At Home - Bill Bryson [52]
The senior servant within the household was the butler. His female counterpart was the housekeeper. Below them came the clerk of the kitchen and the chef, followed by an array of housemaids, parlormaids, valets, houseboys, and footmen. Footmen were originally just that—men who trotted on foot beside their master or mistress’s sedan chair or carriage, to look glorious and perform any necessary services en route. By the seventeenth century, they were prized like racehorses, and sometimes their masters raced them against one another for high stakes. Footmen did most of the public jobs in the household—answered the door, served at table, delivered messages—and so were often chosen for their height, bearing, and general dishiness, much to the disgust of Mrs. Beeton. “When the lady of fashion chooses her footman without any other consideration than his height, shape and tournure of his calf, it is not surprising that she should find a domestic who has no attachment for the family,” she sniffed.
Liaisons between footmen and mistresses were popularly supposed to be a feature of some of the more relaxed of the nation’s households. In one well-known case Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell discovered that his wife had been consorting with an Italian nobleman, Count Vittorio Amadeo Alfieri. Ligonier offered a challenge, as honor required, and the two men had a duel of sorts in London’s Green Park, using swords borrowed from a nearby shop. They tapped weapons for a few minutes, but their hearts didn’t really appear to be in it, possibly because they knew the capricious Lady Ligonier wasn’t worth spilling blood over, a suspicion she confirmed almost immediately by running off with her footman. This prompted a good deal of appreciative ribaldry throughout the nation and some happy versifying, of which I can offer this couplet:
But see the luscious Ligonier
Prefers her post boy to her Peer
Life for servants wasn’t all bad by any means. The big country houses generally were lived in for only two or three months a year, so for some servants life was long periods of comparative ease punctuated by seasons of hard work and very long hours. For town servants, the opposite was generally the case.
Whether in the country or in town, servants were warm, well fed, decently attired, and adequately sheltered at a time when those things meant a good deal. It has been calculated that, when all the comforts are factored in, a senior servant enjoyed a salary equivalent to £50,000 in today’s money. Additional perks were generally also available for those ingenious or daring enough to seize them. At Chatsworth, for instance, beer was piped from the brewhouse to the house in a pipe that ran through Joseph Paxton’s great conservatory. At some point during routine maintenance it was discovered that an enterprising member of the household had, equally routinely, been tapping into it.
Servants often made pretty good money from tips, too. It was usual when departing from a dinner party to have to pass a line of five or six footmen, each expecting his shilling, making a dinner out a very expensive business for everyone but the servants. Weekend guests were expected to be lavish in their tips, too. Servants also made money from showing visitors around. A custom arose in the eighteenth century of providing tours to callers if they were respectably dressed, and it became common for middle-class people to visit stately homes in much the same way they do today. In 1776, a visitor to Wilton House noted that she was visitor number 3,025 that year, and it was still only August. Some properties received so many sightseers that arrangements had to be formalized to keep things under control. Chatsworth was open on two designated days a week, and Woburn, Blenheim, Castle Howard, Hardwick Hall, and Hampton Court similarly introduced opening hours to try to limit the throngs. Horace Walpole was so plagued with visitors to his house, Strawberry