Clifford, Anne

The life of noblewoman and diarist Lady Anne Clifford, countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (1590–1676), was dominated by an inheritance dispute over the Clifford titles and estates, a fractious experience that inflected the various extant writings connected to her with a strong sense of family, lineage, and posterity. The only surviving child of George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland (1558–1605) and his wife, Lady Margaret (1560–1616) – herself the youngest daughter of Francis Russell, second earl of Bedford – Anne Clifford was born at Skipton Castle on 30 January 1590, and apparently conceived on 1 May 1589 ‘in the Lord Wharton's house in Channell Row in Westminster’. During the course of her long life she married only twice: first, on 25 February 1609, Richard Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, third earl of Dorset (1589–1624), with whom she quarrelled bitterly; and second, on 3 June 1630, Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke (1584–1650), Charles I's lord chamberlain, a match that brought great wealth, power, and court influence, but was no more happy than her first. She gave birth to two surviving daughters by her first marriage, Margaret (1614–76) and Isabella (1622–61), and had three sons by her first husband and two by her second, all of whom died in infancy. After Pembroke's death she enjoyed a period of more than two decades of widowhood as a redoubtable matriarch, holding the hereditary office of sheriff of Westmorland, a position she used to assert her ancestral rights. Anne Clifford died on 22 March 1676 at Brougham Castle, and was buried in a tomb of her own fashioning at the church of St Lawrence, Appleby on 14 April, laid to rest as one of the wealthiest noblewomen in later Stuart England, having bequeathed over £80,000 in heritable estates, with a rental income of £8,000 per annum.