Construction Sites: The Architecture of Anne Clifford's Diaries

As critics have noted, both the late writings and the architectural projects of Lady Anne Clifford were parts of an elaborate plan to prove she had been wronged more than forty years earlier. In 1605 her father, George Clifford, had died, leaving his lands and titles to his brother and his brother's heirs rather than to his daughter; she and her mother had spent years attempting without success to prove that his bequest was illegal. Only in 1643, when her cousin died without male issue—a "Deliverance," Clifford wrote smugly in 1651, "so greate, as would not befall to any who were not visibly susteyned by a Divine favour from above"—did she finally inherit the property, and she spent the rest of her life compiling proof that it should have been hers all along.¹ The portion of the diaries that is now published, covering the years 1650–1676, represents less than ten percent of a much larger work intended to establish historical and legal precedent for this claim. This compilation, known as the Great Books of Record, fills three thick folio volumes and approximately 1000 pages, and it was not the private confessional suggested by the title "Diaries" that modern editors have rather misleadingly grafted onto her published work. Far from stashing her writings away or encoding them in Pepysian shorthand, Clifford employed professional scribes to make three almost identical copies of the series which would be preserved for the use and edification of her posterity.² The Great Books trace the history of her ancestors from the time of King John—conveyed mainly in the form of deeds, wills, inquisitions, and family trees—and they are meant to secure her right to her family's lands in Cumberland, Westmorland, and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Clifford transformed the castles on these properties—Skipton, Appleby, Brough, Brougham, and Pendragon—into powerful statements of her own entitlement. They were in varying states of decay when they reverted to her possession, and in 1649, shortly before the death of her second husband, she traveled north and instigated an aggressive program of architectural repair for both the castles and the surrounding churches. Architectural historians have puzzled over why her architectural choices provide no evidence of her earlier experience at the Jacobean Court, which must have led her into contact with the Palladian tastes of Inigo Jones. In fact, Clifford wanted her buildings to look out-of-date; these ancient architectural foundations were meant to prove her own ancestral ones.³ She enlisted each building as legal support by supplying it with a triumphant inscription that proclaimed her inherited titles, her ownership of the land, and her own role in the building's restoration.

While this context evinces a common purpose for Clifford's autobiographical writing and her architectural work, I will suggest that, for her, they were not parallel pursuits but interdependent ones. We can look to the deeds and wills that originally preceded the diary not only for a biographical and legal context but for an interpretive method. Such documents are not born of the desire to tell a personal story, and while they are influenced by the motives and interests of their original authors, they are not meant to be emotionally revealing. Moreover, they are not meant to stand on their own. Instead, they point beyond themselves to physical places, objects, and people known to the author and, presumably, the reader. Without this correspondence between the text and identifiable physical referents, they are emptied—at least in part—of their significance and effectiveness. Clifford not only perceived this connection between a legal document and a piece of physical property, she relied upon and exploited it in order to create a record of legal ownership which did not exist solely on paper but was authoritatively inscribed on the properties themselves.

This correspondence between text and topography elucidates long stretches of the diary, which, despite their first person narration, are strangely barren of personal, psychological, or even causal significance. In 1655, for instance, she writes:

The eighteenth day of September following I removed with my...