Everything about Lady Anne Clifford totally explained
Lady Anne Clifford (
January 30 1590 –
March 22 1676) was the only surviving child of
George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland (1558–1605) by his wife Margaret Russell, daughter of
Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford. Their marriage was soured by the deaths of Anne's two elder brothers: her parents lived apart for most of her childhood. In her young adulthood she was involved in a long and complex legal battle to obtain her rights to her inheritance.
She was brought up in an almost entirely female household—evoked in
Emilia Lanier's
Description of Cookeham—and given an excellent education by her tutor, the poet
Samuel Daniel. As a child she was a favourite of Queen
Elizabeth I of England; she also danced in
masques with
Anne of Denmark, queen of King
James I of England. She was the Nymph of the Air in Daniel's masque
Tethys's Festival, and filled roles in several of the early Court masques of
Ben Jonson, including
The Masque of Beauty (1608) and
The Masque of Queens (1609).
Lady Anne's first husband was
Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset. After his death in 1624, she married
Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery in 1630. Both marriages were reportedly difficult; contemporaries sometimes cited Lady Anne's unyielding personality as a cause. (Her cousin
Edward Russell, 3rd Earl of Bedford compared her to the
Rhone River.) A more sympathetic view would blame some of the troubles in her first marriage on her husband's spendthrift extravagance and his infidelities.
She was an important patron of authors and literature; her letters, and the diary she kept from 1603 through 1616, have made her a secondary literary figure in her own right. She bore five children—though none of their three sons survived to adulthood. A central conflict with her second husband lay in a choice of husband for her younger daughter. Her long-running struggle for her inheritance met with a late success in 1649, when she took possession of the Clifford family's northern castles and estates.
The artist Jan van Belcamp painted a
triptych portrait of Anne Clifford to her own design and specifications. Titled "The Great Picture," it portrays Lady Anne at three points in her life—at age 56, at age 15, and before birth in her mother's womb. In connection with the painting, Anne Clifford dated her own conception to May 1, 1589—certainly an unusual act of precision.
In 1656, she erected the
Countess Pillar in memory of her late mother. She restored churches at
Appleby-in-Westmorland,
Ninekirks,
Brougham and
Mallerstang. She was also responsible for the improvement and expansion of many of the Clifford family's castles across Northern
England, including those at
Brough,
Skipton and
Appleby, the last being her home. At her death, aged 86, she was the Dowager Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery.
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