It may well have been some sort of a memorial of the household who had stood by Lady Anne (she became Countess of Pembroke after the death of the Earl of Dorset) during the period when she was being denied her rightful inheritance (which had been seized by the Earl of Cumberland), the mistress’s woes and successes having been shared by the whole household. Being of a famously indomitable spirit, she held out for her inheritance. She later wrote of the castles that Cromwell pulled down: ‘Let him destroy my Castles if he will, as often as he levels them I will rebuild them, so long as he leaves me with a shilling in my pocket.’24
It seems that the family usually ate in private, upstairs in the Great Chamber, and the senior servants ate in the Parlour (today the private family dining room, and long known as the Poet’s Parlour after the portraits that hang there), but on certain days all might still eat with the immediate family and some senior attendants on the raised dais in the Great Hall.25
There would have been a degree of ceremony at mealtimes, perhaps similar to that observed in the lodgings of the courtier, the Earl of Carlisle, by Thomas Raymond, a nephew of one of Lord Carlisle’s retainers: ‘I have often seen his diet carried from his kitchen across the court at Whitehall, 20 or 25 dishes covered, mostly by gentlemen richly habited, with the steward marching before and the clerk of the kitchen bringing up the rear, all bareheaded. This for the first and as many more for the second course.’26
At the ‘Parlour Table’ sat the senior household officers, whose responsibilities, education or birth put their status only just below that of the family. The women are waiting women; notably the men, including the chaplain, steward, and the gentleman of the horse, are given the title Mr, are referred to as gentlemen and are ranked above those who worked with their hands.
At the ‘Clerk’s Table in the Hall’ came the next rung of senior servants, skilled and dependable, including clerks of the kitchen, who were in charge of purchasing kitchen provisions, Henry Keble, a pastryman, three cooks, a slaughterman, a groom of the great chamber, two gardeners, a caterer or provisions purchaser and one Lowry, ‘a French Boy’.
The yeoman of the buttery eventually absorbs the roles of the pantry and by the end of the century has become the butler, operating from a room known as the pantry or butler’s pantry, whilst the groom of the chamber remains an identifiable post well into the twentieth century, by which time it has responsibility for the condition and presentation of public rooms.27
It is notable that the gardeners are here in the senior rank of yeoman servants; given that there are only two of them, they probably had additional labour brought in as necessary.28 It is worth remembering that this was the age of gardeners such as John Tradescant. The elaborate gardens of the seventeenth century required head gardeners of impressive tradecraft. The Company of Gardeners, incorporated in 1605, specified apprenticeships of seven years and enumerated the skills expected of the professional gardener for ‘the trade crafte or misterie of Gardening’, which included ‘planting grafting Setting sowing . . . covering fencing and removing of Plantes herbes seedes fruites trees Stockes Settes and of contryving the conveyances to the same belonging’.29
Tradescant, who in died 1638, is perhaps the most famous of the early-seventeenth-century gardeners associated with a great country house, as he was the principal gardener to Robert Cecil (created Earl of Salisbury), and working at Hatfield by 1610. A contemporary note on expenditure refers to work in the kitchen garden there: ‘diging dunging sowing & planting of Earbes Rootes hartichokes . . . & all other Earbes nessicarie [necessary] for the kichen with the keepping Clene of the gardin & geving Attendance for the sarving of the house with thes Nessicaries’. Under the gardeners in that kitchen garden alone were three workmen, two labourers and six women weeders at 6d a day, suggesting the scale of gardening operations in the early seventeenth century.30
At Knole, the nursery staff are also mentioned in the household catalogue, but presumably they dined in a chamber dedicated to the nursery. At the ‘Long Table in the Hall’ were seated various attendants, and, among others, a barber, the groom of ‘my Lord’s Chamber’, the yeoman of the wardrobe, the Master Huntsman, the yeoman of the great chamber, a falconer and an armourer.
The group comprising the stables and coach staff includes various grooms, plus a chief footman with six junior footmen under him. Clearly many more footmen were employed, in contrast to the single individual footman listed in the household of the Earl of Northumberland in 1511. Also footmen were evidently regarded as part of the coaching establishment and ranked separately from those of the chamber and the kitchen, although by the end of the seventeenth century the footmen had become the principal serving attendants in the dining room. Coach travel was more and more important in the seventeenth century, as carriage design improved and they increasingly became an object of display, leading John Evelyn to regret the speed at which everyone travelled and yearn for the more stately progress of former years.31
Among the lowest-ranking servants at Knole were the servants of the servants: the steward’s man, a multitude of every type of groom, the under farrier or blacksmith, the chaplain’s man, two huntsmen including George Vigeon, the bird-catcher, a postilion (who rode on the forward pair of horses to help keep them heading in the right direction), the armourer’s man and his servant, and two men to carry wood for fires.
At the Laundrymaids’ Table, which may not have been in the hall, sat a number of women, including Lady Margaret’s maid, ‘a Blackamoor’, and a porter. Confined to the Kitchen and Scullery were another group, also including ‘a Blackamoor’.32 The two black servants were presumably slaves, and one of the named men or boys may have turned the spit in the kitchen.
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.33
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.34
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.’35 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 on
e 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.36
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.’37
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 1643.38
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.39
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.40 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.’41 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’.42 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.43
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’.44
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’.45
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