Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/1128

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given by the French king, Charles VII." He took a prominent part on the Lancastrian side in the wars of the Roses, and fell at the battle of St. Albans, 22nd May, 1455. This Lord Clifford is the subject of some powerful lines in the second part of Shakspeare's Henry VI.—His son, the "Younger Clifford," is stigmatized by the great dramatist and the old chroniclers, as notorious for his cruelty, even in that merciless age. Leland says, "that for slaughter of men at Wakefield, he was called the 'Boucher.'" The duke of York, the competitor for the crown, fell in that bloody engagement, and his son, the youthful earl of Rutland, was killed in the pursuit by "blackfaced Clifford," as Shakspeare terms him. The perpetrator of this barbarous deed was himself slain soon after, at the age of twenty-six, the day before the battle of Towton; and, according to the traditional account of the family, his body was thrown into a pit with a promiscuous heap of the slain. His estates were forfeited, and bestowed upon the "crook-backed" duke of Gloster, afterwards Richard III.

Clifford, Henry, Lord, the elder son and successor of this redoubted Lancastrian partisan, was the best of his heroic race. At the time of his father's death, he was a child of seven years of age, and was forced to seek a refuge among the simple dalesmen of Cumberland, where he lived as a shepherd for the space of twenty-four years. During his pastoral life he is said to have acquired great astronomical knowledge, watching upon the mountains, like the Chaldeans of old, the stars by night; and in the archives of the Cliffords have been found manuscripts of this period, supposed to belong to the "Shepherd Lord," which make it more than probable that astrology and alchemy were also among the pursuits to which he was addicted. On the death of Richard III. in the battle of Bosworth, "the good Lord Clifford," as he was affectionately termed, was restored to his ancestral honours and estates—an event commemorated in Wordsworth's beautiful song, At the Feast of Brougham Castle, one of the finest specimens of lyric poetry in our language. At the age of sixty, the "Shepherd Lord" went at the head of his retainers to the battle of Flodden Field, "and there showed," says Whitaker, "that the military genius of the family had neither been chilled in him by age, nor extinguished by habits of peace." He died in 1528, ten years after the battle of Flodden.—His son, who was created Earl of Cumberland, sorely disturbed the old age of his venerable father by his follies and vices. But he is said to have been reclaimed in good time, and there is great reason to hope that his father lived to see the effects of his reformation. The earl was the youthful comrade of Henry VIII., and had the address or good fortune to retain the favour of that monarch till the end of his life.

Clifford, Henry, second Earl of Cumberland, "had a good library," says his granddaughter Lady Anne, "and was studious of all manner of learning, and much given to alchemy." His first wife was the Lady Elinor Brandon, niece to Henry VIII., and daughter of Mary, the widow of Louis XII.; "a woman," says Hartley Coleridge, "to be held in everlasting honour, for she dared, in the sixteenth century, to unite herself to the man of her choice." The most memorable event in the history of the earl was his recovery from a, violent sickness which, for a time, suspended all appearances of animation, so that the physicians thought him dead. His body was stripped, laid out upon a table, and covered with a hearsecloth, when some of his attendants perceived symptoms of returning animation, and by the use of warm applications, internal and external, gradually restored him to life.—His son and successor—

Clifford, George, third Earl of Cumberland, was distinguished by his romantic daring, and his unextinguishable passion for nautical adventure. He made eleven expeditions, fitted out at his own expense, chiefly against the Spaniards and Dutch, to the West Indies, Spanish America, and Sierra Leone. The voyages of this chivalrous but eccentric sea wanderer, are full of extraordinary adventures and perils. In 1588 he commanded one of the vessels in the fleet which destroyed the Spanish armada, and highly distinguished himself by his bravery and skill in the various conflicts with the invaders, especially in the action fought off Calais. . In the following year he dismantled Fayal in the Azores, and captured twenty-eight vessels of various sizes, valued at more than £20,000.—(See the narrative of Edward Wright in Hakluyt's Collection.) The earl stood high in the good graces of Queen Elizabeth, who seems to have both admired and flattered his foibles. She invested him with the garter, and appointed him her peculiar champion at all tournaments. He lavished immense sums on public spectacles, on horse racing—which had just then become fashionable—and in magnificent banquets; and taking this expenditure into account, as well as his great losses at sea, it is no wonder that having "set out with a larger estate than any of his ancestors, in little more than twenty years he made it one of the least." This extraordinary man who saw, and did, and suffered so much, died 30th October, 1605, in the forty-seventh year of his age. His daughter and heiress—

Clifford, Lady Anne, was the last of this great race, and was one of the most remarkable women whom this country has produced. She was born in 1589, and was married at a very early age to Richard, third earl of Dorset, a man of talent and spirit, but a licentious spendthrift. He died in 1624. Lady Anne speaks gently of his memory, though his licentiousness and extravagance must have caused her much misery. After six years of widowhood, she was wedded in 1630 to Philip Herbert, earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, and nephew of Sir Philip Sidney. This new connection was a source of much misery to the countess. She admits that the marble pillars of Wilton, the ancient seat of the Herberts, were as Knowle (the seat of the Dorset family) had been to her, "oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish." The earl of Pembroke died in 1650, immediately after the downfall of the monarchy. He had rendered himself peculiary obnoxious to the royalists, and their contemptuous hatred broke out in keen and bitter satires after his death. One of these, entitled his "Last Will and Testament," &c., has been attributed to Samuel Butler. The death of Francis, fourth earl of Cumberland, uncle of Lady Anne, and of his son, without male issue, terminated the contest which, during thirty-eight years, had been carried on for the Clifford estates, between the male and female branches of the house; and the death of her husband left Lady Anne free and uncontrolled mistress of the inheritance of her ancestors. During the remainder of her life, she was chiefly occupied in repairing the damages of war, of law, of neglect, and of waste. She did great works, and took good care to commemorate them, and had a very commensurate consciousness of her many good and great qualities. She restored six of her ancestral castles, and several churches which had been ruined by the great civil war. She erected a monument to her tutor, "the well-languaged" Daniel the poet. She was a woman of a high spirit and a determined will, as is abundantly shown by the famous letter which she is said to have written to the secretary of Charles II., who had attempted to interfere with her borough of Appleby. "She patronized," says Dr. Whitaker, "the poets of her youth, and the distressed loyalists of her mature age. Her home was a school for the young and a retreat for the aged, an asylum for the persecuted, a college for the learned, and a pattern for all." She died at Brougham castle in 1675, at the age of eighty-seven, and with her the noble race whose high characteristics seem to have been united in herself became extinct. She left behind her a curious autobiography, containing many interesting details respecting her own life and the history of her family.—(See Whitaker's History of Craven; Hartley Coleridge's Northern Worthies; Edinburgh Journal, vol. xii.; "The Cliffords," by the writer of this sketch.)—J. T.

CLIFFORD, Arthur, an English lawyer and writer. He edited the official correspondence of Sir Ralph Sadler, 1809; The Texall Poetry, with notes, 1813; and was the author of an ode entitled "Carmen Seculare," 1814, on the centenary of the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty. He died in 1830.

CLIFFORD, James, was the author of a choice little volume entitled "Divine Services and Anthems, usually sung in the cathedrals and collegiate choirs in the church of England," printed in 1663 and 1664—a work frequently referred to by Anthony à Wood, and valuable as giving us the words of the anthems (with the names of the composers) in use from the Reformation to the death of Charles I. Wood says, "He was born in the parish of St. Mary Magdalen in the north suburb of Oxon; educated in Magdalen college school as chorister of the said college, but took no degree in this university. After the restoration of King Charles II. he became petty canon of St. Paul's cathedral in London, reader in a church, near Carter Lane, which is near the said cathedral, and afterwards chaplain to the honourable society of Serjeant's Inn in Fleet Street, London." He died at the close of the year 1699, and was buried in the church of St. Andrew Undershaft.—E. F. R.

CLIFFORD, Thomas, first Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, was born in 1630, and was the eldest son of Hugh Clifford of Ug-