 Anne's father was soon appointed curate (deputy vicar) of Saint Wilfrid's, the local church in Alford, and in 1585 he also became the schoolmaster at the Alford Free Grammar School, one of many such public schools, free to the poor, begun by Queen Elizabeth. About this time Marbury married his first wife, Elizabeth Moore, who bore three children, then died. Within a year of his first wife's death, Marbury married Bridget Dryden, about ten years younger than he, from a prominent Northampton family. Dryden's brother, Erasmus, was the grandfather of the famous playwright and Poet Laureate, John Dryden. Anne was the third of 15 children born to this marriage, 12 of whom survived early childhood. The Marburys lived in Alford for the first 15 years of Anne's life, and with her father's strong commitment to learning, she received a better education than most contemporary girls, and also became intimately familiar with scripture and Christian tenets. While education at that time was almost exclusively offered to boys and men, one reason that Marbury may have taught his daughters is that six of his first seven children were girls; another reason may have been that the ruling class in Elizabethan England began realising that girls could be schooled, looking to the example of the queen, who spoke six foreign languages.
