d; and a well-founded dread of the vengeance of the
Yorkists caused his widow to conceal his son and heir under the lowly
disguise of a shepherd-boy, in which condition he grew up among the
fells of Westmorland totally illiterate, and probably unsuspicious of
his origin.

At the end of five-and-twenty years, the restoration of the line of
Lancaster in the person of Henry VII. restored to lord de Clifford the
name, rank, and large possessions of his ancestors; but the
peasant-noble preferred through life that rustic obscurity in which his
character had been formed and his habits fixed, to the splendors of a
court or the turmoils of ambition. He kept aloof from the capital; and
it was only on the field of Flodden, to which he led in person his hardy
tenantry, that this de Clifford exhibited some sparks of the warlike
fire inherent in his race.

His successor, by qualities very different from the homely virtues which
had obtained for his father among his tenantry and neighbours the
surname of the Good, recommended himself to the special favor of Henry
VIII., who created him earl of Cumberland, and matched his heir to his
own niece lady Eleanor Brandon. The sole fruit of this illustrious
alliance, which involved the earl in an almost ruinous course of
expense, was a daughter, who afterwards became the mother of Ferdinando
earl of Derby, a nobleman whose mysterious and untimely fate remains to
be hereafter related. By a second and better-assorted marriage, the earl
of Cumberland became the father of George, his successor, our present
subject, who proved the most remarkable of this distinguished family.
The death of his father during his childhood had brought him under
wardship to the queen; and by her command he was sent to pursue his
studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, under Whitgift, afterwards primate.
Here he applied himself with ardor to the mathematics, and it was
apparently the bent of his genius towards these studies which first
caused him to turn his attention to nautical matters. An enterprising
spirit and a turn for all the fashionable profusions of the day, which
speedily plunged him in pecuniary embarrassments, added incitements to
his activity in these pursuits; and in 1586 he fitted out three ships
and a pinnace to cruise against the Spaniards and plunder their
settlements. It appears extraordinary that he did not assume in person
the command of his little squadron; but combats and triumphs perhaps
still more