The House of Clifford: From Before the Conquest

by Hugh Clifford

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1987

About the author

Sir Hugh Charles Clifford GCMG, GBE was a British colonial administrator and writer. He was born in Roehampton, London, the sixth of the eight children of Major-General Sir Henry Hugh Clifford and his wife Josephine Elizabeth, née Anstice; his grandfather was Hugh Clifford, 7th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh.

Clifford intended to follow his father Henry Hugh Clifford, a distinguished British Army general, into the military but later decided to join the civil service in the Straits Settlements, with the assistance of his relative Sir Frederick Weld, the then Governor of the Straits Settlements and also the British High Commissioner in Malaya. He was later transferred to the British Protectorate of the Federated Malay States. Clifford arrived in Malaya in 1883, aged 17.

He first became a cadet in the State of Perak. During his twenty years there and on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula in Pahang, Clifford socialised with the local Malays and studied their language and culture deeply. He came to sympathise strongly with and admire certain aspects of the traditional indigenous cultures, while recognising that their transformation as a consequence of the colonial project which he served was inevitable. He served as British Resident at Pahang, 1896–1900 and 1901–1903, and Governor of North Borneo, 1900–1901.

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a long time in the making. The present Lord Clifford inherited the project when his uncle died in 1969, reworked the research already done (with heavy recourse to the library of the House of Lords and the muniment room at the family estate of Ugbrooke), and passed it on to Sir Iain Moncreiffe. Sir Iain, one of the most highly regarded genealogists of the 20th century, corrected the manuscript and added considerable new material. At Moncreiffe’s death, Noël Currer-Briggs (also a very noted genealogist) took on the editorial role and readied the manuscript for press. With such a provenance, I’m willing to give a high level of trust to the material included. Pons, the founder of the family, was one of the proven companions of Duke William of Normandy and became one of the new king’s barons in England. He is thought to have been a scion of the House of Eu (and therefore a grandson of Richard "the Fearless," the 3rd duke) and he was certainly a close friend of Richard FitzGilbert (founder of the House of Clare) and of Ralf de Toeni (who, Horace Round said, "was no ordinary baron"); the families were soon connected by marriage, as well. Pons’s immediate descendants were marcher lords in south Wales, with nearly regal powers, for "in the Welsh March the king’s writ does not run." "Fair Rosamund" Clifford, daughter of Walter FitzPons, was the mistress of Henry II and the probable mother of William Longespée, who became Earl of Salisbury. The subsequent history of the family is laid out with one generation, more or less, per chapter, through the first line of Clifford peers, which ended with the death of the 5th Earl of Cumberland in 1633, then through the cadet line from 1357 down to the author himself, the thirtieth of his descent. This line remained Roman Catholic, which complicated things after the Test of 1673. Numerous graphic descent diagrams and lineage charts in the style of Burke’s make the discussion easy to follow and there are frequent footnotes, as well as portraits from the 15th century on. Other branches of the family in Devonshire, Northumberland, Kent, and Ireland, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, also are covered in some detail, and there are chapters on the name "Pons" in pre-Conquest Normandy and on the putative descent from Rollo the Viking. A model history of one of the most historically interesting ancient families in Britain.