SOURCE: Suzuki, Mihoko. “Anne Clifford and the Gendering of History.” CLIO 30, No. 2 (Winter 2001): 195-229.

[In the following essay, Suzuki suggests that in her writings Clifford undermined the dominant ideology of early modern historiography, which “regarded women not as agents of history but as either chaste transmitters of genealogical succession or unruly obstacles to the unfolding of male-centered history.”]

Tyme brings to forgetfullness any memorable thing in this world, bee they never so carefully preserved.

“A Summary of the Records, and a True Memorial of the life of me the Lady Anne Clifford”

In her study of women and property in early modern England, Amy Louise Erikson describes Anne Clifford (1590-1676) as the protagonist of the most publicized and celebrated marital property dispute of the seventeenth century.¹ Heir to one of the most prominent families in Elizabethan England, Clifford, the daughter of George, Third Earl of Cumberland (1558-1608) and Margaret Russell (1560-1616), refused to acquiesce to what she considered her father's alienation of her rightful inheritance to Francis Clifford (1559-1641), his brother and her uncle. Her father in fact had illegally broken the entail, established during the reign of Edward II, which stipulated the inheritance of the Clifford titles and estates in a direct line of descent, whether the heir was male or female. With the support of James I and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Clifford's husband, Richard Sackville, Third Earl of Dorset (1589-1624), sought in vain to persuade her to accept a cash settlement in forfeiture of her claims. James judged against her, and she was disinherited despite her withholding of consent to the settlement. Yet precisely because she withheld consent, Clifford was able to inherit her title and estates thirty-eight years later, after the death of Francis and his son Henry (1592-1643), who was survived by a daughter; Clifford's father had stipulated that the estates revert to her if Francis's male line failed.²

Clifford left a detailed record of these events in what is now known as The Knole Diary, and sought to buttress her claim through her Great Book, a genealogical history of her ancestors culminating in herself. Her intense and lifelong obsession with family history accords with her contemporaries' growing interest in local and family histories and their implications for English history, as described by F. Smith Fussner.³ Fussner considers the “historical revolution” in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England to have originated in the common law appeal to precedent—which was based on the assumption of the applicability of historical research to contemporary problems—and in the recognition of the importance of public records, which were at least initially preserved for legal, not historical, reasons and used to support litigation.⁴ In this respect, too, Clifford's historiographical practice is of her time, for her family history, compiled after she came into her inheritance, was based on the documents assembled by her mother and herself in order to litigate her claim against her uncle. Her contemporary William Dugdale similarly based his Baronage (1675-76) on original documents from the archives of noble families. Like Clifford's history, his work traces the changing nature of feudalism in the histories of the great families responsible for its operation.⁵

There is good evidence in both The Knole Diary and Great Book for arguing that Clifford derived the resolve for her extraordinary resistance to the most powerful patriarchal authorities in her culture from her reading and writing of history. Clifford's library, as represented in the Appleby Triptych—a pictorial record of her familial and intellectual history—included numerous volumes of history, attesting to the explosion of historical writing in the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.⁶ Her tutor, whom she honored by including his portrait in the Appleby Triptych and by erecting a monument in his memory, was Samuel Daniel, the author of important works of English history. In fact, Clifford's autobiography and genealogical history constitute histories in themselves, for during the seventeenth century, these genres were not distinctly separated from the genre of history.⁷

Mary Ellen Lamb has usefully extended the notion of inheritance to encompass Clifford's use of literary heritage “to validate her identity as heir”; she argues that Clifford inserted herself into the “ungendered or even male-gendered subject position as reader of a patriarchal canon.”⁸ While, in seeking to be recognized as her father's heir, Clifford clearly did assert her legitimacy as the heritor of a patriarchal genealogy, I suggest that the subject position from which Clifford read and wrote history was in fact predominantly gendered female. Clifford, I would argue, stands as a counterexample to the dominant ideology of early modern historiography that largely regarded women not as agents of history, but as either chaste transmitters of genealogical succession or unruly obstacles to the unfolding of male-centered history. As Phyllis Rackin puts it, Renaissance history was “a masculine tradition, written by men, devoted to the deeds of men, glorifying the masculine virtues of courage, honor, and patriotism, and dedicated to preserving the past heroes and recording their patriarchal genealogies.”⁹ Although many may still consider Catherine Macaulay's The History of England (1763) to be the first work in England by a female historian—and although Elizabeth Cary's History of Edward II (composed 1627; published 1680) has more recently begun to receive critical attention—I will argue that Clifford much earlier practiced a distinctive, if in our view unconventional, history that took various forms: her diaries, the Great Book, the Appleby Triptych, the monuments she erected for her mother, Samuel Daniel, and Edmund Spenser, as well as the architectural restoration of her ancestral holdings.

The Knole Diary, which constitutes a detailed and vivid record of Clifford's acts and thoughts during the important years in which she contested her father's will (1616-1619), significantly begins with an account of young Anne's impressions of Elizabeth Tudor's funeral.¹⁰ These events of 1603 are described in retrospect, from the perspective of her dispute with her husband over her inheritance, for Clifford pointedly remarks that her father's right to “carry the Sword” in Elizabeth's funeral procession, though contested by Burleigh, “was an office by inheritance, and so is lineally descended to me” (22).¹¹ Despite Allison Heisch's assertion that Elizabeth's rule did not affect women's position in patriarchy, Elizabeth appears in fact to have had a profound influence on the ability of women to imagine political possibilities for themselves in the generation that followed her.¹² Clifford states that “if Queen Elizabeth had lived she intended to prefer me to be of the Privy Chamber for at that time there was much hope and expectation of me as of any other yong Ladie whatsoever,” and she records the impact the queen's death had on her as a young girl: although she was upset at not being allowed to be a “Mourner … because I was not high enough,” she remembers that “I stood in the Church at Westminster to see the Solemnities performed” (22). The importance of Elizabeth for Clifford is again made evident when she refers to the queen's death in recording her mother's death, precisely “13 years and 2 months after the death of Queen Elizabeth. … I being 26 years and five months” (35 n). These repeated references to the queen throughout the Diary indicate that Clifford apparently found an inspiring model and example in Elizabeth, who suffered years of adversity under Mary Tudor's rule and who eventually triumphed to assert the inheritance of her title and crown from Henry VIII. In fact, Clifford's contemporaries evidently confirmed this identification, for Bishop Rainbow in his funeral sermon for Clifford explicitly compared her to Elizabeth: “she [Clifford] was like herself in all things: sibi constans, semper eadem, the Great, Wise Queen's Motto.”¹³

It may seem a contradiction that, during these years of struggle over her inheritance, Clifford seems also to have drawn inspiration from Elizabeth's adversary Mary Stuart. Early in her 1616 entries concerning the dispute, Clifford records a solitary visit to Mary's tomb in Westminster in the midst of threats and recriminations directed at her for “all my Faults & errors in this business” (29); and in the final month of 1619 when relations irreparably broke down with her husband, she records that she had a servant read to her “Leicesters Common Wealth, in which there's many things concerning the reignment and Death [of] the Queen of Scots” (81). The latter entry is especially surprising because, despite the division between Catholics and Protestants in Jacobean England, it shows Clifford reading without prejudice a notorious attack on Leicester, represented in the Common Wealth as the head of the Protestant persecutors of Catholics. It is clearly not the scandals concerning Leicester that interest Clifford, however. Rather, she is interested most likely in the parallel between her own father's exclusion of her in favor of his brother and the exclusion from the succession in Henry VIII's will of the line of his elder sister Margaret (Mary Stuart's mother) in favor of his younger sister, Mary, Queen of France; the authenticity and legality of this exclusion are contested by the recusant work.¹⁴ Moreover, if Elizabeth served as an example of a woman who succeeded in claiming her inheritance, Mary's perseverance in pursuing her claim, even in the face of imprisonment and execution, provided another model that Clifford drew on to strengthen her resolve. Although Clifford eventually came into her inheritance, during the actual struggle, Mary's model might have seemed more immediately relevant to Clifford, who was “condemned” (56) by many for her resistance to her king, husband, and male relatives. Both these queens provided historical examples for Clifford: surely a daughter could inherit baronies if Elizabeth and Mary could inherit sovereignty over kingdoms. Indeed, Clifford makes explicit the present uses she made of the past and of historical precedent: “my Trust is still in God & [I] compare things past with things present, & read over the Chronicles” (50). Her own diary entries that record her extraordinary resistance serve as a guide and a source of her strength and resolve.

The Diary suggests that public opinion concerning Clifford's actions was not uniformly critical. She reports that while “most Folks” made “strange censures … of my Courses,” her unbending resistance was approved by some: “now they began to think at London that I had done well in not referring this Business to the King, & that everybody said God had a hand in it” (48). She is also told that “many did condemn me for standing out so in this Business, so on the other side many did command [sic] me in regard that I have done that which is both just & honourable” (56-57). These diametrically opposed judgments of Clifford's actions suggest the fissures in the accepted norms of patriarchy from which Clifford derived justification for her actions; such fissures manifested themselves in the contradiction between the totalizing theory of patriarchy and the historical evidence of women rulers such as Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, as well as the contemporary example of a rival court around Anne of Denmark.¹⁵

The three-volume Great Book, a monumental record of Clifford family history from the thirteenth century leading up to Anne, based on the careful compilation of documentary evidence, is a genealogical and legal justification of her claim to the position of sole legal heir to the Clifford titles and estates. The inclusion of copies of legal documents and other records concerning the family recalls the inclusion of proclamations and other relevant documents in Holinshed's Chronicles. Clifford had three, albeit not identical, copies made, so that they could not only be referred to by her lawyers, but could endure as a permanent record for her descendants. It is a collaborative effort that includes documents collected by her mother and by those she employed for research, as well as corrections, notes, and cross-references made by the noted legal scholar Sir Matthew Hale, yet its design and hence authorship can be attributed to Clifford. Her involvement in the composition is evident in the copious annotations she made throughout the work over a period of many years. The second half of the third volume is titled “A summary of the Records, and a True Memorial of the life of me the Lady Anne Clifford,” and includes a detailed record of the years 1650-1676.

The genealogical history consists of a documentary biography of each Viteripont and Clifford holder of title and his wife or wives. Although women were traditionally represented as marginal or as obstacles to the course of history, Clifford in fact contests such a view of history. Clifford's own tutor Samuel Daniel (whose work in history she emphasizes by calling him “that Religious & honest poet, who Composed the Civil Wars of England, between the 2 houses of York and Lancaster in Verse” [58v]) began his second epistle dedicatory to The Collection of the History of England (1626), addressed to Queen Anne, by commending “Queenes, the Mothers of our Kings, by whom is continued the Blessing of succession that preserues the Kingdome.”¹⁶ Daniel's emphasis on the queen's function as a vehicle of monarchical succession corresponds to the structure of his history according to the reigning monarch, and to its representation of women's role as limited and marginal. Daniel considers even Edward II's Isabella, “the worst of a Queene [England] euer had” (5:202), incapable of having acted on her own: “An impotent Woman led with passion, and abused by wicked Councell, is brought to make head against her owne head, … to vndertake an action she knew not how to manage” (5:201). In his account of the reign of Edward III, Daniel excoriates the “kings Concubine” Alice Pierce, who “presuming vppon the King's fauour, whom she had subdued, grew so insolent … that shee entermedled with Courts of Iustice and other Offices, where she herselfe would sit to effect her desires: which, though in all who are so exalted, are euer excessive, yet in a woman most immoderate, as hauing lesse of discretion, and more of greedinesse” (5:280). Although Clifford includes a representation of a copy of Daniel's history as well as a portrait of Daniel himself in the Appleby Triptych, by notable contrast to her tutor's negative assessment of female agents in history, Clifford stresses their positive contributions.

Barbara Lewalski has argued for the importance of Clifford's matrilineal heritage and kinship network;¹⁷ this emphasis also manifests itself in the notable focus on female ancestors in the Great Book, which results in the overturning of gender norms in historiography. First Clifford singles out as “a great heir” and “so great a Woman in those times” (2v) Idonea de Viteripont (d. 1235), the wife of Robert de Viteripont (d. 1227); she notes that King John made mention of Idonea in his bequest of Westmoreland and its sheriffwick, and that she held Westmoreland property as a widow for seven years, bequeathing lands to an abbey and a church, just as Clifford herself would do. Even more significant for Clifford is Isabella de Viteripont (1254-1291), whose marriage to Roger de Clifford the Younger (d. 1283) brought the barony and sheriffwick of Westmoreland to the Cliffords: “As also for that Almighty God bestowed the great blessing on her, to let her posterity successively enjoy those lands & honors of her in inheritance, for more Generations proceeded from her own body & for more Years than almost any of this Kingdome hath done, for, from the time she Marryed this Roger de Clifford being the 8th of April 1269, till the 30th of October A.D. 1605 when George Clifford Earl of Cumberland dyed which was 326 Years, the Cliffords that descended of her in their Male issue lawfully enjoyed it” (17-17v). Here and throughout her history, Clifford repeatedly traces the origin of the Cliffords to Isabella, making her virtually the founder of the Clifford line. Moreover, Isabella's sister and coheir, another Idonea (1262-1333), died without issue and left her inheritance to Isabella's grandchild, Robert, to whom she was great aunt. The importance of Isabella for Clifford derives not only from her status as an heiress of title and estates, but also from her having exercised the office of sheriff, which Clifford herself sought to do: “very remarkable it is in the life of this Isabella, that in the time of her Widdowhood, she had the honor to execute the same office [of sheriff] in her own person, and sat her self upon the Bench as hereditarie Sherif of Westmoreland upon Trials of life & death, an honor which no Woman in this Kingdom hath hitherto attained but her self” (8). Clifford states that she “desired Mr. hale's Opinion concerning her [Isabella's] sitting there” (17)—no doubt because she was interested in her own right to fulfill the role as sheriff. The entries concerning both the first Idonea and Isabella stress their roles as significant and positive agents of history—in contrast to Daniel's representation of Queen Isabella and Alice Pierce as destructive meddlers—and indicate that Clifford used her historical research concerning her female ancestors to ascertain her own prerogative, as well as to identify examples for her to follow in discharging the duties associated with her title. Moreover, she calls attention to the enabling status for these women of their widowhood: not only for Isabella, whose “Office of Sherifwick … & the Execution thereof rested in her in the time of her widowhood” (8), but also for Idonea, whose bequests and grants were achieved “in her pure Widdowhood” (2v). Like Idonea and Isabella, Clifford also came into her own in fulfilling her role as a feudal lord after the death of her second husband.

Later in her history, Clifford honors female ancestors such as the famous “Fair Rosamond” Clifford, the mistress of Henry II: “the Unparallelled beauty of her time of whom mention is made in the Records, & likewise in the Chronicles of this realm” (10). Daniel's “Complaint of Rosamond” (1592) represented her as a “Syren, faire enchaunting good, / … whose power doth moue the bloud, / More then the words or wisdome of the wife” (1:85, ll. 127, 129-30), who prevails over her king: “A Crowne was at my feete, Scepters obey'd me: / Whom Fortune made my King, Loue made my Subiect / Who did command the Land, most humbly pray'd me” (1:87, ll.163-65). By contrast, Clifford focuses on the unequal power of sovereign and subject: “[she] was unfortunate in being beloved of K. Henry the 2d who's unlimited power was Sufficient to work a Compliance & so prevailed as by him she had William de Longspee the Earl of Salisburie, & other Children, by reason whereof she became afterwards a Sacrifice to the rage of the offended Queen, who in the 23d year of the same K. Henry put a period to her life which she effected as is supposed by poyson” (10-10v). Although Daniel's Rosamond is said “to disgrace [her] selfe and grieue [her] heires, / That Cliffords race should scorne [her] one of theirs” (ll. 335-46), Clifford instead stresses Rosamond's “Sacrifice” as well as a positive outcome of her relationship with the king in recounting the history of her son William and his descendants.

The most marked gendering of the historical record can be found in Clifford's entries concerning her parents—the one for her mother being much lengthier and more detailed than that for her father. The headings to the two Lives indicate her assessment of the relative importance of her parents as historical agents. For her father, she writes: “A Summary of the Records of George Lord and Baron of Clifford … last heir Male of the Cliffords that was rightfully possessor of those Ancient lands & honors” (48); the heading for her mother reads “A Summary of the Records & also a Memorial of that Religious and blessed Lady, Margaret Russell Countess of Cumberland, Wife & Dowager to George Clifford … by whom she had their sole Daughter & heir the Lady Anne Clifford, now Countess Dowager of Dorsett, Pembrook & Montgomery & by birth Baroness Clifford, Westmoreland & Vesey, High Sheriffess of the same County, & Lady of the Honor of Skypton in Craven” (54v).¹⁸ Even in these headings, Clifford emphasizes the links between her mother and herself, and derives her heritage from her; the terse heading for her father stresses that he wrongfully alienated her heritage from her by styling him as the last “rightful” male possessor of the lands. In fact, Clifford marks the lives of her uncle and cousin as “digressions”: “A Summary, by way of digression, concerning Francis Clifford …” (12); “A Summary, by way of digression, concerning Henry, Lord Clifford …” (15).¹⁹ Moreover, her mother's entry, consisting of eleven and a half folio pages in the Harley manuscript, by contrast to seven and a half for her father, is not subsumed under her father's entry as other wives are but is separated from her father's by those for Frances and Henry. In Clifford's historical narrative, then, Margaret Russell's role is not as George's wife, but as Anne's mother, for Anne's life directly follows that of Margaret: if George illegitimately diverted the course of history, Margaret through her lawsuits and refusal to acquiesce to her husband's will brought it back on course. Indeed, Clifford stresses her mother's role as the initiator of the historical research that forms the basis of her history: “she caused diligent Search to be made, amongst the Records, of this Kingdom touching these Antient Lands, & caused Copies to be taken out of them of such records as concerned her said Daughters Inheritance” (58). Clifford's repeated biblical references—most notably to the Psalms—both in her mother's narrative and in the account of her own life that immediately follows it announces the providential nature of this history.²⁰ She recounts more than once that her father foretold on his deathbed that his titles would eventually revert to her and also that her mother had a prophetic dream during her pregnancy that Anne would be the heir even though her two brothers were still living. Thus Clifford overturns the traditional gendering of history as masculine and the obstacles to the historical process as feminine, to represent her mother—whose “excellent Mind” was “endowed with the seeds of the 4 Moral Virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance” (55)—as the legitimate agent of history and her father as one who illegitimately attempted to divert its course.

It would, however, be inaccurate to state that Clifford's interest in her genealogical history was focused exclusively on her female ancestors, for in 1617 she commissioned an account of her father's voyages to the West Indies. In her engagement with historical models, Clifford evidently found especially resonant the example of one of her ancestors, Henry de Clifford (1454-1523), the so-called “Shepherd Lord,” who was denied his title and estates for twenty-four years because his father was attainted of high treason by Act of Parliament. Clifford's close identification with Henry across history can be discerned in her description of his life as one of the “Examples of the Variety of fortunes in this world” (40). Henry's mother directed that he be brought up by shepherds to conceal his identity from Edward IV and the Yorkists who sought him because his father had killed the king's brother, the Earl of Rutland. He was even kept from learning to read or write lest he reveal his parentage, but he was restored to his heritage upon the accession of the Lancastrian Henry VII. Clifford's commentary on Henry's “restoration” could apply as well to her own situation after she came into her inheritance: “Notwithstanding which disadvantage, after he came to be restored again to the Enjoyment of his fathers estate, he came to be a very wise Man, & a very good Mannager of his Estate and fortunes” (40v). Moreover, she indicates that her own vindication was supported by and based on her ancestor's case: “Which restoration was the Chief ground of the lady Anne Clifford, now Countess Dowager of Pembrook, her title to the lands of Inheritance, which by Gods blessing, she now injoys both in Westmoreland & in Craven” (40v-41). When the king later challenged Henry's right to Westmoreland, Henry assembled records to support his claim; Clifford asserts that this documentary evidence “did much help to forward the Manifestation of the Title & right of the Lady Anne Clifford, now Countess Dowager of Pembrook to the said Lands & Sheriffwick” (41). Like Clifford, Henry was “a great builder & repairer of all his Castles in the North which were much gone to decay, when he came to enjoy them, for they had been in Strangers hands about 24 or 25 years,” and he “lived for the most part a Country life, & came seldom either to the Court or to London” (41).

Even in this rather exceptional case of Clifford explicitly identifying with a male ancestor, she does not neglect the role played by either his mother or his wife. She stresses the “Care & love of an Industrious Mother” (40), the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Margaret Bromflett (who, she notes, brought the title of Baron Vesey and other lands to the Cliffords) in concealing her two sons from the vengeful Yorkists and in successfully deflecting official inquiries concerning their whereabouts by means of “Equivocation” (40). Perhaps even more significantly, preceding the entry that marks Henry as an exemplar for Clifford's own struggle to have her patrimony acknowledged, Clifford celebrates his first wife Anne St. John: “by tradition it is received, that the Cause chiefly why he recovered his lands and honors was because he Married the said Kings Cosin German. … a woman of great goodness, piety, & Devotion. … so great an housewife, as that she caused Tapistry hangings, which was then a rare thing here in England to be made, & some of them are remaining untill this time, with the Arms of her self & husband wrought in them” (39). Even more notable is Clifford's acknowledgment that Henry VII's later challenge to Henry de Clifford's right to his estates was in part motivated by the latter's having been “unkind to her & had 2 or 3 Children (base) by another Woman,” which caused him to be “in some disgrace with the said King” (39). Clifford's own experience mirrors Anne St. John's, for her first husband also fathered illegitimate children by a mistress—children whom Clifford supported after his death. Clifford's narrative strategy here recalls but also differs from Christine de Pizan's entries concerning Dido in the Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Like Clifford, Pizan separates her account of Dido's achievements as a ruler of Carthage from the account of her suicide after being abandoned by Aeneas.²¹ Yet unlike Clifford's juxtaposed entries on Henry, Pizan's positive account of Dido is allowed to stand alone in the narrative until she introduces the account of her death much later in the work; she thereby revises traditional representations of Dido which tend to undo her achievements through an emphasis on her suicide. Even though Clifford separates the account of Henry's wife's contribution to his restoration and his later betrayal of her from the celebratory account of Henry's vindication, it is nevertheless striking that the entry concerning Anne St. John precedes that of Henry and therefore cannot but qualify the positive representation of Henry.

Clifford's interest in Anne St. John confirms my argument that, despite the notable counterexample of Henry, Clifford does tend to focus on female agents of history. Just as Clifford recorded in the Knole Diary her potential and imaginative relationship to Elizabeth Tudor and the actual support from Anne of Denmark that sustained her against James I, so she reveals in the diary entries of 1650-1676 her interest in female members of the Restoration monarchy rather than in Charles II, whom she seldom mentions. Although supposedly a staunch royalist, her remembrances of Charles I's execution are curiously detached:

And this day was 27 years [since] our then King Charles (who was borne in Scotland) was beheaded on a Scaffold in the open aire near the Banqueting house at Whitehall & his dead body afterwards buried in the Chappel at Windsor in Berkshire. And when this Tragedy was performed did I lye in Baynards Castle in London and my second Lord was in his lodgings by the Cockpit at Whitehall where hee dyed about a year after.

(244)

The mention of Charles's Scottish origins recalls her reference to James as “the Scotchman” (233). Her detached description of the execution, calling it a “Tragedy,” literally in the sense of a dramatic performance, contrasts with the vivid memories of her own resistance against the pressure brought to bear on her by her husband and James. Moreover, the association of Charles's death with Pembroke's further stresses the link between king and husband that marked the earlier alliance between James and Dorset. In January 1676, she records that her household kept a fast for “the Martyrdom of King Charles the first,” explaining, drily, “the day being commanded to bee kept by Act of Parliament” (245).

In contrast to this detachment, Clifford records Henrietta Maria's visit to England after the Restoration in terms that echo her account of her own “Restoration”:

About the second of November this yeare did Queen Marie, Queene Dowager of England, Daughter to King Henry the 4th of France, widdow to our late Kinge and Mother to our now King Charles the second, come over seas out of France into England … and she now lay at Whitehall in her owne Lodgeings … and this Queene had not bin in England since July in 1644 till now.

(149)

After recording the dowager queen's subsequent visits to England, Clifford marks her death and funeral, noting that she died in “her House called Colombe in France … which House she had lately caused to be built,” a detail that recalls Clifford's own building projects. Moreover, in contrast to the terse description of Charles's execution, which contained no assessment of the king's life or character, Clifford gives a summary of Henrietta Maria's genealogy and life, concluding with the statement: “She was a Woman of excellent perfections both of Mind and Body” (198). She concludes the entry with a description of her funeral, which followed the “form and magnificence as had bin formally used at the funerall of the Queen Mother of France” (198). In these entries Clifford appears to identify with, and celebrates, Henrietta Maria as a woman who triumphantly reclaimed her prerogative after being exiled from her rightful position.

Similarly, she records the visit of Elizabeth, “the Widdow Queene of Bohemia … after she had bin now out of England 48 yeares and a month over” (150). As in the case of Henrietta Maria, Clifford records Elizabeth's death and burial, noting her own sojourn “in Brougham Castle in Westmoreland when she dyed” (156), following her practice of noting where she learned of deaths of members of her family. In the final months of her life in 1676, she remembers how it was “63 years” (252) since the marriage of Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, a ceremony that she attended along with Dorset and her parents. In the various entries for Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth, Charles II and James, Duke of York, figure only incidentally as sons or nephews. She also records the visit to England of Charles's sister Henrietta and her death after her return to France; the arrival of Katherine of Braganza from Portugal to marry Charles and her subsequent miscarriages; the death of Anne Hyde, wife of James; and the arrival of Mary of Modena to marry James. Her history is thus a gendered one that inverts the hierarchy between male and female, focusing on female characters with whom she identifies.

Clifford's skepticism toward a male-centered historiography seems to have fostered an independent judgment that declined to conform to predictable royalist rhetoric: for example, she dispassionately refers to “the Civill Warres between the King & Parliament” (95), or “the late Civill Warres in England” (106) in sharp contrast to the more usual and partisan formulations (e.g., the “late … Rebellion and Usurpation,” “when they threatened to level all degrees of men and women,” “when the Sword-men usurped Dominion over the Persons and Estates of all the Loyal in the Land”) used by her eulogist Bishop Rainbow (48, 57). Significantly, she refers to the Wars of the Roses also as “the Civil Wars in England” (36 and passim). Rainbow's funeral sermon includes an anecdote describing how Clifford expressed disapproval of the court of Charles II: “if I should go to those places, now 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 my self, or give offence to others” (44). Clifford also expressed her independence from the contemporary polarization in religious matters through her admiration of Catholic queens such as Mary Stuart and Henrietta Maria, her matter-of-fact entries recording the election of Clement X as Pope, and her own cordial dealings with Quaker tradesmen.

Clifford's revision of traditional historiography to emphasize the role of women in both the nation and her family was clearly based on her knowledge of, and interest in, earlier histories; the Knole Diary includes mention of a number of works of history among the books that were read to her: “the History of the Netherlands” (41; A Tragicall Historie of the Troubles and Civil Warres of the Low Countries, 1559-1581 [1583], trans. Thomas Stock), “Mr Sandy's Book … about the Government of the Turks” (54; A relation of a journey begun An. Dom. 1610: Four Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and islands adjoyning [1615]), and a “Turkish History” (54; Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turks [1610]). Even though her father did not allow her to learn any foreign language, her interest in non-English history, including the history of the Middle East, is notable. The Appleby Triptych, which records not only her familial history but also her intellectual history in the form of various books whose titles can be readily discerned, contains representations of a number of histories, including William Camden's Britannia (trans. Philemon Holland, 1610), Samuel Daniel's Chronicles of England (1612), Plutarch's Lives (in French), Guicciardini's History (in French, trans. from Italian, 1568), De Commines's History (trans. 1596), and Marcellinus's Roman Historie (trans. Philemon Holland, 1609).²²

In her Great Book Clifford also refers to “Hollingsheads Chronicle & Stows Chronicle & all other Chronicles of England” (20; see also 35), though she challenges these chronicles in two instances. That is, she contests the report that Roger Clifford (d. c. 1327) was executed for treason by Edward II on the grounds that he was too severely wounded to be executed and was later pardoned. And she also disputes the accusation that John Clifford (1435-1461) killed the Earl of Rutland, when the latter was only twelve years old, arguing instead that the Earl must have been a youth of seventeen who met his death on the battlefield. Such critical scrutiny of the authority of chronicle sources, albeit motivated by Clifford's desire to exonerate her ancestors, departs from the practice of what Levy has called “history written by agglomeration,” in which incompatible accounts were included without assessment of the relative value of each because all sources were considered to be equal in value.²³

The Appleby Triptych also includes a representation of the 1609 Works of Edmund Spenser; and Clifford records in her 1617 Diary that her maid “Moll Neville [used to read to me] in The Faery Queen” (47-48). Spenser had dedicated his Fowre Hymnes (1596) to Clifford's mother and to her aunt, the Countess of Warwick. In the Faerie Queene, Spenser frequently represents history in the form of genealogy: for example, in Book II, canto x, where Arthur and Guyon eagerly read the genealogical histories of Britain and the kingdom of Faerie, Spenser indicates the importance of historical knowledge—in the form of genealogy—for his heroes. This idea becomes even more pronounced in Book III, where Merlin imparts to the heroine Britomart the genealogy of her progeny ending in Elizabeth (canto iv) and Paridell and Britomart recount the double genealogy from Trojan Paris and Brute to themselves (canto ix). Spenser revised Virgil's Aeneid by featuring a female epic hero as a historical agent; in this way Spenser's epic provides a historiographical model for Clifford. Spenser praises Britomart's empathy with both her Trojan ancestry and her British progeny who have Elizabeth as telos; Clifford's close and emotional connection to her ancestors, her strong sense of obligation to her descendants, and her unfolding of a genealogy with herself as telos all suggest the importance of the Spenserian model.²⁴

Clifford's various monuments demonstrate her interest in the authorship of another kind of history that commemorates and constructs the identities of those she intended to celebrate. By commissioning in 1617 a monument to her mother in St. Lawrence's Church that resembles Elizabeth's monument in Westminster Abbey, she elevated her mother's position in her northern estates to one comparable to Elizabeth's in the nation. In 1654 she also erected the Countess's Pillar, a fourteen-foot structure, recalling northern market crosses, to mark her last parting with her mother at that location in 1616. Clifford's monuments to both Spenser and Daniel raised them above the actual social stations they held in life. She erected a bust of Daniel in a Roman toga wearing a wreath, with the epitaph asserting that she was the Dowager Countess of Pembroke, Dorset & Montgomery and “sole Daughter and Heire to George Clifford Earl of Cumberland.” In 1620, almost contemporaneous with the struggles recorded in the Knole Diary, Clifford commissioned the replacement in Westminster Abbey of an earlier monument to Spenser. This more imposing monument included, in addition to the original Latin inscription, an English translation and the famous designation of Spenser as the “Prince of Poets.” Here Clifford reverses the relationship between aristocratic patron and homage-paying poet by celebrating Spenser in the same way poets conventionally offer to celebrate their patrons. Just as poets claim to grant immortality to their patrons through their works, so Clifford's commemoration of Spenser in Westminster Abbey constructs him as a national poet and confers on him an extended life. In turn, Clifford herself gains cultural prestige and a type of immortality through the monument.

Clifford's architectural restoration projects also serve as memorials and proclaim her fulfillment of her role as a proper heritor of the Clifford estates. Spending the enormous sum of 40,000 pounds on these projects, she prominently marked these buildings with her initials, plaques, and heraldic crests, along with the date of the restoration, calling attention to her authorship as well as its historical significance; in these practices she followed the examples of many of her ancestors.²⁵ In particular, she proudly signalled her taking possession of her estates as a momentous event by prominently emblazoning Desormais, or “henceforth,” the Clifford family motto, on these buildings. Clifford evidently considered her restoration projects to have national, rather than regional, historical importance, for she records that her Pendraggon Castle “had layen desolate ever since the 15th yeare of Edward the third in 1341, which is 320 yeares agoe, for then (as old Records and Chronicles it appears) the Scotts made an Inroad into the West of England totally destroying it and pulling downe all the timber and a greate parte of the Stone building of it” (154). Referring to the more recent history of England, Clifford proudly states in 1663, “though … the cheife parts of [Skipton] Castle were pulled down by the demmaunds of Cromwell in 1648, yet did I cause it to be rebuilt as it now is in the yeares 1657, 1658 and 1659” (162). The architectural style she employed in these building projects was medieval Gothic; in refraining from creating a bricolage or hybrid by adding a more contemporary Renaissance style to an existing medieval one, she demonstrated an understanding of historical principles of restoration and reconstruction.

Not only did she rebuild her own castles, she also restored eight churches on her property. And she completed the institution, initiated by her mother, of a hospital or almshouse at Beamsly for lay widows; she also endowed a similar almshouse in Appleby. That she considered these institutions to be lasting legacies is evidenced in the special provision she made for them in her will, bequeathing property that she had purchased expressly for their maintenance, and enjoining her daughter and her descendants “to take care for the well ordering of my almshouses at Appleby, and also of my almshouse att Beamesley … which was founded by my blessed mother.”²⁶ Barbara J. Todd has shown that the institutional support for widows of clergymen contributed to lower remarriage rates in the later seventeenth century, and such relief provided poor widows in general with an effective alternative to matrimony.²⁷ In this instance, Clifford's endowments of the almshouses are in line with the growth of institutional charity that Todd describes. In the 1650s, Clifford founded St. Anne's Hospital, expressly intended for the retirement of her female servants; in doing so she resembles Madam Jantil in her contemporary Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo (1662), a widowed noblewoman who wills to her maid “a thousand pound to live a single life.”²⁸

If Clifford discharged what she considered her duties and obligations as a medieval feudal lord, she also was fastidious in claiming her prerogatives. Recalling Elizabeth's royal progresses, Clifford's annual “removals” among her castles, which she recorded in detail, proclaimed her sovereignty over her Westmoreland estates and created occasions for the tenants and neighbors—as numerous as three hundred—to express their homage: “my women attending me in my Coach drawn with six horses and my menservants on horsback and a great many of the chief Gentry of this Countie and of my Neighbours and Tenants accompanying mee in this my Removall” (209). This passage is preceded by a detailed catalogue of the rooms of Castle Brougham in Westmoreland from which she removed herself, the various sites (including the memorial to her mother) passed along the way, followed by the description of all the rooms in Appleby Castle she passed on the way to her “owne chamber” (209). Like Elizabeth, she also commissioned numerous copies of her own portrait to be given to her family, gentry officers, and neighbors, thus disseminating her image. Clifford's life in later years, which her recent biographer Richard Spence describes as a throwback, that of a “born-again medieval suzerain,” can be explained not only by her life-long obsession with her Clifford heritage, but perhaps by her understanding of historical change gained through her study of that heritage.²⁹

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith explained the transition from feudalism to capitalism as partly originating from aristocrats who sold their estates in order to purchase consumer goods: “For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them.”³⁰ Lawrence Stone gives a similar assessment of the same phenomenon, stating that “conspicuous consumption,” made possible by the increased availability of luxury imports and motivated by the desire to maintain “pomp and circumstance” in royal service, was a leading cause of family decay in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.³¹ Both Clifford's father and first husband exemplify the phenomenon described by Smith and Stone. George Cumberland willingly incurred great expenditures as Elizabeth's official champion and a sponsor of numerous naval expeditions to the West Indies; Clifford herself states that her father “spent so much in 9. or 10. Sea Voyages as that he repaired none of his Castles” (41v); “he consumed more of his Estate than ever any of his Ancestors did by much, to which his Continual building of ships, & his Many Sea Voyages, gave great occasion to these vast expences of his, & that which did Contribute the more to the consuming of his estate, was his extream love to Horse-races, Tiltings, Bowling Matches, Shooting, & all such expensive sports” (56v). Both Williamson and Spence surmise that George Clifford left the estates to his brother because the latter would be better able than his daughter to discharge the debts he was leaving.³² And Richard Dorset was notorious for his extravagant expenditures on his clothing and his love of gambling; Clifford repeatedly criticizes him for “his profuseness in consuming his estate” (63) and for his “excessive prodigality in house-keeping, & other Noble ways at Court, as Tilting, Masquing, and the like” (65). He “conveyed” Knole three years after he inherited it (though renting it for one hundred pounds a year), and in less than ten years sold estates including much of Fleet Street and the Manor of Holborn, to the value of over 80,000 pounds; upon his death he left a 60,000-pound debt to his brother.³³

Clifford departed from the prevailing practice among the nobility of removing wealth from estates to consume it in London; in her Great Book she criticized her great-grandfather Henry Clifford (1493-1542) in words that anticipate Smith and Stone: “living so much about the Court in his Youth, drew him so much to love London … as that there he became a great waster of his estate, which caused him after to sell much fair Lands & possessions, & more than his Ancestors had Consumed in many years before” (43); by contrast she commends her grandmother and Henry's daughter-in-law Anne Dacres (d. 1581): “And Remarkable it is in this Anne Countess of Cumberlands life, that she never was at London, nor near it, but applyed her self in Domestick & home affairs, while she was Maid, Wife, & Widow” (45v). According to Stone, after 1620, with the increasing focus on “the pleasures and vanities of London,” the tradition of feudal living in the country virtually ended; aristocrats “gave up impersonal family monuments in favor of the small life-like bust … assert[ing] their personality rather than the sheer grandeur of their line.”³⁴ Yet Clifford stands as an exception to this trend: following Anne Dacres's example and avoiding Henry's, she put her wealth back into her lands through her restoration projects and the building of family monuments—no longer valued by her peers—both of which employed local workers.

Clifford's continuing practice of local hospitality was in keeping with this role of a responsible feudal overlord that she set out to fulfill. As indicated in Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst” and Andrew Marvell's “Upon Appleton House,” hospitality was constructed as an aristocratic virtue—a fulfillment of the obligation to dependents—that was associated with the past and the country, in opposition to contemporaneous aristocratic practices in London and at court. Social historian Felicity Heal indicates that this notion of hospitality celebrated in the “country-house poems” was one that accorded with the prescriptive literature of the seventeenth century. She also suggests that noblewomen used hospitality and charitable giving as a mode of publicly demonstrating their authority.³⁵ Clifford did indeed counter contemporary aristocrats' neglect of hospitality and charity, which was decried in repeated proclamations by James I and Charles I. In doing so, she acted in accordance with the moral economy of an earlier period that prescribed duties as well as granted prerogatives to the feudal nobility.³⁶ She regularly records the names of those who “dined here with my folks”; these guests were brought to see her after dinner and she gave them various gifts, such as “Buckskin Gloves” (235) and “Enamelled Gold Rings” (251), which cemented familial ties and networks of obligations.

As a corollary to her practice of local hospitality and charity, and belying the contemporary stereotype of improvident women, Clifford eschewed the consumption of luxuries associated with the court, such as the elaborate garments that she wore in her youth when she attended the courts of James and Charles I.³⁷ Evidence of her frugality and her direct involvement with her financial affairs emerges when she expresses her anger at tradesmen for overcharging her or even at one of her lay sisters from the abbey for bringing excessive quantities of “Bonlace” (249) for her to purchase. This frugality recalls that of Elizabeth, whose financial prudence gave her more independence from her Parliaments than her Stuart successors, whose extravagant spending made them dependent on their Parliaments to provide them with funds in the form of tax levies. Taking seriously her financial responsibility as a landlord, Clifford kept her own Books of Receipts and Disbursements, with marginal notes in her own hand, meticulously following an elaborate system of accounting and cross-checking between the books. In fact, Rainbow praised her personal oversight of this meticulous system of accounting as unusual among “persons of great Birth and Estate” (35).

Joan Kelly claimed that feudalism allowed women to exercise power as landowners and managers of great estates, a power they lost under the monarchical state that developed in the Renaissance.³⁸ Clifford's remarkable life of independence as a medieval baroness during Restoration England suggests that she chose to live according to the understanding she gained through her extensive historical research, for example, the model provided by her female medieval ancestors such as Isabella de Viteripont. Clifford could not hold the sheriffwick until the death of Pembroke, her second husband, who had been granted the office in right of his wife, and even then she herself could not dispense justice as did Isabella; but she scrupulously recorded every year the visit of the circuit judges whom she lodged in her castles while they discharged their duties. As High Sheriff, she signed the writs of Parliamentary elections; of these, particularly notable for Clifford was the 1668 election of Thomas Tufton, “the first Grandchilde of mine that ever sate in that House of Commons in the Parliament at Westminster” (188). She also took credit for the election of her “Cozens” to the Restoration Parliament—“chosen, most part, by my means” (144). Even during the final months of her life, she granted a request from Lord Wharton to support his eldest son's service in Parliament (284). Through her knowledge of history and the possibilities it offered women in her position, Clifford found a model of female independence, away from monarch-dominated London and the Restoration court. This independence and the real influence she wielded in local politics contrasts sharply with what was considered the illegitimate political meddling by Charles II's mistresses; virulent misogyny marks their satirical and debased representation in many poems collected in Poems of Affairs of State. For example, John Ayloffe's “Britannia and Raleigh” (1674-75) excoriates “the Carwells, Pembrokes, Nells, / The Clevelands, Osbornes, Berties, Lauderdales,” camparing them to Poppea and Messalina for their “lewdness, lust, and shame,” and contrasting them to “the Sidneys, Talbots, Veres, / Blake, Cav'dish, Drake, men void of slavish fears, / True sons of glory, pillars of the state” (170-76).³⁹ Spence remarks that Clifford's “acting as if the barony of Westmoreland were an independent fiefdom and her shrievalty set apart from, even above the law of the realm” (231) seriously offended the royal administration. Nevertheless, Clifford as a titled widow could claim in her later years a political as well as financial independence, free from patriarchal control—of father, husbands, and even her king.

Historians of early modern women have been divided over whether the status of women during this period declined or stayed the same. Alice Clark in Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century maintained that the development of capitalism entailed a decline in the status of laboring women in the Restoration.⁴⁰ Recently Judith M. Bennett has challenged what she calls “the master narrative of a great transformation” and argues for an alternative paradigm of continuity.⁴¹ Bridget Hill, on the other hand, has strongly countered Bennett's emphasis on the persistence of patriarchy by claiming the importance of changes in economic and labor conditions for women.⁴² Although Bennett and Hill both focus on working women, the disagreement between the two historians in their generalized view of women's status is paradigmatic of the issue of whether gender (according to Bennett) or class (according to Hill) is more important. This split mirrors a similar division among literary scholars concerning Aemilia Lanyer, who sought patronage from aristocratic women—Margaret Russell and Anne Clifford among them—in writing Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), a bold challenge to women's subordinate status put forth by questioning patriarchal interpretations of the Bible; that is, these scholars disagree as to whether Lanyer's dedications envision a “community of women” regardless of class, or thinly veil the resentment and hostility of a middle-class poet toward her aristocratic patrons.⁴³ In my view, the split itself between the two schools indicates the difficulty of simultaneously attending to both gender and class: if the former critics focus on gender and thereby deemphasize class differences, then the latter in emphasizing class divisions do not give sufficient importance to the common experience of women in patriarchy. This division also informs Katherine Hodgkin's argument that Anne Clifford was more affected by her gender disability in the first part of her life, but that her class privilege became more important as she came into her estates and wielded power as a patriarchal overlord.⁴⁴ Yet Clifford would not have been in the position to enter into disputes over estates and titles if she were not an aristocratic woman; and as I have been arguing, the Great Book, which she had compiled when she was sixty-three, well after she came into possession of her estates and titles, indicates that gender continued to be an important concern for her. Moreover, later in life, she showed particular care for lay widows and female servants in discharging her feudal duties. Although Bennett and Hill generalize about the status of women from their respective foci on working women in the middle ages (Bennett) and in the eighteenth century (Hill), their arguments do not apply as well to a seventeenth-century aristocrat such as Clifford.

Barbara J. Harris's work on the status of noblewomen in the early Tudor period is of more relevance for Clifford. Harris finds that aristocratic women involved themselves in political matters and wielded a great deal of influence through family and kinship networks; at the same time they received little consideration when the Crown involved itself in disputes concerning inheritance.⁴⁵ Both statements closely approximate Clifford's status, although Clifford was more insistent than Harris's Tudor women in asserting her inheritance rights despite the efforts of the Crown. While Harris's noblewomen worked tirelessly on behalf of their sons—even preferring as heirs their sons' children over their own daughters—Clifford's efforts were exerted on her own behalf as well as for her daughters and their children. Significantly, in this context, Clifford refers to one of her sons who died in infancy as her husband's while she claims Margaret as hers: “my eldest Daughter the Lady Margaret and his young Sonn the Lord Buckhurst” (246).⁴⁶ Harris also states that widows were eager to contract marriages between their own children and their stepchildren in order to solidify dynastic alliances; yet Clifford strenuously resisted her second husband's efforts to have his son and her daughter marry, respecting her daughter's aversion to the marriage. In these ways Clifford was more assertive of her own and her daughters' rights than were Harris's Tudor noblewomen who identified with the interests of the patrilineages into which they had married.

Lois G. Schwoerer's biography of Clifford's contemporary Lady Rachel Russell also shows her subject to have wielded political influence, especially as a widow, largely due to the prestige of her husband, William Russell, who was constructed as a Whig martyr after his execution for the Rye House Plot.⁴⁷ Unlike Russell, however, Clifford kept aloof from the court and London, and she did not derive her political power from her husbands, although her second marriage to the powerful Philip Herbert, Lord Chamberlain and privy counselor, was clearly intended to aid her legal pursuit of her northern titles and estates. Because her husbands were problematic examples of patriarchal efforts to subordinate her, she sought models of legitimation and empowerment from her medieval ancestors.

Writing in 1894, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes maintained that women engaged in a variety of political activities in medieval and early modern England, but that in the seventeenth century Sir Edward Coke and others distorted the historical record by denying women legal and political standing.⁴⁸ The irony here lies of course in Coke's role in championing the rights of the commons against the Crown by citing historical precedent in the form of common law. In evaluating Stopes's work, Hilda L. Smith states that it “continues to offer the greatest documentation of women's early citizenship,” and concludes that its validity has not been disputed.⁴⁹ The occlusion of the historical record that Stopes describes makes evident the importance of Clifford's investigation of precedents for her own political role, in particular as sheriff. For Clifford, contemporary models were wanting or inadequate; returning to medieval models allowed her to counteract the patriarchy of monarch and husband as well as the centralization of the English nation around London. Rather than positing a choice between a decline or a continuity in the status of women, Clifford's example calls for an alternative history that allows for change but not necessarily a teleological one that charts either progress or decline. Rather than be bound to the present and acquiesce to a prevailing paradigm, she chose and followed examples from her historical research; the past provided her with precedents, a political imaginary that made available possibilities. Her contemporary Francis Bacon expresses the theory of history that she followed: “The observation of proportion or likeness between one person or one thing and another, makes nothing without an example, nor nothing new … when circumstances agree, and proportion is kept, that which is probable in one case is probable in a thousand, and that which is reason once is reason ever.”⁵⁰ Yet her decisions and practices cannot simply be characterized as reactionary or nostalgic, not only because she found in past paradigms possibilities for a titled woman such as herself, but also because she adapted feudal practices to contemporary uses as evidenced by her participation in the newer modes of institutional charity.

Clifford rewrote the genre of male-centered history from the point of view of a female agent who seeks female precedents and exemplars. Thus she implicitly challenged patriarchy through a strategy of historical and textual interpretation, and through practicing historiography from a perspective that introduces gender as a category of historical analysis.⁵¹ Since her writings took the form of journals and other private forms that were passed down within the family, and that were never published in her lifetime, Clifford's own revisionist historiography was directed to a limited audience of her daughters and progeny. Although Clifford's life, thanks to the survival of these texts, is one of the best documented in seventeenth-century England, A. H. Whitaker conjectured in the nineteenth century that some of her papers may have been destroyed by her grandson, the sixth Earl of Thanet.⁵² In any case, the original manuscript of her Diary—in which entries for only a few years survive—no longer exists. As the passage I have chosen for an epigraph suggests, Clifford was very conscious of the fragility of the historical record despite constant vigilance to combat decay and loss; she describes the fire that consumed one of the Clifford castles during the time of the Shepherd Lord and its aftermath: “so as all the Timber & lead was utterly consumed, & nothing left but the bare Walls standing, which since are more & more consumed & quite ruinated, for his Son [Henry Clifford 1493-1542] lived so much at the Court, that he had no time to repair it … & So this Brough Castle went to utter ruin & decay more & more” (41). In fact, many of the buildings she herself restored fell back to ruin after her death.

Yet her passionate claim to her heritage and her fierce loyalty to her daughters and descendants significantly produced an answering interest: in the mid-eighteenth century, Margaret Cavendish Harley Bentinck (1715-1785)—characterized by A. S. Turberville as “a woman of strong intelligence, a keen collector, and a friend of Rousseau”—transcribed Clifford's manuscripts and bequeathed them to her daughter; in the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Sackville West and possibly her sister Mary Sackville copied the Knole Diary.⁵³ These women who copied and transmitted Clifford's Diary are examples of the “hidden” female participation in manuscript culture that Margaret J. M. Ezell has shown to have been neglected by scholars who have overemphasized print culture.⁵⁴ Although we cannot recover the motives behind these acts of copying and transmission, we can nevertheless conclude that they attest to the “tellability” of Clifford's story; it constituted the “kind of story which a culture regards as worth remembering and recounting.”⁵⁵ For example, Clifford's story of a daughter's dispossession was relevant for Margaret Bentinck in that, although her mother, Henrietta Cavendish Holles, was the sole heir of John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, he willed his title and estate to his nephew. Bentinck authorized the bequest of the large number of manuscripts collected by her grandfather Robert Harley to the English nation for 10,000 pounds, a fraction of its cost and value, on the condition that they be kept together and known as the Harleian collection; the Fisher manuscript copy of Clifford's Great Book is part of this collection.⁵⁶

For Clifford's twentieth-century editor Vita Sackville-West, who was descended from Clifford's brother-in-law Edward Sackville, and who spent her childhood at Knole, where Clifford resided during her first marriage, Clifford provided an example of a woman who was denied inheritance because of her gender. Sackville-West repeatedly wrote of her great attachment to Knole. In Knole and the Sackvilles, she declares, “I loved it; and took it for granted that Knole loved me.”⁵⁷ Yet she was unable to inherit it from her father; in an uncanny repetition of Clifford's predicament, the estate passed on to her uncle and then to her cousin.⁵⁸ The structure of Knole and the Sackvilles recalls that of Anne Clifford's Great Book, in that both are family histories culminating in the author herself. Sackville-West, like Clifford, considers her history to have more than family and local significance; she repeatedly claims a typical “Englishness” for Knole—“No other country but England could have produced it” (33)—and a representativeness for the Sackvilles: “From generation to generation they might stand, fully equipped, as portraits from English history” (41). Like Clifford, who emphasized the importance of her female ancestors, Sackville-West also gives pride of place to Clifford over Dorset—though she was in fact related to him but not to her. In her chapter on “Knole in the Reign of James I” she gives a relative assessment of the two, quoting John Donne's praise of Clifford: “He is utterly eclipsed—weak, vain, and prodigal—by the interest of that woman of character, his wife, knowing so well to ‘discourse of all things, from predestination to slea [unravelled] silk’ and by the faithful picture that is her Diary” (69). And in the “Introduction” to her edition of this Diary, Sackville-West invokes Clifford in describing Knole: “Knole I have seen as Anne Clifford knew it.”⁵⁹ Just as Clifford found useful the historical precedents of female agents in history, so her female heritors found resonance in Clifford's own insistence on her right to her title and estates.

The protagonist of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) has long been recognized as having been modeled on Sackville-West, to whom the novel is dedicated. The holograph manuscript of the novel indicates that Woolf additionally based the young Orlando on Anne Clifford.⁶⁰ Repeatedly stating that the Cliffords descended in a straight male line from Isabella to George her father, Clifford places herself at the “end of the line” and constructs her history as essentially an elegiac one; but Woolf places her—though without explicitly naming her in the published version—at the beginning of her rewriting of the still unfolding history of England with gender as its central concern. Despite widely divergent historical circumstances, then, the “tellability” of Clifford's story as well as her history that challenges prevailing historiographical practices became more pronounced for early-twentieth-century writers interested in the question of gender, such as Sackville-West and Woolf. In fact, over two decades before Orlando, Woolf had written, but never published, The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn (1906), a fictional account of a female historian who discovers a journal of a fifteenth-century woman while researching the English land tenure system; the second half of the story constitutes the journal itself.⁶¹ Woolf's historian and alter-ego who gives voice to her female subject can serve here as a figure not only for Clifford and the female ancestors whose lives she researched, but also for the female transmitters of Clifford's own texts. Although Clifford's writings had a limited public during her lifetime, they are now available to a much larger public because intervening generations of women transmitted, and then edited and published her manuscripts, thus ensuring their survival for late twentieth-century readers.

Notes

1. Amy Louise Erikson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), 111. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1999 Modern Language Association Convention, in a session sponsored by the Division on Seventeenth-Century English Literature, “Reading Early Modern Women / Early Modern Women Reading.” I thank the organizer, Margaret Ezell, as well as Clare Kinney and David Norbrook, who provided suggestions and information. Frank Palmeri, Hilda Smith, and Barbara Todd helped me in revising the essay.

2. The monumental biography by George C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke & Montgomery, 1590-1676: Her Life, Letters and Work (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1922), is still indispensible. A more recent study is Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford: Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (1590-1676) (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997).

3. F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (New York: Columbia UP, 1962), 34.

4. Fussner, The Historical Revolution, 29-32.

5. David C. Douglas, English Scholars 1660-1730, 2d rev. ed. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), 46.

6. See F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), chap. 6, “The Popularization of History.” Levy gives as reasons for the “great flowering of historical literature” in Elizabeth's reign the influence of humanism (which produced many translations of classical and more recent histories) and the historical outlook of English Protestantism, as well as the lifting of Marian prohibition of histories.

7. Clarendon folded his autobiography into his history, and Gilbert Burnet turned his autobiography into narrative history. See John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance, 2d ed. (London: Weidenfeld, 1993), 31-32, 34-35. Michael Maclagan, “Genealogy and Heraldry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Levi Fox (London: Dugdale Society, 1956), 45, describes the close relationship in the seventeenth century of genealogy to local and national history: “amateur scholars moved imperceptibly from their family to their county and thence to a wider field.”

8. Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 350, 354. In addition, Clifford has recently received a great deal of attention from scholars interested in the question of literacy inflected by gender. See Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 185-95; Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (London: Routledge, 1999), 114-31.

9. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), 147. Significantly, virtually none of the major studies of early modern English historiography deal with the question of gender. The exception is Annabel Patterson's Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), chap. 10, “Women.”

10. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 175, argues that unspecified internal evidence in the “Knole Diary” indicates that it was begun before 1603 and continued at least to 1620. Katherine Acheson, in her edition of the diary of 1616-1619, maintains that the entry for 1603 is a separate document, though both surviving manuscripts, the “Knole” (from the early nineteenth century) and the “Portland” (from the mid-eighteenth century) include the entries for the years 1603 and 1616-1619. The Diary of Anne Clifford 1616-1619: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1995), 17-23.

11. Parenthetical references for “Knole Diary” and the accounts of the years 1650-76 in the “Great Book” are to The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1990).

12. Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth and the Persistence of Patriarchy,” Feminist Review 4 (1980): 45-56.

13. Edward Rainbow, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable Anne Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery … (1677), 53. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

14. See Leicester's Commonwealth: The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents, ed. D. C. Peck (Athens: Ohio UP, 1985). The work calls the “assignation [to Mary, the younger sister] … in prejudice of the elder sister's [Margaret's] right” as “against all reason, law, and nature” (164), and as “a case of manifest and apparent wrong” (165). It further asserts that the provision was either “forged or [the] clause inserted by other and king's stamp set into it after his death” (164).

15. On the gap between patriarchal theory and actual practices, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987), 161-63. On Queen Anne's rival court, see Leeds Barroll, “The Court of the First Stuart Queen,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 191-208. See also Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 15-43, on Queen Anne's use of the court masque as a vehicle for “subversive intervention in Jacobean politics” (15).

16. Alexander Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 4:79. On Daniel as a historian, see D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James to the Civil War (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990), chap. 3, “Samuel Daniel and the Emergence of the English State.”

17. Lewalski, Writing Women, 125.

18. “A Summary of the Lives of the Veteriponts, Cliffords & Earls of Cumberland And of the Lady Anne, Countess Dowager of Pembroke, Dorsett, and Montgomery & Daughter & Heir to George Clifford Earl of Cumberland, in whom the Name of the said Cliffords Determined,” copied from the Original Manuscript the 29th of December 1737 by Henry Fisher, British Library Harley MS 6177, 40. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. J. P. Gilson, who published a portion of this manuscript—the lives of Clifford's parents, of her uncle and cousin, and of Clifford herself, but not the lives of her other ancestors—characterizes the Harley MS as one of several copies made from the “Great Book,” and calls attention to the special value of this manuscript as “a complete and exact transcript in the Countess's own words of the record of family history and of her own times, adding nothing except a copy of her funeral sermon.” The Lives of Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590-1676) And of Her Parents Summarized by Herself, intro. J. P. Gilson (London: Roxburghe Club, 1916), xi-xii.

19. The gendering of Clifford's history extends even to the entries concerning the usurping uncle and cousin, for Clifford remarks that Grizel Hughes, the wife of Francis Clifford, refrained from going to the properties under dispute between her husband and sister-in-law, and she praises Frances Cecill, the wife of her cousin Henry: “She was a Lady of a Noble & Just mind, very bountifull to her power, & kind & loving to her friends & Kindred” (53v).

20. On providence as an organizing principle of early modern history, see Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1967), 64-70. See also Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 171 (on Polydore Vergil), 289-90 (on Raleigh), and Woolf, Idea of History, 5-8, 101 (on Daniel).

21. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), 91-95, 188-89.

22. For other perspectives on the painting, see Graham Parry, “The Great Picture of Lady Anne Clifford,” in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 202-18, as well as Lamb, “The Agency,” Lewalski, Writing Women, Sanders, Gender and Literacy, and Wheale, Writing and Society.

23. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 183-84. Levy does allow that historians of the early seventeenth century were more concerned with the authenticity of the story than their medieval predecessors, and that Sir Walter Raleigh was willing to judge his sources (291-92). Douglas also calls Frank Brady's Introduction of the Old English History (1694) “remarkable” for its time in comparing and collating chronicle accounts with public records (English Scholars, 126-27).

24. On Britomart's simultaneous fashioning as an epic hero and poet in the Paridell episode, see Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 159-73. See also Heather Dubrow, “The Arraignment of Paridell: Tudor Historiography in The Faerie Queene, III, ix,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 312-27. According to Dubrow, this episode participates in contemporaneous debates about the reliability of history and raises questions about the “motivations behind our desire to recount history” (326)—a point that is especially relevant in assessing Clifford's practices.

25. Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury (c. 1527-1608), was Clifford's female precursor in these restoration projects; Clifford's emblazoning of “AC” on her buildings recalls Hardwick's prominent display of “ES” (for Elizabeth Shrewsbury) on Hardwick Hall. On the building of Hardwick New Hall in 1596-97, see E. Carleton Williams, Bess of Hardwick (London: Longmans, 1959), 207-15.

26. “Summary of the Will of Lady Anne Clifford,” Dated May 1st, 1674, in Williamson, “Appendix,” 467, 469-70.

27. Barbara J. Todd, “The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered,” in Women in English Society 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 72, 79.

28. Margaret Cavendish, Bell in Campo, part 2, IV, xix, in The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), 164.

29. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 230.

30. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 264.

31. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 184-86.

32. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, 34; Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 22.

33. Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles, new ed. (1922; London: National Trust, 1991), 68, 81.

34. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy 188.

35. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 114, 183.

36. I take the phrase “moral economy” from E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 77-108.

37. Hilda L. Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982), 11, discusses as one of the indices of the decreasing social power of aristocratic women in seventeenth-century England the decline of “upper-class women's useful functions on family estates” and the concomitant encouragement of “their becoming social ornaments and gadabouts.”

38. Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 27, 31.

39. Poems of Affairs of State, ed. George deF. Lord (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 1:228-36.

40. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, 3d ed. (1919; London: Routledge, 1992), 41.

41. Judith M. Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women, Across the Great Divide,” in Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992), 165. See also the recent assessment of “the search for significant trends within the narrative sequence of women's history” in Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), epilogue.

42. Bridget Hill, “Women's History: A Study in Change, Continuity, or Standing Still,” Women's History Review 2 (1993): 5-22. See also Bennett's response to Hill, “Women's History: A Study in Continuity and Change,” Women's History Review 2 (1993): 173-84.

43. An earlier generation of scholars of women's writing, such as Barbara Lewalski, has been criticized for not sufficiently acknowledging class differences between middle-class poet and aristocratic patrons. See, for example, Anne Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35 (1993): 357-76; Lisa Schnell, “‘So Great a Difference is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996): 23-35.

44. Katharine Hodgkin, “The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford: A Study of Class and Gender in the Seventeenth Century,” History Workshop Journal 19 (1985): 148-61.

45. Barbara J. Harris, “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 259-81; “Aristocratic Women and the State in Early Tudor England,” State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England, ed. Charles Carlton (New York: St. Martins, 1998), 3-24.

46. Barbara J. Harris, “Property, Power, and Personal Relations: Elite Mothers and Sons in Yorkist and Early Tudor England,” Signs 15 (1990): 618-22. Harris also adduces counterexamples of mothers who used their estates to provide for other children besides the eldest son (623-24); Clifford made bequests to the younger children of her daughter Margaret, for the eldest was in line to inherit the title and estates of his father, the Earl of Thanet.

47. Lois G. Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell: “One of the Best of Women” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), esp. chaps. 7 and 8.

48. Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (London: S. Sonnenschein and Co., 1894), chap. 4. Stopes says that Isabella and Idonea Viteripont insisted on fealty and homage from the inhabitants of Appleby (41). On Coke, see chap. 7, “The Long Ebb.”

49. Hilda L. Smith, “Women as Sextons and Electors: King's Bench and Precedents for Women's Citizenship,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 326 n., 338. Smith's “All Men and Both Sexes”: Gender and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832, forthcoming, Penn State UP, includes a discussion of Anne Clifford's political activity.

50. The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James E. Spedding et al. (London, 1857-74), 9:14, quoted in Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 252. See also Baker, The Race of Time, 48-49, on the use of history “as a guide to present action”—a principle that underlies the works of Machiavelli as well as Bacon.

51. I am referring to Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 28-50.

52. A. H. Whitaker, History of Craven (1823), cited in D. J. H. Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, xiii.

53. A. S. Turberville, A History of Welbeck Abbey and its Owners (London: Faber, 1939), 2: v. For information concerning the “Knole” and “Portland” manuscripts of Clifford's diary, and the manner of their transmission, see the “Introduction” to Acheson, The Diary of Anne Clifford, 17-23.

54. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), 11.

55. Philippe Carrard, “Voice Trouble: The Search for Women's Words in French Historiography,” Clio 27 (1997): 27. For another perspective on Clifford's “modernity,” see Katherine Osler Acheson, “The Modernity of the Early Modern: The Example of Anne Clifford,” in Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998), 40, which treats Clifford as “respond[ing] to an analysis of modernity as a metonymic and metaphoric relationship to history.”

56. “Letter to the Speaker, on the purchase of the Harleian Manuscripts” (April 3, 1753), BL Add. MS 17521 f. 38 (miscatalogued as 30).

57. Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles, 29.

58. Victoria Glendinning, Vita: A Biography of Vita Sackville-West (New York: Knopf, 1983), xvii, states that “the first great sorrow of her life was that, by an accident of gender, Knole could not be hers.” To her cousin, Edward, who was to inherit Knole, she wrote: “Knole has been an awful and deep block. I suppose my love for Knole has gone deeper than anything else in my life” (September, 1933, quoted in Glendenning, Vita, 291; for other examples of Sackville-West's statements about Knole, see 189, 196, 275-76, 329, 368).

59. Vita Sackville-West, ed., The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford (London: Heinemann, 1923), xxxiii.

60. Nicky Hallett, “Anne Clifford as Orlando: Virginia Woolf's Feminist Historiology and Women's Biography,” Women's History Review 4 (1995): 508, points out that in the published version, Clifford is not named and is transposed into Orlando's mother.

61. Hallett suggests that Woolf's repeated engagements with Clifford elsewhere in her work reveal Woolf's feminist historiography, which had manifested itself earlier in The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn. The modern editors of The Journal assess the work as “a significant addition to Woolf's canon … [an] early fictionalization of her views about the role of woman as historian and the significance of women in the history of England. … themes that occupy Virginia Woolf throughout her lifetime.” Susan M. Squire and Louise A. DeSalvo, “Virginia Woolf's The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” Twentieth Century Literature 25 (1979): 208-9.