Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [34]
The fortunes of a whole household could rest very uneasily on the fate of a master or mistress imprisoned for treason in the politically volatile years at the beginning of the century, or caught up in the civil war. This is illustrated by a tearful letter from Lady Arbella Stuart, a cousin of Charles I, to Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, dated 16 July 1610, shortly after she and her husband, William Seymour, had been arrested after their secret marriage. As both were possible claimants to the English throne, the king’s permission was required for their union. In fact she died in 1615 while still in capitivity.
She writes pathetically of her servants and their uncertain future:
If it please your lordship theare are diverse of my servants with whom I [never] thought to have been parted [from] whilest I lived; and none that I am willing to part with. But since I am taken from them, and know not how to maintain either my selfe or them, being utterly ignorant how it will please his Majesty to deal with me I weare better to put them away [dismiss them] now, than towards winter. Your Lordship knowes the greatnesse of my debts and [my] unablenesse to do for them either now or at Michaelmasse.
Michaelmas was a traditional date from which servants were hired or released from hire. She continues: ‘I beseech your Lordship let me know what hope you can give me of his Majestie’s favour with out which I and all mine must live in great discomfort.’37
The dependent status of household servants was a critical aspect of the loyalty and patronage that they owed to the head of the household, an important nexus of relationships illustrated by the letters and accounts of the richest landed proprietor of the Protestant settlement of Ireland in the early seventeenth century. Richard Boyle, the 1st Earl of Cork, was a Kent-born adventurer who built up a considerable estate in Munster, centred on Lismore Castle, which has passed by descent to the Duke of Devonshire.
In 1640, Boyle’s annual income from these estates was probably around £8,000; during the period 1629–39 he was the lord justice and lord treasurer of Ireland. Whilst an extraordinarily astute politician, he experienced great insecurity, on the one hand being persecuted by the lord deputy Wentworth, and on the other subjected to an armed siege by forces led by the Irish Catholic gentry in 1641. He died in 1643.38
Lismore Castle, an ancient bishop’s palace, which he adapted rather than rebuilt, has changed out of all recognition from its seventeenth-century form. In Cork’s time the house is known to have been richly furnished, with extensive silver. Typically for a late-sixteenth- or seventeenth-century household of status, the quantity of servants was an expression of status in itself, as well as supporting the exercise of power (which took on an extra significance, being part of the Protestant settlement).
Some flavour of the life of this still peripatetic household is given in a manuscript set of brief regulations for the earl’s English house, in Dorset, A Form for the Government of the Earl of Cork’s Family at Stalbridge, which was built in the 1630s. The regulations are signed by Thomas Cross, his steward, and include reference to daily household prayers:
1. First, All the Servants except such as are Officers or are otherwise employed shall meet every morning before Dinner, and every night after Supper, at Prayer.
2. That there be lodgings fitting for all the Earl of Cork’s servants to lie in the house.
3. That it shall be lawful for the Steward to examine any Subordinate Servant of the whole Family concerning any Complaint or Misdemeanour committed, and to dismiss and put away any inferior Servant that shall live dissolutely and