de Veteripont, from whose family it passed by marriage into the hands of the Cliffords and Tuftons successively. It is now the property of the Earl of Thanet- -a Tufton. Extensive additions were made to it by the first Roger de Clifford, and the ambiguous inscription, "This made Roger," was lately to be deciphered over the inner gateway. In 1412, whilst in the possession of the Clifford family, it was attacked and laid waste by the Scots. In 1617, the Earl of Cumberland, another Clifford, feasted James I. within its walls, on his return from Scotland.* In 1651, having fallen into decay, it was thoroughly repaired by the celebrated Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, who also restored the Castles of Skipton, Pendragon, Brough, and Appleby; all of them, except Skipton, in Westmorland. In these reparations of the old waste places she spent £40,000— an immense sum in those days. Some few years after

the Countess's death, the Earl of Thanet, her grandson, barbarously demolished three of the castles, selling the timber and materials. "We will hope," says Wordsworth, "that when this order was issued, the Earl had not consulted the text of Isaiah, 58th chap. 12th verse, to which the inscription placed over the gate of Pendragon Castle by the Countess, at the time she repaired that structure, refers the reader.' And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in.' The Earl of Thanet, the present possessor of the estates, with a due respect for the memory of his

Of this entertainment, which was of the most magnificent description, there is a curious memorial still in existence, viz., a folio volume printed in 1618, entitled "The Ayres that were sung and played at Brougham Castle in Westmerland, in the King's Entertainment, given by the Right Honorable the Earle of Cumberland, and his Right Noble Sonne the Lord Clifforde. Composed by Mr. George Mason and Mr. John Earsden." The Countess of Pembroke records, that the King upon this occasion was lodged in the room where her father was born and her mother died. This royal visit took place on the 6th of August 1617. The next night his Majesty slept at Appleby Castle, another of the Earl's seats.

ancestors, and a proper sense of the value and beauty of these remains of antiquity, has given orders that they shall be preserved from all depradations." We have

seen it stated, but we are afraid there is no authority for the assertion, that Sir Philip Sidney wrote part of his Arcadia at this place. The reader is probably acquainted with Wordsworth's "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," one of the noblest strains of lyric poetry in the language. It is supposed to be chanted by a minstrel in the day of rejoicing for the restoration of the " Shepherd Lord," mentioned on a preceding page :

"High in the breathless hall the minstrel sate,
And Eamont's murmur mingled with the song;
The words of ancient time I thus translate,

A festal strain that hath been silent long."

* Some members of the noble family of Clifford have been named before in this volume; and as it was intimately connected with the early history of Westmorland, a sketch of the more distinguished of them may not, perhaps, be deemed out of place here. They were a warlike sept, and engaged in all the contests of the time, so that it was a rare thing for any to die off the field. Doubtless they felt, or imagined they felt, that

The first of the family who gained a footing in the country, was the Roger de Clifford above referred to. His son Robert, said to have been the greatest man of all the family, being of a most martial and heroic spirit, was one of the guardians of Edward II. when a minor, and in that monarch's reign he was made Lord High Admiral. He was a formidable part "of King Edward's power" at the battle of Bannockburn, where he fell on the 24th of June 1314. His grandson Robert was engaged, under the Black Prince, in the famous battle of Cressy. John, the grand-nephew of the last Robert, married the only daughter of Hotspur Percy (whom Shakspere has made immortal), and was killed at the siege of Meaux in France. His son Thomas gained renown at the battle of Poictiers, by the stratagem he planned, and successfully executed, for taking the town. Snow being on the ground, he and his men clad themselves in white, and thus habited, they fell unperceived upon the place, and took it. Then came the Wars of the Roses. The last mentioned Thomas, Lord Clifford, sided with his Sovereign, and fell at the battle of St. Alban's in 1455. This warlike Baron and his son, the next Lord, figure in Shakspere's "Henry the Sixth." At the battle of Wakefield, in which all the nobility of England were engaged on one side or the other, John, Lord Clifford, tarnished the well-earned fame of his family, by killing, in the pursuit, the youthful Earl of Rutland, son of the Duke of York,

A short distance beyond Brougham Castle, stands the Countess's Pillar, erected in 1656, by the same Lady Anne Clifford, "a memorial," as the inscription says, "of her last parting at that place with her good and pious mother, Margaret, Countess-Dowager of Cumberland, the 2d of April, 1616: in memory whereof she has left an annuity of £4, to be distributed to the poor, within the parish of Brougham, every second day of April for ever, upon a stone here by. Laus Deo."

who also fell in the same battle. "But who," says Speed, 66 can promise anything of himself in the heat of martial fury ?" This barbarous deed was perpetrated through revenge, for the Earl's father had slain the murderer's. This Lord met his death in the small valley of Dittingdale, the day before the battle of Towton, leaving a son, named Henry, only seven years old at the time of his father's death. This child was saved from the rage of the victorious party by concealment. For twenty-four years he was deprived of his estate and honours; during which time he lived as a shepherd at Lonsborrow, in Yorkshire, or in Cumberland, at the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Lancelot Threlkeld. One of the first acts of Henry VII. was to restore the Shepherd Lord to his possessions and dignity. In his retirement he acquired great astronomical knowledge, watching, like the Chaldeans of old, the stars by night upon the mountains. He also possessed some acquaintance with alchemy, and yet he was so illiterate when he took his place amongst his peers, as to be unabled to write, nor did he ever attain higher proficiency in the art, than enabled him to subscribe his name. At the age of sixty he went, with a band of followers, to the battle of Flodden Field; "and there showed," says Dr. Whitaker, "that the military genius of the family had neither been chilled in him by age, nor extinguished by habits of peace."

"Yet not in war did he delight;

This Clifford long'd for worthier might;
Nor in broad pomp or courtly state-
Him his own thoughts did elevate;

Most happy in the shy recess

Of Barden's humble quietness."

White Doe of Rylstone.

Three Earls of Cumberland then followed. George, the third Earl, was one of those to whom England is indebted for her proud title of "the Ocean Queen." He performed nine voyages in his own person, and in a great measure at his own expense, most of them to the West Indies, doing great honour to himself, and service to his Queen and country. That Queen was Elizabeth, who seems to have expended some of her coquetry upon him, for the naval hero was an accomplished courtier, and in a ceremonial pageant he was appointed her peculiar champion at tournaments. The last of the family whom we shall particularise, was the daughter of this chivalrous Earl, she who is best known by her maiden name, the Lady Anne Clifford (the "good

The Bard of Memory thus alludes to this pointed illustration of his theme :

"Hast thou through Eden's wild wood vales pursued

Each mountain scene magnificently rude,

Nor with attention's lifted eye revered

That modest stone by pious Pembroke rear'd,
Which still records, beyond the pencil's power,
The silent sorrows of a parting hour?"

Wordsworth has a sonnet upon this subject; and Felicia Hemans, with that love of feminine worth, and that true poetic sensibility which eminently distinguished her, also composed some lines upon the memorial Pillar, from which we extract the first stanza :

"Mother and Child! whose blending tears

Have sanctified the place,

Where to the love of many years

Was given one last embrace

Oh! ye have shrined a spell of

power

Deep in your record of that hour!"*

Four miles from Penrith, near the road to Appleby, and in the district which to this day bears the name of

Countess" of Gray's Letters), one of the most celebrated women of her time. Her tutor was the "well-languaged" Daniel, whose fortunes she was instrumental in advancing, and to whose memory she erected a monument in Westminster Abbey, an office she performed likewise for two other poets, Spenser and Drayton. She was twice married; the first time to the Earl of Dorset, with whom she led a life of much unhappiness; and then to "that memorable simpleton," as Walpole calls him, the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, nephew of Sir Philip Sidney. "In her first widowhood," says her secretary and biographer, "she resolved, if God ordained a second marriage for her, never to have one that had children, and was a courtier, a curser and swearer. And it was her fortune to light on one with all these qualifications in the extreme." Notwithstanding all her troubles, she was of a high and courageous spirit, not fearing, when she imagined herself in the right, either King or Protector. The answer, couched in language of Spartan brevity, which she is said to have returned to a ministerial application respecting the representation of the borough of Appleby, is well known-" I have been bullied by an usurper, I have been neglected by a Court, but I will not be dictated to by a subjectyour man shan't stand." It is now generally agreed that this letter is spurious; but however that may be, she was undoubtedly a woman of great ability, knowing well, as the witty Dr. Donne said of her, how to discourse of all things from predestination to slea silk.

"The 2d day of April 1616, was the last time that ever mother and daughter saw one another, for that day about noon, a quarter of

Whinfell Forest, there formerly stood a fine oak, which bore the name of Hart's Horn Tree, a name it acquired from a tradition to this effect. In the time of the first Robert de Clifford, about the year 1333, Edward Baliol, King of Scotland, came into Westmorland, and stayed some time with that Lord at his castles of Appleby, Brougham, and Pendragon. During his visit they ran a stag, by a single greyhound, out of Whinfell Forest to Redkirk, in Scotland, and back again to the same place. Being both spent, the stag leaped over the pales, and died there; but the greyhound, attempting to leap, fell, and died on the opposite side. As a memorial of this incident, the stag's horns were nailed upon a tree just by, and (the dog being named Hercules) this couplet obtained currency amongst the people—

Hercules kill'd Hart-a-grease, *

And Hart-a-grease kill'd Hercules.

In course of time, it is stated, the horns became grafted, as it were, upon the tree, by reason of its bark growing over their root, and there they remained more than three centuries, till, in the year 1648, one of the branches was

a mile from Brougham Castle, in the open air, they took their last leave one of another with many tears and much grief; the mother returning unto her said castle again, where she dyed the 24th day of the month following, and the daughter then going forward on her journey out of Westmerland towards London, and so unto Knowles House in Kent."

A True Memorial of the Life of me the Lady Anne Clifford.

Harleian MSS. 6177.

* Dr. Percy, in a note to the stanza given below from the old "Song of Adam Bell," explains Hart-o-grease, or greece, to mean a fat animal, from the French word graisse.

"Then went they down into a laund

These noble archers thre;

Eche of them slew a hart of greece
The best that they could see."

There is an ancient broadside proclamation of a Lord Mayor of London preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, in which, after denouncing" the excessyve and unreasonable pryses of all kyndes of all vytayles," it is ordered that "no citizen or freman of the saide citie shall sell or cause to be solde," amongst other things, "Capons of grece above xxd. or Hennes of grece above viid."