Crossing Generations: Female Alliances and the Exercise of Dynastic Power in Anne Clifford's Great Books of Record

In 1606 Margaret Russell began a campaign to secure her daughter’s rights to the ancient Clifford estates in Westmorland and Skipton in Yorkshire. Samuel Daniel describes how Anne Clifford’s rights to her father’s lands were “brought to light unto the knowledge of the world by your [Russell’s] wisdom and industry, out of the records of this Kingdom miraculously after the death of my Lord her father.”1 At his death in October 1605, George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, instead left his estates to his brother, Francis Clifford, effectively disinheriting his daughter. In a letter to Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss, Margaret Russell proclaims the justice of her actions in defiance of her husband’s wishes, stating that her daughter’s rights came “from women heretofore and now going to women again.”2 Through her investigation of manuscript sources relating to the Clifford estates, Margaret Russell discovered the importance of female inheritance and alliances to the building of the Clifford dynasty.