by Tessa Boase
She did have another plan, hatched with her husband. She had thoughts of opening a small shop in nearby Newcastle-under-Lyme, though she didn’t know how she would manage it without help. But Mrs Doar’s heart was not in this new career. She held out hope that Her Ladyship might reconsider, with Loch as her powerful go-between. The letter returns to the open sore of her dismissal:
I assure you at this time my heart is almost broke I have been upwards of 14 years in the Marquis of Stafford’s family and it grieves me much very much indeed to leave it–indeed Sir to describe to you the distress I am in would be impossible–but I hope by leaving me case in your hand who I had always concidered my friend that you will be able to prevail on Lord and Lady Stafford to dow something for me.
I remain Sir your most humble and obedient servant
Dorothy Doar.30
James Loch was an exceptionally busy man. He had been with the Staffords for twenty years, and was at this time involved in a myriad other activities: pushing through the Scottish clearance systems, chasing rick-burners across rural Salop and Staffordshire, manoeuvring with the railway and canal men over Lord Stafford’s awkwardly overlapping interests, keeping up with the auditing and administration of the various landed estates. All this kept him daily at his desk until late, much to his wife’s chagrin. He was also an MP, for Scotland’s northernmost constituency of Wick Burghs, and was immersed in the growing excitement of the Reform Bill question, a motion the Staffords supported unambiguously. At home his own family was getting larger: he and Anne now had nine children. In 1832 Loch was 52 years old and at the height of his powers, a managerial entrepreneur employed by a millionaire aristocrat. He was a man who held real power.
Mrs Doar’s troubles might have seemed like a dot on the map to James Loch. But this was not how he treated them. Hearing again from Lewis that Mrs Doar seemed ‘in very great distress’ and had ‘not saved a single shilling but is desirous of setting up a little shop in Newcastle [-under-Lyme] to sell Groceries & confectionary goods’, Loch–who is damned by history as the intransigent, inhuman architect of the Highland Clearances–turned his mind to extracting some good from this unfortunate case.
Our most intimate glimpse of Dorothy Doar comes from this series of letters between the two agents: the push and pull of power as senior and junior together decide her future. The letters sit in two musty bundles in the Sutherland archives, sandwiched between missives on animal husbandry, new roofs for the Lilleshall tenants, road-building projects and rick-burning culprits: the stuff of estate management. And at first it seemed as if this particular staffing problem could be dealt with in the same drily efficient way.
Lewis, anxious to help (and keen to avoid another emotional, recriminatory interview with the housekeeper), had got behind the shop idea: he’d already identified a vacant premises on Newcastle Road owned by Lord Stafford. ‘I doubt not she would soon get a little business that would maintain her’, he wrote to Loch. ‘I should be most happy to throw my little influence in her favour for I do consider she has been a very good and faithful servant to Lord & Lady Stafford but of course I will not say a word to her on this subject until I hear from you.’
First, Loch had to contact the Staffords. On 6 April he replied, in his fast-flowing, rapid-thinking, almost illegible hand, to Lewis–three days before the Reform Bill’s first night debate in Parliament. ‘Your idea for Mrs Doar is upon the whole approved of’, he wrote. Lord Stafford would help with start-up costs, providing the money didn’t go straight into her husband’s debts. It was a generous offer, and it was the final offer.
Both Lord and Lady S. are very sensible of Mrs Doar’s being a very faithful servant–but it is quite impossible in such an establishment to permit of her breeding and bearing a family in the House and if she went away for a time who then would look after the girls–besides it would be an example for the other Upper Servants and it would be Castle Howard over again in its worst times.
(One wonders what sexual liberties the Georgian upper servants had been taking at Castle Howard, the Yorkshire seat of Lord Stafford’s nephew George Howard, 6th Earl of Carlisle.)
‘You may perhaps have an opportunity of explaining this to Mrs Doar’, he continued, ‘and tell her I have got her letter, that I shall be most happy to help her in any other way but in the way she wishes, and if she fixes upon going to NCastle we will do what we can for her.’
On 10 April Loch managed, in the midst of great political fervour, to talk to the Marchioness about her housekeeper’s plan. ‘You may take steps to put Mrs Doar into her shop and give her a little assistance’, he wrote to Lewis; ‘of course her own health and situation are to be first consulted–and let it be known that she has her Ladyship’s support and that she goes on good terms.’
In the Midlands, Mrs Doar learns of Her Ladyship’s financial and moral support and is a little mollified. She has a focus. She has a plan. A shop is not so very different to her various store cupboards; she will make a good shopkeeper. As she lies sick in bed, the baby kicking in her belly, I imagine her mind turning to the material world of stock and supplies. She begins, as is her way, to make lists. ‘She seems now at rest in her mind’, Lewis writes to Loch, ‘and is much satisfied with Lord & Lady Stafford’s goodness toward her.’
So much oil poured onto troubled waters, so much soothing and praising of Mrs Doar’s talents and loyalty. And yet she is to be let go, rather than be granted six weeks’ leave. The Staffords are barely at Trentham for six weeks each year. Attitudes have changed since Dorothy bore her last baby: this time it is the principle of the thing that counts, not the logistics.
That evening, Lady Stafford left her husband at home once again to attend a ball at Westminster’s Ashburnham House, hosted by Princess Lieven, formidable wife of the Russian Ambassador, famous for introducing the waltz to London society (and for the remark, ‘It is not fashionable where I am not’). It was an evening ‘numerously and elegantly attended’ by a clutch of Marchionesses–Titchfield, Londonderry, Salisbury, Clanricarde…and of course that old intriguer and womaniser, Prince Talleyrand.31
A fortnight later, the Staffords took ten horses, four carriages and numerous servants to another of their splendid houses–West Hill, a mansion in leafy Wandsworth, just south of the capital. The servants’ hall buzzed with talk of ill health. ‘A Murrain appears to have got among our housekeepers’, as James Loch puts it, rolling his Scottish Rs with enjoyment at the biblical term. A murrain: a plague. Poor Mrs Galleazie was virtually under house arrest in town, Mrs Kirke dangerously ill at Lilleshall, Mrs Spillman at Dunrobin was at increasing risk being so near the infected Scottish ports and Mrs Doar not just ill but pregnant. Who would replace her?
West Hill’s housekeeper, Mrs Cleaver, was herself still learning the ropes. According to the servants’ wage ledgers, we can see that she took over from Mrs Maben in January, a step up from her previous position at the Marquess of Landsdowne’s house. Her old employer might be in Lord Grey’s Cabinet, but the Staffords were incontestably Britain’s most powerful family. No doubt she thought it most unorthodox that Trentham should have a married housekeeper: more still, one with a daughter and another baby on the way. But Mrs Cleaver prudently kept her council. She knew better than to gossip this soon into her tenure.
At West Hill the Staffords fall into a quieter regime, and Lady Stafford’s attention alights on her new housekeeper, poached at new year from her acquaintance, Lady Louisa. Cleaver is, it must be admitted, an impressive figure: sensible, efficient, tolerably well educated. After not quite four months at West Hill she is running the house with far more zeal than old Maben who, for all her loyalty, had most definitely let things slip. Goodness knows, it was hard enough to find a replacement housekeeper, not once but twice in a year…and–if Lady Stafford is to act upon the plan taking shape in her mind–to have to start all over again at West Hill…Quel ennui.
Before she is called back to town for an intimate soirée at Kensington Palace (just the Duc
hess of Kent, the King and Queen and a dozen other titles) the Marchioness comes to a decision.
VII
Eight Dozen Of Sweet Wine
Mrs Cleaver arrives at Trentham Hall with her bags after two days’ travel by stagecoach. She has her instructions. She knows she is on trial, and that this could be an unprecedented chance for advancement. Gingerly, she knocks on Mrs Doar’s door.
‘Who is it?’
The housekeeper’s voice sounds thin and strained to Mrs Cleaver’s ears. She hopes Mr Lewis has paved the way for the transfer of power, as she doesn’t want a fight on her hands.
On 9 May Lewis writes to Loch: ‘Mrs Cleaver arrived on Monday.’ He has also received a note from Lady Stafford, increasingly tetchy as the political tension mounts in London: ‘Her Ladyship will never again have a married House Keeper it is attended with many bad consequences.’
Mrs Cleaver is put straight to work drawing up an inventory: every new housekeeper must know how things stand. It is a way of taking possession–to finger and itemise every sheet, every cloth, every teacup and saucer. No cupboard or room escapes her eye.
Lewis’s letter, interrupted, continues in an irritable hand. ‘I am this moment told Mrs Doar has packed up 8 dozen of sweet wine to be sent off. Is this allowed? Mrs Doar has not pleased me these last few days, for I think she does not estimate properly the great kindness shewn her by the family and thinking she ought to be continued.’
Dorothy Doar is still sick in her bed and won’t be moved: it is her only way of hanging on. How could they bring in her replacement so quickly? After all these years! Her store cupboards, her systems, her girls, her rules. Is it her replacement? Mrs Doar finds Mrs Cleaver coldly efficient and reeking of ambition. She becomes resentful, contrary, territorial. But most of all she is frightened. It is time to stop procrastinating, as her uncertain future now stares her baldly in the face.
While Mrs Doar was packing up her ninety-six bottles of sweet wine, Britain was teetering on the brink of revolution. On 7 May Earl Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, requested an interview with the King and asked His Majesty to create sufficient Whig peers to push the Reform Bill through the House of Lords. It was a bill that aimed to enfranchise the growing middle classes (those living in homes worth at least £10 annually–£500 in today’s money–which cut out most of the working classes) and give proper representation to the newly industrialised cities of the English Midlands and North–and thus far it had been systematically and cravenly blocked by the Tories.
William IV then had sudden doubts about meddling with Parliament. He misjudged the ugly mood of the nation and refused. On 9 May, with the Reform Bill vetoed yet again by the House of Lords, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet resigned in disgust.
On 10 May, town councillor Mr Lee wrote to James Loch from Birmingham, where the police were trying to prevent ‘an explosion of public feelings’. ‘Disastrous news from London. The country is I feel in an awful state of difficulty. People of England have lost their faith in royal pledges [and are] disgusted with privilege and aristocracy.’32
It was not a good time to be a lord. Nor was it a good time to be a king. William IV had mud slung at his carriage and was hissed at in public; Queen Adelaide was left with the ‘fixed impression [that] an English revolution is rapidly approaching, and that her own fate is to be that of Marie Antoinette’.33 Whig clergyman Sydney Smith described a ‘hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear’ as London’s streets crackled with anger.
On 10 May James Loch, sitting in his office in the well-to-do suburb of Bloomsbury Square, turned his rapid-fire mind to Dorothy Doar’s health and the matter of the sweet wine. His suspicions were now aroused, and his tone had subtly changed. There was a clear wish to resolve this matter and move on. ‘We are in a state of ferment on public matters’, he wrote to Lewis.
I have time only to say that Mrs Doar when she is fully able must go to her lodgings at Handford–she appears to repay badly her Ladyship’s kindness–take care that directions are given that all her linen is kept separate from the rest of the household–and that Mrs Cleaver know that it is her Ladyship’s orders that every thing in Mrs Doar’s room be well scoured–let a temporary female wait on her and let the House Servants attend to their own duty.
He was slightly irritated by the detail of the wine. ‘Surely the sweet wine must be her own making’, he wrote; ‘she never could think of packing up his Lordships?’
The worry was that the housekeeper might have contracted the cholera morbus. But there was also a sense of wishing to erase Mrs Doar from Trentham Hall. She had become an embarrassment; she was surplus to requirements. As she went about her packing, sending box after box out of the back door with the help of the girls and the boot boy, gossip began to travel along the basement corridors.
Loch’s letter crossed that of William Lewis, who was now obsessed with the sweet wine. If he didn’t have access to such perks, why should Mrs Doar? Lewis tried to pull rank. ‘Hope you will let me know if Lady Stafford allows her to claim the sweet wine. I should think not. But if so, such indulgences may and will lead to great abuse if House Keepers have such privileges.’ The answer from the Marchioness–communicated to Loch before she readied herself for a splendid Friday-night ‘rout’ at Devonshire House–was not what Lewis wanted to hear. Do not interfere in this matter, came her instructions. It was, in all probability, some home-made wine of Mrs Doar’s own. Let the housekeeper be.
By 12 May William Lewis’s careful, audit-book mind felt under attack from conflicting sources of chaos. First the state of the nation, still without a government: ‘The people are generally speaking very much disappointed and disgusted at the conduct of the Lords’, he wrote to Loch, ‘and it will be well if they in the manufacturing towns remain quiet under such a disappointment.’ Stoke-on-Trent sat just outside the gates of Trentham Hall. What if the people were to storm this pleasure palace with cries of ‘Go it! Go it! This is our time!’? Where would this leave the servants?
Within the house all was not well either. ‘Mrs Cleaver has nearly gone over the inventory’, he continued:
she seems a very correct & proper person. I am exceedingly annoyed at Mrs Doar’s conduct. She has I understand behaved in a very unkind and improper manner to Mrs Cleaver. But Mrs Doar has told her to take upon herself the entire control and management of the house, which she has done. Mrs Doar has a person to wait upon her & the Girls are all kept to their own work. Everything will be well scoured that has been used or connected with Mrs Doar’s rooms.
James Loch did not involve himself further with these acrimonious hints and allusions. He had his hands full. At Westminster the anti-Reform Duke of Wellington was trying in vain to form a new Tory Cabinet. Protesters with placards were urging a run on the banks: ‘To stop the Duke, go for gold!’ As frantic crowds cashed in their savings for solid gold, some £1.5 million was withdrawn from the Bank of England. The Duke of Wellington, leaving St James’s Palace in his carriage, was attacked by a mob which ‘set up such an astounding hissing and yelling, as to frighten the horses; and in plunging about, one of them fell near the Queen’s entrance’. Military precautions were taken ‘to preserve the peace of the Metropolis’.34
On 15 May, Wellington resigned and Earl Grey was recalled to office. The news was greeted in the capital with peals of bells. Now that revolution was looking slightly less likely, William Lewis could contain himself no longer. Seventeenth of May: ‘There has been some very unpleasant reports about Mrs Doar packing up and sending off some heavy packages from the Hall’, he wrote to Loch, enclosing a defamatory letter written by one Mr Kirkby, another upper servant, probably the butler. ‘This is altogether a most distressing circumstance. If anything is wrong that the woman should have so far forgotten herself in the honest discharge of her duty–(I was not by any measure reconciled to the sending off the sweet wine…).’ No longer able to arbitrate, Lewis appealed to his senior, Loch: what should he do next?
On the morning
of 19 May Loch replied with customary sangfroid. He was reluctant to think the worst of the housekeeper. ‘You will investigate carefully the stories regarding Mrs Doar & if after a calm and deliberate enquiry you think her conduct really liable to suspicion you may & should then give her the enclosed letter.’ But he cautioned Lewis ‘how easy a thing it is to whisper away a person’s character–& how serious a matter it is to so do’. Recollect also, he advised, how some think they can gain favour by bad-mouthing others behind their backs; spreading rumours while seeming to ‘fawn’ before them.
Why suspect Mrs Doar, he asked, if her own mistress didn’t? ‘Don’t forget that her place entitled her to certain perquisites, and that system being approved of by her Ladyship it cannot be thrown up against Mrs Doar.’ As to Mr Kirkby’s malicious letter: ‘I must caution you also at being led away entirely by Kirkby–he is as honest a man as breathes, but he is a man of strong passions and liable to be prejudiced–& he never liked Mrs Doar for she resisted his authority.’
He concluded by placing full responsibility on Lewis’s shoulders. You be the judge, he said. Give her my letter if you think she deserves it. But remember that this will reflect badly on your own character if she is found to be blameless.
By now the gossip lines between the Stafford residences were humming. Later that day, as the gas lamps were being lit in the square down below, Loch was forced to pick up his pen to Lewis again.
I regret to have to mention that various reports have reached me of Mrs Doar making up large packages some of which are already sent away from the House–including some wine. It is never my habit nor my inclination to listen to stories or suspect others upon loose grounds of improper conduct, but as these reports have reached me in a way that prevents my neglecting them, I must call your attention to them.
