence: “This Countess of Warwick … was no less generally esteemed and honored through the whole court and all the said Queen's dominions; which indeed she deserved, for she was a great friend to virtue and a helper to many petitioners and others that were in distress, that came to court for relief of their wrongs.”

55. Life of Me, 36, 38.

56. Anne Clifford, Life of Me, 35-36. Daniel had formerly served as tutor to William Herbert, son to the Earl of Pembroke and Mary Sidney. For the account books, see T. D. Whitaker, The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven (London, 1878), 388. Also see Williamson, Anne Clifford, 58-67.

57. Memorial of Margaret, 28.

58. See illustration at beginning of chapter. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 498-500, provides a listing of the books.

59. Among the literary works addressed to Margaret Clifford as patron are Spenser's Fowre Hymnes (1596), Daniel's Poetical Essayes (1599) and Whole Workes (1601, 1604, 1607); Henry Lok, Ecclesiastes (1597); Robert Greene, Penelope's Web (1587); Thomas Lodge, Prosopopeia: Containing the Teares of the holy Marie (1596); and Lanyer, Salve Deus (1611). Also works by Henry Peacham, Henry Constable, and Francis Davison. See Williams, Index of Dedications.

60. Theological works addressed to Margaret Clifford as patron include William Perkins, Salve for a Sicke man (1611), and Workes (1600); Samuel Hieron, Certain Meditations (1615) and Sermons (1620); Richard Greenham, Works (1599); Thomas Saville, The Raising of Them that are Fallen (1606); Peter Muffett, The Excellencie of the Mysterie of Christ Jesus (1590); Richard Vennor, The Right Way to Heaven (1602). Also works by James Balmford, Thomas Tymme, H. Graie, and Christopher Shutte. See Williams, Index of Dedications.

61. Samuel Daniel, “To the Lady Anne Clifford,” in A Panegyrike Congratulatory … Also Certaine Epistles, sigs. E 5-6.

62. “To the right noble Lady Anne Clifford,” in Certaine Small Works (London, 1607) [sig. A 7]; “To the Lady Anne, Countesse of Dorcet,” in Salve Deus, sigs. e 4-f 2. Lanyer's country-house poem “The Description of Cooke-Ham” contains a much idealized and perhaps wholly fanciful description of Anne's youthful sports and recreations.

63. Anthony Stafford, Staffords Niobe, pt. 2 (London, 1611), rpt. in Williamson, Anne Clifford, 516-517; cf. ibid., 329-333.

64. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 63.

65. Rainbowe, Sermon, 39.

66. Both comment on her readiness to quote Scripture, and her special fondness for the Psalms and Romans 8, Sedgwick observing also that “she could give a good account of most histories that are extant in the English tongue.” Both comment as well on her lifelong inattention to food and clothing: Sedgwick notes that “she wore in her latter days, always very plain and mean apparel; indeed far too mean for her quality.” Rainbowe, Sermon, 39-40; Sedgwick, Memoirs, 302-303.

67. Rainbowe, Sermon, 40.

68. BL, Additional MS 15,232.

69. See Faerie Queene VI, stanza 36, ll. 6-7: “Through infusion sweete / Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive / I follow here the footing of thy feete.”

70. For some theoretical treatments of autobiographical writing, and the special features of women's autobiography, see James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Wayne Shumaker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Forms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); Karl J. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Domna C. Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph (New York: Literary Forum, 1984; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Some historical treatments of autobiographical writing in early modern England include Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969); Sara Heller Mendelson, “Stuart Women's Diaries and Occasional Memoirs,” in Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 181-210; Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen's Private Diaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Extracts are reprinted in Elspeth Graham et al., eds. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writing by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989). Delany accounts for the upsurge of autobiographies by both men and women in the later seventeenth century by pointing to the increased self-awareness and self-importance promoted by Puritan methods of introspection and also the widespread consciousness of changes in social roles (British Autobiography, 1-23).

71. See list in CBEL, I, 2259-64; also W. Matthews, ed., British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written between 1442 and 1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950). Both of the domestic diaries were products of a Puritan upbringing, and probably undertaken as exercises in spiritual account keeping. Lady Margaret Hoby's Diary records Hoby's daily prayers and meditations, her constant attention to household management and accounts, and her frequent medical and surgical attentions to the sick of the community, but displays little introspection or self-analysis. Grace Sherrington Mildmay's lengthy memoir of her life (c. 1570-1617) as child and wife (written in her old age, as a contribution to the education of her daughter and other young people of her class) contains much lively description of daily activities and family life.

72. Simon Forman, “Autobiography,” Bodleian, MS Ashmole 208.

73. Sackville-West's edition obscures the effect of the format by placing Anne's marginalia, together with her own explanatory notes, at the bottom of the pages. Two hands at least are identifiable in the marginal notes, though the voice is Anne Clifford's.

74. That some marginal notations were added much later is clear from that for December 15, 1616: “Upon the 15th was Mr. John Tufton just 8 years, being he that was afterwards married to my 1st Child in the Church of St. Bartholomew” (Diary, 44). That marriage took place in 1629. There is some attention to public matters in the Diary proper, but the large number of such references in the marginalia suggest that Anne felt called upon to fill in that aspect of the record, so as to fit her diary for a wider audience—including at least her descendants.

75. Diary, 12. Anne conveys a sense of the plague as a fact of daily life:

    From Windsor the Court removed to Hampton Court, where my mother and I lay at Hampton Court, in one of the round towers, round about which were tents where they died two or three in a day of the plague. There I fell extremely sick of a fever, so as my Mother was in some doubt it might turn to the plague, but within two or three days I grew reasonably well, and was sent away to my cousin Stiddolph's, for Mrs. Taylor was put from me, her husband dying of the plague shortly after … The next day Mr. Menerill as he went abroad fell down suddenly and died, so as most thought it was the plague, which was then very rife; it put us all in great fear and amazement.

76. Diary, 7-17. Anne records her particular excitement over the ceremonies surrounding the Feast of Saint George at Windsor: “I stood with my Lady Elizabeth's Grace in the shrine of the great hall at Windsor, to see the King and all the knights set at dinner. Thither came the Archduke's Ambassador, who was received by the King and Queen in the great hall, where there was such an infinite company of lords and ladies and so great a Court, as I think I shall never see the like again” (11).

77. Diary, 18-19. On the same day, she notes, Lady Grantham warned her of the impending visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury and “persuaded me very earnestly to agree to this business which I took as a great argument of her love.”

78. Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/Hoth/44. The paper, duly witnessed by nine men's signatures and also her mother's, reads:

    Memoranda that I Anne Countesse of dorsett, soale daughter and heire to George late Earle of Cumberland, doth take witnesse of all these gentlemen present: that I both desier and offer my selfe to goe up to London, with my men and horses, but they having Receaved a Contrary Commandment, from my Lord my husband will by no meanes Consent nor permitt me to goe with them, Now my desire is, that all the world may know that this stay of myne, percedes onely from my husbands Command, Contrary to my Consent or agreement, whereof I have gotten these names underwritten to testefye the same.

79. Diary, 45. Specifically, she reports that Lady Arundel “had much talk with me about the business and persuaded me to yield to the King in all things”; and that “Lady D[erby?], my Lady Montgomery, my Lord Burleigh, persuaded me to refer these businesses to the King” (Diary, 46, 49).

80. One was Lady Selby (Dorset's cousin and daughter to the Lord Treasurer), who told her “she had heard some folks say that I have done well in not consenting to the composition” (Diary, 31-32).

81. Banished to the country, she was especially anxious when Dorset reported in late February “how bitter the King stood against me,” and that he would disallow even her rights of reversion if she held out (Diary, 56).

82. Ibid., 80-81. She notes that the King “bid me to go to his attorney, who should inform him more of my desires,” suggesting some gesture to secure the rights of reversion; she records also that on this occasion “King James kissed me when I was with him, and that was the first time I was so near King James as to touch him.”

83. Ibid., 91-92. The “thirds” were her general dowry rights as a widow to one-third of her husband's estate; she had agreed (reluctantly) to the revocation of the previous jointure settlement securing those rights.

84. Ibid., 106. Earlier, as Aubrey notes (Brief Lives, 100) Dorset was said to be the “greatest gallant” of Venetia Stanley (later Digby) and to have had “one, if not more children by her.” Aubrey reports also that Dorset settled on her an annuity of £500.

85. Diary, 102. He responded by promising her a jointure of £4,000 a year, though that was to be derived in part from funds that would be forfeited to Cumberland if she renewed her lawsuits.

86. Williamson, Anne Clifford, 149.

87. Her second daughter, Isabella, was born in 1622, after the period covered by the Diary.

88. Lawrence Stone, among others, has speculated that the high rate of infant mortality contributed to the disposition of early modern era parents to hold their young children at some emotional distance. Family, Sex, and Marriage, 37-66. The youngest infants were at greatest risk, and by age five the worst hazards had been survived. The Diary shows that Anne kept no such distance from the infant Margaret, but the naming at age five recognizes the place in society she might now live to fill. On that birthday also Dorset “caused her health to be drank throughout the house,” and in the same month she began to sit for her portrait by Van Somer (Diary, 104-105).

89. Diary, 36, 46, 80, 83-84. Besides Lady Bedford (her kinswoman and the Queen's favorite), she sought out Lady Ruthven, Lady Wotton, Lady Verulam (wife of Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor), and Lady Pembroke (wife of the Lord Chamberlain).

90. She visited Penshurst with some frequency, associating with Lady Lisle (Barbara Sidney), Lady Mary Wroth, and Lady Dorothy Sidney (75-77). On one occasion, however, after a quarrel (August 4, 1617) Dorset went off to Penshurst without her, “although my Lord and Lady Lisle sent a man on purpose to desire me to come.” She also cultivated Dorset's sisters, the Ladies Sackville, Compton, and Beauchamp, and his niece Cecily Neville, endeavoring “to win the love of my Lord's kindred by all the fair means I could” (Diary, 69).

91. Ibid., 74. She also records visits (January 1619) from “my old Lady Donne and my young Lady Donne, with whom I had much talk about religion” (85).

92. This book, belonging to her mother, is a treatise inspired by Petrarch's De Vita Solitaria; it has been attributed to Sir John Harington, and is included in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington Together with The Prayse of Private Life, ed. Norman McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 323-378. The manuscript was presented to Margaret Clifford by Samuel Daniel.