Henry Clifford, 10th Baron Clifford (23 April 1523) was an English nobleman. His father, John Clifford, 9th Baron Clifford, was killed in the Wars of the Roses fighting for the House of Lancaster when Henry was around five years old. A local legend later developed that—on account of John Clifford having killed one of the House of York's royal princes in battle, and the new Yorkist King Edward IV seeking revenge—Henry was spirited away by his mother. As a result, it was said, he grew up ill-educated, living a pastoral life in the care of a shepherd family. Thus, ran the story, Clifford was known as the "shepherd lord". More recently, historians have questioned this narrative, noting that for a supposedly ill-educated man, he was signing charters only a few years after his father's death, and that in any case, Clifford was officially pardoned by King Edward in 1472. It may be that he deliberately avoided attracting Yorkist attention in his early years, although probably not to the extent portrayed in the local mythology.
The Yorkist regime came to an end in 1485 with the invasion of Henry Tudor, who defeated Edward's brother, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry's victory meant that he needed men to control the North of England for him, and Clifford's career as a loyal Tudor servant began. Soon after Bosworth, the King gave him responsibility for crushing the last remnants of rebellion in the north. Clifford was not always successful in this, and his actions were not always popular. On more than one occasion, he found himself at loggerheads with the city of York, the civic leadership of which was particularly independently minded. When another Yorkist rebellion broke out in 1487, Clifford suffered an embarrassing military defeat by the rebels outside the city walls. Generally, however, royal service was extremely profitable for him: King Henry needed trustworthy men in the region and was willing to build up their authority in order to protect his own.
Although Clifford's later years were devoted to service in the north and fighting the Scots (he took part in the decisive English victory at Flodden in 1513) he fell out with the King on numerous occasions. Clifford was not an easy-going personality; his abrasiveness caused trouble with his neighbours, occasionally breaking out in violent feuds. This was not the behaviour the King expected from his lords. Furthermore, Clifford had married a cousin of the King, yet Clifford's infidelity to her was notorious among his contemporaries. This also drew the King's ire, to the extent that the couple's separation was mooted. Clifford's first wife had died by 1511, and Clifford remarried. This was also a tempestuous match, and on one occasion he and his wife ended up in court accusing each other of adultery. Clifford's relations with his eldest son and heir, the eventual Henry Clifford, 1st Earl of Cumberland, were equally turbulent. Clifford rarely attended the royal court himself, but sent his son to be raised with the King's heir, Prince Arthur. Clifford later complained that young Henry not only lived above his station, he consorted with men of bad influence; Clifford also accused his son of regularly beating up his father's servants on his return to Yorkshire.
Clifford outlived the King and attended the coronation of HenryVIII in 1509. While continuing to serve as the King's man in the north, Clifford carried on his feuds with the local gentry. He also indulged his interests in astronomy, for which he built a small castle for observation purposes. Clifford grew ill in 1522 and died in April of the following year; his widow later remarried. Young Henry inherited the title as 11th Baron Clifford as well as a large fortune and estate, the result of his father's policy of frugality and avoiding the royal court for most of his life.
Background
The Clifford family, originally from Normandy, settled in England after the conquest of 1066. The family was elevated to the peerage in 1299 as Barons Clifford, and also held the minor baronies of Skipton in North Yorkshire and of Appleby in Westmoreland. The historian Chris Given-Wilson has described the Clifford family as one of the greatest 15th-century families never to receive an earldom. By the time of Clifford's birth, the King, HenryVI, was politically weak and occasionally incapacitated, which prevented him from ruling effectively. His failure to control his nobility, combined with the loss of England's French territories during the latter years of the Hundred Years' War had seen the political situation in England deteriorate into what the scholar David Loades has called a "chaos of factional quarrels". Civil war (known to historians as the Wars of the Roses) broke out in 1455. By 1461 a number of battles had been fought between nobles loyal to the Lancastrian King and those of the Yorkists, led by Richard, Duke of York, who had claimed the throne in 1460.
These engagements became increasingly bloody, comments the author Robin Neillands, "either in the actual battle or the subsequent rout". At the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460 Clifford's father supposedly encountered York's second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, on Wakefield Bridge, as the latter was attempting to flee the destruction of his father's army. John, Lord Clifford, crying "by God's blood, thy father slew mine and so shall I slay thee", stabbed Rutland to death. Lord Clifford himself died on 28 March the following year during another clash at Ferrybridge, North Yorkshire. Tradition states that he was killed by a headless arrow to the throat and buried, along with those who died with him, in a common burial pit.
The next day, the bulk of the Yorkist and Lancastrian armies faced each other at the Battle of Towton. After what is believed to be the biggest and possibly bloodiest battle ever to take place on English soil, the Lancastrians were routed, and the son of the Duke of York was crowned King EdwardIV. On 4November 1461, at Edward's first parliament, the dead Lord Clifford was attainted and his estates and barony forfeited to the Crown. The bulk of the Clifford lands were granted to Richard, Earl of Warwick, while Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Sir William Stanley received the Lordship of Westmorland and the Barony of Skipton respectively. The latter included the Clifford caput baroniae, Skipton Castle.
Family and early life
Henry Clifford was born around 1454, the eldest son and heir of John Clifford and Margaret Bromflete. In the view of the medievalist A. G. Dickens, Margaret, as sole heiress to her father Henry, brought Clifford's father a "questionable claim" to the title Lord Vescy. She also brought Clifford extensive lands in the East Riding.
"Shepherd Lord"
Popular belief later held that as a boy of seven, Clifford was spirited away from his home in Skipton Castle following his father's death. For his own protection, so it went, his mother sent him to live in Londesborough on the property of a trusted family nurse where he employed himself tending the family's sheep. Whenever his mother believed him likely to be discovered he would be moved. Precisely where to is unknown, but both Yorkshire and Cumberland are possible; in the latter case, for example, Clifford's father-in-law held estates in Threlkeld. This supposedly gave Clifford the soubriquet "shepherd lord". The story seems to have originated with the 16th-century antiquarian Edward Hall and been reiterated by Lady Anne Clifford, in her 17th-century family history. The early modern historian Jessica Malay, argues that "with EdwardIV on the throne (elder brother of the Earl of Rutland) and the Clifford hereditary lands forfeit, the Clifford dynasty was threatened with extinction". Lady Anne was, she says, "keen to emphasise the role of women in the survival of the Clifford dynasty", and as such created a "dramatic narrative" in which Margaret deliberately defies the crown for the sake of her dead husband's heir. Anne clearly believed that King Edward sought revenge for the murder of his younger brother, which put young Clifford's life in danger. Malay suggests that, while Anne Clifford believed the story of the shepherd's family taking her ancestor in, modern historians generally discount it as folklore, to greater or lesser degrees. It has received some traction; the 19th-century genealogist George Edward Cokayne accepted the story of Clifford's being "(for security against the disfavour with which his family was viewed by the reigning house) concealed by his mother" and raised as a shepherd, as did the antiquarian J. W. Clay in a 1905 article for the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal. The scholar R. T. Spence also repeated the story in his 1959 University of London PhD thesis on the later Cliffords (writing that Clifford was "brought up as a Shepherd boy to escape the fate of his father's victim"). Three years later Dickens (in his edition of the Clifford Papers) described how Clifford "aged about seven, lay in real danger and was brought up first as a shepherd".
The topographer Thomas Dunham Whitaker expressed doubt as to the 'shepherd lord' story's veracity in 1821. More recently, the historian K. B. McFarlane has gone further, arguing that it was probably "apocryphal", and J. R. Lander calls it "very dubious indeed". James Ross has pointed out that Clifford was pardoned by EdwardIV in 1472 and could hardly have been in danger from the King thereafter. Further, he notes, as early as 1466 Clifford was named publicly as receiving a bequest of a sword and a silver bowl by Henry Harlington of Craven. This argues that the young lord could not have been difficult to find, comments Ross. He also, though, suggests that Clifford may well have kept a low profile after Towton, if only temporarily: "it may not have been with a shepherd, but surely Clifford was in hiding in secret somewhere". Malay also suggests that "in all likelihood, he spent only a few years in rural retreat" in Cumberland. Clifford's biographer Henry Summerson, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, also refutes the theory, "later stories to the contrary notwithstanding, that the seven-year-old Henry Clifford was ever pursued by vengeful Yorkists". Summerson notes, for example, that Hall wrote that Clifford—due to his upbringing by remote shepherds—was illiterate. In reality, says Summerson, Clifford "was later to be not just literate but even bookish, owning volumes on law and medicine". Summerson agrees that "it may be that the Clifford heir thought it prudent to keep a low profile" in the early years of the new regime. While the medievalist Vivienne Rock subscribes to the theory that Clifford grew up ill-educated, she agrees that in later life "he did become an able administrator for his substantial estates".
Inheritance and estates