Poud Northern Lady

ANNE CLIFFORD died in 1676, full of years and honours, ‘the great wise woman’ of Bishop Rainbow’s funeral oration, ‘fitter for a history than a sermon’. The history had to wait 300 years, for Martin Holmes to write this book, but she was not forgotten and indeed, is referred to as if but recently departed in Craven, where she was born; in Kent where she was mistress of Knole; in Wiltshire, where she saw teh rebuilding of Wilton under Inigo Jones; and, most of all, in Westmorland where, in her several ancestral castles, she spent her indomitable old age.

Born in 1590, daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s Champion, the Earl of Cumberland, she had been in succession Countess of Dorset and Pembroke; but, in an age when women were merely their husband’s obedient chattels, she remained steadfastly herself and her father’s daughter. She defied King James, she defied Cromwell, and survived them and her husbands to leave an indelible mark and memory in the places and mong the people who knew her.

‘This excellent biography…is unpretentious and all too brief, but it is exact and full of relevant detail…it is a measure of Mr. Holmes’ art as a biographer that in all this wealth of material we never lose sight of Lady Anne herself.’ The Sunday Times

‘…far from being a dry catalogue of achievements of Lady Anne…[the author] breathes into it the atmosphere of the extraordinary times in which she lived and the book is compulsive reading.’ Cumberland and Westmorland Herald