To her mother she seems to have been excessively devoted; and indeed, in the midst of this stubborn and peremptory character, the most vulnerable spot is her tenderness for her relations; those of her relations, that is to say, with whom she was not at mortal enmity.
The death of Queen Elizabeth, which occurred when Anne Clifford was a girl of thirteen, was a disappointment to her in more ways than one, for “if Queen Elizabeth had lived she intended to prefer me to be of the Privy Chamber, for at that time there was as much hope and expectation of me as of any other young lady whatsoever,” and moreover “my Mother and Aunt of Warwick being mourners, I was not allowed to be one, because I was not high enough, which did much trouble me then.” She was not even allowed the privilege of watching by the great Queen’s body after it had come “by night in a Barge from Richmond to Whitehall, my Mother and a great Company of Ladies attending it, where it continued a great while standing in the Drawing Chamber, where it was watched all night by several Lords and Ladies, my Mother sitting up with it two or three nights, but my Lady would not give me leave to watch, by reason I was held too young.” It is to be regretted that the writer, who possessed so vivid and unself-conscious a pen, should have been thus defrauded of setting upon record the scene in which the old Queen, stiff as an effigy, and blazing with the jewels of England, lay for the last time in state, by the light of candles, among the great nobles whom in her lifetime she had bullied and governed, and whom even in death the rigidity of that bejezabelled presence could still overawe.
Although she had not been allowed to see the dead Queen, Lady Anne was taken to see the new King, but did not find the court to her liking:
We all went to Tibbalds to see the King, who used my Mother and Aunt very graciously, but we all saw a great change between the fashion of the Court as it is now and of that in the Queen’s time, for we were all lousy by sitting in the chamber of Sir Thomas Erskine.
This unpropitious introduction was the first she had to James I, but it was by no means her last meeting with him, for she relates several later on which might more properly be called encounters.
About two years after Elizabeth’s death Lord Cumberland died, “very patiently and willingly of a bloody flux,” leaving Anne Clifford his only surviving child and heiress, then being aged about fifteen years. Her father cannot have been much more than a name to her, for although “endowed with many perfections of nature befitting so noble a personage, as an excellent quickness of wit and apprehension, an active and strong body, and an affable disposition and behaviour,” he “fell to love a lady of quality,” which created a breach between himself and his wife, and “when my Mother and he did meet, their countenance did show the dislike they had one of another, yet he would speak to me in a slight fashion and give me his blessing.... My Father used to come to us sometimes at Clerkenwell, but not often, for he had at this time as it were wholly left my Mother, yet the house was kept still at his charge.” All this early part of her life, I ought to explain, is related by her in the Lives of her parents and herself, which she compiled in her old age; and partly from a diary of reminiscences, a transcript of which is at Knole, and which she appears to have written at the same time as the more detailed Diary which she was then (1616–1619) keeping from day to day. She had a happy childhood with her mother, and cousins of her own age—“All this time we were merry at North Hall. My Coz. Frances Bouchier and my Coz. Francis Russell and I did use to walk much in the garden, and were great with one another. I used to wear my Hair-coloured Velvet every day, and learned to sing and play on the Bass-Viol of Jack Jenkins, my Aunt’s boy.”
The Diary at Knole jumps without any warning or transition from the reminiscences of youth to 1616. It begins with a sad little hint of the weariness that was to follow: “All the time I stayed in the country I was sometimes merry and sometimes sad, as I had news from London.” She had then been married for seven years to Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, grandson to Queen Elizabeth’s old Treasurer, who was himself anxious for the match, writing to Sir George Moore about “that virtuous young lady, the Lady Anne Clifford,” and soliciting Moore’s good offices with Lady Cumberland.
RICHARD SACKVILLE, 3rd Earl of Dorset, K.G.
From the miniature by Isaac Oliver in the Victoria and Albert Museum
There were, in all, five children of the marriage: three little boys, who all “died young at Knole where they were born,” and two little girls, of whom Margaret, born in 1614, figures largely in the Diary and is the only one to concern us, since Isabel was not born till some years after Lady Anne had ceased to keep the Diary. Lady Anne’s mother travelled to London from the North in order to be present at the birth of Margaret, the first child; but by a strange mischance the journey was rendered vain, for, having gone “into the Tower of London to see some friends there, where, the gates being shut up by an accident that happened, she was kept there till after her daughter was delivered of her first child, though she had made a journey purposely from Appleby Castle, in Westmoreland, to London.” Not only does the Diary contain constant references to this little girl, but Lady Anne’s letters to her mother, now at Appleby, are rarely without some comment—