Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [31]
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