I hardly think that it is necessary or even interesting to go into the legal details of the long dispute over Lord Cumberland’s will. The interest of Anne and Richard Dorset is human, not litigious. It may therefore be sufficient to say that by the terms of his will Lord Cumberland bequeathed the vast Clifford estates in Westmoreland to his brother Sir Francis Clifford, with the proviso that they should revert to Anne, his daughter, in the event of the failure of heirs male, a reversion which eventually took place, thirty-eight years after his death. What he does not appear to have realized was that the estates were already entailed upon Lady Anne; and that he was, by his will, illegally breaking an entail which dated back to the reign of Edward II.
It is easy to judge, from this broad indication, the infinite possibilities for litigation amongst persons contentiously minded. Such persons were not lacking. There was Lady Cumberland, Anne’s mother, bent upon safeguarding the rights of her daughter. There was Francis, the new Earl of Cumberland, equally bent upon preserving what had been left to him by will. There was Richard Dorset, whose own fortune was not adequate to his extravagance, and who, having married an heiress, was determined for his own sake that that heiress should not be defrauded of her inheritance, or that, if she was to be defrauded, he at least should receive ample compensation. And finally there was Anne herself, who was more resolved than any of them that she and the North of England should not be parted. Dorset’s part, of the four, was the most elaborate and the most discreditable. He would have been willing for his wife to renounce some of her claims in return for the compromise of ready cash. Anne, however, remained single-hearted throughout: she was the legal heiress of the North, and the North she would have; and in the midst of the otherwise sordid and mercenary dispute, in which Dorset used every means of coercion, she remains fixed in her perfectly definite attitude of obstinacy, unswayed by her husband, his relations, her own relations, their friends, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the King himself, their remonstrances, their threats, their vindictiveness, and the actual injuries she had to endure over a long stretch of years. In the end she got the better of them all, and the last picture of her left by the “Lives” is that of a triumphant and imperious old lady, retired to the stronghold of her northern castles, where her authority could stand “against sectaries, almost against Parliaments and armies themselves”; refusing to go to court “unless she might wear blinkers”; moving with feudal, with almost royal, state between her many castles, from Appleby to Pendragon, from Pendragon to Brougham, from Brougham to Brough, from Brough to Skipton; building brew-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses, kitchens, stables; sending word to Cromwell that as fast as he should knock her castles about her ears she would surely put them up again; endowing almshouses; ruling over her almswomen and her tenants; receiving, like the patriarchal old despot that she was, the generations of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.