The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading

M A R Y E L L E N L A M B

The Agency ofthe Split Subject: Lady Anne CliVJord and the Uses ofReading

ne of the most significant activities of current critics has been the dismantlement of the transcendental or essentialist subject. Despite ideological differences, various orientations,

such as Marxism, feminism, cultural materialism, and New Histor- icism, have seen a presumed political neutrality of the transcendental subject as a mask for self-interested efforts to maintain a white, male, upper-class status quo.’ Revealing the transcendental subject to be both inaccurate and duplicitous, recent critics have increasingly provided a sense of specificity among subjects, who are seen to be shaped by cultures distant from this one in space or time. Their sense of the “estrangement” that results has encouraged a new respect for the power of cultures-their ideologies, their discourses, their practices. But with this respect for the power of cultures has also emerged a sense of the powerlessness of individuals, of the subject. In a study of Shakespearean plays, for example, a recent critic has taken this idea of the subject to its logical extreme, to deny agency not only to the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed, but also to the rich, the guilty, and the powerful, who also only voice the discourses of their culture.3

I . See e.g., Catherine Belsey, The Subjecf of Tragedy: Identity and Diference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985), pp. ix-x, 7-10; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Selj-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), pp. 3-8; Raymond Williams, Culture (Glasgow, 1981; and Pofiticuf Shakespeare: New Essays in Cutturul Materiatism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N . Y., 1985), pp. vii-viii, 2-7. In “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 5-18, Carol Thomas Neely has noted that some of these new critical practices still construct the subject as male. For a parallel development in scientific discourse, see Evelyn Fox Keller, “Feminism and Science,” Signs 7 (1982), 589-602.

2. See, e.g., Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore, 1987).

3 . Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean Inscriptions: the Voicing of Power,” in Shakespeare and fhe Question ofTheory ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), pp. I 16- 37.

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While a return to the transcendental subject seems scarcely feasible in the light of such critical commentary, the powerless subject has itself invited vigorous critique.“ A less extreme alternative has been suggested recently by Paul Smith, who proposes a more active subject whose agency derives from the gaps and contradictions within competing ideologies present within any culture. Thus, without discount- ing the power of ideologies and cultural practices, Smith’s model endows the subject with the power to choose between a number of subject positions offered by a number of discontinuous discourses.5 What Smith’s work has not yet done, however, is to historicize this model, to explore the extent of a specific subject’s agency, and the extent of its restrictions. Without the analysis of this model in terms of a particular subject, his theory remains necessarily incomplete.

Initially, Lady Anne Clifford’s representations of her lifelong struggle to maintain and to exercise her rights as a landowner seem to provide an almost textbook case of Smith’s model. Her repeated refusals to resign her disputed rights to inherit land demonstrate that her resistance to her subject position as wife, obliged to obey her husband and the authorities empowering him as her head, was enabled by her competing subject position as a land-holding aristocrat obliged to pass down ancestral estates intact to heirs.6 However, her self-representations not only provide historical substance to Smith’s model; they also significantly refine it by revealing that these original

4. Walter Cohen has critiqued New Historicism for its near-totalitarian model, in “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York, 1987), pp. 33-38; Marguerite Waller, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville, 1989), pp. 163- 65, suggests that the sense of powerlessness expressed by New Historicist critics may represent a “flight . . . from the implications for historical thought of Marxism and feminism” (p. 163).

5 . See Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 5 5 . (Min- neapolis, 1988), esp. pp. 24-26; Belsey finds that for women these contradictory subject positions can create confusion and paralysis (pp. 149-60).

6. As her father’s only living heir, Clifford’s rights to inherit his land, entailed during the reign of Richard 11, had some justification under English common law; profits from that land, however, would pass to her husband: see Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederick William Maitland, T h e History ofEnglish Law before the Time OfEdward I (Cambridge, Eng., 189s rpt. 1968), pp. 17, 260-61; Susan Staves, Married Women% Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). pp. 27-32, See also Lisa Jardine’s discussion of the increase of female heirs in this period in Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton, Eng., 1983). pp. 85-87. The relationship of gender and class in the creation of a self by women of this time has been interestingly explored from different premises in Catherine Gallagher, “Embrac- ing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders I (1988). 24-39.

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subject positions themselves became transformed as she attempted to reconcile their contradictions. On the one hand, rather than subverting patriarchy, she unsettled gender by appealing to class to create herself as one of its dominant members. On the other hand, her portraits reconstitute gender ideology to signify solidarity between female relatives rather than subordination to male authorities, and especially husbands. As these transformations suggest, Clifford remained a split subject, caught in the contradictions between obedient wife and aristocratic heir.

Clifford’s writings and portraits extend Smith’s model in another important direction which also provides application for work by recent theorists of reading: her agency as a subject derived from, and contributed to, her agency as a reader.7 Representing her as a reader of some fifty-three books, all written by male authors and most addressed primarily to male readers, Clifford’s diaries and portraits reveal her use of reading as a means of interpellating herself into a dominant, rather than a subordinate, subject position in her culture.8 From these diaries and portraits emerge strong indications that Clif- ford used her sense of communion with deceased authors and deceased family members alike to construct a community of the dead legitimating her rights to land when the community of the living did not. More specifically, her occupation of the role of implied (male) reader of these works apparently facilitated her assumption of the traditionally male role of landowner. Most strikingly, a postscript to one of her letters reveals the extent to which she created her reading according to a model ofinheritance; in a silent quotation from Spenser she implies her claim as, with him, a spiritual co-heir to Chaucer, a kinship apparently assuming material substance in her erection of Spenser’s funeral monument in Westminster Abbey. Thus Clifford’s insertion of herself into the subject position of landowner was enabled

7. One of the first to urge “resisting readings” for women as opposed to “reading against themselves’’ was Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature (Bloomington, 1978); see also Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Femi- nist Theory of Reading,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore, 1986). pp. 31-62. The use of canonical reading to reproduce social relations is well discussed in John Guillory, “Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” E L H 54 (1987), 483-525.

8. George C. Williamson, Lady Anne C l i f i r d , Countess ofDorset, Pembroke G Montgomery. 1590-1676. Hcr Life, Letters and Work (1922; East Ardsley, Eng., 1967), lists the forty-four books painted in the triptych (pp. 341-44); some ofthese with nine others are mentioned in Clifford’s Diary,ed. VitaSackville-West(London, 19z3), pp. 41.47, 52, 57, 64, 66, 76, 87.90.91, 104, I I I ,

103n.

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in part by a discursive activity, while her insertion of herself into the ungendered or even male-gendered subject position as reader of a patriarchal canon became (to use Tony Bennett’s words) a “strategic site for the contestation of dominant ideological subject id en ti tie^."^

I1

To understand Lady Anne Clifford as a divided subject, it is first necessary to describe the circumstances underlying her claim to ancestral lands. Structuring much of her life, this struggle also directed much of her two extant diaries, the first with entries covering 1603, and 1616 to 1619, and the second with widely disparate entries covering 1651 to 1676. Her creation of herself as reader-landowner also emerges as a prominent theme in two portraits of her in a triptych painted about 1 6 4 6 . ’ ~ The disputed lands were willed by her father George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, to his brother Francis Clifford, the next Earl of Cumberland, to pass back to Anne if Francis’ line produced no male heirs. However, since these lands had been entailed during the reign of Edward 11, Anne’s mother argued that George Clifford had not had the right to will them to his brother. In defense of her daughter’s claim, the Countess of Cumberland began a huge compilation of family history that influenced the shape of her daughter’s diaries and her creation of herself as a landowner. 1 1

9. Tony Bennett, “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,” journal ofthe Midwest Modern Language Association I 8 (1985), I S .

10. Diary, ed. V. Sackville-West, is the earlier diary; Lives ofLady Anne Clijiord, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590-1676) and ofherparents, ed. J. P. Gilson (London, 1916) includes the later diary. These diaries are perhaps more accurately described as annals, compiled from diaries, as described by Edward Rainbow, Bishop of Carlisle, in A Sermon Preached at the Funeral ofthe Right Honorable Anne Countess ofpembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (1677). sig. Gz. For his edition of her later diary, Gilson used as his copytext Harley MS 6177, itself a copy or abridgement from three volumes of records written or compiled by Anne Clifford (p. xi). This later diary is preceded by her summary of her own life. Her earlier diary includes her own annotations as notes. My thanks to Valerie Wayne for alerting me to the brief discussion and excerpts from Clifford’s earlier diary in Her O w n Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth- Century Englishwomen ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (New York, 1989), pp. 35-53. Clifford’s diaries are also discussed briefly in Sara Heller Men- delson, “Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs,” in Women in English Society, 1500-

1800 ed. Mary Prior (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 81-210; Dorothy Meads’ introduction to Lady Margaret Hoby, Diary (London, 1930), pp. 55-61. The triptych is reproduced on the final, unnumbered page of Williamson; it also appears in Graham, p. 36.

1 1 . Williamson, pp. 1-2. 34-35. 78, 359.

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What began as a legal problem regarding disputed lands soon became a conflict of obligations, even a conflict in identity, which Clifford was apparently working out in her diaries and portraits. Both of her husbands, Robert Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and then Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, pressured Clifford to give up portions of her land for their own financial benefit. Her first husband attempted to force her to yield her right to her disputed land in exchange for money to be paid to him. Her second husband attempted to force a marriage between his son and her daughter, upon whom she was to settle a large dowry from her holdings.12 Her refusal to obey her first husband in particular, as well as those religious and secular authorities he mustered against her, placed her in serious conflict between two competing loyalties. As a landed aristocrat, she had an obligation to her ancestors and to her posterity to pass down her land, or her claim to her land, to her descendants,l3 and this traditionally male role came into direct conflict with her role as wife, subject to her husband’s will. One set of obligations was vertical in time, to past ancestors and to future descendants, few of whom were physically present to support her efforts on their behalf. The other set of obligations was horizontal in time, to living spouses and to other authorities, abundantly present and highly capable of inflicting pun- ishment for her noncompliance with their demands.

While the ideologies of class and gender in many cases reinforced each other, Clifford’s interpellations of herself within these discourses moved on a trajectory of repeated collisions. Clifford’s early diary contributes to abstract discussions of the subject a sense of the real emotional cost paid by a living historical person. Various entries detail her grief and loneliness when her first husband deprived her of his love, then of the company of her favorite servants, and finally even of her small daughter. Her diary relates episodes which caused her to “weep bitterly” (pp. 19, 26; Feb. 16 and May 3 , 1616). Her distress suggests that rather than simply favoring her obligations to ancestors over those to husbands, she was pressured by both obligations simultaneously. The following entry in her early diary implies the extent to which her sense of self was divided according to an unresolved conflict concerning her husband’s authority: “Sometimes I had fair words

12. Williamson, pp. 84, 87-95, 173. 1 3 . Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, I977),

PP. 83-90.

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from him and sometimes foul, but I took all patiently, and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of my love as I could possibly, // yet I told him that I would never part with Westmoreland upon any condition whatsoever” (p. 62; April 5 , 1617; / / added). The two positions could not be reconciled; it would even be difficult to utter them both in the same tone of voice.

A similar split in subjectivity is suggested by an equally startling shift of voice in Clifford’s response to her husband’s cancellation of her jointure in revenge for her refusal to sign away her right to her lands: “The 27th I wrote a letter to my Lord to let him know how ill I took his cancelling my jointure, / / but yet told him I was content to bear it with patience, whatsoever he thought fit” (p. 69; May 27, 1617; / / added). In a single sentence Clifford registers both protest and acquiescence, representing herself as simultaneously angry and “content.” She has clearly internalized her position as a divided subject.

This split was not confined to Clifford’s positions as wife and land- holder. Also at stake was her status as obedient parishioner and even as loyal subject; her insistence upon her rights to her land brought her into conflict with the larger cultural discourses which reinforced her husband’s authority. One especially powerful example was institu- tionalized within the Anglican church. Her diary details the exertions of the Archbishop of Canterbury as he employed both theological and secular arguments in her husband’s behalf: “The Archbishop took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and a half and persuaded me both by Divine and human means to set my hand to their arguments . . . Much persuasion was used by him and by all the company” (pp. 19-20; Feb. 17, 1616). Despite her refusal to capitulate, Clifford could not remain indifferent to this pressure. She described herself as alternately flattered and terrified by the Archbishop’s attempts to dissuade her.

Susan Amussen’s work has shown how the powerful seventeenth- century discourse of gender tended to reinforce political hierarchies, so that a threat to one tended to be perceived as a threat to the other. 1 4

These overlapping discourses can be seen as Clifford’s disobedience to her husband brought her into open conflict with the King himself. Anne Clifford provides a vivid description of the time when King

14. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988). pp. 1-7, 180-84; Royalist writers, in particular, defended monarchial authority by associating it with the husband’s/father’s authority, pp. 59-60.

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James called her to court so that he himself could adjudicate this dispute:

[The King] put out all that were there and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair sides when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands . . . but I beseech’d His Majesty to pardon me for that I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever. Sometimes he used fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul means but I was resolved before so as nothing could move me. (pp. 48-49; Jan. 18, 1617)

Demonstrating obeisance by her gesture of kneeling, Clifford begged for pardon in the very act of denying the King’s authority over her. These discrepancies between her postures, physical and rhetorical, and her refusal to accede even to the King replicate the discrepancies of voice in her responses to her husband. Repetitions of phrasing suggest the similarity of her experience of the authority of the King and her husband. The King used “fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul”; her husband used “fair words . . . and sometimes foul.” More striking is the almost identical phrasing of her reply to King James and her reply to her husband, that she “would never part from Westmoreland upon any condition whatsoever.” The King did not take her resistance lightly. When she again rejected his interven- tion a few days later, this time with the family members concerned and their lawyers, he “grew in a great chaff-” (p. 50; Jan. 20, 1617). Clifford never did convince the King or her husbands to agree to her position as landowner. She received her land only when all other claimants had died. Yet she did succeed in continuing to insist upon her rights to inherit, and the forces enabling her persistence, if not her victory, in her struggle against these formidable opponents invite examination.

I 1 1

Anne Clifford’s creation of herself as a reader was one strategy by which she struggled against the demands of her contemporaries. Her representations of herself as a reader and an owner of books confirmed the position in class which supported her identity as a landowner, while they unsettled her position in gender which would have forced her, as an obedient wife, to resign her claims to land to her husbands. Her attainment of literacy and her ownership of books


established her elite status by distinguishing her from many women of the middle or lower classes. l 5 More central to her diaries, however, is her act of reading as a relationship with deceased authors. This spiritual communion with the dead affirmed her identity vertically. Her beloved authors and her powerful ancestors alike inhabited a single past; and it was this past, as opposed to the present, which validated her identity as heir. This connection with the past aided her in her struggle with the present, in which her identity was constructed in terms of gender, horizontally in time, with her obligations to her husband confirmed by those to her Archbishop and to her King.

Clifford’s use of books also constructed her identity by employing various seventeenth-century writers who described reading as a kind of conversation with the dead. In 1620 an anonymous translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, dedicated to Anne Clifford’s second husband Philip Herbert, quoted the philosopher Zeno for recommending the attainment of happiness “by resorting to the dead, and having familiar conversation with them” (sig. A2). This form of communion with the dead by reading their books was approved for women in 1638 in Jacques Du Boscq’s courtesy book, The Compleat Woman (sig. G2). From this use of reading as ghostly conversation, Clifford assembled authors as members of an invisible society which, together with her ancestors (especially her deceased mother) and God Himself, supported her identity as landowner when her immediate society of living relatives did not.

An entry in Clifford’s later diary reveals the extent to which books served as an alternative society in her bitter marital struggles over her rights to her land. Unlike people, books were companions who could be counted upon as partisans in her cause: “I gave myself wholly to retiredness, as much as I could, in both those great families and made good books and virtuous thoughts my companions, which can never discern affliction, nor be daunted when it unjustly happens” (p. 40). In Clifford’s representation of books as her companions, the difference of gender is ignored; she conveys no sense of herself as a “woman reader.” Her literary canon belonged properly to a male or a female:

I S . For the relatively low literacy rates among women of various classes at this time, see David Cressy, Literary and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Sruart England (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), pp. 1 1 3 , 119-21, 128, 145-48. These figures have been questioned by Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga., 1981). pp. 22, 34-37.

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Montaigne, Spenser, Ovid, Augustine, Josephus, an historian of the Netherlands. Rather than “reading against herself,” however, her occupation as implied male reader apparently created what Mary Jacobus has called the “ambiguity of subjectivity,” with the havoc that ambiguity wreaked upon gender systems. 16

A version of this ambiguity is suggested in a postscript to a letter Clifford wrote in 1649, in which she constructs reading as more than a form of companionship with Chaucer: “If I had nott exelent Chacor’s booke heare to comfortt mee I wer in a pitiful1 case, having so manny trubles as I have butt when I rede in thatt I scorne and make little of them alle, and a little part of his beauteous sperett infusses ittselfe in mee.”l7 In the act of reading, Clifford’s subjectivity is either ungendered or even partly male, as she partakes of Chaucer’s spirit.

Even aside from the implications within the postscript itself, Clif- ford’s ungendered or male-gendered subjectivity is indicated by her construction of her spiritual relationship with Chaucer on a male model, for her postscript silently alludes to a passage written by Spenser. The narrator of T h e Faerie Queene excuses himself for bor- rowing a plot from Chaucer by describing himself as a transmitter of his literary legacy: “Through infusion sweete / Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me survive, / I follow here the footing of thy feete.”18 Clifford’s use of Spenser as a model collapses distinctions of the spiritual communion with revered literary ancestors possible to male and female readers. Spenser used his “infusion” from Chaucer to write a portion of the Faerie Queene; Clifford used hers to cope with her “trubles.” Instead of writing a literary work, Clifford has embodied Chaucer in the text of her life. Her construction of a self by reading and by thus inheriting the spirit of her literary predecessors makes legitimate, by analogy, her claims to inherit land from her ancestors who have also, presumably, passed down some of their family spirit to her as well.

Clifford’s commission of the first funeral monument for Spenser in Westminster Abbey strikingly suggests her association of literary and

16. Fetterly, p. xx, discusses how patriarchal fiction causes women to read “against” them-

17. Harley MS 7001, f. 212; cited in Gilson’s introduction to the later diary, p. xxvii n. I .

18. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 4.2.34, 11. 6-7; Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1919, rpt. 1989). p. 223; Clifford may have appropriated this passage from Thomas Speght’s prominent citation of it in his 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works, sig. Cjv.

selves; Mary Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York, 1986). p. 5 .


familial inheritance. The original inscription on his tomb, long since disappeared, stresses Spenser’s descent from Chaucer, from whom he derived his ingenio or “genius.”19 Spenser’s “Chaucerness,” his in- ner resemblance to his literary ancestor, has legitimated him as a poet, just as Anne Clifford’s “Cliffordness,” her aristocratic nature derived from her noble ancestors, has, in theory, legitimated her as an heir. Clifford’s erection of Spenser’s funeral monument in Westminster Abbey reflected not only the cultural prominence of Spenser; it also suggested her own spiritual connection to that author in an aristocracy, not of blood, but of taste.20 This relationship emerged primarily from her reading for, while Spenser had dedicated his Fowre Hymns to her mother and to her aunt, Countess ofwarwick, there is no mention of any friendship or personal meeting between Spenser and Clif- ford.21 According to her representation of her reading of Chaucer, from whom like Spenser she had received an infusion of “beauteous sperett,” it would seem that she also had become in her own eyes a kind of progeny, a spiritual descendent, possibly by way of her mother.

Anne Clifford’s inscription on her more modest monument to her former tutor Samuel Daniel at a church in Somersetshire suggests the extent to which the act of erecting monuments was also bound up in her own self-fashioning as landowner:

Here lyes, expectinge the second comming of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, ye Dead Body of Samuel Danyell, Esq., that Excellent Poett and

19. Williamson, pp. 63-64. 20. For a discussion of the aristocracy of taste, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social

Critique oftheludgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). 21. According to Spenser’s dedication of this work addressed to “The Ladie Margaret

Countesse of Cumberland and the Ladie Marie Countesse ofwarwicke,” one ofthese “two most excellent Ladies” had moved him to call in the first two hymns to love and beauty; instead, he added two hymns to heavenly love and heavenly beauty. His claim of “great graces and honourable favours” which they did “daily shew” to him may have been exaggerated, for he misnames the Countess of Warwick as Marie rather than Anne (Poetical Works, p. 586). The Countess of Cumbedand may have been the “Faire Marian, the Muses only darling.” 1. 50s of “Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe”; see Poetical Works, p. 541. Any biographical link between Spenser and Margaret Clifford was probably not of long duration, for Quitslund’s useful reading of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes through the filter of the experiences of Anne’s mother and aunt did not turn up factual evidence; see Jon A. Quitslund, “Spenser and the Patronesses ofthe Fowre Hymnes,” in Silent Butfor the Worded. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985), pp. 184- 202. Brief mentions of her appear in Alexander C. Judson, T h e Life ofEdmund Spenser (Bal- timore, 1945), pp. 147, 188, 207.


Historian, who was Tutor to the Lady Anne of Clifford in her youth, she that was sole Daughter and Heire to George Clifford Earl of Cumberland Who in Gratitude to him erected this Monument in his Memory a long time after when she was Countess Dowager of Pembroke, Dorsett & Montgomery. He dyed in October 1 6 1 9 . ~ ~

According to this inscription, Daniel’s importance seemed to lie almost as much in his role as Anne Clifford’s tutor as in his prominence as a literary figure. Clifford’s expression of respect for Daniel is bound up with her obtrusive representation of her own identity. Her erection of Daniel’s monument, and perhaps Spenser’s as well, demonstrated not only her respect for his works, but her own successful assertion of her position as one whose wealth enabled such monuments.

Like her reading, the writing of entries in her diary also provided support for Clifford’s resistance to the demands of contemporaries, for both activities constructed her identity vertically over time. More- over, the significance of this chronicle of her life was determined in part by its participation in a larger chronicle begun by her mother in her ambitious compilation of family documents in defense of her daughter’s rights. Clifford’s late diary forms part of the voluminous record of the Cliffords and Veteriponts which she compiled to justify her identity as heir.23 Clifford’s compilation of family chronicles may have given rise to her habit of keeping a diary, an unusual activity for women in the Renaissance. Traces of her chronicle-writing also sur- face in places in her diary, such as in this note which locates her mother’s death along the continuums of other lives: Queen Eliz- abeth’s, her father’s, her own, and her child’s: “Upon the 24th being Friday between the hours of 6 and 9 at night died my dear Mother at Broome in the same chamber where my Father was born, I 3 years and 2 months after the death of Queen Elizabeth and 10 years and 7 months after the death of my Father, I being 26 years old and 5 months and the Child 2 years old wanting a month” (p. 30n; May 24, 1616). Describing her mother’s death in this way provides a larger context of both past (Queen Elizabeth and her father) and future (herself and her child). The representation of a common physical

22. Williamson, p. 63. 23 . Williamson, pp. 78, 359, 368-73


space for her mother’s death and her father’s birth contributes a sense of the importance of place to this vertical sense of time. Reference to the specific room in Brougham Castle adds urgency to the obligation to retain family estates by furnishing a means of continuity between her life and those of her parents.

IV

A heightened awareness of minute coincidences of time and place, probably developed from her compilation of family chronicles, appears repeatedly in Clifford’s diary. For example, her entry recording the death of Queen Anne, wife to King James, notes that she received the news of the death of Queen Anne and of her mother at about the same time of day and in the same place, and that Queen Anne died in the same room as her regal predecessor Jane Seymour (p. 89; March 2 ,

1619). Clifford’s remarkings of such coincidences convey a sense of overarching order, no doubt itself a sign of Providence exercising artistic taste. Through their elaborate tracings of family trees, family chronicles and genealogies imply an orderly, pre-ordained system for passing down land that finally appeals to divine will. The rights of landowners, like those of the King himself, derive from God who, in this society, dependably backs the firstborn. Thus, in the following entry describing the solace offered by her chronicles, Clifford adds another author to her bookish companions as a devoted partisan of her cause: “My soul was much troubled and afAicted to see how things go, but my trust is still in GOD, and (I) compare things past with things present and read over the Chronicles” (p. 56; Feb. 27, 1617). The solace Clifford drew from God as her ally was a powerful means to legitimate the hierarchy of class to which she was appealing. Her confidence that God personally backed her claims to her land was absolute. Clifford regarded her decision to defy the King as mediator in the land dispute, as Providential: “I may say I was led miraculously by God’s Providence . . . for neither I nor anybody else thought I should have passed over this day so well as I have done” (p. 5 I ; Jan. 20,

1617). According to a minister ofher acquaintance, she was not alone in perceiving her insistence on her rights to her ancestral lands as divinely sanctioned: “(Mr. Amherst) told me that now they began to think at London that I had done well in not referring this business to the King and that everybody said that GOD had a hand in it” (p. 52;

Jan. 30, 1616). About three weeks later, Clifford prayed “GOD to


send me some end of my troubles that my enemies might not still have the upper hand ofme” (p. 5 5 ; Feb. 19, 1616). A note appended to an entry a few weeks later argues that this struggle over land will ultimately be determined by God, the highest judge, whose decision would finally invalidate any secular proceedings through which her husband and uncle signed away her rights: “My Lord and they signed and sealed the writings and made a final conclusion of my business and did what they could to cut me off from my right, but I referred my cause to GOD” (p. 581-1.; March 14, 1617).

Clifford’s perception of God as her ally emerges even more forcefully in what remains of a later diary where she uses biblical narratives to give meaning to her life. Here, for example, she notes God arranged her second marriage, initially a positive force in her struggles, for the express purpose of defeating the designs of her uncle on her land: “This second marriage of mine was wonderfully brought to pass by the Providence of God, for the crossing and disappointing the envy, malice, and sinister practices of my enemies” (p. 49). Her citation from Job 5 . 1 2 provides a biblical narrative through which to interpret her legal battle; the citation describes how God “scatereth the devises of the craftie: so that their hands can not accomplish that which they do enterprise.”24 God apparently also protects the progeny who will eventually inherit that land. Lady Anne cites Genesis 9. I after praising God’s goodness to her in providing her daughter with ten children: “Bring forthe frute, and multiplie” (p. 50). When she visits her castle at Brougham with her daughter and grandson, she cites Psalm 16.5-6: “The Lord is the porcion of mine inheritance and of my cup . . . yea, I have a faire heritage” (p. 65).

Clifford’s frequent citation of biblical verses in her later diary confirms her use of reading to appropriate male roles justifying her own role as landowner. She compares herself to the patiently suf- fering Job, whose God deprived him of family and earthly goods, only to restore them again; to the lonely David, outnumbered by his enemies, placing his faith in God; to the righteous Isaiah, prophesying to a hard-hearted people. Like these biblical heroes, she emerges triumphant; and through the agency of a sympathetic God, Himself swayed by the prayers of her mother in heaven, she finally gains possession of many castles.

Clifford’s role as landowner was not entirely modelled upon male

24. Citations are from The Geneva Bible: Afacsimile ofthe 1560 edition (Madison, Wisc., 1969).


figures. Her mother had vigorously defended Clifford’s rights to her ancestral lands. In an entry where Clifford describes her new residence at Wilton and Ramsbury with her second husband, it is clear that her mother’s influence remained powerful even after her death: “I was in the country, not far from Devonshire, where that blessed mother of mine was born; so powerful1 an influence had her goodness over the destinie of her posteritie” (p. 53). Clifford attributes the flourishing of her posterity to “the heavenly goodness of my dear mother, whose fervent prayers were offered up in great zeal” (p. 610).

Clifford’s representations of her mother’s influence in her later diary participates in a larger sense of the interpenetration of her world with that of deceased ancestors. During her second marriage cere- mony, for example, Clifford provides a lengthy guest list not of the living but of the dead, both male and female, then in residence in the church vault-her great-grandfather and grandfather of Bedford and their wives; her elder brother Robert; her aunt Anne, Countess Dow- ager of Warwick; and numerous others, concluding with “Edward Russell, 3rd Earl of Bedford, who dyed without issue the 1st of May 1627” (p. 49). Validating her construction of her identity vertically, her relationship with her ancestors played a central role in her refusal to resign her rights to ancestral lands.

The prominence of ancestors of both genders in her diary worked to reconcile somewhat the discourses of class and gender competing so intensely in Clifford’s life. In her later years Clifford derived her rights to land not only from male landowners, but from at least one female heir/coheir as well. Justifiably proud of her restoration of Pendragon Castle, she described that estate as the “chief and beloved habitation” of “Idonea, the younger daughter and coheir of Robert de Veteripont, my ancestor . . . to whom I am heir by a lineal descent” (p. 97). In this partial reconciliation of class and gender, the ideology of gender was transformed within Clifford’s life to create solidarity with other female ancestors, especially her mother, rather than subordination to men. This adaptation is represented strikingly in the Appleby Portraits.

V

Painted about three years after her attainment of her lands, the triptych at Appleby Castle composes a visual document validating Clif-

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Mary Ellen Lamb 361

ford’s position as heir by confirming her elite position in class and by subverting her subordinate position in gender. The composition of several portraits first painted in about I 589 and copied onto one frame in about 1646, the triptych was most probably painted by a John van Belcamp, and the many inscriptions were apparently written on the canvas by a professional copyist. It appears that Clifford took an active role in these representations of herself and of her family. Ac- cording to one of the inscriptions, this triptych was “finished by the appointment of Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, in memoriall” of her family.25

Clifford’s role is indicated by other inscriptions similar to descrip- tions in her diaries. Probably written by Clifford herself or under her influence, these inscriptions describe her as “sole” or “onely” “daughter and heire” to George Clifford no fewer than eight times. The inscriptions are clearly written with Anne Clifford as a reference point. Her aunt Lady Anne Russell, for example, was praised for her affection to the children of her brothers and sisters, “especially to the Lady Ann Clifford.”26 When Margaret Clifford died, “hir only daughter Ann Clifford, Countes of Dorsett, did then lie in Knowle Howse in The narrative of the life of her brother Francis is interrupted at obtrusive length by their mother’s pregnancy with Anne, who “cam after to bee the onely Childe to hir Parents.”**

Although Anne Clifford does not appear in the central portrait, her prominent place in its numerous and lengthy inscriptions reveals her centrality to these narratives ostensibly about her parents and brothers. The family group in the middle portrait is also clearly central to her narrative. Turned toward this middle panel in both her portraits, with her hand in each of the portraits directing a sight line toward the center, Clifford is represented by the content of the central portrait. In addition, the contrast between the portrait of the young Anne on the left and of the old Anne on the right creates of the triptych a chrono- logical narrative of Clifford.

The central portrait secures Clifford’s aristocratic credentials by displaying her lineage over the past several centuries. The importance of this topic is revealed by its border decoration of no fewer than

25. Williamson, pp. 335-36, 345. 26. Williamson, p. 492. 27. Williamson, p. 491. 28. Williamson, p. 493.


thirty-four intricately delineated coats-of-arms tracing her family’s descent from Robert de Veteripont during the reign of King John. The four members of her family portrayed in this central portrait represent the most recent of these ancestors, and together with the portraits of four aunts on the wall above Clifford’s brother, these figures represent the honored dead.29 Solitary in the side panels, Lady Clifford appears excluded from this family group, perhaps because she is alive. Yet her identity derives from them, from her ancestors who attained the land, from her mother who worked to pass it on, and from her brothers whose early deaths made her heir.

The centrality of Clifford’s mother in the middle portrait and in the triptych as a whole represents a striking disruption of conventional gender ideology. Unlike other early seventeenth-century portraits, it is she, not her husband, who presents her eldest son to the observer.30 Her role appears to be linked to the argument organizing the triptych, for she vigorously defended Anne’s rights to the ancestral land willed away from her by her father. Her position in the portrait expresses her unusually prominent part in passing on land. A similar explanation accounts for another highly unconventional feature of the triptych. While husbands are usually portrayed prominently, Anne Clifford’s two husbands appear only in framed portraits, also bordered with coats-of-arms, on the back wall of the third section. While her husbands figured conspicuously in Clifford’s life, their role in asserting her rights as heir was finally negligible. Clifford’s two husbands are given scarcely any more prominence than her tutors represented in the portraits hung above the bookshelves on the first section of the triptych. Even the portrait of the noted Samuel Daniel is given no more space than the portrait of Clifford’s woman tutor, a Mrs. Tay-

Books play a part in this process of validating Clifford as a landowner. The triptych forcefully portrays Anne Clifford not only as an heir but as a reader; and the importance of her reading to the triptych’s argument is demonstrated by the presence in her two panels of some

lor. 31

29. Williamson, pp. 339-40, 30. See portraits discussed in Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Bal-

timore, 1983), pp. 95-106; the portraits ofJames and the royal family, pp. 92-93, 96 convey a sense similar to Clifford’s of the interpenetration of the worlds of the living and their dead ancestors; the portrait, p. 106, perhaps suggests a closer association between women and the dead than between men and the dead.

31 . Williamson, pp. 342. 344.


forty-four books, each with its title skillfully inscribed. Her relatively ungendered identity as a reader is contrasted to her mother’s. The bookshelf above her mother’s left hand supports three folios: the Bible, the works of Seneca, and a manuscript of medical remedies.32 These three books represent the Countess of Cumberland as a conventional female reader of the time. The medicinal manuscript reflects a duty assumed by conscientious mistresses of large estates who at- tended to the health of their families and employees.33 The Bible’s presence draws upon a prominent iconography of the time signifying praiseworthy devotion among female readers.34 A Christianized form of Senecan stoicism taught the resigned acceptance expected of women within this patriarchal culture; and by the seventeenth century, Senecan stoicism, especially in its Christianized form, was judged particularly appropriate for aristocratic women. 35

Anne Clifford’s books included in the left panel of the triptych both reflect and adapt her mother’s reading. The Stoic philosophy contained within the manual of Epictetus continues her mother’s interest in Seneca’s works; and the epitome of Gerard’s Herball represents an update from the book of alchemical medicines above her mother’s head. In contrast to her mother’s books, Anne Clifford’s canon is large and diverse with such works such as Louis le Roy’s The Variety of Things, a survey of the rise and fall of nations from ancient until early modern times. A strong sense of history also structures Samuel Dan- iel’s Chronicle of England and especially William Camden’s mammoth Britannia. Abraham Ortelius’ Maps of the World may have been influenced by the adventures of Clifford’s seafaring father. Also included in her library are epic romances by Sidney and Spenser, essays by Montaigne, sermons by Hall, and philosophy by Agrippa. Two conduct books-Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Primaudaye’s French Academy-are primarily oriented toward the fashioning of gentlemen, rather than of gentlewomen, readers.

Despite the extension of Clifford’s reading beyond her mother’s

32. Williamson, p. 339. 33. These duties were performed, for example, by Margaret Hoby, as recorded in her Diary. 34. John N. King, “The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography,” Renaissance Quarterly

38 (198s). pp. 41-84. 3 5. Ralph Graham Palmer, Seneca’s “ D e Remediis Fortuitorum”and the Elizabethans, Institute of

Elizabethan Studies, I (Kendal, Eng. 1953), p. 18; Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Countess of Pembroke and the Art of Dying,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 207-26.


small gender-bound collection, the lefthand portrait still represents Clifford’s possession of this canon as one of the accomplishments of a proper young woman of the aristocracy, not unlike the other aristocratic accomplishments such as embroidering and playing music also implied in the portrait. Richly dressed, Anne Clifford rests her hand on a piece of embroidery with a viola de gamba by her side.36 Her books are neatly arranged under the watchful eyes of her tutors’ portraits. This left panel contrasts dramatically with the right one, which portrays a somberly dressed Clifford more individuated from contemporary models of aristocratic women. The older Clifford’s reading appears even more central to her representation; in addition to the numerous books included on the shelf, her hand rests on two more. Occupying the space of the lute, a dog leaps up toward her left hand, while a black cat curls up by her right foot. Most startling, her books are in striking disarray.

This later library represents both a continuation and a change from the earlier one. Alexander Barclay’s popular romance Argenis continues her interest in romances, and her taste for Stoic philosophy is seen in her copy of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Her continued interest in history is suggested by her copy of Guicciar- dini’s History in French. Perhaps natural in old age, a preoccupation with dying well is revealed in numerous titles, including the Royalist George Strode’s Book of Death, which expresses the undoubtedly comforting sentiment that “it is utterly a fault in any man, to alienate his lands or goods, wholly or in part from his blood and posterity” (sig. IIV). Clifford’s interest in a seventeenth-century debate upon the nature of the relationship between the present and the past is indicated by her inclusion of two books expressing conflicting viewpoints: Henry Cuffs The Age ofMan’s Life, which argues that the present represents an inevitable corruption of the past; and the more optimis- tic George Hakewill’s A n Apology of the Providence and Power o f G o d , which argues against the world’s decay.37 Her ownership of Henry Wotton’s Book of Architecture fits her ongoing efforts to restore and refurbish her own castles. In addition there are works by Ben Jonson, Fulke Greville, and John Donne.

36. Williamson, p. 341. 37. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965). pp. 200-

203.

Mary Ellen Lamb 36s

The most striking contrast between Clifford’s early and late library lies not, however, in the contents of the books, but in their arrangement. The deformation of the usual neat arrangements of books in portraits may signify at least two things. The first is the mastery embodied in their continual use. Although less spectacularly untidy in arrangement than Clifford’s, the books depicted in portraits by Hol- bein and by a follower of Durer imply this form of mastery. The shelf behind Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus includes a few books at angles, partly concealed by a curtain.38 An anonymous painter from Base1 depicts St. Ambrose in his study with a shelfabove him holding about six books in various positions.39 Since both men were skilled readers, the disarray of their books may well signify their frequent use. Quite possibly the odd angles of Clifford’s books also suggest her increased use and mastery of them, although messiness was more often associ- ated with male rather than female readers.

A second possibility is that the disturbingly disheveled arrangement of her books may represent something chaotic about the nature of knowledge itself, also traditionally male. This possibility is suggested by the philosophy expressed in one of the two books under Clifford’s hand in the third panel: in addition to the Bible, she is touching Pierre Charron’s Book of Wisdom. Influenced by the religious wars in France, this follower of Montaigne challenged the reliabil- ity of human knowledge. Charron excoriated speculative reasoning about God’s plan and pedantic debates about religious dogma as foolishly based upon illusions. Charron advocated instead the Socra- tic doctrine “Know thyself.’” The presence of the Bible in the panel was perhaps necessary to distinguish Clifford’s reading of Charron from that of the French libertines who enthusiastically adopted his text, quoting his philosophy out of context to justify their irreligious leanings.4l Thus the skepticism about the validity of human knowledge may also explain the disarray of Clifford’s books. Knowledge is not neat as suggested by the deliberate arrangement of books in the first panel. Yet rather than elevate ignorance, Charron’s skepticism

38 . Anthony Bertram, Hans Holbein the Younger (London, 1948). plate 12.

39. Erwin Panofsky, Albrerht Durer (Princeton, I945), 11, 32. 40. Pierre Charron, Book of Wisdom (1622), p. I .

41. Jean Daniel Charron. The “Wisdom” ofPierre Charron: A n Original and Orthodox Code of Morality, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature, 34 (Chapel Hill, 1960). pp. 107-11; 131-32.


about the value of books was an educated position relying on various authoritative authors, from Plato to Montaigne. If the clutter of Clifford’s books suggests a similar skepticism, she, like Charron, arrived at it from the vantage of considerable reading.

The triptych insists upon the variety of Clifford’s interests, the intellectuality of her concerns, the presence of an active subjectivity controlling, rather than being controlled by, the authors she read. Clifford’s denial of the authority of books is inextricably connected with her necessary denial of other cultural authorities, especially of husbands and kings. She has transcended the patriarchal texts of her culture to use them rather than to be defined by them, just as she has appropriated a male-authored canon as a means of creating herself. The creativity underlying Clifford’s construction of herself as an ungendered or even a male-gendered reader demonstrates the auton- omy possible to at least one strong-minded subject within the patriarchal culture of the seventeenth century. But, far from transcend- ing her culture, Clifford’s subversion of the prevailing discourse of gender was enabled only by her appeal to a competing discourse of class.

VI

Clifford’s creation of herself as an heir was not, however, acknowledged within her culture. Any possible subversion of gender ideology was apparently contained by subsequent reconstructions of her activities according to a patriarchal system. Her funeral sermon, preached by the Bishop of Carlisle, reveals some ways by which her subversion was prevented from serving as a dangerous precedent to women of subsequent generations. Rather than criticizing or ignoring Clifford’s creation of herself as landowner, the Bishop transformed this traditionally masculine role into a conventionally female duty. Citing Proverbs 14. I (“Every wise woman buildeth her House”), he praised her role as landowner, which had pitted her against her husbands and even against the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury, as a praiseworthy example of ho~sewifery.4~ While admitting that men as well as women build houses, and that sex (gender) is “accidental” before

42. All citations taken from Edward Rainbow, Bishop of Carlisle, A Sermon Preached at the funeral ofthe Right Honorable Anne Countess ofkernbroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (1677).

Mary Ellen Lamb 367

God (sig. Aq), the Bishop also notes that the house is “Woman’s Province, her Sphear wherein she is to Act” (sig. B3). Clifford’s concern for “all the Descents, Relates, or Clientels” was absorbed into her domestic obligations to her “Family, Children, Servants” (sig. B3). Praising her restoration of seven churches or chapels and of two almshouses in addition to her seven castles, he also represents her activities as a form of worship (sig. DI).

Clifford’s learning is similarly acknowledged, only to be contained. Enabled by her reading to “discourse with Virtuoso’s, Trav- ellers, Scholers, Merchants, Divines, Statesmen, and with Good House- wives” (sig. Ejv), she nevertheless sought wisdom rather than fame (sig. E4). Like “those honourable women (as St. Paul there stiles them), who searched the Scriptures daily, with Mary, she chose the better part of Learning” (sig. E4). Invaluable information about Clifford’s literary habits is easily accommodated to culturally accepted perceptions of women readers. According to the Bishop of Carlisle, Clifford’s keen ability to quote from her reading was based upon the following domestic practice: “Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors . . . with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants on them” (sig. E4v). Representing Clifford’s attitude toward her reading as respectfully receptive, this passage does not convey any sense of her authors as her allies against a larger society, nor does it suggest that Clifford sensed any limitation to the value of their knowledge. While praising the usefulness of the information about pedigrees and titles to her posterity, the Bishop describes her keeping a diary as signifying religious virtue: “Whatsoever kind of Censure others may pass of this exactness of Diary as too minute and trivial a Diligence; I think one may charitably conclude a serenity of Conscience, clear, at least, from foul and presumptious sins” (sig. G2). Rather than the painful and sometimes obsessive creation of herself as an agent in a hostile culture, Clifford’s writings were read to reveal her “serenity,” an absence of sin, a void rather than a presence. To the Bishop of Carlisle, Clifford’s diary was in a sense composed of blank pages.

The Bishop of Carlisle demonstrates, as Clifford does, that ideology exists not in texts but in the use made of them. The Bishop


reproduced in discourse a figure that he called Anne Clifford, endow- ing her with a set of ideological meanings. This essay is also a repro- duction of this figure according to a more subversive ideology. Both readings refer to Clifford’s self-representations. All three readings- Anne Clifford’s, the Bishop’s, and mine-are based finally on self- interest, a force which cannot be ignored in any discussion of the agency of the subject within a culture. From her rereading of gender ideology to construct herself as an aristocrat, Clifford gained castles. From his containment of the threat to gender ideology posed by Clifford’s ownership of land, the Bishop affirmed his position as a male in gender hierarchy. My own treatment of Clifford’s writings participates in a recent surge of work in women’s autobiographies which recuperates a sense of female predecessors. 43 Thus ideology exists not in texts but within the minds of readers possessing their own histories and their own agendas. Like Clifford, readers are also agents, choosing their own meanings as they produce themselves in the interstices between and among their own cultural discourses. Ideology exists not only in my writing of this essay, but in your reading of it.

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

43. Especially significant among these are Nancy K . Miller, “Women’s Autobiography in France: For a Dialectics of Identification,” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker. and Nelly Furman (New York, 1980), pp. 258-73; Sidonie Smith, T h e Poetics of Women’s Autobiography (Bloomington, 1987); T h e Female Auto- graph: Theory and Practice ofAutobiographyfrom the Tenth to the Twentieth Century ed. Domna C. Stanton (Chicago, 1987); T h e Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writ- ings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill, 1988).

Documents

The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading