Up and Down Stairs (13 page)

In January 1653, when his exile came to an end, Sir Ralph Verney wrote from Brussels to a friend, Dr Denton, of his preparations to return to the house at Claydon, reflecting on his new situation and the need for economies against the awareness of status: ‘If I must keepe house which I am willing to doe if you advise it, I will keep but one woeman kind, who must wash my small Linnen (bed & board linen shall bee put out) and cleane both house & Vessels which she may doe for I sup not; if she could cook also I should not bee sorry.’

He had views too about the men he might employ: ‘for men I intend to keep only a Coachman & 2 footmen; or a Vallet de chambre & one footman; or which I like much better a Page & a Footman, but if persons of my condition keep not pages in England I will not bee singuler, though they are used here and in France, & by reason they ride behind the coach, not in it, are better than any Vallet de chambre.’
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He then addressed the matter of the housekeeper, who continued to live at Claydon, asked what other servants were still in place and what new household supplies would be needed. He later sent down a new male cook and asked the steward to encourage the new arrival to use his leisure in learning to read and write, as he was worried that ‘Idlenesse may spoil him’; presumably he hoped the new cook could make use of the growing number of printed cookery books. He wrote later to ask whether the housekeeper approved of the newcomer, stressing his views on smoking and drinking: ‘I shall suffer no
man that’s either debauch[ed] or unruly in my house, nor doe I hier [hire] any servant that takes tobacco, for it not only stinks upp my house, but is an ill example to the rest of my Family.’
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Sir Ralph wrote to his faithful steward William Coleman, in preparation for a return to the house many years later, after a trip to London on 7 July 1696, and asked that two village men be employed to lie in his bed and air it, as in those days there was a great fear of the consequences of sleeping on damp linen: ‘When Hicks and Parrot lie in my bed give them strong beer and keep my coming as private as you can.’ Later he wrote to Coleman, asking after his health: ‘Pray be careful of a cold and advise the other servants to be so too . . . I had much rather my business be undone, than you should receive any prejudice [harm] by doing it.’ Sir Ralph’s relationship with his housekeeper in his final years was such that she often chided him when she thought him in the wrong. Between 1692 and 1717, she wrote him at least 106 letters.
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Sir Ralph also had a trusted secretary, Charles Hodges, who not only wrote his letters and looked after his money but witnessed legal documents. At the end of the century he was one of the three most senior servants at Claydon.
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Sir Ralph’s son Edmund (known as Mun, who died in 1688) had famously less straightforward relationships with his servants. His chief servant, Nurse Curzon, was described as ‘old, crazy and decayed, and hath more need to have one to look to her, than to look after others’. Edmund was made indignant by servants’ petty thefts: ‘I caused my little boy Thom Warner to be whipped againe this morning for more faults than this sheet will contain, viz picking pockets, opening Boxes that were lockt, picking locks, stealing, lying etc.’
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However, Mun himself was not above having affairs with three women in his own household, and sired at least one child by a servant. Indeed, the mother of one of his illegitimate offspring, one ‘Mathew Verney’, was the wetnurse to his own children. Mun left her a house and income in his will.
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John Verney, the eventual heir to Sir Ralph, is said in his turn to have fathered a child with a servant while a young man.
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Those familiar with Samuel Pepys’s diary will
need no reminding of the vulnerability of maidservants to the repeated attentions of their masters.
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Whilst at the end of the seventeenth century many of the servants in the Verney household may have been recruited locally, some migrated to London to improve their opportunities. In 1695, the coachman who worked for John Verney, Sir Ralph’s heir, gave notice ‘not to get a better place, but . . . to set up a hackney coach and drive it himself’. John added, in a revealing aside that could have been written in 1895, ‘His wife is a proud woman and he hath a little of it himself, and they think it below ’em to be a servant.’
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Although the civil war and the Commonwealth may not have changed country-house life overnight, during that period political attention was shifted away from the great households and their country seats, to focus instead on Parliament, London and the court. After the Restoration, the London season is born, following the rhythm of the sittings of Parliament and the location of the court; it was then that the landowner would spend time in the capital and, indeed, invest dizzying sums on his social life there.

The account books of the Earl of Bedford, based at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, show that he still maintained a considerable household at the Restoration, and spent money with the intention of reasserting some of the social prestige and courtliness of the aristocracy, which had been suspended under the Commonwealth. Some relate to the earl’s presence in the procession attending the king’s return after the Commonwealth in appropriate – and highly expensive – glamour, an illustration of the display felt necessary after the years of Commonwealth austerity.
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As it began to expand, there is a sense of the household at Woburn Abbey being gently revived in the same hopeful spirit as the procession of 1660. The account books reveal a somewhat traditional hierarchy, with the steward as the senior officer, and a clerk of the kitchen and the house bailiff as his second in commands. The steward, William Baker, was described as a gentleman and was paid £40 per year, twice the wage of the house bailiff. Baker was succeeded in 1668 by Randolph Bingley, who was still there in 1700, an example of the longevity of senior servants. In 1664, the salaries bill for the whole household was £600.

In what was then the established pattern, the steward was in charge of all the household staff, although responsibility for the footmen and pages was shared between the house and the stables, coming under the steward for duties in the house, and the master of the stables for duties relating to coach or horses. A gentleman of the privy purse, with the splendid name of Dixy Taylor, was authorised to make regular small purchases on behalf of his master, such as ‘a coffee-pot, a china dish and coffee’ for £1 2s 2d in 1670.
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There were normally twelve footmen (double the number listed at Knole in the early seventeenth century), paid between £2 and £6 a year. Two or three of them served the family in closer attendance than the others; one Clem Robinson stands out as especially trusted, judging by the payments made to him for journeys he made. The footmen’s liveries were supplied by the master of the horse, as were those of the pageboys. There are numerous mentions in the accounts of silk stockings, shirts, haircuts, periwigs ‘for my lady’s page’ and sometimes accomplishments such as studying music: ‘1663–1664 For teaching the page of the flageolet [a recorder-like instrument], £2 10s.’
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There appear to have been only seven or eight women in the household, reporting to the housekeeper, Ann Upton, who certainly came under the steward, but was clearly an important figure. In the sixteenth century her duties would have been the responsibility of men but by the end of the seventeenth century the female housekeeper, almost as a proxy for the lady of the household, is well established pivotal in the administration of a country house. Even so, none of the women under Ann Upton worked in the kitchen.
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That was still run by a man, the clerk of the kitchen, who was responsible for the supplies of butcher’s meat, game, fruit and vegetables and dairy produce, purchases that were recorded in a kitchen book that was signed weekly by the earl; the steward would be advanced money each week for the following week’s purchase. There appears to have been no home farm and the only major source of meat from the earl’s own demesne was his deer park, whilst most of the fish consumed came from the Woburn ponds.

What is surprising is that the more frugal earl’s household of the early Commonwealth era of the 1650s, which then numbered only
about fifty, became larger and more splendid from 1658 onwards, with relatives visiting the abbey for prolonged periods, often with their own retinues of staff, with the result that annual household expenditure in the 1660s averaged £900–£1,000.
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Below the clerk of the kitchen came the cook, who was in turn supported by various boy scullions and turnspits. There were also porters and nightwatchmen, paid between £3 and £4 a year; in the records for 1684, ‘to John Bradnock, being his lordship’s gift yearly to see all candles out every night £2 And to him for killing rats and mice, etc £1.’ The porters received livery uniforms, whilst the nightwatchmen did not, but, like the women in the household, they seem to have been made gifts of new clothes from time to time.

With certain exceptions, the staff at Woburn Abbey were also the staff for Bedford House in London, and they moved back and forth with the family. In the London house the only permanent employees appear to have been a housekeeper, a nightwatchman and a gardener.
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The whole household continued to migrate to London once a year, but after 1660 the annual pilgrimage was larger in terms of numbers and lasted for a much longer period.
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The wages of servants in gentry houses appear to have increased somewhat after the Restoration, but still varied considerably. An estate steward who had considerable economic responsibilities in managing the estate would earn the most, £40 or more, whilst in the years between 1660 and 1700 a cook could earn between £4 and £25, a butler from £3 to £10, a gardener anything from £4 to £20, and a coachman between £3 and £10. Of female servants, a housekeeper could earn £6 to £10 and a cook-maid £3 to £9.
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In July 1699, Alexander Popham of Littlecote in Wiltshire was prepared to pay an exorbitant £40 a year for a new cook to come down from London.
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It is interesting to note that whilst stewards were powerful figures (sometimes minor landowners or clerics) who effectively had overall control of their masters’ property, they might be required to undertake surprisingly menial tasks. Lord Cholmondley’s chief steward William Adams received a request in May 1690 to order a housemaid ‘to brush my lord’s embroidered waistcoat that is in your custody and take care that the worms doth not get into it’.
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Servants expected to have their income topped up with tips or ‘vails’. Sir John Pelham, in 1658, recorded his tips to servants at the houses he visited. At Burton Hall in Lincolnshire, he gave £3 12s 6d; at Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire, £3 10s. In 1697, when Sir Edward Harley stayed with Paul Foley of Stoke Edith in Herefordshire, his servant, William Thomas, made a record of the gratuities given out: 2s 6d each to the butler, coachman, and a chambermaid, 2s 2d to the cook and, to a groom, 3s 6d.
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As we have seen, at Knole in the early seventeenth century two black servants worked in the kitchen. The black servant, often a slave, is ubiquitous in seventeenth-century country-house life, although their stories are not well recorded. In grand portraiture, as in Sir Peter Lely’s
Countess of Dysart, with a Black Page
, painted in the early 1650s, or in Van Dyck’s
Earl of Denbigh
, young, good-looking black servants appear with some regularity, and clearly are seen as indications of wealth, status and of having international connections.
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The English had become involved in the slave trade from the 1560s, when Sir John Hawkins acquired 300 slaves from the Guinea coast – previous to that Henry VIII had a black trumpeter. Queen Elizabeth I, who is known to have had black servants, and whose accounts show that a ‘lytle Blackmore’ was provided with a fine Gascon coat, nevertheless issued hostile proclamations towards them, such as the 1601 decree that the country should be stripped of ‘the great number of Negroes and blackamoors [that] are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people which covet the relief which their people consume’. The decree failed. Like his predecessor, James I employed numerous black servants at court for their ‘exotic’ value, where they appeared in plays and masques, and served as musicians.
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It was then not long before Cromwell acquired through force West Indian colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados, which added to the trade between the former Spanish colonies, with their established slave populations, and England.
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By the later seventeenth century, black pages and dark-skinned servants remain popular and fashionable. Pepys, for instance, owned African slaves, mentioning in his diaries that on 30 May 1662 he saw ‘the little Turk and Negro’
acquired by his great patron, Lord Sandwich, to be pages to his family.
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Some of these unfortunates received a degree of education, for among the Verney papers is a letter written in 1699 by John Verney’s black servant from Guinea.
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By the later years of the seventeenth century, the black servant, page and footman had become an established feature of the English country house. One unhappy tale of an unnamed boy, who became the focus of an extraordinary story of intrigue in the 1670s, illustrates the vulnerability of these young people. He was a servant to the Yorkshire landowner and MP, Sir John Reresby, who records his fate: ‘I had a fine More about sixteen years of age (given me by a gentleman, one Mr Drax, who had brought him out of the Barbadoes) that had lived with me some years, and dyed about this time of an imposthume [abscess] in his head.’
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