The ancestor of the Cliffords; from Pons in Saintonge. “The Lords of Pons in Acquitaine were one of the most powerful families in France, and are frequently mentioned in history. Pontius or Pons, who in 1079 granted a church to the Abbey of Cormery (Gall. Christ. xii. 14) had four younger sons who went to England, of whom Drogo Fitz-Ponce and Walter Fitz- Ponce held important baronies in 1086 (Domesd.) Their younger brothers were 1. Richard Fitz-Ponce; 2. Osbert Fitz-Ponce, ancestor of the Veseys and Burghs. The names of these sons are mentioned by Henry I. in his charter confirming their gifts to Malvern Abbey (Mon. Angl. i. 366) and from the Monasticon (i. 363, ii. 876) it appears that they also bore the name of “Pontium” or des Pons, from which it appears they were sons of Ponce “of Pons.”

“Richard Fitz-Ponce witnessed, with Bernard de Neumarché, a charter of Brecknock Priory c. 1120 (Jones, History of Brecon ii. 75) and was, as is generally known, the ancestor of the De Cliffords.” - The Norman People.

It certainly argues an unaccountable ignorance of his own pedigree in some one or other of the Cliffords, that he should have caused the name they had adopted temp. Henry II. to be inserted on the Roll (see Vol. 1, p. 278), when that of their first ancestor Pons was already there. Clifford Castle in Herefordshire, built in the Conqueror’s time by William Fitz Osbern, the first Norman Earl of that county, passed through his daughter to Ralph de Toesni; and Margaret de Toesni, in her turn, brought it to Richard Fitz Pons’ second son, Walter, thence­forward known as Walter de Clifford. Their eldest daughter was the Fair Rosamond - Rosa mundi, non Rosa munda, (“the rose of this world, but not the cleane flowre”) as she is called in her monkish epitaph at Godstowe, who became celebrated as the mistress of Henry II., and the mother of one of the greatest soldiers of his time (see Vol. 1, p. 323). The Cliffords continued for several generations in the marches of Wales, fighting the Welsh, and once bringing home a Welsh princess as a bride, This Walter de Clifford, the husband of Llewellyn’s daughter, was fined about 1,000 marks, being “all the money he possessed or could procure,” for having “violently and improperly treated the King’s messenger, who bore his royal letters, and having forced him to eat the same, with the seal.” This was in 1250. Matthew Paris tells the story. till Roger, fourth in descent from Walter, by his marriage with a great Northern heiress, removed them to a fresh scene of Border warfare. Roger’s wife was Isabel de Vipont, whose father was Baron and Hereditary High Sheriff of Westmoreland, by a grant of King John to her great-grandfather. She brought him four fair castles, probably all of them the work of Ranulph de Meschines: Brough, built to fortify the pass of Stainmore; Pendragon, that of Mallerstang; Appleby, the head of the honour, for its “central as well as strong and beautiful position in the barony;” and Brougham, to guard its Northern boundary. Her successors in this great inheritance continued to be for three hundred and twenty-six years High Sheriffs of Westmoreland; and her son Robert (one of the four knights of Aymery de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whose portraits are on his tomb in Westminster Abbey) was summoned to Parliament in 1299. “He was educated,” says Sir Matthew Hale, “in the schoole of Warre, under King Edward I., as great a master, for valour and prudence, as this worlde afforded;”who appointed him Constable of Carlisle, Chief Justice of the royal forests beyond Trent, and Earl Marshall of England. Several of his Scottish forays are on record. In 1297, “he entered Annandale with the power of Carlisle, and slew three hundred and eighty Scots near Annan Kirke”; and in 1306, he, with the Earl of Pembroke, defeated the newly-crowned King, Robert Bruce, at St. John’s Town (Perth). He received from Edward I. the castle of Caerlaverock, He had greatly distinguished himself in the siege. There is an enthusiastic eulogium upon him in the Roll of Carlaverock, that winds up with the declaration: “Si je estoie une pucelette, Je li donroie cuer e cors, Tant est de li bons li recors.” with all the lands of Robert Maxwell and William Douglas, but, “not willing to build any great confidence on these debateable acquisitions, caste his eye upon a more firme possession at a reasonable distance from Scotland, and this was the castle and honour of Skipton-in-Craven”; of which we find him possessed in 1314. He was killed at Bannockburn; the first of ten stout Lord Cliffords that successfully bore arms on the Border, and of one of whom it is recounted, as an exceptional case, that he died in his bed.

The seventh Lord married Hotspur’s daughter; and their son and grandson both figure in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI. The son - challenged by the King-maker on the field of St. Albans - “Proud Norman lord, Clifford of Cumberland,“Shakespeare spoke the language of his own time when he called him Clifford of Cumberland; he should have said of Westmoreland. But the great poet despised such minutiæ.” - Whitaker. Warwick is hoarse with calling thee to arms!”

was slain by the Duke of York’s own hand in that stubbornly-fought battle; and the grandson was the savage Black-faced Clifford, who, “partly from the heat of youth, and partly in the spirit of revenge for his father’s death, pursued the House of York with a rancour that rendered him odious even in that ferocious age.” His hands were early dipped in blood, for he was little more than a child when he began to take part in the ruthless civil wars, and he was soon noted and dreaded for his brutality. At the battle of Wakefield, Leland says “that for slaughter of men he was called the boucher.” It was then that he captured the Duke of York’s youngest son, the Earl of Rutland; and when the poor terror- stricken lad fell on his knees before him, his lips frozen and speechless with fear, and with a mute gesture implored mercy, Clifford struck him to the heart with his dagger, crying, “By God’s blood, thy father slew mine, and so will I do thee and all thy kin!”He was himself slain the year after, on the day before the rout of Towton, when, “having put off his gorget, he was struck in the throat by a headless arrow out of a bush.” He had married Margaret Bromflete, who brought him the title of Vesci (derived from William de Aton, Baron Vesci 2 Richard II.) and the Londesborough estates in Yorkshire; but land and honours alike fell under attainder, and the life of his young son was only saved by means of a disguise. The boy was despatched to the wild fells of Cumberland, and entrusted to the care of some faithful hinds, with whom he grew up, and lived concealed for twenty-five years, keeping sheep and watching the sun and stars on the lonely mountain sides. Thus, when Henry VII., on succeeding to the throne in 1485, reversed the attainders of all the Lancastrian nobles, Henry, tenth Lord Clifford, emerged from his retreat with the manners and education of a shepherd. But, though almost altogether illiterate, He had not been taught to write; and his descendant, Lady Pembroke, states that he never learnt to do more than sign his name. According to Burn and Nicholson (Westmorland) he did not even do that, and never progressed beyond the letter “C.” he had a good natural understanding, and was so keenly alive to his deficiencies, that he retired, depressed and humiliated, to Barden Tower in Craven, then a common keeper’s lodge. Here he found the quiet and solitude to which he had been all his life accustomed, and applied himself to the only lore that had been familiar to him among his friendly mountains. “His early habits, and the want of those artificial measures of time that even shepherds now possess, had given him a turn for observing the heavenly bodies, and having purchased such an apparatus as could then be procured, he amused and informed himself by these pursuits, with the aid of the canons of Bolton, some of whom are said to have been well versed in what was then known of the science.” - Whitaker. He also studied alchemy and astrology, and composed a “Treatise on Natural Philosophy” which he presented to Bolton Priory. But when, in 1513, the war-note sounded along the Borders, and the great Northern barons were summoned to gather their followers in defence of the country, the old martial spirit of his forefathers suddenly blazed out in the studious recluse of sixty, and the Shepherd Lord held “a principal command”in the army that fought at Flodden. He was followed to the field by the flower of Craven: “From Penigent to Pendle Hill, From Linton to Long Addingham, And all that Craven coasts did till They with the lusty Clifford came; All Staincliffe hundred went with him, With striplings strong from Wharlédale, And all that Hauton hills did climb, With Longstroth eke and Litton Dale.”

His son and successor was in every respect a contrast to him. While he had lived for nearly half his life as a simple hill shepherd, the heir had been brought up in all the splendour of Henry VIII’s court; and in one of his letters he bitterly bewails the “ungodly and ungudely disposition” of this son, who had despoiled his houses and goods “for mayntayning his inordinate pride and ryot.” He had come from court into the country “apparellyd himself and hys horse in clothe of golde and goldsmythe’s worke, more like a Duke than a poore baron’s sonne as he ys.” He was soon deeply involved in money troubles, by what Whitaker indulgently calls “the extravagancies of a gay and gallant young nobleman, cramped in his allowance by a narrow father under the influence of a jealous step-mother;”and the method by which he relieved himself of them is characteristic of the age. “Instead of resorting to Jews and money-lenders, computing the value of his father’s life, and raising great sums by anticipation, Henry Clifford turned outlaw, assembled a band of dissolute followers, harassed the religious houses, beat their tenants, and forced the inhabitants of whole villages to take sanctuary in their churches.” One of the most pathetic of our North-country ballads is believed to refer to him. “I hope it will be considered no extravagant conjecture that he was the hero of the ‘Notbrowne Mayd.’ That beautiful poem was first printed in 1521. When ‘the man’ specifically describes Westmorland as his heritage, we must either suppose the whole story to be a fiction, or refer it to one of the wild adventures of Henry Clifford, who really led the life of an outlaw within ten years of the time. The ‘great Lynàge’ of the lady may well agree with Lady Percy; and what is more probable than that this wild young man, among his other feats, may have lurked in the forests of the Percy family, and won the lady’s heart under a disguise, which he had taken care to assure her concealed a knight. That the rank of the parties is inverted in the ballad may be considered nothing more than a decent veil of poetical fiction thrown over a recent and well-known fact.” - Whitaker's Craven. It tells the tale of “a banyshed man,” who woos and wins a bride of high degree. He can offer her nothing beyond an outlaw’s rugged lot: the daily and hourly peril - “Even as a thefe, thus must you lyve, Ever in drede and awe;”

and the shelterless greenwood - “The thornie wayes, the deep varies, The snowe, the frost, the rain; And, us above, no other roofe But a brake bush or twayne.”

But she will heed no warning - she will hear nothing of danger or of hardship. Betide what may, she must fare with him - “For in my minde, of all mankinde I love but you alone.”

This faithful “nut-brown maid” was Lady Margaret Percy, who became his second wife, and proved a great heiress. On the death of her childless brother, Henry sixth Earl of Northumberland, she succeeded, by a family settlement, to the entire Percy fee, “equivalent in extent to the half of Craven;” and from that time the whole country between Skipton and Brougham - a distance of seventy miles - belonged, with one solitary break, to the Cliffords. Her husband was early reclaimed from his evil courses, and his outlawry clearly did not stand in the way of his advancement, for in 1525, two years after his father’s death, he was created Earl of Cumberland. He also received from Henry VIII. Bolton Priory and some other church lands as a reward for his loyalty during the Pilgrimage of Grace, when Skipton Castle, alone in Yorkshire, held out for the Crown. The second Earl married the King’s niece, Lady Eleanor Brandon, daughter and coheir of Charles Duke of Brandon by Mary Tudor, Queen- Dowager of France, and her father-in-law built the great gallery and tower at Skipton in 1537 for her reception. Her only surviving child was, however, a daughter (Margaret Countess of Derby) and the heir was the son of a second marriage. This son, George, third Earl, was of some celebrity in his day as an intrepid and skilful navigator, who made “nine viages by sea in his own person, most of them to the West Indies, which he performed with great honour to himself and service to his Queen and countrie.” He was one of the lover-like courtiers of Elizabeth, appointed her own peculiar champion at all tournaments, and wore a glove she had once given him, which he had richly adorned with diamonds, in front of his cap at all public ceremonies. But though he had first sailed under a royal commission, she withheld from him any more solid recompense; and, as he wrote in vain appeal, “Is it not as I have often told ye, Madam, that after I had throwne my lande into the sea, the sea would caste me upon the lande a wanderer?” He had to sell some of his property, and having “set out with a larger estate than any of his ancestors, in little more than twenty years he made it one of the least.” At his death in 1605, “there fell a great division in the family,” for he left only one child, the famous heiress Lady Anne Clifford. The title went to his brother Francis, fourth Earl; but (by right of an ancient entail of Ed. II.) his daughter claimed the estates as well as the baronies, and prosecuted her claim (at least to the former) with unflagging energy for thirty-eight years. James I. tried to compromise the difference by an award that satisfied both her husband and her uncle; but the indomitable lady positively refused to subscribe or to submit. She was twice married; first to Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and secondly to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, and was unfortunate in both her husbands. “The first was a spendthrift, who quarrelled with her because she prevented him from dissipating her estate; the second was a tyrant, who distracted her by the savageness of his humour:” and she complains in one of her letters that her stately homes at Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to her “oftentimes no better than the painted abodes of sorrow.” Yet it may fairly be questioned whether so strong-willed and imperious a woman would ever have been fitted for the yoke of matrimony. Unquestionably the happiest years of her life were the twenty-five years of her widowhood, when, the dismal period of family discord having come to an end on the death of her cousin, the fifth Earl, without issue male, she travelled down in triumph to the North to take possession of her inheritance. She found it cruelly ravaged by the Civil War. Six of her houses were in ruins; Skipton Castle had been “slighted”or dismantled by the Rump Parliament in 1648, and Skipton Church was tottering to its fall; but, with two rich jointures added to her patrimonial estate, she set bravely to work to “repair the breach, and restore the paths to dwell in.” She rebuilt her castles in almost open defiance of Cromwell; and placed over the gate of each (for she was given to self laudation, and never missed an opportunity of putting up an inscription) a full account of what she had done. She lived to be eighty-five, inhabiting all these residences in succession, “diffusing plenty and happiness around her” wherever she went, and keeping a generous and hospitable house, that “was a school for the young, and a retreat for the aged, an asylum for the persecuted, and a pattern for all.” Her high spirit was unquelled to the very end; and flashed out in full vigour when Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State to Charles II., wrote to propose a candidate for her borough of Appleby. She replied: “I have been bullied by an usurper; I have been neglected by a Court; but I will not be dictated to by a subject; your man shan’t stand.” She died in 1675, leaving two surviving children, both daughters of her first marriage; Margaret, married to John Tufton, Earl of Thanet, and Isabel, married to James Compton, Earl of Northampton. The latter had but one girl who died young; but the elder sister, on whom devolved the two great Honours of Skipton and Appleby, was the mother of twelve children. Four of her sons succeeded each other as Earls of Thanet; the last, Thomas, sixth Earl, claimed his grandmother’s baronies of Clifford and Vescy; and that of Clifford was confirmed to him by the House of Lords in 1691. But an untoward fate pursued this unlucky barony. His three sons died; thus it fell at once into abeyance between his five daughters, and though the Crown then interposed in favour of one of them, it twice relapsed into a similar condition; and after passing through a variety of families, was at last granted to Mrs. John Russell in 1833. Her grandson is the present Lord De Clifford. The great Clifford estates, however, remained with the Earls of Thanet till 1849, when the last and eleventh Earl bequeathed them to an illegitimate son born and bred in France, who took the name of Tufton, received a baronetcy, and was the father of Lord Hothfield, the present possessor.

One half of Craven - the original Fee surveyed under “Terra Wil’ de Perce” in Domesday - with Bolton, Barden, &c. (all now the property of the Duke of Devonshire) had descended, on the death of Henry, fifth and last Earl of Cumberland in 1643, to his only child Lady Elizabeth. She was the wife of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork and Burlington, who, in honour of this succession, was created in the following year Lord Clifford of Lanesborough. This title became extinct with his great-grandson, who had, however, previously claimed and obtained another Clifford barony of earlier date (created by writ 3 Charles I.) which went to his daughter Charlotte. She brought it to the Cavendishes by her marriage with William, fourth Duke of Devonshire; but when the sixth Duke died s. p. in 1858, it fell into abeyance between his two sisters, Georgiana Countess of Carlisle and Henrietta Countess Granville.

Unlike most of its compeers, this renowned house still boasts of a descendant in the male line, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. He derives from Sir Lewis Clifford, a Knight of the Garter under Richard II., who defended Carlisle against the Scots in 1467, and was twice sent Ambassador to France. Dugdale, and most other authorities, make him the son of Roger, fifth Lord Clifford by his wife Maud de Beauchamp; but Sir Harris Nicolas has proved, by a careful comparison of dates, that this is impossible, and he was probably, as Froissart calls him, Roger’s brother. He was “a chief man among the Lollards,” but made his recantation before he died, and in his will confesses that he was “fals and traytor to my Lorde God, and to all the blessed companie of Hevene, and unworthie to be clepyed a Cristen man.” His descendants were seated at Boscomb in Wilts, till, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, Anthony Clifford married the heiress of Sir Peter Courtenay of Ugbrooke, near Chudleigh, in Devonshire. They then removed to Ugbrooke, which has ever since been their residence. Anthony’s great grandson, Thomas, became a Roman Catholic, and was a leading member of the “Cabal” in the reign of Charles II. He had begun life as a sailor, but in 1666 entered the King’s Household, first as Comptroller, and then as Treasurer; from whence he was promoted in 1672 to the high office of J Lord Treasurer of England, and in the same year - the year before his death - created Lord Clifford of Chudleigh.

Another family, sprung from the same stock, retained their ancestral name of Pons, which became Poyntz in the English tongue. Their pedigree is traced from Osbert Fitz Ponce or Fitz Ponz, whose descendant Hugh Pointz, temp. King John, married the co-heir of William Malet of Cory-Malet in Somersetshire, and also held land in Gloucester and Dorset. His grandson and namesake had summons to parliament in 1295. This barony fell into abeyance on the death of the fourth Lord in the fourteenth century; but there remained two other branches of the family, believed to be descended from a second marriage of Nicholas, second Lord Pointz, to a Gloucestershire heiress who brought him Iron-Acton. One was Poyntz of Iron-Acton; the other Poyntz of Midgeham in Berkshire, of whom the last male heir, Stephen Poyntz, married the only sister of Viscount Montague, and inherited Cowdray at his death. (See Browne.) The first Lord Pointz had a controversy with the Fitz Alans of Bedale respecting his coat of arms: - “Le beau Brian Fitz-Aleyne, De courtoisie et de honneur pleyn, I vi ov’ bannière barrée De or et de goules bien parée, Dont le chalenge estort le poins Par entre luy et Hue Poyntz, Ki portoit cel ni plus ni moins, Dont merveille avait meinte et moins.” - Roll of Carlaverock.

The name is retained by Sutton-Poyntz, in Dorset.

A corruption of Poyntz.