SOURCE: Spence, R. T. “Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590-1676): A Reappraisal.” Northern History XV (1979): 43-65.

[In the following essay, Spence claims that Clifford's biographers have tended to be too uncritical of her, and attempts to present a more rounded picture of Clifford's character and actions. He claims that while she was indeed a remarkable, strong woman, she also adhered to the assumptions of patriarchalism and was thus not a champion of female emancipation.]

More than most of her contemporaries, Lady Anne Clifford has attracted not just the attention but the admiration of historians.¹ Indeed there is much to praise in Lady Anne's attitudes and activities—her intellectual and cultural interests, devotion to faith and family, munificence and massive rebuilding of her castles and churches. She readily evokes sympathy too for her marital misfortunes and the long struggle to win her rightful inheritance against the opposition of her Clifford relatives, the devious actions of both her husbands and the partiality of James I and then her spirited defence of her properties against Commonwealth generals after they did become hers in 1649. That there was a darker side to Lady Anne has not gone unnoticed by her biographers, but their criticism has been muted and her behaviour interpreted in the most favourable light.²

Admittedly, it would be difficult to be over-critical of Lady Anne. She and her rather precise, puritan mother, Margaret Russell, countess of Cumberland—‘my saint-lyke mother’ Lady Anne called her—rubbed shoulders with a dubious cross-section of their contemporaries and stand out with all the greater purity and virtue in consequence. There were, for instance, Anne's father, the reckless, gambling and spendthrift George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland; Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, the great manipulator at the centre of a web of political intrigue and corruption; Anne's two husbands, Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, a profligate character, and Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, called ‘the most dissolute wastrel at Court’, both of whom coveted and the first in part obtained Anne's inheritance. Then there were Dorset's relatives, the ambitious and unscrupulous Howard family; Lord Chancellor Bacon, who took the Cliffords' ‘rewards’ along with many others, and James I with his pretty men, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset whose bride she might have become, and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham who ‘elevated corruption to the status of a system’.³

But Bishop Rainbow surely went too far in eulogising Lady Anne in his seventy-page, three-hours-long funeral sermon on 14 April 1676. He listed amongst Anne's many virtues her Courage, Humility, Faith, Charity, Piety and Wisdom. ‘Thus died’, he proclaimed, ‘this great, wise woman who, whilst she lived, was the Honour of her Sex and her Age, fitter for a History than a Sermon.’⁴ Lady Anne's biographers have tended to echo Bishop Rainbow's adulation. They have all been a bit too generous to her. They have taken her too much at her own self-evaluation. The chief reason is the limitations of the most accessible sources for any study of her. Her Diary is useful but prejudiced.⁵ Her letters tend to be self-indulgent. Bishop Rainbow and George Sedgewick were devoted to her.⁶ Williamson, whose life is the most thorough survey, was more of a literary scholar than an astringent historian. For unwary historians of noble personages there is always the trap of snobbery and Williamson was not free from this, and of course for radical historians the even greater pitfall of inverted snobbery. Moreover, Anne's high moral tone finds a ready response from those for whom the rapid erosion of values is difficult to adjust to. What I want to do this evening is redress the balance a little on Lady Anne, to try to present a more rounded picture of her character and actions.

Let me remind you of Lady Anne's life and career. She was born at Skipton Castle on 30 January 1590, the third and only surviving legitimate child, as she herself stressed, of the 3rd Earl of Cumberland and his wife Margaret, daughter of Francis, 4th Earl of Bedford. Anne knew on which day she had been conceived, 1 May 1589, which is more than most people know or wish to know, but it illustrates one of her interests, an historical virtue even, in exactitude and fine points of detail. In her Diary she gives us her own picture of herself. ‘I was born’, she writes, ‘a happy creature in mind, body and spirit.’ The perfections of her mind surpassed even those of her body and she was blessed with ‘a strong and Copious memorie, a sound Judgement and a diserneinge spirritt’. Like her mother, Anne proved to be both devout and studious. She was privately tutored by Samuel Daniel, an able man whose pupils included William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. But Daniel was irked for much of his life at having to earn his living, as he said, by biding with children when he should have been writing about the activities of men, a not uncommon grouse amongst those of academic bent. Anne was also taught by Mistress Anne Taylor, wife of one of her father's household officers, and she had a dancing master called Stephen. Under Daniel, Anne developed a taste for poetry, music, history and the classics and throughout her life good literature and needlework were to be a constant pleasure and solace to her in difficult times. Her father, oddly enough for a much-travelled man, would not allow her to learn a foreign language. Whether that was male chauvinism or worldly wisdom one can only guess. Once Lady Anne left Skipton Castle, when only nine weeks old, she was not to return to live there for fifty-nine years, and I think only saw it once during that time.

Lady Anne's life was one of great contrasts—disappointments, unhappiness, loneliness and much wrangling, but also spells of deep satisfaction and pleasure and, later in life, real contentment and pride. The unhappiness started early, with the estrangement of her parents, her father's infidelity with a lady at Court and the straits into which his indebtedness put both himself and his wife and daughter. Although the Earl was kind to Anne and she had a strong affinity with him, she saw little of him whilst she was in her teens and her parents' separation obviously hurt her deeply, as her Diary shows. It also led to the kind of humiliating situation as when the Earl entertained James I and his entourage at Grafton House in Northamptonshire but his Countess, although present with Anne, could not act as hostess to the King. Lady Anne and her mother had to make their own way in life after 1601 and Anne's yearning for friendship at this time is clear from her Diary and her attachment to her cousin Lady Frances Bourchier who was, alas, to die young. Anne was frequently and for long spells to suffer loneliness and lack of friends she could trust. After marrying Dorset in 1609 she saw little of her mother who stayed at her jointure house Brougham Castle whilst Anne lived in the south. The feeling of isolation and the hostility often shown her during her sixteen years of marriage with Dorset merely hardened her natural determination, self-reliance and stubbornness which became in her own eyes a virtue but to her opponents an exasperating failing.⁷

The issue which was to cause Anne and her mother greatest distress was, of course, the inheritance dispute. This dominated Lady Anne's life from the time of her father's death in 1605 until her entry into the estates legally hers forty-four years later. The dispute not only became an obsession with Anne and her mother but soured her relations with both her husbands. To explain a complex matter briefly, her father was heavily in debt at the time of his death and to ensure that the debts would be honoured he left all his property in Craven, Westmorland and the East Riding to his brother Francis, 4th Earl, on whom he could rely to raise the money from the estates to satisfy his many creditors. The 3rd Earl believed, quite properly, that the resources of all the Clifford estates would be needed to pay the debts. As recompense to Anne, the Earl left her £15,000, also to be raised from the estates. To Anne and her mother this was but further humiliation and they fought the Earl's will through the courts, helped by a major blunder made by the Earl's lawyers who had failed to break the entail to the heirs general—that is, daughters as well—before making the fine and recovery to the Earl's brother which should have given him legal possession of all the Clifford estates. The judges eventually ruled, rightly, that Anne was entitled only to the original Skipton Castle estates and, to a lesser degree, the Westmorland properties, but none of the rest. Anne persistently refused to accept the judges' decision until, finally, in 1617 after twelve years of costly litigation King James made an award as a final settlement of the controversy. This award followed the lines of the 3rd Earl's will; it gave the estates to the 4th Earl and £17,000 as recompense to Anne. But it also laid down that if the male line died out then she would inherit the Skipton and Westmorland properties. Anne refused to accept even this final judgement, which was put into effect by Dorset and her Clifford relatives despite her. Dorset pocketed the £17,000. Anne's sense of ill-treatment over the issue was to embitter much of her life. What made things worse for her was the displeasure both her husbands expressed at her unco-operative attitude. Under the strain she became mentally and physically exhausted and her health at times was fragile. Not surprisingly, when the male line of the Cliffords came to an end in 1643 with the death of her cousin Henry, 5th Earl and Anne could at last obtain her castles and lordships she saw it as the hand of God, the justice of divine providence and the justification of her long fight for her rightful inheritance. By one of the quirks of history, she and her husband had benefited twice; Dorset with his great windfall, Anne with her estates.⁸

In 1649, when Lady Anne journeyed north to take possession of her estates, her life entered its happiest and most fruitful phase. Becoming mistress of her lands gave her a new impetus. She now achieved her long ambition to restore her castles, move round in great state on her horse litter, hold court for the local worthies, dominating in the style of a great noble lady. For twenty-seven years she was the greatest personage in Westmorland and Craven and she imprinted her personality on those places for ever. Yet before she died, on 22 March 1676, she expressed the wish for a quiet family funeral. In fact a huge assembly turned up to listen to Bishop Rainbow's panegyric.

This was typical of Lady Anne. Though only a small woman—she was under five feet tall—everything she did seemed larger than life. Granted that, as Mrs Stopes pointed out,⁹ Anne had spiritual courage, wealth, power, and opportunity, she achieved things on a grand scale, the accidental as well as the planned, and with a conspicuity rare amongst the wives of the Stuart aristocracy. The list of those who tried to persuade Anne to give in over the inheritance settlement reads like a roll call of the great at James I's Court. Apart from Lord Dorset and his noble friends, his relatives and servants, the Archbishop of Canterbury took her aside to try to change her mind. Lady Compton, Lady Fielding and Lady Arundel did their best to persuade her ‘to yield to the King in all things’. Lord Burghley, the Dowager Lady Dorset and Lady Montgomery followed suit. ‘All this time of my being in London’, she records in her Diary, ‘I was much sent for and visited by many … everybody persuading me to hear and make an end since the King had taken the matter in hand.’ The great pressure that James I himself put on Anne was, happily for her, undermined by the Queen who warned her not to entrust her claims to the King's judgement lest he deceive her, as in fact he did. The Queen was one of the very few people Anne could trust at this time and she was a great comfort to her.¹⁰

Later in life, on her northern lordships, the rôle was reversed. Court was paid to Lady Anne. She was the resident aristocrat in Westmorland, owning an estate which embraced a large part of the county. Her journeys to and from her castles were conducted with all the elements of a great dignitary in transit, a royal progress almost. She herself went in her horse-litter, followed by coaches with her ladies-in-waiting and other women servants, then her officers and menservants on horseback and behind them a long train of wagons carrying the household belongings. Neighbouring gentry and many other local people came to her and the number accompanying her to her destination sometimes exceeded 300. A stream of local worthies paid their respects, and Anne's numerous descendants (her daughter Margaret had twelve children) dutifully turned up, in awe no doubt, to be scrutinized and rewarded by the formidable old lady. Anne had never been reluctant to stand on her dignity. In her castles and on her estates, at the dining table and in her own chamber, she upheld the hierarchy of rank which came naturally to a woman of her titles, wealth and generation. Finally, at her funeral a vast throng swarmed. What was it for, homage or curiosity or a sense of relief?¹¹

Nothing illustrates the grandiose aspect of Anne's career quite so much as the massive repairs on her castles and churches for which she is best remembered today. She gave an early intimation of her taste for stonework in commemorating those people she had known and admired and especially her family. First she built a tomb for her cousin and friend Lady Frances Bourchier in 1616 at Chenies. In Appleby church there is the fine tomb to her mother which Lady Anne put up in 1617. She erected a monument to her tutor Samuel Daniel at Beckington church in Somerset, though characteristically the inscription tells more about Anne than Daniel. In 1620 she commissioned Nicholas Stone to erect the first monument to Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey.¹²

But it was, of course, after she entered her estates in 1649 that Anne began to rebuild and also donate on a huge scale. She started to repair Brough Castle almost at once and was able to stay there in 1650. Reconstruction at Brougham Castle took place in 1651 and 1652, began at Appleby in 1651 and at Pendragon in 1660. To all these renovated dwellings she added other necessary new buildings such as kitchens, bakehouses, brewhouses and stables to provide the necessary modern amenities. Skipton Castle was restored between 1657 and 1658 and Barden Tower about the same time. She put up plaques, which many of you will have seen, to mark her restorations. But the proprietorial pride shown in these repairs of her ruined ancestral homes was not at the expense of sound estate management. Indeed, that was one of her objectives. Some of the building was clearly in line with this. A courthouse was erected at Brough Castle to keep her manorial courts there. Brough Mill and Hough Mill near Barden, water-corn mills which brought in high rents, were rebuilt and a new one constructed at Brougham. A bridge was built over the Eden to give easy access to Pendragon Castle in 1663.¹³

Lady Anne is almost as famous for her splendid church repairs as for her castles—St. Lawrence's, Appleby in 1655, Bongate church at Appleby, the chapel at Brougham, Ninekirks and another church at Brough, the chapel at Mallerstang, Skipton church and possibly Kirby Thore too. On these the initials A.P. and the arms of the Cliffords and Veteriponts are more discreet memorials to her work. The ornate tomb to her father erected in Skipton church in 1654 will be familiar to you and perhaps equally the tomb she built for herself in Appleby church. The almshouses Anne provided and endowed in 1651-2 for twelve poor women at Appleby are today one of the most interesting features of that unusually attractive town. Lady Anne also gave endowments to schools at Appleby and Mallerstang and she completed the almshouses at Beamsley near Skipton put up by her mother in 1593. She erected a pillar to herself, known as the Countess's Pillar, near Brougham Castle.

But Lady Anne's handiwork did not end there. She had a habit of giving away stock locks—huge locks made by George Dent of Appleby at a cost of £1 apiece. These are still in situ at the former homes of her household officers and other local men of standing, at Appleby Castle itself, at Dacre church, at the bishop of Carlisle's residence Rose Castle, at Dalemain, the home of her servant Sir Edward Hasell, at Collinfield near Kendal where her faithful George Sedgewick lived and at Great Asby peel tower. The impact that Lady Anne made on the visible environment can hardly be overestimated. She created an inheritance in that respect not just for herself and her descendants but for the general public too and it is one from which we, far more conscious now of the need to cherish our heritage, can constantly benefit. However critically we may view Lady Anne, we are at least in her debt for enriching our perception and enjoyment.

Giving away stock locks was but one of many notable acts of generosity, a characteristic Bishop Rainbow stressed in his funeral oration. Giving presents was Lady Anne's hobby. She lavished gifts on servants and friends after 1649 when she had the wherewithal to do it: gloves, books, jewelry, money, bedsteads to her chief officers with whom she stayed—those at Collinfield and Dalemain still survive. That foible was for dignity and comfort, to ensure a good night's sleep. The number of portraits of herself which she gave away must have meant that she was one of the most frequently painted ladies of her time. She once purchased fifty-five copies of a book of devotions by the Reverend John Rowlet of Kirby Stephen, costing £3 5s. 4d. the set, which she gave away one at a time. Anne had a paternalistic attitude towards her servants and their personal welfare. She paid them, besides their wages, extra sums for special service. Unlike her father and her two husbands, she paid on the nail for all her purchases, which must have made her unusually welcome to the tradesmen. Her munificence towards the poor is well-attested in the few household accounts which survive. She gave daily alms to them and helped others in distress. For example, on 8 February 1665 she gave Roger Varey, one of her tenants, ten shillings towards the repair of his house which had been accidentally burnt down. She also supported divinity students at university.¹⁴

And yet, when all is said and done, was not Lady Anne as prodigal in her own way as her father? He ‘threw his lands into the sea’, as he graphically put it, at a time of national emergency, for patriotic reasons as well as in the hope of making a fortune which, alas, always eluded him.¹⁵ Anne indulged her similar, perhaps inherited streak of extravagance in stone, timber, slate and lead, sculptures and plaques, more enduring, less intangible than sea power and maritime achievement to which her father contributed in no small way. Like father, like daughter, great spenders the pair of them, though the object of the passion was different. But Lady Anne, brought up in the shadow of her father's losses and kept short by Dorset, carefully husbanded her revenues, checked accounts personally and, unlike them, passed on to her heirs an estate free from indebtedness. She spent heavily, but always within her means, as we shall see later.

Even granted that Lady Anne had to wait until she was aged fifty-nine before she could take over her estates, it is rather hard to visualise her as roughly treated by Dame Fortune except in the rarified circles of those born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Yet that is invariably how writers see her. Mrs Stopes, for example, wrote of her in such terms in British Freewomen, published in 1894. Mrs Stopes was deeply touched by Anne's struggle to win her inheritance but regarded it as no purely personal one. ‘It was the first protest’, she asserted, ‘against the invasion of the rights of her sex.’ Lady Anne, in Mrs Stopes' view, saw how legal precedent was drifting, under the influence of Coke and other lawyers, against the rights of women.¹⁶ In this sense, at least, it would have been appropriate if Anne's tercentenary had coincided with Women's Liberation Year. But if Anne fought in vain against the tide of male domination, the contingent factor in human affairs turned the tables in her favour in the end. She outlived both husbands and her Clifford rivals by a clear twenty-six years.

Wallace Notestein, who chose Lady Anne as one of his Four Worthies, did not regard her as at all liberated, even in an age when women's rights were coming under siege as Mrs Stopes thought. In some ways, Notestein argued, Lady Anne was an unpractised young woman moving uncertainly amongst designing people, saved only by her singleness of purpose and sheer courage. There, at least, on Anne's tenacity of purpose and courage, Stopes and Notestein are in full agreement. But for Notestein, Anne's difficulties stemmed from the fact that it was a man's world and she was in pursuit of a man's inheritance. There were also the restraints of her birth and her rank which, for example, condemned her to marry men of similar status to hers, with unhappy consequences. In a later, more enlightened age, she might have done better to marry below her, but not in the early seventeenth century. To contrast Lady Anne's failures with the great success of, say, Bess of Hardwick is of no value, since Bess clambered into the ranks of the aristocracy on the backs of and the proceeds from four successively wealthier husbands. Lady Anne could climb no higher. In Notestein's view, a ‘feudal life in the North was what the Countess had been born for’, but she was denied it for most of her life.¹⁷

When we look at the indignities Anne suffered at the hands of her relatives, her husbands and their friends and servants, there is much that is plausible in Notestein's thesis. When she passed through Skipton, her uncle's officers treated her disdainfully. Dorset, after vainly trying to persuade Anne to sign the agreement with the Cliffords over the inheritance, parted from her in a rage in January 1616. She rode to Westmorland but Dorset later ordered her servants to leave Brougham and Anne had to ride south again, mostly on horseback with the indignity of having to sit behind one of her servants, Mr Hodgson. In May, Dorset grieved Anne further by taking their daughter away from her. He forced her to exchange her wedding ring for another one. But these petty acts of displeasure ended and Dorset became much friendlier when the death of the Dowager Countess on 24 May opened up new possibilities for him over the inheritance, which now could become his. At the time of the King's Award, however, Dorset again put pressure on her, this time keeping her short of cash as a lever to force her to accept the final decision about her estates. ‘On Whitsunday’, she wrote in her Diary, ‘we all went to church, but my eyes were so blubbered with weeping that I could scarce look up.’ Worse was to follow. Dorset cancelled her jointure in June 1617 and did not restore it until 1623, the year before he died. This removed the financial safety net from under her. It is not surprising that, psychologically and in some ways physically assailed, her health suffered. For those six years Lady Anne must have felt weak and vulnerable indeed. If she did develop a hardness and a rigidity of outlook, we must bear in mind that it was because her spirit had been tempered by adversity.

Anne had similar disagreements with her second husband, Pembroke, and for the same reason, the great prize of Anne's share of the Clifford inheritance, by then much more likely to become hers since her cousin Henry, Lord Clifford's three sons had all died in infancy. Anne could only have married Pembroke because he offered her some protection in a hostile man's world and because he was a nobleman available for a second wedding. This was a political marriage even more than Anne's first. As Williamson points out, Anne was the antithesis of Pembroke. ‘She was studious and bookish, he cared nothing whatever for study; she was devout and he irreligious; she was stately, solemn and grave; he was flippant, cared little for anything but horses and dogs, and neither his moral character nor his language could bear scrutiny.’ According to George Sedgewick, Anne had determined never to marry a husband who had children by an earlier marriage, nor a courtier, nor a curser or swearer. But in Pembroke she married all these. In fact, they lived together for only a short time. Over the inheritance, Pembroke gave her little protection or comfort. Worse—he tried to grab it for his own children. Again she managed to fend off a predatory spouse and then, happily for her, Westmorland and Skipton became her own property and in 1649 she was able to turn the tables and leave Pembroke in the lurch, a few months before his death. But Pembroke as a Parliamentarian did give Anne protection during the Civil War. Unlike the 2nd Earl of Cork who got the rest of the Clifford estates, Anne, though a staunch royalist, did not have to compound with Parliament to regain her castles and lordships. In this sense, Pembroke proved a far better bet than Sir Thomas Wentworth would have been if Anne had indeed married below her as was mooted in 1626 when Wentworth was seeking a second wife.¹⁸

The interpretations of Anne's career put forward by Notestein and Stopes together embrace the views of other writers such as Williamson and Martin Holmes whose title, Proud Northern Lady, sums up the quintessential Anne Clifford. Yet they all miss the main point about her. She was very much a child of her times and the prevailing outlook during her formative years was patriarchalism. Throughout her life, Anne drew strength and conviction from adhering to and applying the assumptions of patriarchalism, not by rejecting them. She and her mother fought for her inheritance, not by claiming female emancipation or women's liberation, but on the premise of hierarchy and inequality. Her inalienable rights as sole heiress to the Clifford properties; the Scriptural authority to which she constantly referred as events turned to her advantage; her reverence for her parents, in accordance with the fifth commandment, and exaltation of her family; her respect for the law which vindicated her claim to her estates—all these were integral to the patriarchal concept to which she clung as the justification of her actions.¹⁹ Her motto, appropriately, was ‘Preserve your loyalty, defend your rights’.

The same idée fixe inspired so much else that she created; in 1617, the beautifully compiled description of her father's voyages, the Great Picture—‘the glorification of the Cliffords’—commissioned in 1646 to mark the final and undisputed reversion of her estates to her, the great Books of Record written up in 1649, and the restoration of her castles and churches started in that year. Her six ancestral residences provided a fitting setting for the institutions of her patriarchalism—her family, household, estates, tenantry, manor courts and stately progresses—and the submissive attendance she expected as paterfamilias. No surprise then that Cromwell treated her with respect as well as tolerated her harmless traditionalism. On the other hand, much of the anguish, the ‘spiritual crises’ which she suffered for several years from 1615 may well have been caused by the clash of loyalties, the imperatives of the Clifford lineage conflicting with the required subservience to her husband and obedience to the King as the judge in all causes.²⁰

Lady Anne was deeply conservative which is not surprising in view of her obsession with her inheritance. She constantly looked back at events earlier in her life for repetitions and anniversaries though never apparently did she mention her birthday or her age.²¹ What strikes me are the similarities, the parallels between Anne's experiences and those of her mother and the explanation of them. For instance, both Margaret Russell and her daughter married for convenience, as was the custom, and despite spells of affection and respect they both suffered many unkindnesses from their husbands. Both Cumberland and Dorset, after a few years of closeness with their wives, left them to live profligately as courtiers along with their titled intimates. Both earls had notorious extra-marital affairs at Court, Cumberland with a lady of quality, Dorset with Lady Venetia Stanley and then Lady Penistone. In contrast, Lady Anne and her mother were country lovers with no real liking, indeed at times a distaste, for the Court, and both retired later in life to Westmorland, well away from the high life of James I's and Charles II's palaces. Moreover, both the Countess of Cumberland and Lady Anne had the mortification of seeing their sons die young and had only one daughter who survived to adulthood and in turn carried on the female line, that is Anne herself and her daughter Lady Margaret who married John Tufton, 2nd Earl of Thanet who, like Cumberland and Dorset, long predeceased his wife. Both the Countess and Anne faced difficulties over their jointures and also it was their husbands' younger brothers, not their own children, who obtained the Clifford and Sackville estates. I wonder if Lady Anne was not sometimes conscious that her mother's fate seemed to be repeating itself in her own life.

Yet I cannot help feeling that to some degree these two noble ladies brought their troubles on themselves. It is when we look, not so much at their personalities, as their attitudes that we see this factor also in common between mother and daughter. Margaret Russell was a precise puritan who lamented her husband's extravagant ways and his dangerous sea-voyaging. Lady Anne, to quote Notestein, ‘derived her ideas as to right and wrong from the Old Testament, where sin was sin and was soon punished’. She, too, had a somewhat puritannical view of pleasure and would not attend Charles II's Court because of what she would find to censure there. Like her mother, Anne was something of a blue-stocking—as John Donne said, praising her, she could talk on any topic from predestination to sleave-silk. I wonder how Dorset and Pembroke took to that. Nor was Anne at all self-indulgent except, apparently, in smoking. Bishop Rainbow emphasised in his funeral oration, pointedly some of his listeners might have thought, that Lady Anne lived austerely and dieted sparingly—her household accounts give proof of this. Further, she clad herself more cheaply and coarsely than some of those closest to her.

Here we come to the crux of the matter as regards attitudes. Even more than her mother, who had similar leanings, Lady Anne was something of a frump. Dorset tried hard to persuade her to wear fashionable dress and get her out of the blacks which she favoured, as her portraits so clearly show. She paid little attention either to her looks or to her costume. Bishop Rainbow summed it up judiciously in saying that ‘her dress, not disliked by any, was yet imitated by none’. Williamson explains that she dressed in rough black serge after she came into the North so that she might have more to give away, a nice point to make but really she had got into that habit, as it were, when she was young.²² To exaggerate only a little, she was a frumpish, puritanical, blue-stocking who found relaxation in walking, needlework and improving literature. Neither Lady Anne nor her mother in adult life would cut much of a figure at Court where their husbands indulged in high life amidst titled ladies more beguiling in looks and behaviour. I would not go so far as to say that these two stern and dignified ladies drove their respective earls away from home and into gambling and the arms of other women—well, I would not say it if I did not suspect an element of truth in it. Arranged marriages got Cumberland and Dorset two rather prissy, disapproving wives. Lady Anne, so careful with her housekeeping and accounting, must have been horrified at the £60,000 debts her husband owed when he died not having reached half his three score years and ten, but these were smaller than her father had amassed in the fourteen years after he left his wife for the life of adventure at Court and at sea.²³

For Lady Anne to be thrifty so as to be charitable is doubly worthy of praise. But she had other not-so endearing characteristics. Williamson noted that she had ‘a dry, caustic wit’. Indeed, she had a very sharp tongue and pen. For instance, she refers in her Diary with grim satisfaction to the fact that ‘my Lady of Suffolk about this time had the smallpox, which spoiled that good Face of Hers, which brought to others much misery, to herself Greatness, which ended with much unhappiness’. A few years later, smallpox ‘martyred’ her own face. She recorded in her Diary also, with a touch of cattiness, the unpleasant rumours of incest and defamation of character that were flying about in February 1619 respecting Lady Exeter, Lady Lettice Lake, Lord Roos and others. She made a very unworthy comment about her uncle the 4th Earl, claiming that he would welcome her mother's death—not in the least true. In fact, Cumberland and his sister-in-law, despite their legal battles, were very aware of the family bond between them. When at the Restoration an enemy of Lady Anne, one Captain Atkinson, was concerned in the Kaber Rigg Plot, she could not refrain from a certain exultation, as Williamson puts it, when he was condemned and executed. Then, showing compassion after her feelings of triumph, she did her best to care for Atkinson's widow and children. This capacity to make enemies and indulge in moral superiority yet be generous is one of the paradoxes of her complex character. She cannot have been overjoyed at Dorset's infidelity but she had respect and affection for him despite his faults and after his death she provided for his two illegitimate daughters.²⁴

One of the more worrying aspects of Lady Anne's activities is how did she obtain the finances which allowed her to play the rôle of Lady Bountiful and, even more so, to pay for all her costly building projects. This is a question her biographers have tended to sidestep. Notestein suspected that ‘most of the money Lady Anne laid out for building came from what she saved from the rents of her lands’. Admittedly, there is much that is confusing and little that is certain about her finances since almost all of her account books have disappeared. George Sedgewick considered her rebuilding cost at least £40,000. From Anne herself, we have only broad hints. Barden Tower and Pendragon Castle were renovated to her ‘great cost and charges’; Brough Castle to her ‘exceeding great costs and charges’. The Appleby church repairs in 1655 cost six or seven hundred pounds. Anne affirmed that she was determined to repair her houses as long as she had money or credit. Quite possibly then she did borrow, most likely from her officers, until her estate revenues were improved from the low state they were in in 1649. Sedgewick lent her £200 in 1660 at six per cent interest per annum and she did not repay this sum until 1665. Nevertheless, there is a huge disparity between Anne's certain income and the £40,000 cited by Sedgewick, not to mention the gifts and annuities she is known to have made which diminished her net revenues.

The disparity is evident from the one account which happily has survived, for the year 1665. Her finances by then were in a settled state. The bulk of her income came from her Clifford properties. The Westmorland rents came to £888 13s. 9d., much less than the net income of £1,200 the Cliffords enjoyed before the Civil War. Craven brought in £1,109 3s. 4d. Her jointure rents supplemented these; £250 from the Dorset lands in Sussex, £310 from the Pembroke lands in the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. With minor receipts from the sale of wood, turves and wool, her total income came to £2,574 19s. 11d. In fact Lady Anne lived well within this quite modest income for an aristocrat and was able to repay £450 borrowed money and £12 in interest, possibly debts incurred in her reconstruction In 1665 she devoted £270 to building. But the largest single item of expenditure was £474 in gift money, clear proof of her philanthropy. In other respects, as Bishop Rainbow stated, she was quite frugal. Her total household costs came to only £25 a week. Her diet was plain, though spiced with a little sack, canary wine, and Westphalia hams bought in Newcastle. Her laudable priorities in expenditure are clear from the account, though they did mean in this year she spent rather more than she received.²⁵

Yet there is no doubt how Lady Anne reached this happy financial state and where she obtained the bulk of her moneys to spend on her houses and churches. Here, the ruthless streak in her character is apparent. She squeezed the cash out of her tenants. Oddly enough, in raising money from her estates, the King's Award, which she had never accepted, now benefited her. The award had restricted the amount of fines the 4th Earl could raise from the Skipton estates by granting long leases and he had faithfully held to it, which protected those manors from his general policy of selling off holdings to the tenants. Thus Anne had far greater scope there for converting the existing leases into short leases with high rents, which she did by compromise and agreement with the tenants and if not then legal action. Within three years she had nearly doubled the income from her Skipton manors—from £600 a year to £1,050. In Westmorland, where many tenants had paid large fines to purchase their farms after the King's Award and a further £2,000 in 1640 on the death of the 4th Earl, the resistance was much stiffer. A series of lawsuits by Anne lasted from 1650 to 1657. The security given the tenants by the 4th Earl to confirm their tenures as the award required proved no protection against Lady Anne. Her litigation was entirely successful and she won both her cases and the costs. She was therefore able to eject many of the tenants and impose twenty-one years leases at an annual rackrent.²⁶

There is, again, only one year for which records survive of the fines the tenants paid her. In 1656-7 she received £1,200 in fines at eight years rent on death or alienation, a sum which gives some idea of the cash available to her annually in the middle sixteen-fifties for her reconstruction. Unless Anne had some large, unknown sources of income, the available figures of her finances make Sedgewick's statement of £40,000 spent on the rebuilding in little more than a decade highly implausible, even though he claimed the account books would show it. One consequence of Anne's heavy fines was that they cut down the considerable traffic in small parcels of ground, so after 1657 her annual receipts from fines almost petered out. How this in turn affected farming efficiency and practices in Westmorland I really cannot say.²⁷

Lady Anne had promised to be a good landlady to her tenants and by her lights she probably was. After her legal victory she claimed, with a touch of hypocrisy which is to me one of her least attractive traits, that changing the tenures on her estates by the lawsuits was not only a great benefit and advantage to her and her posterity but ‘to all the landlords and tenants' in Westmorland. The tenants did not share that opinion. On the juries in the manorial and other courts they opposed her and not until 1656 were they compliant. The description of the ejection of the family of James Walker, the tenants' spokesman, makes sober reading for any devotee of Lady Anne.²⁸ Yet she was to discover later that the protection of the law was not always on her side. Hugh Currer of Kildwick in Craven recovered £95 5s. 4d. costs against her in a suit over Silsden mill in 1667 and enforced payment by a decree in the Exchequer Court in 1668.²⁹

Lady Anne's biographers do not appreciate the grasping and oppressive aspects of her policies. Like Dawson, they uncritically support Lady Anne over her attitude to her tenants. Dawson claimed that she endeared herself to her tenants. ‘She associated with them’, he wrote, ‘not as a titled aristocrat, but as a friend and a counsellor, sympathising with them in their troubles, ministering to their needs, advising them in their difficulties.’ ‘I venture to say’, he concluded, ‘that the Clifford estates had never a more careful guardian: had never one so careful.’ At that last assertion, no one could cavil. But the example Dawson cites is worth a second thought. Lady Anne would not permit tenants, to their own injury, to contract large arrears of rent. If a tenant defaulted on his rent, she would use ‘the strictest course I cann to turne him outt of the farme’. There was not surely great injustice here, thought Dawson, for if the rents went unpaid the tenants would soon be in a very sad condition. So, to save them from their own worst inclinations, the tenants were ejected from their livelihood. There was nothing mild or benevolent about Lady Anne; she was tough and uncompromising when it came to estate matters, generous only when she had her way. Her peculiar blend of harshness and paternalism can be seen also in the regulations for her Appleby almshouses, copied from her mother's rules for Beamsley. She was emphatic that none of the sisters should get into debt in the town. Any who did had to forfeit a fortnight's allowance, half of which was to go to the poor of the town, half to the informer. The deterrent for a second offence was even more severe—expulsion.³⁰

There is another aspect of Anne's raising of estate revenues and her modes of expenditure. To balance her rackrenting against her munificence is not easy. The whole question of the local use of financial resources is a vexed one for historians. There is, for instance, the pertinent complaint of Robert Aske at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 that the North was suffering economically because monastic revenues were not being spent locally, as previously, but sent down to London.³¹ The Carlisle citizens in 1624 ascribed their poverty in part to noble landowners in the area who took their rents away from the region.³² Both the 3rd and 4th Earls of Cumberland were guilty of this in Cumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire. They raised large sums from their estates and sent most of them south to pay their creditors, especially London merchants and lawyers.³³ One can argue that, like unemployment in depressed areas today, this strangled local purchasing power and had a bad effect on local economies whilst stimulating the booming economic life of the capital and the south-east of England.

Lady Anne cannot be accused of doing that: With her the problem is a different one. She squeezed cash out of the farmers on her estates but spent most of the money locally. She thus redistributed wealth in the principalities she controlled. She patronized locally the masons, woodworkers, ironmongers, glaziers and other craftsmen who devoted their skills and materials to restoring her great houses and churches. She purchased produce locally for her household and heated her castles with coal mined at Caldbeck and on Stainmore. She bought cloth, books and other goods to give away. In these and other obvious ways she stimulated the local economy and local crafts and tradesmen. Indeed, Bishop Rainbow praised her building as a work of piety and her charity as a benefaction since they set people to work; and Westmorland was one of the poorest of the English counties.³⁴

But one must ask the question how would Lady Anne's tenants have spent their money, the product of their labours, if they had not paid over so much to her in fines and high rents? I really do not know, but I can suggest one way by looking at the other parts of the Clifford estates where the sales of farms by the 3rd and 4th Earls had given the villagers control over their own financial affairs, one of the underrated quiet revolutions of the seventeenth century. In Craven these people built fine stone cottages which today give much of the character to the Yorkshire Dales.³⁵ The replacement of wooden, crucked houses and barns by stone and slate constructions by these Craven ‘statesmen’ must have stimulated the same local crafts and generated wealth in the same way as Lady Anne's rebuilding. I do wonder if the later phase of replacement by the Westmorland statesmen, as much as half a century, is not in part a result of Anne's treatment of her tenants, especially as it began in the decade following her death.³⁶ But the general question of the impact of Lady Anne on the local economy is one I can only pose and hope that someone else might be able to answer it. The same applies to Anne's redistribution for philanthropic ends. Too little is known about communal self-help in the North to reach any conclusion about that aspect of Anne's activities. But, after all, most Craven farmers did very well without Anne's largesse.

You will have gathered that, in my view, the profligacy of the 3rd and 4th Earls of Cumberland did more for the ordinary people on the Clifford estates than Lady Anne's much-lauded munificence, and in this I differ from all her biographers. I also find the Earls' human weaknesses more acceptable as well as more interesting than Anne's supposed moral rectitude. What I find least appealing about Anne is her smug self-righteousness. True, her patriarchalism and unwavering Anglicanism gave her the inner reserves which she needed to sustain her through all her tribulations and fend off Cromwell, Harrison and other upstarts who tried to interfere when she at last was mistress of her own fortunes. But a touch of the humility her father and uncle possessed would not have come amiss in her make-up.³⁷ What else is absent? One searches in vain for a genuine sense of humour as distinct from her caustic wit.

Anne's self-righteousness coloured her attitude towards her Clifford relatives. For instance, she condemned her cousin Henry's marriage with Lady Frances Cecil as a device to enlist the Earl of Salisbury's aid, yet her own match with Dorset was for personal advantage too. She took a blinkered view of the problem over the inheritance. She was right and everyone who did not take her side was wrong. She did not in the least appreciate the immense difficulties her father's indebtedness had caused and there is no trace anywhere of any concern for the large numbers of creditors—many of them small traders—who had legitimate claims on the Cliffords' landed wealth. Raising the £17,000 to pay her under the King's Award, even if Dorset took it, caused a severe financial crisis for her uncle, but from Anne there is no sign of sympathy or understanding. Nor did she pay any of her father's debts, even though in the end she got half his estates. She left the other branch of the family, Richard, 2nd Earl of Cork in fact, to honour the bonds entered into by her father and Cork faithfully paid off the last in 1660, fifty-five years after the 3rd Earl's death.³⁸

Lady Anne's biographers also have tended to ignore the extent to which she was prepared to play politics—factional politics in Cumbria—to gain advantage over her relatives. In this, of course, she was merely following custom. She dabbled in the politicking herself to some degree but most of it was done by proxy, by gentry and some nobles who, as her Diary shows, had a common interest with her in embarrassing her Clifford relatives. Lady Anne thus participated in the major factional conflict which dominated Cumbrian politics in the latter half of James I's reign. This was the struggle for power and influence between the new man in Cumberland, Lord William Howard, backed by his recusant friends and his relatives at Court, and the old-established gentry led by Lord Clifford. Here was a situation which lent itself to Anne's moralising—Howard, her confidant and her husband's uncle, worthy of her praise whereas her cousin Clifford could be dismissed as a devious arch-rival for both her estates and Howard's political supremacy in Cumberland. She wrote of the Howard-Clifford confrontation: ‘The spleen increased between them more and more, and bred faction in Westmoreland, which I held to be a very good matter to me.’ When Anne herself became dominant in Westmorland, she used her political patronage for the benefit of her relatives and supporters.³⁹

Lady Anne also was not above exploiting the Westmorland tenants against her relatives. This, of course, was the stuff of local politics and there was an intriguing alternation of opportunity for it between the two branches of the Cliffords. After the 3rd Earl's death, the Westmorland tenants were not friendly to his widow and the 4th Earl was able to play on their dislike of the change of landlord for his own advantage against the dowager Countess. After her death in April 1616, the situation was reversed—the tenants were now more loyal to Lady Anne and her late mother and she was able to use them to cause trouble to the incoming owners. There was quarrelling between the tenants and Lord Clifford. Anne noted in her Diary: ‘Matters went more to my content and less to his than we expected.’⁴⁰ She sided with the tenants, gave them comfort and encouragement and presents of gold and silver. In 1649, she was the one who had to struggle against the tenants' opposition. After a quarter of a century under the Cliffords, in which many had thought they had secured their tenures, and six years without a landlord, the tenants were not happy to find themselves saddled with Lady Anne and with good reason, as her lawsuits were to prove.

From 1649 Anne Clifford became in reality the ruthless and ambitious arbiter of her dignities and properties. For good measure, she occupied Barden Tower to which she had no legal or moral right and refused to discuss the matter with the other Clifford heiress and rightful owner, Lady Elizabeth, countess of Cork. The Earl of Burlington recovered it by lawsuits after Anne's death. Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State in 1674, wrote of her that ‘she is wilful’. Bishop Rainbow summed her up. He said: ‘She was absolute Mistress of her Self, her Resolutions, Actions and Time … None had access but by leave, when she called; but none were rejected; none must stay longer than she could; yet none departed unsatisfied. She turned and steered the whole course of her Affairs.’⁴¹

Of one thing she could not be mistress and that, needless to say, was her death. Her last words, a little exaggerated as it turned out, were ‘I thank God I am very well’.⁴² At the age of eighty-six, she had outlived her generation and the world she had known. For the latter part of her life she had also, essentially, lived in the past, a relic of bygone times and in no sense a pre-cursor of the great era of aristocracy already approaching at the time of her death. As with the old Queen Elizabeth whom she had known, Lady Anne's heirs were relieved to see her go. She had outstayed her welcome on earth. Her death lightened the financial difficulties of Richard, 5th Earl of Dorset who now came into the reversion of the lands settled on her by her first husband in 1623.⁴³ Her uncle's action in breaking the Clifford entail belatedly in 1607, which she had never recognized, now enabled her to leave her lands as she wished. As she wrote in her Diary, ‘by the providence of God, it turned to the best for me’.⁴⁴ Yet, almost inevitably it seems with the Cliffords, she too bequeathed a dispute over the inheritance. She left her Westmorland estates to her daughter Margaret for life and then to her favourite grandson John Tufton. But his elder brother Nicholas, 3rd Earl of Thanet, claimed it after Margaret's death also in 1676 and excluded John, overthrowing Anne's will in the process.⁴⁵ Just what she had tried to do and failed. I doubt if Lady Anne would have been much amused by that.

Notes

1. This article is a slightly expanded version of a lecture given to the Yorkshire Archaeological Society on 10 Nov. 1976, one of two (the other by Dr E. A. Gee on ‘Lady Anne Clifford's Buildings’) to mark the tercentenary of her death. I am grateful to Dr C. E. Challis of Leeds University for his comments. The views expressed are personal.

2. The standard biography is George C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke & Montgomery. Her Life, Letters and Work (Kendal, 1922). More chronological and accurate is Martin Holmes, Proud Northern Lady (1975). She is discussed in detail in Wallace Notestein, Four Worthies (1956), pp. 123-66. See also, Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America (1974), Doris, Lady Stenton, The English Woman in History (1957) and Maurice Ashley, The Stuarts in Love (1963).

3. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 31, 142-4, 174-5; R. T. Spence, ‘The Cliffords, Earls of Cumberland, 1579-1646’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, London Univ. 1959), pp. 299-301; L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 493.

4. C. C. Stopes, British Freewomen (1909), pp. 147-8.

5. J. P. Gilson, Lives of Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590-1676) and of Her Parents (Roxburghe Club, 1916); V. Sackville-West, Diary of Lady Anne Clifford (1923).

6. For Sedgewick's MS., now lost, see J. Nicolson and R. Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland (2 vols, 1777), i, pp. 299-302.

7. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, chaps vi, vii; Holmes, Proud Northern Lady, chap. iii.

8. The fullest account of the dispute is Spence, thesis, chap. viii. See also Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 34-5, chap. vii.

9. Stopes, British Freewomen, p. 147.

10. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 87-91.

11. Ibid., chap. xiii.

12. Ibid., pp. 62-4, 69-70, 408.

13. A detailed study of her building is J. Charlton, ‘The Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676)’, in Ancient Monuments and their Interpretation. Essays presented to A. J. Taylor, ed. M. R. Apted, R. Gilyard-Beer and H. D. Saunders (1977), pp. 303-14.

14. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 308-13, 326-8, chap. xxii; K(endal) R(ecord) O(ffice), WD/HOTH, Lady Anne Clifford's Account Book, 1665-1668.

15. G. C. Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland, 1558-1605 (1920), p. 243.

16. Stopes, British Freewomen, pp. 147-8.

17. Notestein, Four Worthies, pp. 141, 145, 152.

18. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, chaps vii, x; Nicolson and Burn, Westmorland and Cumberland, p. 299; Wentworth Papers 1597-1628, ed. J. P. Cooper (Camden Society, 4th series, xii, 1973), p. 324.

19. Patriarcha and other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. P. Laslett (Oxford, 1949), pp. 11-25.

20. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 122 sqq., chaps xix, xxi; Notestein, Four Worthies, pp. 142-3.

21. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, p. 281.

22. Notestein, Four Worthies, p. 18; Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 325-6; Holmes, Proud Northern Lady, pp. 98, 166.

23. Notestein, Four Worthies, p. 134; Spence, thesis, pp. 22, 170.

24. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 130, 144, 154, 269 n.8, 315.

25. Notestein, Four Worthies, pp. 151-2; Nicolson and Burn, Westmorland and Cumberland, p. 300; Gilson, Lives of Lady Anne, pp. 70, 88, 96-7. For the account, see below, Appendix. Cf. her income with that of other nobility in Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 762. Other aspects of her finances are mentioned by Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 152, 213.

26. Gilson, Lives of Lady Anne, pp. 56-78; Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 191-2, 198, 206-24.

27. K.R.O. Hothfield MSS, D/HO Box 20, Book of Fines, 1656-1657.

28. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, p. 304.

29. K.R.O. WD/HOTH, Lady Anne Clifford's Account Book, 1665.

30. W. H. Dawson, History of Skipton (1882), p. 245; Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 370, 381.

31. A. Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (1968), p. 123.

32. British Library (Museum), Hargrave MS. 321, quoted in Seventeenth Century Economic Documents, ed. J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford, 1972), p. 479.

33. Spence, thesis, pp. 169, 317.

34. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, p. 325.

35. A. Raistrick, Malham and Malham Moor (Clapham, 1947), p. 25.

36. R. W. McDowall, ‘The Westmorland Vernacular’, Studies in Architectural History, ed. W. A. Singleton, ii (1956), pp. 131-3; R. W. Brunskill, ‘The Development of the Small House in the Eden Valley from 1650-1840’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series (C.W.2), liii (1953), pp. 160-89.

37. Cf. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 50-52, 280, 315-16.

38. Spence, thesis, pp. 224-5, 303 sqq., 330-31.

39. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 129-30, 255; Gilson, Lives of Lady Anne, p. 88.

40. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, p. 136.

41. Ibid., pp. 193, 195, 297, 326, 439-40.

42. Ibid., p. 280.

43. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Sackville, i, p. xv.

44. Gilson, Lives of Lady Anne, p. 38.

45. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 282-3.