Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [38]
Henry Skipwith, Lord Castlehaven’s closest servant, who had much prospered in his master’s service, was born to a father of no set occupation and a mother who distilled ‘hot waters’, yet within a few years he was sitting at a lord’s table. Skipwith was named in the trial as the lover of not only the earl and the countess, but of the earl’s fifteen-year-old daughter-in-law, Lady Audley.
Lord Castlehaven claimed that the charges were a conspiracy and that he had been guilty of nothing more than unusual generosity to his servants; it was certainly unusual to be convicted on the evidence of only your wife and servants: ‘It is my estate, my Lords, that does accuse me this day, and nothing else.’ He and his two menservants were dispatched together in May 1631.55
There may well have been some element of politics involved, as these events took place in the years that led up to the civil war. Although complex in political terms, the conflict did not give birth to a major social revolution of the type that might have set household servants against their employers. In the regions, most of the smaller landowners seem to maintain their traditional allegiances to major local families.56 Similarily, servants in noble households seem to have largely followed the allegiances of their lord and master.
Certainly, household servants often became involved in military actions, not least in the sieges of houses belonging to Parliamentary and Royalist owners equally, as in the famous Basing House siege in 1645, or in the 1643 siege of Brampton Bryan Castle in Herefordshire. The defender of the latter was Lady Harley, whose unusual first name was Brilliana, and who was the wife of a Member of Parliament who under Cromwell was Master of the Mint. This indomitable woman withstood a sustained Royalist offensive at the head of her household servants, with only one military veteran and a Hereford doctor to advise her. Shortly before it took place, she wrote to her son of how her servants were being harassed by soldiers, and during the hostilities she noted the mortal wounding of a household servant: ‘on August 18: our honest cook received a shot through his left arm.’57 He died a week later. The siege was lifted, but brave Lady Harley soon succumbed to pneumonia, after which the house fell to the Royalists.58
In ancient custom, a landowner summoned to bear arms for the king would come at the head of some portion of his household servants, armed for action. An echo of this expectation is suggested by the summons sent by Lord Pembroke and received by Sir Edmund Verney, Knight, of Claydon House, Buckinghamshire on 7 February 1639, which refers directly to the attendance of servants: ‘His Majesty’s royal pleasure is that all occasions set apart you be in readiness in your own person by the 1st of April next at the city of Yorke, as a cuirassier in russett arms, with gilded studs or nails and befittingly horsed, and your servants which shall wait upon you horst in white arms, after the manner of a hargobusier [mounted rifleman], in good equipage.’59 Sir William Russell’s troop included ‘twelve of his servants in scarlet cloaks, well horsed, and armed’. Colonel Edmund Ludlow went to war accompanied by Henry Cole, an old family retainer who had been his father’s groom.60
Claydon House was never attacked, although Sir Edmund’s wife’s old family home at Hillesden was besieged, taken and destroyed by fire. Sir Edmund never returned to his own home and died, reputedly still holding the king’s standard, at the Battle of Edgehill on 23 October 1642. A servant was sent to find his body and bring it home, but was unable to recover it.61
Daniel Defoe’s Memoir of a Cavalier (1724), now thought to be based on an actual seventeenth-century memoir, includes one account of a household of servants acting in concert like a small private army, commanded by their