SOURCE: Holmes, Martin. “The Old Waste Places.” In Proud Northern Lady: Lady Anne Clifford, 1590-1676, pp. 159-68. London: Phillimore, 1975.

[In the following excerpt from his full-length study of Clifford, Holmes discusses some of the details from Clifford's later years as noted in her unfinished autobiography, a work that, unlike her diary, is not a spontaneous expression of feeling but a selection of facts recorded long after the events had taken place.]

The castle's gently render'd

Macbeth, V, vii

In 1652 Lady Anne started an autobiography based on her memories, diaries and other documents. For many years she had been compiling a genealogical history of the Vipont and Clifford families, based on her mother's researches and embodying transcripts of official records and other documentary evidence, taken originally in the course of her campaign to establish her daughter's rights. Now it was fair-copied in triplicate in three sets of three great folio volumes for the instruction and edification of Lady Anne and her two daughters, and adorned with genealogical trees and careful drawings of seals, badges, and armorial bearings. The material collected by Lady Cumberland is supplemented by details of Lady Anne's own formal claims for her inheritance, and followed by a passage described as ‘a summary of the records, and a true memorial of the life of mee, the Lady Anne Clifford’. The copying has been done by a number of different secretaries and attendants, and checked and annotated by Lady Anne herself for the benefit of posterity.

The trouble about this last portion is that it is a summary and no more. Its value is undeniable, but its extreme compression reduces it, in a great degree, to a list of journeys undertaken and visitors entertained, and arouses a feeling of deep regret that the writer's original diary or ‘day-by-day’ book has not come down to us for comparison with this rather frigid epitome. The Knole Diary has shown us how expressive a writer Lady Anne could be; this summary is a congested array of facts without the seasoning of the writer's feelings. These are indicated only by the near-statistical quality of many entries, notably those recording anniversaries, conicidences and visits from newly-acquired descendants. When Lady Thanet, once ‘the child’ of Knole, came with four of her younger children to Skipton in 1663, her mother notes they came

about eight o'clock at night into the chamber where I then lay, and wherein I was born into the world, and I then kissed them all with much joy and comfort, it being the first time that I saw my Daughter of Thanet, or these four younger Sonnes of hers in Skipton Castle, or in Craven, for it was the first time that they had ever come into Craven.

It is expressive, and it still shows the workings of the old lady's mind, but we miss the fascinating trivialities and irrelevances that make the earlier Diary such a very moving document. This summary is not a spontaneous expression of feeling, but a selection of facts and emotions judiciously recorded in tranquillity long after the event.

This period of residence in Skipton and the north, established at last in her own ancestral property, ruling her tenants and entertaining her neighbours and her descendants, was something that at one time she had given up hope of enjoying, but it had come after all, and lasted for a quarter of a century. The first 10 years or so were overshadowed by the disapproving rule of the Protectorate, and now and again her castles were garrisoned by Roundhead troops in case of possible revolt, but she went on practically unmoved. Castles and churches, many of them dilapidated and near to ruin, were repaired and set in order by local labour and made to become, as far as possible, what they had been. There was no sweeping change to Palladian elegance, no reflection of Wilton or imitation of Jones or de Caus; new buildings, such as the stables and almshouses at Appleby, were plain, graceful and efficient, while those old ones that were slipping into decay were restored as nearly as possible to their earlier form. Now and then there were alterations, but they were not many, nor were they conspicuous. To a great extent, Lady Anne chose to live and to worship after the manner of her forefathers.

This, at times, must have had its difficulties. The services of the Church of England, and the use of the book of Common Prayer, were prohibited by law, but the old lady ignored the prohibition, and Sedgwick notes that she had the forbidden service held ‘in the worst of times … duly in her own private chapel, where she never failed to be present at it, though she was threatened with sequestration: Yet by means of her honourable friends and relations in both houses of parliament she always escaped it’. Williamson's statement that ‘she carried with her in her progresses her own chaplains, and they frequently officiated for her and her household’ is directly contradicted by that of Bishop Rainbow, who was in a better position to know, and who says that she had in effect six domestic chaplains, because ‘at every one of her Houses the Parochial Minister did officiate to her Family, as well as at their Cures, and they wanted not all due encouragements from so good a Patroness’. In each of her estates it was the same. By instinct or design she was no visitor from a remote life elsewhere, but the tradesmen knew her as a familiar customer, the various incumbents as a parishioner. Her very clothes were made locally. A few pages remain from an Appleby account book of 1673, and include the information that William Marshall, a tailor of Bongate, made her a black cloth gown for 39s. 6d., and Sedgwick tells us that ‘a petticoat and waistcoat of black searge was her constant wear, nor could any persuade her to wear others’.

More than half a century had gone by since the time when she danced at Whitehall in costumes designed by Inigo Jones, or got Lady St. John's tailor to make her dresses of sea-green satin or green damask embroidered with gold. Now she was her own mistress and could wear what she liked; there was no one to find fault with her ‘for wearing such ill clothes’ as certain people had done in the past, and she had no objections to the plain fact that her two attendant gentlewomen habitually dressed much better than she did. Everyone who knew her could see that, and Rainbow summed up the position very neatly in her funeral sermon when he spoke of ‘her Dress, not disliked by any, yet imitated by none’. There was no longer any need to follow the fashion, she had seen the court of Elizabeth change to that of King James, and in turn to the very different court of King Charles, and what fashionable society might be wearing in London was no longer any concern of hers. ‘None disliked what she did, or was’, says the bishop, ‘because she was like herself in all things’, and that was enough. He makes a shrewd reference to the ‘semper eadem’ motto of Elizabeth I, ‘whose Favour in Her first, and that Queen's last years, she was thought worthy of, and received’, and indeed, in that remote countryside, it was not impossible, or indeed unnatural, to find a characteristic Elizabethan living on, unchanging in herself, yet admitting the possibility of change in others, well into the reign of Charles II.

She had been just over 10 years in the north when that king came to his own again, and for the last time Lady Anne took part in a spectacular public function. Appleby had been rigidly Royalist throughout the interregnum, despite the Roundhead garrisons in the castle and the ‘constant sufferings, sequestrations and imprisonments’ which the neighbouring gentlemen underwent for their loyalty to the King. Nicolson and Burn cite the narrative of the Reverend Thomas Machell, who tells how no one could be found to read aloud the proclamation declaring the dead king's son to be a proscribed traitor.

The mayor withdrew himself, and the bailiffs (whose office it was) threw up their commissions, though but poor men, insomuch that the soldiers were glad to have recourse to a fellow in the market, an unclean bird, hatched at Kirkby Stephen, the nest of all traytours, who proclaimed it aloud, whilst the people stopped their ears and hearts, having nothing open but their eyes, and those even filled with tears … And the townsmen were not far behind this gallant example of their noble leaders; who when captain Atkinson came down from the castle with his musketeers to chuse a Roundhead mayor, and clapped his hand on his sword, saying, I'll do it by this, yet made resistance, for they then conferred the office (to prevent bloodshed) on a moderate man, who had acted on neither side, except in bearing that office before, and so he was mayor two years together.

There was not always a parliamentary garrison at mayor-making time, so this particular crisis does not seem to have been repeated, but Cromwell later granted a charter of his own to the borough, through this same Atkinson's instrumentality. Another moderate man (Lancelot Machell, father of Thomas the narrator) refused to take office while this charter was in force, and when elected at the Restoration, he would not take the oath of office until he had sent for the document, cut it up with his own hands and thrown the pieces to a group of tailors to make into tape-measures, with the punning remark that ‘it should never be a measure unto him’. Thomas Machell, as a boy of 14, was almost certainly an eye-witness of the festivities on the new King's coronation day,

when there was almost as many bonefires as houses, and two stately high scaffolds at each end of the town, hung with cloth of arras and gold; whither, after service done at the church, the countess of Pembroke, with the mayor, aldermen and all the other gentry of the county ascended, with I know not how many trumpets, and an imperial crown carried before them, where they proclaimed, prayed for, and drank the health of the king upon their knees; the aged countess seeming young again to grace the solemnity. The expences of that day were very considerable. For throughout the town was kept open house, after the example of that noble countess, who thought not her gates then wide enough to receive her guests, which before had been too wide for receiving armies of soldiers.

Lady Anne was then in her 72nd year, and Machell's phrase is expressive enough for one to wonder what she looked like. This was no occasion for a black serge dress made locally, yet it was hardly possible to have something made to measure for this occasion when it was not likely to be worn again. A more recent episode provides a possible explanation. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, when clothing was still rationed and coupons were needed for dress material, a very old and very great lady asked to see a dress and hat which she had sent to a museum some years before. They were duly sent over for inspection, and a few days later she spoke of the costume to an official of the museum, saying, ‘That dress, you know. I felt I should like to see it again, and I found to my surprise that I could still get into it, so I thought I'd keep it. You don't mind, do you?—I'll give you another instead’. Which was duly done; the earlier dress was given some slight modifications and worn at an important public function, and looked magnificent.

Even so may it have been with Lady Anne. The little lead coffin in the vault, still remembered by persons now living, shows that she did not grow stout in her old age; its whole length is just under five feet, and it is clear that at the end of her life she would still have been able to wear the dresses of her girlhood. She was not one to throw anything away prematurely; the gown of ‘sea-water green satin’ of 1617 was apparently available to be painted in 1646, and it, or one of its fellows, might still be laid up at Appleby or Brougham, in one of the ‘seaven or eight old truncks’ mentioned in her will as usually standing in her bedroom or in the room next door. They contained ‘for the most part old things that were my deare and blessed mother's’, but it is to just such a receptacle that Lady Anne would be likely to turn when she wanted something decorative at short notice, that had been made to her measure by a good tailor. It was old-fashioned, but not exaggeratedly youthful in cut, so there would be no suggestion of mutton dressed as lamb.

Her own ‘true memorial’ of her life makes no mention of this episode, recording only that on 23 April King Charles was crowned at Westminster ‘for which God be praised’, and that she herself was in Appleby at the time. There does not seem to be any justification for Williamson's statements that ‘she sent up her page Lancelot Machell, then 16 years old, to London, on this occasion, to take some part in the ceremonial on her behalf’ and that ‘his uncle acted as her page 36 years before at the Coronation of Charles I’. Lancelot Machell, Appleby's Restoration mayor, was never Lady Anne's page, though his daughter, Susan, became one of her gentlewomen, his brother, Henry, her house steward, and his youngest son, Lancelot, born about 1650, attendant, at the end of her life, to Thomas Strickland, receiver of her rents. In his will he leaves to his son and grandson (yet another Lancelot) and their descendants a silver portrait-medal of the Countess of Pembroke, given him ‘as a token of her love, also another large medal being the picture of Charles II also given to me by the Countess, to remain in the evidence chest as monuments of her favour for ever’. As for the other allegation, Lancelot had no Machell uncle, his father having been an only son, and Lady Anne is unlikely to have been summoned to the coronation of Charles I, with a page or without one, as at that time she was recently widowed, was no longer Countess of Dorset, but Countess Dowager, had lately recovered from smallpox and was very self-conscious about what it might have done to her appearance. The omission of any reference to the performance on coronation night gives another pointer to the nature of the ‘true memorial’ and the character of its compiler. She had reached a stage when she no longer needed to record her feelings and actions in detail, so as to justify them, if necessary, to those who should come after her.

But, quite unexpectedly, the old lady was enjoying herself. After years and years of anxiety and frustration she had come into her own, and it was not dust and ashes after all. She had lands, and houses, and descendants, and they all needed looking after in one way or another, and, quite possibly to her surprise, she liked it. Popular imagination has been inclined to picture her as an autocratic and terrifying old person with a caustic tongue, but this appears to be the result of a certain amount of wishful thinking. The brusque and discourteous letter attributed to her by Horace Walpole in 1753 has long been discredited as an 18th-century fabrication, and the story of her saying she would not come to the court of Charles II unless she might wear blinkers is customarily repeated with the point left out, and cited as an example of intolerant puritanism. The Court of Charles II could have little to shock or surprise anyone old enough to have lived in that of James I, and the character and habits of her two husbands had taught her much about the infinite variety of mankind. She had been 10 years away from the metropolis and had not kept in touch; she knew that there would necessarily have been changes in fashions and ideas, and that she would find much that was different without knowing why. Bishop Rainbow tells how the suggestion was made to her by a neighbour, but that when

the Lady wished that she would once more go to London, and the Court, and glut her eyes with the sight of such happy Objects, and after that give up herself to her Country retirement; She suddenly, and pleasantly replyed, if I should go to those places, now so full of Gallantry and Glory, I ought to be used as they do ill-sighted, or unruly Horses, have Spectacles (or Blinkers) put before mine eyes, lest I should see and censure what I cannot competently judge of; be offended myself, or give offence to others.

She was apprehensive, not of being shocked, but of being unwarrantably critical—or, quite simply, bored—and her answer echoes that which the great lady of Shunem gave to the prophet in rather similar circumstances: ‘I dwell among my own people’.

There was no doubt, by now, where her heart lay, and she had made arrangements, by this time, for her body to lie there likewise after death. In 1654 she had had a burial-vault made for herself in the north-east corner of Appleby church, and in the following year an altar-tomb had been set up immediately over it, against the northern wall of the Sanctuary. Behind the plain slab of black marble rises a panel displaying the armorial bearings of the ancestors from whom she derived her inheritance, and the marriages from which in turn she derived her blood. The arms of her uncle and cousin are not there. she is shown as the daughter of her father, and the whole display is an epitome of her inheritance in the direct line from that Vipont to whom the property had been granted in the first year of King John. The inscription on the front, setting out her name and titles, was cut in her lifetime, and probably under her supervision, and it is still possible to see a slight difference in the lettering of the last few lines, added some 20 years later to give particulars of her own death.

Much of her rebuilding, here as elsewhere, must have involved the replacement and re-pointing of existing material rather than the erection of anything new. In many places where the mortar was gone and the walls were crumbling and unsafe, it would be necessary to take off the roof and so many courses of the stonework as were loose, and set them back firmly bedded in new mortar, but as far as possible in their old positions, using as much of the original material as had not actually disintegrated. That explains at once her adherence, in churches and castles, to what some might consider an out-of-date style, and the difficulty of reconciling the contemporary statements that Appleby church was in great part ‘taken down and rebuilded’, and Bongate church ‘raised out of its ruins’ with the amount of medieval material still to be seen in both. Certain alterations, of course, there were; a vestry on the north side of the chancel at Appleby was removed, and a small private transept, on the south of the Sanctuary, was turned into an extension of the south aisle by the removal of a dividing wall, while the stability of both Appleby and Bongate churches was safeguarded by the provision of reinforcing buttresses, but on the whole, Lady Anne's restorations interfered very little with the design of the earlier builders.

To her time, and almost certainly to her bounty, must be ascribed the panels of the royal arms to be seen in both churches. The panel at Appleby surmounts a passage from the book of Isaiah (xxxiii, 15 and 17) that suggests it was set up in 1660 or 1661 in honour of the restoration or coronation of Charles II, while that at Bongate specifically bears the date of the latter year. King Charles, who had no illusions about his personal appearance, might have grimaced at the promise that ‘thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty’, but the loyalty of the whole passage was unquestionable. More felicitous, perhaps, was another passage, from the same prophet, to which Lady Anne refers on the inscribed tablets that she caused to be set up in more than one of her repaired castles, recording the dates of her work of restoration:

And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.

(Isaiah, lviii, 12)

The barren lands were being encouraged to bear again, the last heiress of the great line of Clifford had lived to look on her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she had gone over ways ‘where never coach went before’, and had won the respect and affection of those about her, from the country landowners who came to wait upon her on her formal Progresses to the ‘ancient maids’ in her almshouses and the poorest cottagers who guided her horse-litter along the rude pathways of the fells. She had waited long, and endured much, and had come to her long-delayed inheritance at a time when she thought her life was practically over, but it had proved to be nothing of the kind, for her continued works of repair and restoration and benefaction were awakening feelings that she had once thought atrophied for ever, and bringing life to the old waste places of her much-enduring heart.