Up and Down Stairs (21 page)

Swift deals with each member of staff in turn: butler, cook, footman, coachman, groom, housekeeper, chambermaid, waiting maid, housemaid, children’s maid, nurse, laundress, dairymaid, house steward, land steward, porter and tutoress – and thus supplies a titillating portrait of the servants of an aristocratic household. He revels especially in absurd advice:

When your master or lady call a servant by name, if that servant be not in the way, none of you are to answer, for there will be end to your drudgery, and masters themselves allow, that if a servant comes when he is called that is sufficient. . . . When you are at fault, be always pert and insolent; and behave yourself as if you were the injured person; this will immediately put your master and lady off their mettle . . .
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Never submit to stir a Finger in any Business but that for which you were particularly hired. For example, if the groom be drunk or absent, and the butler be ordered to shut the stable door, the Answer is ready, An it please your Honour, I don’t understand horses: If a corner of the hanging wants a single nail to fasten it, and the Footman be directed to tack it up, he may say, he doth not understand that sort of work, but his Honour may send for the upholsterer.
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Most memorable of all: ‘Never come till you have been called three on four times; for none but dogs will come at the first whistle: and when the master calls “Who’s there?” no servant is bound to come; for
Who’s there
is nobody’s name.’
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One cannot help wondering about Swift’s relationships with his own domestics, which, given his connection with ‘Stella’ – the daughter of a household servant – when he himself was a mere secretary, were probably not as clear cut as one might think. One nineteenth-century book of stories about Swift and other Irish wits contains some plausible, if anecdotal, accounts of how he treated his own staff:

Swift’s manner of entertaining his guests, and his behaviour at table, were curious. A frequent visitor thus described them: He placed himself at the head of the table, and opposite to a great pier glass, so that he could see whatever his servants did at the great marble side-board behind his chair. He was served entirely in plate, and with great elegance . . .

The beef once being over roasted, he called for the cook-maid to take it down stairs and do it less. The girl very innocently replied that she could not. ‘Why what sort of a creature are you,’ exclaimed he, ‘to commit a fault which cannot be mended?’ . . . [and observed to his neighbour] that he hoped ‘as the cook was a woman of genius, he should by this manner of arguing, be able, in about a year’s time, to convince her she had better send up the meat too little than too much done’.
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Swift also famously held a saturnalia modelled on the Roman festival in which slaves would be served by their masters, as a gesture of humility before the Roman gods, but when a manservant sent back the meat just as Swift was apt to do, it caused him to fly into a temper and chase the servants from the room. Swift himself started life in the service of Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey and, according to Temple’s nephew, who disliked him, he was not in those days allowed to dine with the family. This throws an interesting light on the psychology behind his satire.
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The real-life issues of the day are perhaps reflected more accurately in the letters of Elizabeth Purefoy, the mistress of Shalstone, a moderately sized establishment in Buckinghamshire. They contain numerous references to servants getting into unfortunate scrapes, either petty theft or unwanted pregnancy, such as the one for 3 May 1738: ‘’Tis not my dairy maid that is with child but my cookmaid, and it is reported our parson’s maid is also with kinchen [i.e. child] by the same person who has gone off & showed them a pair of heels for it. If you could help me to a cook maid as I may be delivered from this, it will much oblige.’
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The following year she is driven by similar circumstances to write to a Mr Coleman: ‘About 6 weeks ago, I hired one Deborah Coleman who tells me you are her father. I am sorry to tell you that she is very forward with child. She denied it and I was forced to have a midwife to search her, upon which she confessed it was so, and by Mr Launder’s manservant whom she lived with.’
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By 1743, Mrs Purefoy had become more circumspect in her hirings: ‘am obliged to you for enquiring after a maid, & if her living at home in a public house has not given her too great an assurance to live in a civilised private family, I think there will be a probability of her doing’.
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Unwanted
pregnancies seen to have been a perpetual hazard for young maidservants, and then for their employers too.

It was the duty of every mistress to manage a happy household, and misery ensued if she could not. Lord Cowper wrote to his troubled wife Mary on 5 June 1720:

As vexatious as your very naughty servants have been to you, I am glad you could so far forget their ill behaviour, as to omit it in your former letters: you find turning away one, is no example to mend another, or prevent ye like offence, as you imagined it would . . . the only way to govern them, is to make them so content with their places, yt shall fear turning away; otherwise we hav no restraint upo[n] them.

Lord Cowper went on to remind his wife of the negative impact of too-frequent criticism: ‘Their places are good, but they are often so sharply reproached for small faults, yt they grow desperate, hate their places, & so become very easy to comit great [ones].’ He noted that the servants ‘do not, as I observe, use me or anyone so very ill, as they do ye.’ However, he concluded it was up to her to ‘turn em away & take em at your pleasure, & when you have [th]em use [th]em as you think fit’.
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The Grand Tour featured largely in the lives of young aristocrats of the period, principally young men, but also women. Usually, these tours were conducted in the company of a supposedly trusted servant and tutor, which could sometimes leave the noble traveller in a vulnerable position. In 1773, Lady Coke wrote home in despair after finding herself in the hands of a dishonest servant, one Diehans: ‘Think of my distress to be at this distance from England and this Man in my service, who I am obliged in some things to trust, as I have nothing but footmen. I have reason to believe he cheats me in everything.’
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Lord Byron recorded his dissatisfaction with the English servant who travelled with him on the continent:

The perpetual lamentations after beef and beer, the stupid, bigoted contempt for everything foreign, an insurmountable incapacity for acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him, like all other English servants, an encumbrance. I do assure you, the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far), the [dishes] he could not eat, the wines which he would not drink, the beds where he could not sleep.
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The logistics of feeding servants were a continual source of comment, although the management of households on such massive scales must have been challenging. A good picture of the daily life, and especially diet, of a large establishment is revealed in the papers of the Marquess of Kildare (created 1st Duke of Leinster in 1766). His rules for the government of his household, again still referred to as a ‘family’ just as in the seventeenth century, survive in a manuscript version at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland.
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It offers a valuable insight into the richest and grandest household in Ireland of the period – his country house at Carton. It also gives an impression of the busy life of Lady Kildare, at the centre of a whirlwind of demanding people, writing in a letter to her husband: ‘Plagued by servants, worried by the children, my dearest Lord Kildare, I have not been able to sit down and write to you till this minute.’
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The steward was charged, among other things, ‘Not to allow of Cursing and Swearing about the House &c or any riotous Behaviour but everything done in the most quite and regular Manner [and] To see that every Person do their own Business in the proper Manner and times, and if not, to inform Lord or Lady Kildare of it.’ In 1769, Lord Kildare penned a note to the steward: ‘I will not permit any dancing to be in any part of the house without my leave or the Duchess of Leinster’s, which occasions neglect, idleness, drinking.’ The duke wrote another to his English butler on the subject of his pantry, saying that ‘he must not by any means admit the pantry to be a meeting or a gossiping place for the under servants’, which presumably means that it was.
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Most interestingly, Kildare’s ‘rules for the feeding of the Family’, in the absence of Lord and Lady Kildare, set out mealtimes and fare. Good provision for servants was not only a statement of the wealth and patronage of the household but a matter of good administration, as underfed servants could hardly be expected to perform well.

The upper servants (steward, housekeeper, clerk of the kitchen, personal maids and valets) dined in the steward’s hall at 4 p.m., on ‘Mutton and Broth, Mutton Chops, Harrico or Hashed, Roast or boiled Pork with Pease Pudding and Garden things, Stakes, Roast, or boiled Veal with Garden things when veal is killed at Carton’. Once
a week there would be mutton or beef pie; on Sunday, roast beef and plum pudding. ‘Particular care must be taken that all meat is well and cleanly dressed and good of the kind.’
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The servants’ hall – meaning the lower servants – dined at one o’clock on ‘boiled Beef, Cabbage and Roots, every Sunday to have a Piece of Beef Roasted and Plum Pudding, or any other kind of Pudding’. Thursdays were boiled mutton or pork, with vegetables, and for supper there would be bread and cheese. Salted fish was served once a week, on Friday, possibly in deference to the Catholicism of some of the servants.
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Each person who supped in the servants’ hall was given a pint of ale, a common practice in country houses all over the British Isles until the end of the nineteenth century. Whilst there were different regulations about the provision of ale, small beer, which was much weaker, was available to all, ‘no Person of the Family to be refused . . . as much as they shall drink’, between breakfast and 6 p.m. Beer was regarded, as in the medieval and Tudor eras, as a kind of liquid bread, as ordinary water was then unhealthy to drink.
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When the Kildares were based at Leinster House, their town house, the smaller number of servants left behind at Carton were on ‘board wages’, which meant that their salaries were adjusted to reflect the fact that they had to supply their own meals but could have as much garden produce as they wanted. Married servants were not allowed to live in the house, and the steward was instructed that they were not permitted to eat or drink within its walls ‘except now and then, [and] they and their Wives may be asked to Dinner on Sunday to live in Harmony with them so far as to carry on their mutual business to Lord Kildare’s advantage’.
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The mention of the married servants’ dining arrangements is intriguing, as household servants were more often unmarried in English houses. The English agriculturalist Arthur Young, who had worked as a land agent at Mitchelstown Castle and whose survey of the improvements in architecture and agriculture was published in 1780 as
A Tour in Ireland
, commented on the high incidence of married Irish servants: ‘Marriage is certainly more general in Ireland than in England. I scarce ever found an unmarried farmer or cottier; but it is seen more
in other classes, which with us do not marry at all; such as servants. The generality of footmen and maids, in gentleman’s families, are married, a circumstance we very rarely see in England.’
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In England at this time, there seems to have been a widespread prejudice against employing indoor married servants in English country houses, possibly because of anxiety about divided loyalties, but also to avoid multiplying dependants for the house – and the provisioning of such dependants.

Allowances were given for livery uniforms. From 1 January 1767, footmen at Carton were given 20 shillings a year for ‘a Pair of black Worsted Shag Breeches, for a fine Felt Hat with a Silver Chain Loop and Button, and a Horse Hair Cockade’. It was a case of take it or leave it: ‘Those who do not chuse to accept of it, to let me know that I may discharge them’.
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The duchess’s sister Louisa ran a famously meticulous household at Castletown and once wrote to her sibling: ‘As to servants I think we treat them too much as if they were dependents [sic], whereas I cannot think them so much so, for I am sure they give us a great deal more than we give them, and really if we consider it, ’tis no more than a contract that we make with them.’ This was a gentle reminder to the more conservative sister of the changing nature of the family or household in the traditional sense.
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The presence of the copy of the Kildare regulations at Alnwick Castle is an intriguing little mystery in itself. The castle was much restored as the principal country seat of the Duke of Northumberland in the 1750s and 1760s, when it had been virtually derelict. During this intensive building activity, there were also major attempts to monitor the activities of the servants, and the duke and duchess apparently requested a copy of all the household regulations drawn up for Lord Kildare. The archives contain a series of notes made from the late 1760s through to the 1790s, leading up to a final, all-encompassing version dated 16 August 1805.
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This document may have been modelled on the Kildare Household regulations and was perhaps inspired by the Northumberland Household Book of 1511/12, which was edited and published at about this time.