Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [12]
As can be seen from the Paston letters, some deeper attachments occurred between senior servants and ladies of the household. Certainly some stewards were highly ambitious and successful, and marriage into a noble family could help advance their interests. One most famous example is John Thynne, the son of a Shropshire farmer, who was steward to Edward Seymour (later Protector Somerset) and later bought land in his own right. He married the heiress of Richard Gresham and eventually built Longleat. Seymour’s gentleman usher, Francis Newdigate, married the dowager duchess Anne and became MP for Wiltshire in 1559.25
But many senior late-medieval servants would have been deeply devoted to their masters. One such, John Russell, speaks to us across the centuries via a blank verse treatise that he wrote in the 1460s, titled The Book of Nurture. Written in the form of an instructive discourse with an inexperienced but hopeful young man looking for opportunity and advancement through service to a nobleman, it details the duties of servants to a great lord at the time.26 Russell also wrote another treatise titled The Book of Courtesy and both were based on his experience of having spent most of his life in service.
Russell himself says that he learnt all these sciences ‘with a royal prince, to whom I was usher and also marshall’. His master was Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, who died in 1447, the younger son of Henry IV. Duke Humphry, whose library forms the core of the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford, built a much admired palace, Bella Court, later known as Placentia in Greenwich, on the site of which was built the Greenwich Naval Hospital.27
Despite his scholarly interests, Duke Humphry chose to endure the burning heat of court intrigue and politics. He was for a time the Regent of England, yet had to endure the humiliation of having his second wife imprisoned for witchcraft. Shortly afterwards he himself was arrested for treason, dying in captivity a few days later. A trusted, long-serving, able and literate servant such as John Russell would have provided much of the stability and order of Duke Humphry’s life, as well as himself being less subject to the whims of political fortune than any immediate family member.
What sort of man was an usher or a marshal? When the great fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales wrote of the innkeeper of the Tabard who comes up with the idea of the story-telling on the pilgrims’ journey that is the basis of the Canterbury Tales, he describes him as ‘full fit to be a marshal in a hall’; he goes on to depict a man of presence and authority.
Mr Russell must have been just such a person, if perhaps more ascetic and clerical – with a slightly bloodless face, as in the famous portrait of Henry VII. He may well have been highly conservative, as his verse treatise has an unmistakably Jeeves-like tone of amiable, but indefatigable, certainty and authority. Mr Russell’s treatise – which like all such works may itself have been based in part on earlier writings – is effectively a manual of service, outlining the more responsible roles of the noble household in the late fifteenth century, and probably those of the century before as well.
Intriguingly, it was later published in edited form by the entrepreneur early printer, Wynkyn de Worde, as the Boke of Keruynge (1513), which in itself suggests that by the sixteenth century there was a wider market for such manuals of servants’ duties, as wealthier Tudor merchants and officials from non-aristocratic and non-courtier backgrounds took an increasing interest in details of etiquette, which were traditionally passed down in on-the-job training. Indeed, another version was published in 1577, by Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture or Schoole of Good Manners.28
The upper servants of the day were the men who were on show and who had direct physical contact with the aristocrats they served. But while Mr Russell’s account genuinely helps us visualise the roles and activities of great houses, he says little