Women's History Month 2024, 5: Journeying with Anne Clifford and Alice Thornton

Blog article published by Jessica Malay on 28 March 2024  castlesfaithfamilylawletterslifewritingprovidence

March is Women's History Month and to mark it - like last year - we’ve been bringing you a series of blog posts, this time on Alice Thornton and her links to various other women. In this final instalment, Jessica Malay, Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Huddersfield and a member of the Alice Thornton's Books project board, compares Thornton with Anne Clifford, whose writings she has edited and of whom she is presently writing a biography.

Authority and Power

For many years I have worked with the diaries, memoirs, letters, and historical writing of the Lady Anne Clifford. She, especially in her later years, was an almost larger than life woman with her five castles and nearly unchallenged social and political power in a huge part of the north of England. It is gratifying to explore just how much power she had in the area during her 25 years in the north, and I especially enjoyed finding the letter where one of the leading gentlemen of Westmorland, Philip Musgrave, wrote to a secretary of Charles I, complaining about Anne’s choice of wardens for her Pendragon castle. He ends the letter by asking that the secretary keep his letter secret because of ‘the dependence that many gentlemen in these counties have on her ladyship’.^[1]

Later another writer, Dr Thomas Smith, a townsman of Appleby, echoed Musgrave’s words when deciding not to challenge the Lady Anne over her choice of MP. He told his correspondent that ‘they of Appleby, having so absolute a dependence upon her (as indeed they have) it would be vain to strive against that stream’.^[2] It is gratifying to see a woman holding this kind of authority in the seventeenth century. Yet I think my favorite part of Anne Clifford’s life story is not this period of her triumph, but her decades of vulnerability. She was an extraordinary woman in her later years, but through most of her life she experienced the kinds of struggles, pain, humiliation, and despair that was the common lot for women across society during that time (and even today).

Shared Struggles

Alice Thornton’s writings helped me to consider again Anne Clifford’s life during those times of struggle because Alice shared many of the same difficulties. Both Anne and Alice were very dependent upon their mothers for their emotional, social, and financial well-being. The death of these mothers was devastating to both women and had a tremendous effect on them. Alice remembered sitting by her mother’s deathbed where she ‘took the saddest leave of my dear parent as ever child could to part with so great a comfort’ and ‘began a dangerous sickness at Oswaldkirk, after my dear mother's death’.^[3] Anne Clifford described the ‘heavy news of my mother’s death’ as the ‘greatest and most lamentable cross that could befall me’.^[4]

Another experience Alice and Anne shared was their legal battles. Both ‘went to law’ many times over property and other rights, as did many women in the time, from rag-sellers to countesses.^[5] This willingness to make private injustices, often between family members, public is sometimes framed as combativeness, acquisitiveness, or even betrayal. Old prejudices against women actively protecting themselves and their children have a long life. In the stark reality of the time securing the financial resources to live respectable lives was crucial to Anne and Alice and their children’s very survival.

What a failure to do this looks like is dramatically portrayed in the life of another woman from the period, Mistress Mary Hampson, whose short autobiography I discovered early in my career.^[6] This woman began life as the daughter of a respected gentleman and woman, holding about the same social status as Alice Thornton. But a disastrous marriage, and the loss of her inheritance through her husband’s swindle meant that she spent her last years in a London tenement as a lodger in the home of an impoverished widow. Threats of financial ruin were ever present, and people held on to what they could by whatever means open to them. Anne and Alice knew this well.

Women’s legal problems and their battles with male family members certainly caused them grief, but perhaps most heart rending in their stories are the deaths of some of their children, which caused both women tremendous suffering. Alice lost six of nine children, while Anne lost five of seven in infancy, and both lost an adult child. Anne and Alice describe this grief poignantly in their books.

The Role of Faith

When I initially began my work on sixteenth and seventeenth-century women it was these stories of women’s resistance and endurance, as well as their stories of joys and a sense of life in the everyday that attracted me to their diaries, letters, poetry, and other writing. I also noticed they were committed to their faith, but even as a person of faith myself, I took it for granted that of course they would have their religious beliefs, and in my work, I pushed these aside into a corner—barely acknowledged but lurking in the background. In the intervening years as my own faith has taken a more central role in my life, including ordination and service in the Church of England, I realized that I had barely acknowledged a hugely important underpinning reality in these women’s lives—their faith journeys.

Anne, Alice, and so many men and women of the period lived in a reality where God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — was actively present in their lives. This belief in Providence upheld them in their worst of circumstances, protected them, provided guidance in decision making, and was present in their celebrations of joy. When the practices that maintained their faith life were threatened, especially in the cultural upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, Anne and Alice’s physical and mental health suffered. Alice’s meditations allow us to experience what her faith felt and looked like to her.

Anne Clifford did not leave any religious meditations, but her annotations of biblical passages inserted liberally throughout her writing, and her comments in her diaries, reveal an active association between her life and her sense of its embeddedness in her faith. We come to know these women better when we accept that for them, faith did not live in a corner. In Anne and Alice’s world the divine was present and active all around them—in the small day to day moments and the great events of life. This fills me with wonder and has encouraged me to reflect on my own faith journey.

Despite the social distance between a countess and a gentlewoman, Alice and Anne shared many experiences common to women in their own time, and often still in ours. I continue to enjoy journeying with them through the writing they have left us.