Author Ramie Targoff reveals what she’s learned about our historic female figures – chatelaines of some of the county’s greatest houses – through investigations for her latest book
One of the great pleasures I had while writing my book Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance (Riverrun, 2024) was visiting the magnificent homes that several of the women writers lived in.
The great poet and translator, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, counted Penshurst Place as her family home. Built in local sandstone in the mid-14th century and fully fortified some fifty years later, Penshurst had belonged to the Sidney family for less than ten years when Mary was born in 1561. It was bequeathed in 1552 to her grandfather, Sir William Sidney, from the new king, Edward VI, as a gift for Sir William’s service as Edward’s lord chamberlain.
Mary’s father, Sir Henry Sidney, took on the task of renovating the grand house, building one of the earliest classical loggias in England as well as a spectacular Italian parterre. There’s no way to know what Mary’s thought of Penshurst, as she left no mention of it—or of any of her homes—in her writing, but her older brother, the poet Sir Philip Sidney, famously described the house as, 'handsome without curiosity and homely without loathsomeness.' Given that
Mary spent most of her childhood at Ludlow Castle, where her father served as president of the council of Wales and the Marches, Penshurst was for her a place of retreat—a holiday home, as it were, where the Sidney family gathered when her parents weren’t busy with their responsibilities. (Mary’s mother, Lady Sidney, had a very demanding job of her own, serving Queen Elizabeth as one of her ladies of the privy chamber). It’s tempting to imagine young Mary running through Penshurst’s beautiful gardens with her siblings, or sitting quietly under a shady tree to read or write. When she and the family went to the local church on Sundays, she would have seen the tombs of her grandfather, Sir William, who was buried in the Sidney Chapel in 1554, and her sister, Margaret, who had died at the age of fifteen months before Mary’s birth.
This was only one of Mary’s sisters who died as a child: when she was six, she lost her elder sister, Elizabeth; eight years later, she lost her younger sister, Ambrosia. Ambrosia’s tragic death was the occasion, however, for the greatest turn of events in Mary’s life. Feeling the weight of the family’s 'grief upon us' and concerned about the 'unpleasant air' Mary might be breathing in damp Ludlow Castle, Queen Elizabeth invited Mary to come to live at court as one of her maids of honour. Within two years, the15-year-old girl was married off to the immensely wealthy Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a 38-year-old widower desperately in need of an heir. At this point, Mary’s geographical base shifted to Wiltshire, where she took up residence as the Countess of Pembroke at Wilton House.
Some 15 kilometers north of Penshurst lies Knole House, where another of the women at the heart of Shakespeare’s Sisters lived during her first marriage. On February 25, 1609, Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of George Clifford, earl of Cumberland, was married to Sir Richard Sackville, who inherited his father’s title (earl of Dorset) and estates two days after the wedding. Anne Clifford, the new Countess of Dorset, moved with her husband to the Sackville family’s magnificent home at Sevenoaks. Generally ranked in the top five of England’s largest houses— the popular myth is that it's a 'calendar' house, with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and seven courtyards, even if these numbers aren’t exactly right—Knole was first built as a palace for the 15th-century archbishops of Canterbury before becoming a royal possession under Henry VIII. When Richard Sackville’s grandfather acquired the home in 1603, he began massive renovations, employing roughly 200 workmen, including craftsmen from Italy, to create the opulent rooms that are still preserved today.
However splendid Knole was—and still is—in both its architectural fineness and its sprawling grounds, it didn’t appeal to Anne Clifford, who always longed for her ancestral lands in the north. The defining event in her life came with her father, George Clifford, earl of Cumberland’s death in 1605, when she learned she’d been disinherited from one of the greatest estates in the kingdom. As an only child born into a family where the inheritance was legally meant to pass to the direct heir regardless of sex, Anne had grown up imagining she would inherit the grand castles of Appleby, Skipton, and Brougham, among others, and she fought a lawsuit for nearly forty years to regain what she regarded as hers. In the memoir she wrote covering the years from her conception (which she tried to date very precisely) through to her final victory after her father’s male heirs had died—she wrote this about her previous homes:
'The marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay harbours of anguish, insomuch as a wise man that knew the inside of my fortunes would often say that I lived in both these, my Lords’ great families, as the river of Rhône or Rhodanus runs through the lake of Geneva, without mingling any part of its streams with that lake'.
Anne’s second husband was none other than Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery and Pembroke, and son to Mary Sidney. When Anne married Philip in 1530, six years after the death of Richard Sackville, she moved to Wilton House. The description of Knole’ and Wilton’s 'marble pillars' as 'gay harbors of anguish' had very much to do with Anne’s longing throughout both of her marriages to gain her father’s roughly 90,000 acres in Westmoreland and Yorkshire. But in the early 20th century, Richard Sackville’s descendant, Vita Sackville-West, who was herself born at Knole and loved it but was unable to inherit the estate due to the laws dictating that only men could inherit property, took up the task of imagining what Anne Clifford might have seen and felt while she lived there. While acknowledging Anne’s preference for the 'barbarous castles' and 'wild heaths and moors' of her ancestral lands, Vita writes: 'Knole I have seen as Anne Clifford saw it, quietly magnificent, down there in Kent, with its grey towers and wide lawns and glinting windows, and the flag floating high up in the cool empty blue.'
Whatever Anne Clifford thought about Knole, it was there that she began the writing for which she is best known today. Starting with a memoir for 1603 - the year that Queen Elizabeth died, which is the occasion for the very first entry - Anne began to keep close track of her own life and the events surrounding her. Her last diary entry was written the day before her death, in 1676, when her secretary recorded her final words, 'I thank God I am very well.' In 1923, Vita Sackville-West published Anne’s early memoir of 1603 and the diaries of 1616, 1617, and 1619 - the only ones from that period that have survived -which are filled with wonderful details of life at Knole. We hear about visits from the great poet John Donne, who was rector of nearby St Nicholas Church in Sevenoaks from 1616 to 1631, and who famously complimented Anne for being able to '...discourse of all things, from predestination to slea-silk.' We learn that she 'made pancakes with my women in the Great Chamber,' that she walked with her husband 'in the Park in the garden,' and that she 'sat by my Lord and my brother Sackville in the drawing chamber and heard much talk about many businesses.' We read enough to be able to retrace her footsteps, and conjure up what life at Knole would have been like some 400 years ago.
penshurstplace.com
nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/kent/knole
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff is published at £25 by riverrun
