Dorset also was fond of the little girl, for in other letters to her mother Anne says, after apologising for her bad writing, which she terms “scribbling,” “my Lord is as fond of her as can be, and calls her his mistress”; and again, “My Lord to her is a very kind, loving, and dear father, and in everything will I commend him, saving only in this business of my land, wherein I think some evil spirit works, for in this he is as violent as possible, so I must either do it next term or else break friendship and love with him”; and Dorset was, on his side, of the same opinion, for in a letter written to her at Knole, which begins “Sweet Heart,” and sends messages to the child, he adds to his wife, “whom in all things I love and hold a sober woman, your land only excepted, which transports you beyond yourself, and makes you devoid of all reason.” It would appear that but for this unfortunate question of the lands and money they might have lived happily together, affection not lacking, and on Anne’s part at any rate good will not lacking either, as witness her constant defence of him, even to her mother:
It is true that they have brought their matters so about that I am in the greatest strait that ever poor creature was, but whatsoever you may think of my Lord, I have found him, do find him, and think I shall find him, the best and most worthy man that ever breathed, therefore, if it be possible, I beseech you, have a better opinion of him, if you know all I do, I am sure you would believe this that I write, but I durst not impart my mind about when I was with you, because I found you so bitter against him, or else I could have told you so many arguments of his goodness and worth that you should have seen it plainly yourself.
They were married when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and two days after their marriage he succeeded to his father’s titles and estates: “We have no other news here but of weddings and burials, the Earl of Dorset died on Monday night leaving a heaire [?] widow God wot, and his son seeing him past hope the Saturday before married the Lady Anne Clifford.” In spite, however, of all they had to make life pleasant—their youth, their wealth, and the privileges of their position—they spent the succeeding years in making it as unpleasant as they possibly could for one another.
I hardly think that it is necessary or even interesting to go into the legal details of the long dispute over Lord Cumberland’s will. The interest of Anne and Richard Dorset is human, not litigious. It may therefore be sufficient to say that by the terms of his will Lord Cumberland bequeathed the vast Clifford estates in Westmoreland to his brother Sir Francis Clifford, with the proviso that they should revert to Anne, his daughter, in the event of the failure of heirs male, a reversion which eventually took place, thirty-eight years after his death. What he does not appear to have realized was that the estates were already entailed upon Lady Anne; and that he was, by his will, illegally breaking an entail which dated back to the reign of Edward II.
It is easy to judge, from this broad indication, the infinite possibilities for litigation amongst persons contentiously minded. Such persons were not lacking. There was Lady Cumberland, Anne’s mother, bent upon safeguarding the rights of her daughter. There was Francis, the new Earl of Cumberland, equally bent upon preserving what had been left to him by will. There was Richard Dorset, whose own fortune was not adequate to his extravagance, and who, having married an heiress, was determined for his own sake that that heiress should not be defrauded of her inheritance, or that, if she was to be defrauded, he at least should receive ample compensation. And finally there was Anne herself, who was more resolved than any of them that she and the North of England should not be parted. Dorset’s part, of the four, was the most elaborate and the most discreditable. He would have been willing for his wife to renounce some of her claims in return for the compromise of ready cash. Anne, however, remained single-hearted throughout: she was the legal heiress of the North, and the North she would have; and in the midst of the otherwise sordid and mercenary dispute, in which Dorset used every means of coercion, she remains fixed in her perfectly definite attitude of obstinacy, unswayed by her husband, his relations, her own relations, their friends, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the King himself, their remonstrances, their threats, their vindictiveness, and the actual injuries she had to endure over a long stretch of years. In the end she got the better of them all, and the last picture of her left by the “Lives” is that of a triumphant and imperious old lady, retired to the stronghold of her northern castles, where her authority could stand “against sectaries, almost against Parliaments and armies themselves”; refusing to go to court “unless she might wear blinkers”; moving with feudal, with almost royal, state between her many castles, from Appleby to Pendragon, from Pendragon to Brougham, from Brougham to Brough, from Brough to Skipton; building brew-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses, kitchens, stables; sending word to Cromwell that as fast as he should knock her castles about her ears she would surely put them up again; endowing almshouses; ruling over her almswomen and her tenants; receiving, like the patriarchal old despot that she was, the generations of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.
LADY ANNE CLIFFORD
Wife to Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset
From the portrait at Knole by Mytens
Before she could reach these serene waters, however, she had many storms to weather, and to bear the “crosses and contradictions” which caused her to write “the marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish.” Richard Sackville in his own day was a byword for extravagance, and was bent on extorting from his wife for the purposes of his own pleasure the utmost resources of her inheritance. His portrait is at Knole, a full-length by Van Somer; he has a pale, pointed face, dark hair growing in a peak, and small mean eyes, and is dressed entirely in black with enormous silver rosettes on his shoes. There is also the very beautiful miniature of him by Isaac Oliver in the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing the richness of his clothes, his embroidered stockings, and his hand resting upon the extravagantly-plumed helmet on the table beside him.
His life is an empty record of gambling, cock-fighting, tilting; of balls and masques, women and fine clothes. “Above all they speak of the Earl of Dorset,” says a contemporary letter, after describing the lavishness of some of the costumes worn in a Court masque in which he was taking part, “but their extreme cost and riches make us all poor,” and Clarendon says of him, “his excess of expenditure, in all the ways to which money could be applied, was such that he so entirely consumed almost the whole great fortune which descended to him, that when he was forced to leave the title to his younger brother he left, in a manner, nothing to him to support it.” The enormous estates which he inherited, the careful accumulation of the old Lord Treasurer, he sold in great part, in order to squander the proceeds upon his amusements; before he had been in possession for three years he had sold the manor of Sevenoaks, and had “conveyed” Knole itself to one Henry Smith (retaining, however, the house at a rent of £100 a year for his own use), and in the course of rather less than ten years he had sold estates, including much of Fleet Street and the Manor of Holborn, to the value of £80,616, or nearly a million of modern money.