Up and Down Stairs (11 page)

Lady Anne Clifford kept a detailed diary, which provides further insight into the challenges posed by her life, as well as the closeness of mistress and household. Her marriage to the Earl of Dorset was notoriously difficult, and the servants played a sensitive role when unwelcome news had to be passed from one spouse to the other. Their relationship was evidently problematic, not least as a result of the complications surrounding her inheritance. She writes in May 1616:

Upon the 2nd came Mr Legg [the earl’s steward] & told divers of the Servants that my Lord would come down & see me once more, which would be the last time that I should see him again.

Lady Anne was then separated from her own child and household servants had to arrange everything.

Upon the 3rd came Baskett [the earl’s gentleman of the horse] down from London & brought me a Letter from my Lord by which I might see it was his pleasure that the Child should go the next day to London, which at first was somewhat grievous to me, but when I considered it would both make my Lord angry with me & be worse for the Child, I resolved to let her go. After I had sent for Mr Legg and talked with him about that and other matters and [I] wept bitterly.

The steward presumably was the only person in whom she could openly confide at the time. It could be risky for servants to take sides in such fallings-out, given their dependent situation.
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Upon the 4th being Saturday, between 10 & 11 the Child went into the Litter to go to London, Mrs Bathurst & her two maids with Mr Legge & a good Company of the Servants going with her . . . [on the 10th] came the Stewards from London whom I expected would have given warning to many of the Servants to go away because the Audits was newly come up. Upon the 11th being Sunday, before Mr Legge went away I talked with him an hour or two about all this Business & matters between me & my Lord, so as I gave him better satisfaction & made him conceive a better opinion of me than ever he did.
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In November 1619, she also records losing at gambling to two of the household’s senior servants: ‘Upon the 2nd I had such ill luck with playing at Glecko [a card game] with Legge & Basket that I said
I would not play again in six months.’
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Evidently Lady Anne would often spend private social time with senior servants, as almost as if they were members of her family. In her old age she had a portrait painted of herself, in which one panel depicted her as a young girl, with the portraits of her tutor Samuel Daniel and her governess Mrs Anne Taylour – who had helped frame the mind that survived so many vicissitudes – hanging above her.
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The fortunes of a whole household could rest very uneasily on the fate of a master or mistress imprisoned for treason in the politically volatile years at the beginning of the century, or caught up in the civil war. This is illustrated by a tearful letter from Lady Arbella Stuart, a cousin of Charles I, to Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, dated 16 July 1610, shortly after she and her husband, William Seymour, had been arrested after their secret marriage. As both were possible claimants to the English throne, the king’s permission was required for their union. In fact she died in 1615 while still in capitivity.

She writes pathetically of her servants and their uncertain future:

If it please your lordship theare are diverse of my servants with whom I [never] thought to have been parted [from] whilest I lived; and none that I am willing to part with. But since I am taken from them, and know not how to maintain either my selfe or them, being utterly ignorant how it will please his Majesty to deal with me I weare better to put them away [dismiss them] now, than towards winter. Your Lordship knowes the greatnesse of my debts and [my] unablenesse to do for them either now or at Michaelmasse.

Michaelmas was a traditional date from which servants were hired or released from hire. She continues: ‘I beseech your Lordship let me know what hope you can give me of his Majestie’s favour with out which I and all mine must live in great discomfort.’
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The dependent status of household servants was a critical aspect of the loyalty and patronage that they owed to the head of the household, an important nexus of relationships illustrated by the letters and accounts of the richest landed proprietor of the Protestant settlement of Ireland in the early seventeenth century. Richard Boyle, the 1st
Earl of Cork, was a Kent-born adventurer who built up a considerable estate in Munster, centred on Lismore Castle, which has passed by descent to the Duke of Devonshire.

In 1640, Boyle’s annual income from these estates was probably around £8,000; during the period 1629–39 he was the lord justice and lord treasurer of Ireland. Whilst an extraordinarily astute politician, he experienced great insecurity, on the one hand being persecuted by the lord deputy Wentworth, and on the other subjected to an armed siege by forces led by the Irish Catholic gentry in 1641. He died in 1643.
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Lismore Castle, an ancient bishop’s palace, which he adapted rather than rebuilt, has changed out of all recognition from its seventeenth-century form. In Cork’s time the house is known to have been richly furnished, with extensive silver. Typically for a late-sixteenth- or seventeenth-century household of status, the quantity of servants was an expression of status in itself, as well as supporting the exercise of power (which took on an extra significance, being part of the Protestant settlement).

Some flavour of the life of this still peripatetic household is given in a manuscript set of brief regulations for the earl’s English house, in Dorset,
A Form for the Government of the Earl of Cork’s Family at Stalbridge
, which was built in the 1630s. The regulations are signed by Thomas Cross, his steward, and include reference to daily household prayers:

1. First, All the Servants except such as are Officers or are otherwise employed shall meet every morning before Dinner, and every night after Supper, at Prayer.

2. That there be lodgings fitting for all the Earl of Cork’s servants to lie in the house.

3. That it shall be lawful for the Steward to examine any Subordinate Servant of the whole Family concerning any Complaint or Misdemeanour committed, and to dismiss and put away any inferior Servant that shall live dissolutely and disorderly either in the House or abroad, without the especial Command of the Earl of Cork to the contrary.

4. That there be a certain number of the Gentlemen appointed to sit at the Steward’s Table, and the like at the Waiter’s Table, and the rest to sit in the Hall at the Long Table.

5. That there be a Clerk to the Kitchen to take care of such Provision as is brought into the House, and to have an especial eye to the several Tables that are kept either above Stairs, or in the Kitchen and other places.

6. That all the Women Servants under the Degree of Chambermaids be certainly known by their names to the Steward, and not altered or changed upon every Occasion without the consent of the Steward, and no Schorers [vagrants?] to be admitted in the house.

7. That the Officers every Friday night bring in their Bills to the Steward whereby he may collect what hath been spent, and what remains weekly in the House.
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The household is still described here as ‘family’, as in the Latin sense in which it was used in the medieval and Tudor periods, meaning everyone in it. Note the emphasis on moral issues, particularly the separate treatment of women, and how discipline was exercised by senior offices with their lord’s consent. Lord Cork took a seemingly inordinate interest in the details of the lives and marriages of his servants, and was evidently proud of the settlements he made on them.
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For example, in 1628 he recorded: ‘My wife’s woman Mrs Mary Evesham was contracted to Mr John Ward of Dublin by my cousin Robert Naylor my chaplain, in the nursery of Lismore, in the presence of myself, my wife, my son, and Mr Whalley, and in the presence of them all I gave her £100 in gold which she presently gave her new betrothed husband.’
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Although he clearly did employ indigenous Irish, his senior servants at Lismore were largely brought over from England.

The Earl of Cork’s many bequests to his servants rewarded the long service of trustworthy individuals who created a secure and dignified oasis around him amid the tumult of early-seventeenth-century politics. During this period of upheaval, his sons (including Robert, who later became a famous scientist) were stranded in Europe on their Grand Tour in the care of their tutor Mr Marcombe, who had
been recommended to Lord Cork by Sir Henry Wotton, provost of Eton. They had to cool their heels in Marseilles, waiting for money that was held up by the Munster rising before being able to travel on. An employer placed great trust in such a man.

Lord Cork’s bequests include one of £20 to William Chettle, who ‘waited upon me in my chamber and carried my purse for above 26 year)’, plus ‘a debt of £195 stirling all other my wearing Linnen and Apparell which I shall have at my Death and is not disposed of in my Last Will + Testament’. Bequests of clothing may have been made for their resale value as well as for everyday use. In his will, he asked his son to continue to employ Chettle in this capacity; indeed, he asked his son to maintain all the servants so mentioned. Old Davy Gibbons, the footman messenger, was rewarded for thirty years’ faithful service with a lease of lands, to which Lord Cork added money to stock the farm. There is also evidence of the clothes left to servants, to William Chettle: ‘a new cloak that I had never wore of London Russet lined throughout with black velvet’, to John Eddow, ‘French green satin doublet with points of gold and green’ and to John Narron: ‘a tawny satin doublet’.
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Perhaps they were worn, or perhaps more likely sold for their monetary value.

The many examples of household servants being remembered in employers’ legacies in the seventeenth century are testimony to the two-way traffic of loyalty and interdependence in the aristocratic and gentry household. Such legacies went principally to the senior servants, such as stewards, cooks and butlers, the more intimate and personal attendants, but not exclusively so. In 1675, William Dutton of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, left annuities amounting to £91 a year to twelve of his servants. In 1684, Sir John Borlase of Bockmer House, in Buckinghamshire, made annuities of £190 shared between ten individuals. Some servants might receive cash legacies: Richard Windwood of Ditton Park, Buckinghamshire, left £20 each to his menservants, and £10 to the women.
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Some bequests provide an insight into the love-hate world of country-house service. In a will of 1686, Sir Nicholas Bacon of Shrubland Hall, Suffolk, originally left a bequest of £20 to Edward Inolds, the boy who waited on him, but later cut him out of the will,
describing him as ‘that ungratefull’ rogue. In 1697, Sir Richard Earle of Stragglethorpe in Lincolnshire made a legacy to his servant, Thomas Waller, rather touchingly ‘begging of him to be sober’.
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The employer’s responsibility for the welfare and morals of members of his household, exemplified by such bequests, is reflected in the many seventeenth-century manuals of guidance on household management, which emphasised this strongly. Robert Cleaver’s
A Godlie Forme of Householde Governmente
(1603) exhorts masters to look after their servants, ‘not onely in providing for them wholesome meat, drink and lodging, and otherwise to help them, comfort them, and relieve and cherish them in health as well in sicknesse as in health.’

Cleaver also advised that the master should rule and correct the menservants, and his wife the maidservants, a recurring theme right up to the early twentieth century, ‘for a man’s nature scorneth and disdaineth to bee beaten of a woman, and a maides nature is corrupted with the stripes of a man.’ Servants, Cleaver wrote, should in their turn be ‘so full of curtesie as not a word will be spoken by their masters to them, or by them to their masters, but the knee shall be bowed withall: they can stand hour after hour before their masters, and not once put on their hat’.
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A sense of responsibility for the lives of your employees was surely not unreasonable in the circumstances of the time. Some guidance, however, seems alarmingly harsh today. Sir Miles Sandys in 1634 wrote of the importance of the householder addressing the morals of those in their care: ‘as neere as you can, to beate down Sinne in them, especially that of Swearing.’
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Clearly, physical chastisement of servants was not uncommon. Adam Eyre, another Puritan and a captain in the civil war, recorded in his diary for 9 October 1647: ‘This night I whipped Jane for her foolishness as yesterday I did for her slothfulness . . . and hence I am induced to bewail my sinfull life, for my failings in the presence of God Almighty are questionless greater than hers are to me.’
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In his tract,
An Exposition of the Domesticall Duties
(1622), William Gouge wrote: ‘Some [employers] make no difference betwixt servants; but esteem of bad and good all alike; they think that the best servants do but their duty. . . . But it is a point of wisdom to account
a duty as a kindness; especially when good will of heart is joined with outward performance of duty.’ Paying good wages was, he thought, just such a matter of duty: ‘When masters do altogether detain their servants’ wages; this is a crying sin, which entereth into the ears of God.’ Employers should value the skills and loyalty of their staff, for ‘Masters and Mistresses are flesh and blood as well as servants, and so subject to weakness, sickness, old age, and other distresses, wherein they may stand in great need of servants’ help.’
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