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.’46
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.’47
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.’48
Sir Henry Chauncy eulogised as a model employer Sir Charles Caesar of Bennington (who died in 1624). He was apparently treated with some awe by his servants.
very regular in his Life, and orderly in his Family [meaning household], which made the Lives of his Servants very easie, and his House very quiet, never reprimanding a Servant oftner than once, and if the Party offended again, he was silently discharged without Noise or Notice of his Displeasure.49
Often in the story of a particular house, one servant stands out on whom the head of the household especially relies. Sir Henry Slingsby, 1st Baronet of Red House in Yorkshire, was eventually executed under the Commonwealth for his allegiance to the king. But in 1638, before the civil war overturned his world for ever, he recorded his whole household of thirty, including sixteen male and eight female servants, whom he called good, faithful and diligent. In the middle of describing his house, he paused to observe of one carved-relief portrait:
There is above ye door that goes into ye inner chamber a head carved in wood like a Roman head, wch I caused to be made for him yt keeps ye chambers & has charge of ye Wardrobe, as a remembrance of him that has so long & faithfully serv’d. This man Francis Oddy was servant to my father many years & since has served me: my father at his death [1634] . . . did recommend this man Francis Oddy to me having good experiences of his fidelity and diligence & even such I find him hitherto. He serves me in ye way of upholsterer wn there is need to furnish ye Lodging rooms and dress ym up: he serves me for a caterer to buy all manner of provisions for the house, & to keep the wine cellar. He is of a very low stature, his head little, & his hair cut short, his face lean and full or wrinkles, his complection such that yt shows he has endured all wethers: his disposition not suitable wth ye rest of his fellow servants which does either by diligence breed envy, or else through plain dealing Stir up Variance & having a working head [good intelligence] is in continual debate.50
Sir Henry Slingsby also recorded his trouble keeping cooks:
Last Sunday my Cook George Taylor went to be marry’d to a maid of Doctor Wickhams at York, & if she be so head strong as they say she is, he will after find his service here freedom in respect of the bondage he must undergo. This cook hath been the freest from disorder of five several cooks w[hi]ch I have had since I became a housekeeper; some of w[hi]ch hath been w[i]th out all measure disordered [referring to their drunkenness] and for their curiosity in the art of cookery I do not much value.51
The calamitous downside of country-house service, favouritism, is all too vividly illustrated by the story of Florence Fitzpatrick, the young Irish footman who was caught up in the extraordinary downfall of Mervyn Touchet, the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, when his large household at Fonthill Gifford, in Wiltshire, imploded with intrigue and sexual misconduct.52 The case demonstrates not only how the intimacy of the country-house community could have its dark side (some believe that the earl was the victim of a conspiracy more inspired by property rights than morality) but also how a young man could prosper as the favourite of a rich peer and landowner.
Another servant, Henry Skipwith, a favourite of Lord Castlehaven’s, became involved in a liaison with the earl’s wife, apparently at the earl’s instigation. Whether or not his heir, James, Lord Audley, objected to this, when the earl gave Skipwith some £12,000, Lord Audley was so taken aback that he petitioned the king in the ‘hope to find him a father when my own forsakes me’. Lord Audley may well not have foreseen the drastic outcome of his initial appeal, which led within a few months to his father’s imprisonment, trial and subsequent execution for engaging in sodomy with his footman Florence Fitzpatrick, and assisting in the rape of his wife by another manservant, Giles Broadway. Both menservants were also executed, perhaps reflecting the Privy Council’s fear of the social subversion that these events represented rather than the issue of criminal sexuality.53
On the witness stand, the countess described her husband’s involvement with ‘prostitutes and serving boys’, and claimed that he had encouraged her to have sexual intercourse with his favourites in the household, one of whom was John Anktill. The younger son of a Dorsetshire family who had first arrived as a page to Lord Castlehaven, Anktill worked his way up to become a steward of some of the earl’s estates. In 1621, he was elected as an MP to represent the family interest, which was a common enough occurrence. Without the earl’s permission, he married Lord Castlehaven’s eldest daughter. He was called as a witness in the trial, in the course of which he is described as having been the sexual partner of both the earl and the countess.54
Henry Skipwith, Lord Castlehaven’s closest servant, who had much prospered in his master’s service, was born to a father of no set occupation and a mother who distilled ‘hot waters’, yet within a few years he was sitting at a lord’s table. Skipwith was named in the trial as the lover of not only the earl and the countess, but of the earl’s fifteen-year-old daughter-in-law, Lady Audley.
Lord Castlehaven claimed that the charges were a conspiracy and that he had been guilty of nothing more than unusual generosity to his servants; it was certainly unusual to be convicted on the evidence of only your wife and servants: ‘It is my estate, my Lords, that does accuse me this day, and nothing else.’ He and his two menservants were dispatched together in May 1631.55
There may well have been some element of politics involved, as these events took place in the years that led up to the civil war. Although complex in political terms, the conflict did not give birth to a major social revolution of the type that might have set household servants against their employers. In the regions, most of the smaller landowners seem to maintain their traditional allegiances to major local families.56 Similarily, servants in noble households seem to have largely followed the allegiances of their lord and master.
Certainly, household servants often became involved in military actions, not least in the sieges of houses belonging to Parliamentary and Royalist owners equally, as in the famous Basing House siege in 1645, or in the 1643 siege of Brampton Bryan Castle in Herefordshire. The defender of the latter was Lady Harley, whose unusual first name was Brilliana, and who was the wife of a Member of Parliament who under Cromwell was Master of the Mint. This indomitable woman withstood a sustained Royalist offensive at the head of her household servants, with only one military veteran and a Hereford doctor to advise her. Shortly before it took place, she wrote to her son of how her servants were being harassed by soldiers, and during the hostilities she noted the mortal wounding of a household servant:
‘on August 18: our honest cook received a shot through his left arm.’57 He died a week later. The siege was lifted, but brave Lady Harley soon succumbed to pneumonia, after which the house fell to the Royalists.58
In ancient custom, a landowner summoned to bear arms for the king would come at the head of some portion of his household servants, armed for action. An echo of this expectation is suggested by the summons sent by Lord Pembroke and received by Sir Edmund Verney, Knight, of Claydon House, Buckinghamshire on 7 February 1639, which refers directly to the attendance of servants: ‘His Majesty’s royal pleasure is that all occasions set apart you be in readiness in your own person by the 1st of April next at the city of Yorke, as a cuirassier in russett arms, with gilded studs or nails and befittingly horsed, and your servants which shall wait upon you horst in white arms, after the manner of a hargobusier [mounted rifleman], in good equipage.’59 Sir William Russell’s troop included ‘twelve of his servants in scarlet cloaks, well horsed, and armed’. Colonel Edmund Ludlow went to war accompanied by Henry Cole, an old family retainer who had been his father’s groom.60
Claydon House was never attacked, although Sir Edmund’s wife’s old family home at Hillesden was besieged, taken and destroyed by fire. Sir Edmund never returned to his own home and died, reputedly still holding the king’s standard, at the Battle of Edgehill on 23 October 1642. A servant was sent to find his body and bring it home, but was unable to recover it.61
Daniel Defoe’s Memoir of a Cavalier (1724), now thought to be based on an actual seventeenth-century memoir, includes one account of a household of servants acting in concert like a small private army, commanded by their mistress whose husband was fighting elsewhere, in a similar spirit to that of Brilliana Harley. As he recounted: ‘our men had besieged some fortified house about Oxfordshire, towards Thame, and the house being defended by the lady in her husband’s absence, she had yielded the house upon her capitulation.’ One of the stipulations of her surrender was that she was ‘to march out with all her servants, soldiers and goods’, but they are intercepted by some drunken troops on the road. ‘The lady, who had been more used to the smell of powder than he imagined, called some of her servants to her, and, consulting with them what to do, they all unanimously encouraged her to let them fight.’62
Many servants fought at their employers’ side, literally standing by men and women to whom they owed loyalty and service, as much as to the cause their masters espoused. There is one particularly moving story recorded in Aubrey’s highly anecdotal Brief Lives, describing a servant’s identification of the corpse of Lucius Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland, killed in 1643 at the Battle of Newbury. The account concludes: ‘The next day when they went to bury the dead, they could not find his Lordship’s body; it was stript and trod-upon and mangled, so there was one that wayted upon him in his chamber would undertake to know it from all other bodyes, by a certaine Mole his Lordship had in his Neck, and by that marke did find it.’ This touching account illustrates more than any other the intimacy of domestic service.63
Exile touched many of the landowning families of England, after the wars subsided. Edmund Verney’s son Ralph, initially a supporter of the Parliamentary cause, took his family with him to France in voluntary exile, returning in 1653. The large number of private letters among the extensive Verney papers are littered with references to the problem of maintaining servants while in exile. Sir Henry Newton wrote to Ralph Verney: ‘I forgott in my last to acquaint you with the parting of my Boy Estienne, Who having of a long time play’d some prankes, made me at last resolve to pay him his arrearages.’ He was rude and openly defied his employers.
Drunkenness was also a problem: ‘though he knew he was complained of, hee was so sencelesse as for a whole afternoon when my wife and I were abroad with a coach to neglect us and bee debauch’d with another lacquay [who] should have been also following the coach.’ The poor feckless child did indeed run away after a beating but he was caught by another servant.64
Lady Verney struggled to keep her favourite maid, Lucy (sometimes Luce), whose brother wanted her to leave service with the Verneys. Lucy confided to her mistrees that her brother had promised to settle ‘seven or eight pounds a year upon [her] for her life and be good to her’ if she agreed to come home, and had threatened that he would disown her if she refused. He was a man of ‘2 or 3 hundred pound a year and scorns that his sister should serve’. This vividly illustrates the shift in the social status of service in noble and gentry households after the civil war.
This state of affairs was vexatious to Lady Verney because Lucy suited her so well, both for coming from a decent background and for not being wealthy in her own right.65 Lady Verney wrote to her husband: ‘for I know I cannot expect ever to have so good a servant again and for my greater trouble he will have her away before Christmas’. She felt she was unlikely to ‘get one that knows how to dress me that will be content to do half the work that she does, for they are all grown so fine that one cannot have any chamber maid that will serve under 4 or 5 pound a year wages at least and besides they will neither wash nor starch’.66
Finding English female domestics when in exile in France had also been a challenge: ‘I know no English maids will ever be content (or stay a weeke) to faire as these servants faire . . . Noe English maide will be content with our diet and way of liveing: for my part, I have not had one bit of Rost meate to dinner.’ Of one possible local maid, Sir Ralph Verney wrote somewhat disparagingly to his wife: ‘it is hard to find one here of our Religion . . . [but this one is] a civile wench and plays well of the Lute, and she is well clad and well bredd, but raw to service’67
Later, Sir Ralph Verney’s bachelor uncle wrote confidentially to advise his nephew that he had engaged a maid who would travel with them into France ‘For £3 per annum. Because you writ me word that you were in love with Dirty Sluts, I took great care to fit you with a Joan that may be as good as my Lady in the dark, and I hope I have fitted you with a pennyworth.’ It is not known whether the maid was subject to her master’s advances after this lascivious introduction, although the letter goes on to hint that Sir Ralph had already slept with his wife’s faithful maid, Luce.68
When Lady Verney returned home to Claydon House in Buckinghamshire after four years’ absence she learnt what might happen to a dwelling when no longer sufficiently cared for, complaining to her husband: ‘the house is most lamentably furnished, all the linen is quite worn out . . . the feather beds that were walled up are much eaten with Ratts’, the roasting spits were ‘eaten up with rust’ and ‘Musk-coloured stools . . . spoiled, and the dining-room chairs in rags’.69
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.’70
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, stres
sing 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.’71
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.72 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.73
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.’74
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