[In the following excerpt, Clifford provides a brief overview of the content and composition of Clifford's diaries and offers a detailed discussion of her family background.]

‘It is but seldom that any personage who is not of first class historical importance has succeeded in impressing his or her personality upon a whole countryside or has transmitted, however superficially, a personal tradition through succeeding generations of a rural population. This is, however, the case with the Lady Anne Clifford.’ This comment from the introduction to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments' 1936 inventory of Westmorland monuments is as valid today, four hundred years after Lady Anne's birth, as it has ever been. Indeed, the impress of her character and her actions can still be felt in the rural areas of Westmorland and Craven as if she had been alive just a few years ago. Yet this remarkable woman died in 1676.

Lady Anne, as she is always referred to in Appleby and Skipton, was the last of the illustrious northern branch of the Cliffords to bear the name. From her earliest years she appears to have been imbued with all the traditions of her family and that pride of race which a long descent from a medieval stock afforded. She had a passion for the pomp of her family history, making continual notes from documents that had been found telling of even the minor doings of her ancestors, among whom were numbered the ‘Butcher’ Lord who fell at Towton, and ‘The Shepherd Lord’ who spent much of his youth as a fugitive tending sheep among the Lakeland fells.

Anne Clifford was the only surviving daughter—as she is careful to tell us—of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland. She married successively Richard, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke. In spite of frequent quarrels over the disposal of her inheritance, her first marriage was hardly so unhappy as the second, which was an inevitable failure.

The Clifford lands in the north of England had, in accordance with her father's iniquitous will, to pass through the male line before reverting to herself; so it was not until the deaths of her uncle and cousin, the fourth and fifth earls, without further male heirs, that in 1643 she entered into her inheritance. Even then it was not for another six years that she at length found it possible to move from London to the north. From that time, when she was almost sixty, until her death in 1676, she never again left her northern estates, and the picture of this great lady, hereditary Sheriffess of Westmorland residing in one or other of her castles, and gathering round about her a little court, becomes increasingly distinct.

This picture is at once attractive and intimate, and displays in all its phases a character which combined a masculine determination with a very feminine affection for her family and dependants. A determined lady, pursuing her course of action regardless of its effects on her health or even its dangers to life itself, all the while hosting rounds of visits from her daughters and numerous grandchildren, and regularly presenting little gifts to her servants, tenants and friends. Her love of the countryside, especially within the bounds of her lands, was a ruling passion; and there even survives a word-picture of Lady Anne in her country clothes—a black tweed—‘her dress, not disliked by any, was as yet imitated by none’.

The details of this picture are to be found in Lady Anne's diaries, which she kept for most of her long life. They have come down to us, not, unfortunately, as a complete record, but as four separate and distinct manuscripts, located in four different places.

The first, regrettably fragmented, manuscript is a late eighteenth-century transcript which now forms part of the Sackville Collection at Kent County Record Office, Maidstone. It seems to have originated during the time of Anne's first marriage to Richard Sackville. His country seat was at Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, and it was here that she probably made most of her notes. This Knole Diary covers in fact only some four years between 1603 and 1619, at which time it abruptly ends. The first section covers Anne's childhood, and includes an on-the-spot account of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth through very young eyes, followed by a day-by-day description of the royal progress made by the newly crowned James Stuart and his somewhat ineffectual wife, Anne of Denmark. There is then a gap until 1616. Anne Clifford is now Countess of Dorset, and on almost every page appear her reactions to the running battle she is waging with her wayward, spendthrift husband, her Uncle Francis, and King James himself, over the inheritance of the northern estates. That there are regular rows between Anne and Richard comes through only too clearly, but her allusions to these are delicate in the extreme, and it may be argued that though this is essentially a very personal diary, Lady Anne chooses her words with care for fear of the pages falling into the wrong hands. The whole of the year 1618 is unaccounted for in the surviving manuscript, and family legend would have it that these entries were deliberately suppressed by a later member of the family.

Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, died in 1624, leaving his wife with two surviving daughters and still fighting her case. In 1630 she married, not without some considerable misgiving, the ageing Philip Herbert. He proved, if anything, a far worse choice than Sackville, and for most of their married life they lived apart. Thankfully for Anne, he died in 1650, but by this time she had won her case and was already resident in the north.

For the period from 1620 to 1649 two further sources, although very incomplete, nevertheless keep us in touch with Anne's fortunes. The first, the Books of Record, which form part of the Hothfield manuscripts, are discussed below. The second is a slim volume, located in the British Library, which is in itself a transcript made in 1727 by Henry Fisher. On first inspection it appears to be a précis from the Books of Record, containing as it does summaries of the genealogies which comprise most of those documents, but there are also reminiscences by Lady Anne on her life. Moreover, Fisher also includes entries covering the important years of Anne's second marriage, which appear nowhere else. These I have included in the section entitled ‘The Years Between’.

The second main Diary begins in 1650. It is preserved in the third volume of the Books of Record, or the Great Books, as Anne liked to call them. She arranged for three almost identical copies of these books to be made; two sets of which are to be found in Kendal in the care of Cumbria Record Office.

The first two volumes contain vast amounts of genealogical information about the early ancestors of the Cliffords, acquired painstakingly by Anne and her mother as evidence to present to the courts on the inheritance matter. They contain extracts from deeds, wills and the like, some of which have only survived in this way, and which she must have had to call upon during her thirty-eight year long fight. What makes these books so fascinating is that they are original, and include regular notes and alterations in Anne's own hand.

The third volume contains what I have for convenience called the Kendal Diary, a continuous record taking us right up to within three months of Lady Anne's death. Here we have the private thoughts of an ageing, stubborn and ‘Proud Northern Lady’ as Martin Holmes has so aptly called her. Anne is now largely at peace with the world; her daughters are happily married, and have produced many grandchildren, of whom she is obviously very fond. They visit her regularly, and she is often in touch with them by letter. Their births, marriages and deaths are all minutely recorded. Anne hardly makes any mention of the world outside her own domain. There is scant mention of international or even national events, in contrast to the records made by her contemporaries Pepys and Evelyn. A passing reference to the Great Fire of London, the visit of a foreign nobleman, and her unconcealed contempt for life at the court of King Charles II, which it should be remembered she did not once attend, are practically the only comments she makes on the world outside her own circle of interest. Instead she passes on a vivid tapestry of her life among the Westmorland fells which she had loved so much since that first time she set eyes on them, as a girl, and which now at last, she could call her very own.

The Great Books were clearly written down in several different hands at Lady Anne's dictation. Principal among her scribes must have been Edward Langley, who served for many years as her secretary; there is a letter still in existence in which she says: ‘Take care thatt there may be some greatt paper be bought for Ed. Langley to writt in, for the finishing of my 3 greatt written hand-books. One of them, which is the first parte was brought well to mee withein this few days hither, and I pray you, haste the 2 partes, which is the Biggest of them, done hither to mee as soon as Langley hath done it.’

The Great Books at Kendal are indeed large by modern standards; the pages measure 17 in × 14 in. And it is the final half of the third volume that contains the day-by-day notes that form the bulk of the Diary. Lady Anne calls it ‘A Summary of my Life’, and the fact that it starts in 1650, implies that it was only a part of a larger project.

One can only speculate as to where the remainder of her diaries may be; it has been said that the 6th Earl of Thanet, a grandson of Anne's, was responsible for their destruction. A.H. Whitaker, in his History of Craven (1823), recalls that he saw at Skipton several references to large parcels of notes that may possibly have been destroyed by the earl. Whatever the truth of this claim, it is still the case that these valuable original documents have, so far, never been recovered.

Fortunately, however, the original manuscript of Lady Anne's ‘Last Months’ has survived intact, in the care of the Hasell McCosh family of Dalemain, Cumbria, descendants of Edward Hasell, Lady Anne's private secretary. It is of great interest in that it records Lady Anne's diary entries until the day before she died, and in these last few pages we are able to glimpse perhaps as never before the endearing qualities of her character.

She welcomes a continual stream of local worthies to her favourite castle of Brougham, giving away small gifts to those deserving recognition and reprimanding others for their misdemeanours. Although her health cannot have been of the best—she continually mentions that she was confined to her room—yet she seems to have retained a wonderful mental awareness right up until the very end.

.....

Westminster, Thursday 8 April 1603. The funeral procession of Queen Elizabeth is passing down Whitehall on its way to the Abbey. Among the watching crowd is a young girl of thirteen. Her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, is one of the pallbearers, and her aunt, the Countess of Warwick, is another. This girl later noted, somewhat plaintively, that, ‘I was not allowed to be one because I was not high enough, which did much trouble me’. And she had to be content with watching the funeral service from another part of the Abbey.

The girl's name was Anne Clifford, and little could she have realized as she watched the last of the Tudor monarchs being laid to rest, that she too, after almost outliving the three Stuart kings who succeeded Elizabeth, would, in her turn, be the last of the illustrious north country line of her family to bear the proud name of Clifford.

Anne Clifford was born at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire on 30 January 1590. Her father was George, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, and her mother, the beautiful and talented Margaret Russell, a daughter of the Earl of Bedford. She was taken to London early on in her life, and placed in the care of her ‘Aunt Warwick’, a great lady at court, whose task it was to train the little girl in courtly manners, preparing her for a position in the Queen's Household when she was old enough.

The Cumberlands had had two sons before Anne was born, but both had died young; indeed she was only fourteen months old when the second boy died at North Hall in Hertfordshire, and she relates that, ‘ever after that time I continewed to bee the onely Childe of my parents, nor had they any other Daughter but myself’.

In her Great Books she reflects on her childhood: ‘I was verie happie in my first Constitution, both in my mynd and Bodye. Both for internall and externall Endowments, for never was there Childe more equallie resembleing both Father and Mother than myself. The Collour of myne eyes was Black lyke my father's, and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my Mother's. The haire of myne head,’ she goes on, ‘was Browne and thick, and so long that it reached to the Calfe of my Legges when I stood upright, with a peake of haire on my forehead and a Dimple in my Chynne lyke my Father, full Cheekes and round face lyke my Mother, and an exquisite shape of Bodie resembling my Father.’

From the age of eleven, Anne had as tutor the poet and writer Samuel Daniel. He must have had a tremendous influence on her, as she became a great lover of poetry, with a particular affection for the writings of Edmund Spenser. Anne never ceased to venerate Daniel, and sometime after his death in 1619, she caused, at her own expense, a monument to be erected to his memory in the tiny church at Beckington in Somerset where he is buried.

Shortly after Anne's birth in 1590, George Clifford had been appointed the Queen's Champion, and in 1592, he was admitted to the Most Noble Order of the Garter. He had now become one of Elizabeth's most trusted advisers, and what little time he spent in England he preferred to spend at court, rather than returning to one or other of his properties to stay with his family.

George Clifford's lands, acquired over the centuries by means of judicious marriages and from grateful sovereigns, covered a sizeable area of north-west England; he also owned or leased country seats in the south, as well as at least two properties in London.

He was lavish with his wealth, both in England and abroad. He equipped no less than eleven expeditions to various parts of the world—as far East as Madagascar, and west to the Azores and the Caribbean. Some of these trips were on her majesty's service, but others appear to have had a distinctly buccaneering connection; as we can gather from documents of the time, not all the booty that the earl gained from his forays necessarily ended up in the royal coffers. From 1586 almost until his death he was rarely at home, and although his letters to his wife—‘swete Meg’—show some affection, he treated her very badly, and so far as their daughter was concerned he remained a very remote figure indeed.

George Clifford outlived his queen by only two years, dying at the fairly young age of forty-seven. Anne was legally his sole heir, her two brothers having died young. Her father, however, neglectful of his family to the last, although leaving Anne the not inconsiderable sum of £15,000, willed the entire estates to his brother Francis, who succeeded to the earldom.

To be fair, George must have realized when he made out his will in 1603 that he was unlikely to have a son to succeed at that time, and wished to save his daughter the responsibilities attached to running such a vast enterprise. After all, she was hardly fifteen when he died. None the less, it was a cruel move, and was in fact in direct opposition to an entail made by King Edward II to an earlier Clifford, in which it was clearly stated that the Clifford lands should always descend to the direct heir, whatever the sex. After George's death, his wife almost immediately started to contest the will on her daughter's behalf, and then, a year or two later, Anne was taken north to view her inheritance.

The Clifford estates covered most of the old historic county of Westmorland, together with that part of North Yorkshire known as Craven; in all, an area estimated in size as almost 90,000 acres. The northern boundary was marked by Brougham Castle, near Penrith, the southern by Skipton Castle. In between, at strategic points, were the castles of Appleby, Brough and Pendragon. All these castles had, in days gone by, seen action against Scottish raiders, and all, especially Skipton, were to see more during the Civil War.

Anne herself relates that she and her mother were ‘forced for their owne good’ to visit Westmorland, and that they arrived at Appleby Castle on 22 July 1607, ‘which was the first time that I had been in the Countie since my father's death’. Lady Cumberland had already decided upon the course of action she should adopt over the estates, and began to instigate a very careful search of all relevant papers which would enable them to make out a strong enough case in support of the claim. In the ensuing years, an enormous collection of documents was amassed, many of them family papers, which were laboriously copied down. Covering over three hundred years of Clifford family history, it was a collection which, in the words of John Baynes, writing a century later, ‘no other noble family in the world can show’.

Mother and daughter stayed for a time at Appleby, and then moved on to Brougham, and then after three or four nights at Naworth, home of a relative, they returned back to London, intending to call at Skipton on the way. But here they were barred from entering the castle where Anne had been born, by order of the new earl. Disappointed by such abrupt treatment they stayed at nearby Beamsley, where her mother had been engaged in building a hospital for the elderly ladies of the district. From here they toured the Craven lands, which included Barden Tower and Bolton Abbey, where several of Anne's ancestors lay buried. They arrived back in London in April 1608, and shortly afterwards Lady Cumberland started proceedings in the court of ward concerning the lands of her daughter's inheritance.

The Countess of Cumberland died in 1616, and Anne, still only twenty-six, took up the challenge with a determination and stubbornness that completely belied her youth and small stature. Mention of this ‘Great Business’ that she was engaged upon occurs frequently in the pages of the Knole Diary, and so as to more easily understand the disputes and their background, in which Lady Anne had to deal against two unsympathetic husbands, her ‘Uncle Cumberland’, and indeed King James himself, it would be useful to look at the earlier history of the family.

Using as a guide the sequence employed by Lady Anne in her Great Books, the first ancestor to mention is Robert de Viteripont, whose grandfather came over to England with William the Conqueror. Robert was a great favourite of King John, and by reason of the royal favour, as well as his own abilities, which gained him marriage with an heiress, he became a man of immense power and wealth. The king gave him possession of Westmorland, creating him baron and hereditary sheriff of that county. These grants gave him the lordship of the castles at Brougham, Brough, Appleby and Pendragon, together with the considerable income these estates would attract. Moreover, he later became sheriff of four other counties, Custodian of Windsor Castle and one of the country's Law Lords.

Some of these lands were subsequently sold off by Robert de Viteripont's son, John, and there must be many families in the north today who perhaps owe their present landholdings to the fortunate circumstance that John de Viteripont made it possible for their forebears to purchase, a rare occurrence in those times.

John's son, Robert, proved to be a great warrior; he married Isobel Fitz-Geoffrey and was killed fighting against King Henry III in the Barons' Wars. He left two daughters as co-heiresses—Isabella, ten years of age, and Idonea, a baby of just twelve months. This Robert was the last of the Viteriponts in Westmorland, and with him the family connection with the county had almost ended, for the king had seized his estates on account of treason. Fortunately, however, he later restored them to the two girls, whom he put into the guardianship of two of his faithful adherents; Idonea with Sir Roger de Leybourne, and Isabella with Sir Roger de Clifford. Both these worthy knights decided that they could best fulfil their charge by marrying off their respective wards to their own children, which was quite possibly what King Henry had intended.

Roger de Clifford's son, another Roger, had to wait only four or five years for his ward to reach the then marriageable age of fifteen, but the younger Leybourne had three times as long to wait, and eventually acquired through Idonea's dowry the castles of Brough and Pendragon. Idonea de Leybourne outlived her husband, married again, outlived her second husband, and finally died at the good age of eighty-six. Her share of the Viteripont inheritance then reverted to her sister's grandson.

And now to the origins of the Cliffords.

Domesday Book records that five brothers named Pons, sons of William Pons, a kinsman of King William, are found with lands in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. One of these brothers, Richard, married Maud Fitz-Walter daughter of Milo, Sheriff of Gloucester. Richard had established himself at Llandovery in South Wales, and had built a castle there. The couple had four sons and a daughter. One of the boys, Walter, in due time married Margaret de Toeni, whose grandfather had carried William's standard at the battle of Hastings. Her uncle, William Fitz-Osbern, Earl of Hereford, was the first Warden of the Welsh Marches, and his priority was to build a chain of castles along the border as protection against Welsh incursions. One of these, a motte and bailey, he had passed to Ralph de Toeni, Margaret's father. It was perched upon a cliff overlooking a ford in the River Wye. The story goes that this castle of Clifford was given to Walter and his bride, causing the young man to take the name of de Clifford.

The newly named de Cliffords had seven children; four boys and three girls. One of the daughters may have been something of a handful to her parents. Her name was Jane, but she claimed the attention of King Henry II, and has become better known as ‘The Fair Rosamund’.

Walter, the eldest son, became the second lord of Clifford Castle on his father's death, and can certainly be said to be the ancestor of Lady Anne. He married Agnes de Cundy, an heiress from Covenby in Lincolnshire, and by him she had six sons and two daughters. Again, the eldest was called Walter, and he married Margaret, daughter of Llewelyn, Prince of Wales, and left an only daughter, Maud. The title and lordship therefore devolved on to the second son, Roger, who married Sibilla, daughter of Robert Ewyas, a neighbouring landowner in Herefordshire. It was their son, Roger, who became the guardian, and later the father-in-law of Isabella de Viteripont, when his son, Roger, married her in 1269.

All three Rogers were active men and great soldiers of the time, and for services in the wars in France, Ireland and in England, the youngest of them was well rewarded by Henry III with grants of valuable lands in the Vale of Monmouth to add to his already sizeable holdings in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. When the time came for him to move north when he married, he was already a wealthy man. The Monmouth estates were later exchanged for the Craven lands, including Skipton Castle, which estates have remained with Lady Anne's descendants in the female line until this present century.

In 1282 Sir Roger Clifford III was drowned attempting to cross the Menai Straits while in action against the Welsh. He was forty-six. Isabella was left a widow of twenty-nine with their only son, Robert, aged nine. This Robert later became a true man of war. As Lord of Westmorland he was able to muster, as indeed he was required to, a sizeable private army to be put at the disposal of the king. He was frequently engaged in fighting against the Scots, and took part in the siege of Caerlaverock in 1298. He was ultimately slain leading the English cavalry at Bannockburn in 1314. He was also responsible for building up the defences of Skipton Castle, and they were sturdy enough to survive until Cromwell's troops destroyed them in 1645.

Robert Clifford was succeeded by his eldest son, another Roger, who however enjoyed only some eight years of manhood. He supported the Lancastrian campaign against Piers Gaveston, and at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 he was severely wounded in the head and was captured by the royalist forces. Whereas the Lancastrian leaders were executed, Roger appears to have been reprieved on account of his injury and lived a further five years. His estates however were confiscated, although fortunately for the Clifford cause they were restored again to his younger brother, Robert. Most sources make no mention of this Roger having married; some allege that he had a romance with a woman named Julian, who lived in a house in Whinfell Forest not far from Brougham. Here he used to visit her, in much the same way as King Henry II met Rosamund Clifford one hundred and fifty years earlier. But there is an interesting note in the Chronicles of Lanercost, written not many years afterwards, which states that Roger did in fact marry one of the daughters of Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford. No matter what the truth may have been, Roger died, without any apparent issue, and was succeeded by his younger brother Robert. Robert proved to be a model lord and a home-loving gentleman. He was a great builder and repairer of his castles, and he also had a great passion for the chase.

These were quieter times, and in 1333 King Baliol of Scotland paid a visit to Brougham, and it was on this occasion that a famous stag hunt took place. It is related that a hound named Hercules pursued a fine hart from Whinfell to the Scottish border and back again. The hart came to a high wall, gave one last desperate leap to clear it, and collapsed and died on the other side. The hound failed to follow, and also died from exhaustion. To commemorate this strange event, the hart's horns were nailed to a nearby tree, which for ever after was called the Hartshorn Tree. It was still there in Lady Anne's time, still retaining its trophy, and she makes several references to it.

We are told, somewhat significantly, that this Robert Clifford died in his bed. Unlike his father and grandfather before him, or so many Lord Cliffords afterwards.

He was succeeded by Robert, his eldest son, in whom blazed out afresh all the military fire of his race. He served in the French Wars under Edward III and the Black Prince, and was at the battle of Crécy when only sixteen. He was killed, still in France, at an early age sometime around 1349.

Another Roger, his brother, succeeded to the inheritance, and he actually survived to be a grandfather. Yet he was by no means a peace-loving man, and played his fair share in the king's campaigns in Scotland and in France. But fighting to this Roger was a duty not a passion. He too was a builder, and extended Brougham Castle to its present size. His wife, Maud Beauchamp, survived him for many years, and lived on at Brougham, which was made her jointure.

They unaccountably produced a wild and headstrong son named Thomas. For some as yet unknown reason he was banished from parliament and from serving the king, so by way of working off his surplus energies he joined up with a French force engaged in quelling a Hun uprising in Germany, where he was killed in his twenty-eighth year.

Thomas survived his father by only two years, and left a son, John, who in due course married, went away to the wars, and died in battle—a practice which was all too fast becoming a habit with these Clifford lords. John's wife was Elizabeth Percy, daughter of Hotspur. Lord John Clifford fell in the French wars in 1390, when he was about thirty-four. His widow later married Ralph Neville of Raby Castle who was lord also of Penrith.

Lady Anne says of Elizabeth: ‘This Elizabeth Percy was one of the greatest women of her time, both for her birth and her marriages; but the mis-fortunes of the wars so followed her that in her time her grand-father the Earl of Northumberland was beheaded, and his son, her father slain in battle [at Shrewsbury]; her first husband was slain in France; and after her decease her son, Thomas, Lord Clifford, and her son John, Lord Neville, and her grandson John, Lord Clifford were all slain in battle.’ Elizabeth lies buried in Staindrop Church, near Raby, County Durham.

Young Thomas Clifford, son of John and Elizabeth, went early to the French wars, where he soon became a distinguished commander. One of his most interesting exploits was the capture of the strongly held town of Pontoise in winter-time. One snowy night, he and his men, all clad in white, surprised the garrison by their audacity, and in so doing brought about the surrender of the town with hardly any casualties. Arctic camouflage is certainly not a modern invention!

After a long period of service in France, Thomas returned to England, where he almost immediately got involved in the Wars of the Roses, taking the side of the Lancastrians. He was killed at the first battle of St Albans and lies buried in the abbey precincts. He left a son John, who although only twenty, was already fiercely engaged in the same conflict. This John occupies an unhappy niche in the history books for his cold-blooded murder of Edmund, the young Earl of Rutland, son of the Duke of York.

The story is well known, but is worth recounting, if only in brief. After the battle of Wakefield in which the Duke of York was slain, the young Edmund, not yet eighteen years old, was captured and taken before Lord John Clifford. While on his knees begging for mercy, John is said to have exclaimed, ‘Thy father slew mine, and I will slay thee!’ He then stabbed him to death, and for this deed carried the nickname of ‘The Butcher’. Lady Anne disputes this, the generally accepted version of the event, claiming that Edmund was killed honourably in battle. But the well-accredited chronicles of the time appear to make the more unsavoury version incontestable. ‘The Black-faced Clifford’, as Shakespeare describes him, was himself killed by a stray arrow on the eve of the battle of Towton, claimed to be the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. With victory going to the Yorkists, the Lancastrian faction was crushed, and Edward IV was confirmed on the English throne.

John Clifford left a widow, Margaret, daughter and heiress of Henry, Lord Bromflete and Baron Vesci, and these titles thus came into the Clifford family. However, because of her husband's deeds, the vengeance of the Yorkists fell heavily upon her and her two sons. The estates were seized, the family attainted, and the boys were hunted to stand trial for their father's crimes. Margaret succeeded in smuggling them to the east coast, intending them to find safety in the Low Countries. Only the younger boy, Richard, apparently went over to Holland, where, according to Lady Anne, he ‘died young’. However, recent research has shown that he was still alive in around 1490, in his thirties, as a deed has come to light naming him as heir of part of his mother's lands, which parts were to revert to him on her death. Margaret herself died in 1493. Research is currently in progress which points to the possibility that this Richard may have settled down in Norfolk, and that a line stemming from him still survives to this day.

The elder son, Henry, appears to have first been taken to the Bromflete seat at Londesborough, in the Yorkshire Wolds, where for his safety he was brought up by a shepherd family. This location was not deemed safe enough, and so he was moved up to the Cumbrian fells, where other shepherds cared for him under the cliffs of Blencathra. His mother had meanwhile remarried, to Sir Lancelot Threlkeld of nearby Yanwath, and was therefore conveniently near him. It has been said that he was completely ignorant of his true identity and was not taught how to read or write. After twenty years of this existence came the battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor wrested the English throne from the Yorkist Richard III. One of the new king's first actions was to pardon all adherents to the Lancastrian cause, and this included the Cliffords. Henry Clifford, now dubbed ‘The Shepherd Lord’ had all his estates and honours restored to him as the rightful heir to his father. Wordsworth has given us a fine tribute with his poem ‘The Song at the Feast at Brougham Castle’, which recounts the story vividly.

Henry, Lord Clifford and Baron Vesci, must have quickly remedied his earlier lack of education, for Lady Anne tells us:

He did exceedingly delight in astronomy and the contemplation of the stars. He built the great part of Barden Tower, where he lived much, because in that place he had furnished himself with instruments. … He was a plain man, and lived for the most part a country life, and seldom came to Court or to London; but when he was called thither to sit as Peer of the Realm, he behaved himself wisely and like a good English Gentleman.

It appears that Henry's astronomical studies also included astrology, for Lady Anne relates that in her time, ‘there was a tradition that by his skill, he, on the birth of a grandson, read the stars and foretold that this grandson would have two sons, between whom and their posterity there should be great suits at law, and that the heirs male of the line should end with these two sons, or soon after them,’ which, whatever one is to believe, actually came to pass.

The Shepherd Lord married twice, and left two or three sons and several daughters. Despite the simple manner of his upbringing and his hobby of stargazing, he was still able to assume a command at the age of sixty at the battle of Flodden in 1513. He died ten years later, to be succeeded by his son Henry, a contemporary of Henry VIII. The two Henrys virtually grew up together and by their twenties had become close friends. It will therefore come as no surprise to learn that the young king created Henry Clifford first Earl of Cumberland, and a Knight of the Garter. He was also appointed Lord President of the North of England and Lord Warden of the Marches. Henry died at Skipton in 1542 and is buried in the parish church there.

He was succeeded by his eldest son, Henry, who in the early part of his life followed his father's skills in military and other matters. He married Lady Eleanor Brandon, niece to the king and a granddaughter of Henry VII. It was a magnificent wedding, King Henry VIII himself being present. To provide a suitably regal place for the reception of such a bride, the earl undertook an extensive and sumptuous addition to the castle at Skipton, which was completed within three months! Eleanor, alas, only lived for another ten years, leaving just one daughter. She had had two sons, but both had died young. Had one of these boys survived to succeed his father, history might have taken a very different course, as there is an interesting codicil in Henry VIII's will stating that, should none of his own children produce male heirs, then the Crown of England should pass to a son of Eleanor Clifford.

Immediately after Eleanor's death, Henry was stricken with an illness so serious that many believed he too would die. For weeks he was fed as a baby, on asses' milk, and wrapped up in soft blankets. He recovered, after some months, to perfect health, and took as his second wife Anne, daughter of Lord Dacre of Greystoke, Gilsland and Kirkoswald. It was a much quieter wedding, and Anne seems to have been a quiet, homely sort of girl. We are told that ‘never did she go to London or anywhere near to it’.

Henry, like his father, studied astronomy, but also became a ‘great distiller of waters and maker of chemical extractions, and very studious in all manner of learning; he had an excellent library of books, both hand-written and printed, to which he was addicted exceedingly, especially towards his latter end’. He died at Brougham in 1570, and was also buried at Skipton. He left two sons by Anne Dacre, George and Francis, and thus far the alleged astrological forecast of his grandfather, the Shepherd Lord, was fulfilled.

The eldest son, George, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, had been born at Brougham in 1558, just three months before the death of Queen Mary. He married, as has already been stated, Lady Margaret Russell, and Anne was their daughter.

We have seen that this long line of northern Cliffords consisted, almost without exception, of men of mark, ever to the forefront of the leading events of their time, and Anne's father was no exception to this pattern. The medieval brand of chivalry had passed with the demise of feudalism, but the spirit of chivalry was now needed more than ever. Not in the conflict of factions within the realm, but in national defence, something not contemplated in England since 1066.

The would-be hero in Elizabeth's time had to win his spurs through commerce or on the high seas; for the Elizabethan Age saw the birth of English naval supermacy, as well as English colonization, and there arose the new passion for foreign voyaging. It was to this in particular that George Clifford gave his wealth and energy so unreservedly.

Academically he was brilliant only in mathematics; indeed he graduated at Cambridge University, and then gained his Master's degree in the subject at Oxford, but from its study came a taste for navigation, and in this he became most proficient. While his ancestors had spent their wealth in building castles and maintaining private armies, George's resources went into providing ships and funding crews to sail in them. His eleven expeditions to the West Indies and as far as the Indian Ocean make up a book on their own, and indeed Dr G. C. Williamson published such a book in 1922 (George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland), narrating the earl's adventures in great detail.

George Clifford was one of the witnesses at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and a year later a signatory to the document that sanctioned the launching of the tiny English fleet against the Armada in 1588. He himself commanded the Elizabeth Bonaventure during the action in the Channel, this ship being one of the largest in the navy at the time. It is no small claim to say that this Earl of Cumberland stands in our maritime archives alongside the names of Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh.

When George was home from the sea he did not rest; he was forever at court, being one of the Queen's favourities in her later years. He wore her glove in his hat, embellished with jewels collected on his voyages; and he had special suits of armour made for his appearances as her Champion.

But although he was one of England's heroes, he was far from being so within his family for, in short, he was a bad husband and father. His final act of unkindness—disinheriting his daughter from all the titles and possessions of the Cliffords—hit her hard enough to toughen her resolve to fight all she could to right the wrong done in his name. Yet we find Anne, who loved and venerated her mother almost to idolatry, remarkably cool in her comments about her father. We read no words of bitterness against him, though she must surely have thought that his interpretation of the fifth commandment was somewhat perplexing. Anne makes reference to her last meeting with him:

… in the open air, for then I took my leave of him on Greenwich Heath in Kent, as hee had brought mee so farre on my way towards Sutton-in-Kent, where my Mother then lay, after I had bene and stayed the space of a month in the ould Howse at Grafton in Northamptonshire, where my father lived, by reason of some unhappie unkindness towards my Mother. Which was a tyme of great sorrow to my Saintlyke Mother, till I returned back againe to her from my father, the sayd first daie of September.

George Clifford died shortly afterwards, with Anne recording the event as follows:

My nouble and brave father died in the Duchy House by the Savoy in London nere the River of Thames when he was about three months past fortie seven yeares old. My Mother and I being present with him at his death, I being then just fifteen yeares and nyne months ould at the same date. When a little before his death Hee expressed with much affection to my Mother and me, and a great Beliefe that hee had that his Brother's sonne would dye without issue male, and thereby all his Landes would come to be myne …

The 3rd Earl of Cumberland was buried at Skipton, next to his father and grandfather. His tomb, magnificently provided by his daughter, has been justly described as the grandest monument ever built for someone not of royal blood. There are heraldic shields in profusion, tracing his ancestral links with the many families with which the House of Clifford had become connected; but one tends to suspect that not a little of this splendour was rooted in Lady Anne's own interest and pride in her forebears.

After the funeral, Margaret, his countess, commenced an action at law to contest the will on behalf of her daughter. It was argued that the Viteripont estates were, by the royal grant of Edward II, to descend to the heirs, whether male or female, in the direct line, so long as there was an heir. If the law was to uphold this, then Anne's father had clearly made an illegal will; and with this law suit commenced the fulfilment of the second part of the Shepherd Lord's prediction.

In 1609 Anne Clifford was married to Richard Sackville; she has described this as follows:

The 25th day of February in 1609, I was married to my first Lord, Richard Sackville, then but Lord Buckhurst, in my mother's house and her own chamber in Augustine Fryers in London, which was part of a chappell there formerly, she being then present at my marriage.

Two days after the wedding, Sackville's father, the 2nd Earl of Dorset, died, and so Anne immediately became a countess and mistress of the Sackville family seat at Knole in Kent. Anne goes on to relate:

About two years after I was marryed to my said Lord he went to travel in France and the Low Countries for a year, upon a preingagement to his grandmother and others of his friends before he marryed me. He stayed beyond the seas about a year and came to me at Knowle the 8th April 1612.

And in the time that I after lived his wife I had by him five children, viz. three sons and two daughters. The three sons all dyed young at Knowle where they were born; but my first child the Lady Margaret, who was born at Dorsett House the 2nd July 1614, is now Countess of Thanett, and is mother to ten children.

And for the most part, while I was his wife, I lived either in his houses at Knowle, or at Bowlebrook, or in Great Dorset House or Little Dorset House; but Great Dorset House came not to be his till the decease of his good grand-mother, Cicely Baker, Countess Dowager of Dorset, whose jointure house it was. She dyed the 1st October 1615. And the 22nd September 1618 dyed his mother-in-law, Anne Spencer, Countess Dowager of Dorset.

The above notes, made by Lady Anne, are for some unknown reason preserved neither in her Knole Diary nor in the larger Diary incorporated in the Hothfield papers, as they have come down to us. The originals, however, date from about 1650, when Lady Anne was compiling her Great Books. These are now lost, but happily were transcribed by a Mr Henry Fisher in February 1727 and are now in the British Library under Harleian MS. 6177. There are a few more entries on this manuscript, not available elsewhere, which will be quoted later on in context.

Richard Sackville, rather like Anne's father, fancied himself as a great courtier, and spent much of his time there. He was intelligent and learned, but was also abounding in extravagance. He soon showed to his bride that he had little sympathy for her endeavours, unless he could benefit from so doing, and indeed sided with the king in trying to persuade Anne to give up her case. Twice Anne was taken before King James and urged to yield up her claim, but, though the king and her husband coerced, the brave lady held out in resolute defiance.

The countess, her mother, was still in possession of the estates in Westmorland, and in 1616 Anne, after seven years of stormy marriage, went up to see her for what transpired to be the last time. The parting after the final meeting of these two ladies on the Appleby road, just a few minutes' walk from Brougham Castle, is made the more poignant from Anne's description of it. Indeed it made such a lasting impression on her that forty years later she consecrated the spot with a memorial, known thereafter as ‘the Countess' Pillar’.

The Appleby road is a busy trunk-road these days, but the monument can still be seen above it on the southern side. On its north face are two heraldic shields. One shows Clifford impaling Viteripont, the other Clifford impaling Russell; the one being the most remote, the other being the most recent of Lady Anne's forebears.

Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, was buried in a sumptuous tomb provided by her daughter in St Lawrence's Church in Appleby.

Shortly after her mother's death, King James procured an order against Anne; her husband signed away his claim to her estates, and royal letters patent were issued, completing her disinheritance. Almost immediately afterwards we find the new earl (Uncle Cumberland) entertaining the king at Brougham.