Lady Anne Clifford - Early Years

Early Years

Lady Anne was born on 30 January 1590 and baptised the following 22 February at Skipton Church in Yorkshire.

Her parents' marriage was soured by the deaths of Anne's two elder brothers: her parents lived apart for most of her childhood. Upon the death of her father which occurred on 30 October 1605, she succeeded to the title of suo jure Baroness Clifford but her father had willed his earldom and estates to his brother Francis Clifford, 4th Earl of Cumberland. In her young adulthood she was involved in a long and complex legal battle to obtain the family estates, (which had been granted by Edward II under absolute cognatic primogeniture) instead of the £15,000 willed to her. The main grounds were that she was 15 years old at the time. It was not until Francis' only son Henry died without a male heir in 1643 that she managed to secure the family estates, although it was 1649 before she could take possession.

She was brought up in an almost entirely female household—evoked in Emilia Lanier's Description of Cookeham—and given an excellent education by her tutor, the poet Samuel Daniel. As a child she was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I of England; she also danced in masques with Anne of Denmark, queen of King James I of England. She was the Nymph of the Air in Daniel's masque Tethys's Festival, and filled roles in several of the early court masques of Ben Jonson, including The Masque of Beauty (1608) and The Masque of Queens (1609).