Up and Down Stairs (10 page)

The Cook’s Guide
was dedicated to Lady Maynard’s daughter, Lady Anne Wroth, and her granddaughter, Mary: ‘The Duty I owe to your Ladyship, and the rest of your noble Family, commands more than this book is able to Express; but since ill fate hath made me
altogether incapable of any Worthy return of your Love and Bounty, be pleased to accept this as a Signal of what I am obliged to.’

Her second dedication to Mary, the daughter, is a little more revealing, referring explicitly to the importance of the lady of the house being able to direct and educate her own servants in the arts of housekeeping. She writes:

The sublimity of your Lady Mother’s affairs I fear will not permit her very often to view this book; besides her Ladyship needs it not, her acceptation and approbation hereof is my honour only, not her benefit; your practice will be my content, and I doubt not your own. It is a miserable thing for any Woman, though never so great, not to be able to teach her Servants; there is no fear of it in you, since you begin so soon to delight in those Sciences as may and will accomplish you.
¹⁵

Mrs Wolley refers to having prepared a banquet for King Charles I, presumably while in service to the Maynards. She writes of ‘very choice Receipts [recipes] . . . from my own Practice, who have had the honour to perform such things for the Entertainment of His late Majesty, as well as for the Nobility’.
¹⁶
No painted portrait of Mrs Wolley survives, as far as I am aware, but in her writings we get more than a flavour of a Mrs Beeton-like character and tone of voice.

The Gentlewomans Companion
was first published under Wolley’s name in 1673, although Wolley herself complained that this was a plagiarised version of her own manuscript brought out by the publisher, Dorman Newman, trying to cash in on her success and popularity.
¹⁷
But then it was quickly reprinted in 1675 and still carried her name as author. It contains a biographical note in the beginning, ‘A Short account of the life and abilities of Authoress of this Book’, in which the assumed author cites her modesty, her previous books and listed her skills, including ‘Preserving all kinds of Sweet-meats wet and dry’, ‘Setting out of Banquets’, and ‘All manner of Cookery’. It claims that at the age of fifteen she was ‘intrusted to keep a little School’, and was already in the enviable position of accomplishments in Italian, singing, dancing and instrument playing.

After two years, she was taken on as a governess to ‘a Noble Lady in the Kingdom’ who ‘was infinitely pleas’d’ with her learning. During this time she learns the arts of cooking and preserving, and became ‘acquainted with the Court, with a deportment suitable thereunto.’ After her mistress’s death, she moved to employment with another lady whom she serves – first in the role of governess, then of stewardess (or housekeeper) and finally of secretary – for another seven years, in which she ‘kept an exact account of what was spent in the house’ and gained knowledge of ‘Physick and Chirurgery [i.e. surgery]’.
¹⁸

Although this may not be an entirely accurate picture, much of this biographical material seems to have been adapted from Mrs Wolley’s previously published books. Her known works, and those possibly by other hands under her name, all make much of the fact that gentlewomen may have been ‘forced to service’ on account of being ‘impoverished by the late calamities, viz. the late Wars, Plague and Fire’, as Mrs Wolley herself observed in her confirmed autograph work,
The Queen-Like Closet.
¹⁹

The stresses on aristocratic and gentry families in this period might well have driven some widows and daughters into service in other households just to survive.
The Gentlewomans Companion
(1675) encourages parents to ‘endeavour the gentile [gentle] education of their Daughters, encouraging them to learn whatever opportunity offers, worthy [of] a good estimation.
For riches hath wings, and will quickly fly away
; or Death comes and removes the Parents, leaving the Children to the tuition of merciless and unconscionable Executors.’

If they are not trained in the arts of housekeeping, parents lay their daughters open to having to accept more humble jobs: ‘their Daughters are often exposed to great hardships, many times contenting themselves to serve as Chamber-maids, because they have not the Accomplishments of a Waiting-woman, or an House-keeper.’
²⁰
The same book records the duties of the governess to the children of the gentlewomen, a feature of country house life long before the nineteenth century: ‘They who undertake the difficult Employ of being an Instructress or Governess of Children should be persons of no mean birth and breeding, civil in deportment, and of extraordinary winning and pleasing conversation.’

A governess is to study ‘diligently the nature, disposition, and inclination of those she is to teach’. Aside from books of piety, the author also recommends romances ‘which treat of Generosity, Gallantry, and Virtue’, including Sir Philip Sidney’s
Arcadia
, as well as all ‘productions of the needle’, plus rock-work, moss-work and cabinet-work, in addition to preserving, conserving and distillation: ‘those laudable Sciences which adorn a Compleat Gentlewomen’.
²¹

Lady Anne Clifford recalled her governess Mrs Anne Taylour with affection as one of the main influences on her life, along with her tutor. She had plenty of companions to choose from in her adult life too, as illustrated in an extremely rare document at Knole in Kent. Described as ‘
A catalogue of the Household and Family of the Right Honourable Richard, Earl of Dorset
’, it hangs in a frame in the part of the house occupied by the present Lord Sackville and lists all those who made up the household of the Earl and Countess of Dorset (the playboy grandson of the 1st Earl and his serious-minded wife, Lady Anne) as it was between 1613 and 1624.
²²

The Knole catalogue details where staff would sit for meals, whether in the Great Chamber, the Parlour, the Great Hall, at high and long tables, the Dairy, or the Kitchen and Scullery. It even mentions the handful of permanent staff who stayed in Dorset House in London when the main household went elsewhere.

The size of the household of Lady Anne’s second husband, Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, in the mid-seventeenth century was of a similar number, as recalled by John Aubrey in
Brief Lives
:

’Tis certain, the Earles of Pembroke were the most popular Peers in the West of England; but one might boldly say, in the whole Kingdome. The Revenue of this Family was till about 1652, 16,000 pounds per annum. But with his offices and all he had thirty thousand Pounds per annum. And, as the Revenue was great, so the greatnesse of his Retinue, and Hospitality were answerable. One hundred and twenty Family uprising and down lyeing: whereof you may take out six or seven, and all the rest Servants, and Retayners.
²³

The Knole household list illustrates just the same type of ‘Family’. The Knole catalogue itself is, unusually, written on vellum, which
suggests that it may have been drawn up for a commemorative purpose rather than merely as a record; indeed, it is accompanied by a humble prayer for the health of the household and especially the mistress, signed by Henry Keble, yeoman of the pantry. The presence of the names of all the servants adds a considerable resonance to the document, with surnames that might still be found in Kent today. Vita Sackville-West certainly made use of them in her novel,
The Edwardians
, set in Knole in the early twentieth century, for example calling the butler Vigeon, who on this household list appears as the huntsman.

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.