Her chief fault was extravagance, which increased her pecuniary troubles with her unfortunate husband. But they were happy together and had many children, one of whom was that Elizabeth who became the pupil and friend of the philosophic Descartes.[110]
Anne Clifford, born 1589, daughter and heir of the Earl of Cumberland, had been forbidden by her father to learn Latin, much to her chagrin. She made up for it by studying all that she could find to read in English, and by that time through translations she found a good deal. Her diary still remains at the British Museum. She gives a beautiful description of her mother’s character, and of her moral virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. She was not a linguist, but a reader, a thinker, and a chemist, and possessed “many excellent knowledges, human and divine.”
Her tutor was Samuel Daniel, “that religious and honest poet who composed the Civil Wars of England in verse,” and he led her to the study of history, old archives, armorial bearings, and the laws regarding inheritance, whereby she was able to sustain the noble fight against her King and her husband concerning the right of heiresses to transmit property undiverted to their heirs. What she had received from her father she wished to leave to her daughters. In this she succeeded, though the laws drifted after her date to the exclusions and disabilities from which modern women have so much suffered.
She was capable in land estate management and architecture, in which Cromwell gave her practical lessons by demolishing her castles for her fidelity to the King. Each time he destroyed them she rebuilt them stronger, until, fired with admiration at her courage, he bade his officers desist from further molestation.
Her funeral sermon, preached by Bishop Rainbow, was an eloquent oration, in which he said that the life of this great, good woman was fitter for a history than a sermon. He alluded to her studies and her conversation with admiration. “She could speak well on anything, from predestination to slea-silk.”
Thus, I think the women of the sixteenth century proved to their successors that they were fit, in the words of the little Marie Stuart, to study anything, if so be they were granted opportunity.
The lives of these illustrative individuals, who became illustrious because they excelled many others, suggest the probability of a much more general culture, and that of a higher standard, than has been hitherto realized. It is to be hoped that more research may yield more information, and account for the tidal backdraw in the position of women between these times and our own. Men grow great, and poets become inspired in proportion to the influence of the other sex, and it is only reasonable to add to the causes of the special glory of the sixteenth century, the greatness of its women.
Lecture delivered before the Royal Society of Literature, 1904. See Proceedings R.S.L., vol. xxv.
FOOTNOTES:
[106] Hall’s “Chronicle,” p. 730.