Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [39]
Many servants fought at their employers’ side, literally standing by men and women to whom they owed loyalty and service, as much as to the cause their masters espoused. There is one particularly moving story recorded in Aubrey’s highly anecdotal Brief Lives, describing a servant’s identification of the corpse of Lucius Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland, killed in 1643 at the Battle of Newbury. The account concludes: ‘The next day when they went to bury the dead, they could not find his Lordship’s body; it was stript and trod-upon and mangled, so there was one that wayted upon him in his chamber would undertake to know it from all other bodyes, by a certaine Mole his Lordship had in his Neck, and by that marke did find it.’ This touching account illustrates more than any other the intimacy of domestic service.63
Exile touched many of the landowning families of England, after the wars subsided. Edmund Verney’s son Ralph, initially a supporter of the Parliamentary cause, took his family with him to France in voluntary exile, returning in 1653. The large number of private letters among the extensive Verney papers are littered with references to the problem of maintaining servants while in exile. Sir Henry Newton wrote to Ralph Verney: ‘I forgott in my last to acquaint you with the parting of my Boy Estienne, Who having of a long time play’d some prankes, made me at last resolve to pay him his arrearages.’ He was rude and openly defied his employers.
Drunkenness was also a problem: ‘though he knew he was complained of, hee was so sencelesse as for a whole afternoon when my wife and I were abroad with a coach to neglect us and bee debauch’d with another lacquay [who] should have been also following the coach.’ The poor feckless child did indeed run away after a beating but he was caught by another servant.64
Lady Verney struggled to keep her favourite maid, Lucy (sometimes Luce), whose brother wanted her to leave service with the Verneys. Lucy confided to her mistrees that her brother had promised to settle ‘seven or eight pounds a year upon [her] for her life and be good to her’ if she agreed to come home, and had threatened that he would disown her if she refused. He was a man of ‘2 or 3 hundred pound a year and scorns that his sister should serve’. This vividly illustrates the shift in the social status of service in noble and gentry households after the civil war.
This state of affairs was vexatious to Lady Verney because Lucy suited her so well, both for coming from a decent background and for not being wealthy in her own right.65 Lady Verney wrote to her husband: ‘for I know I cannot expect ever to have so good a servant again and for my greater trouble he will have her away before Christmas’. She felt she was unlikely to ‘get one that knows how to dress me that will be content to do half the work that she does, for they are all grown so fine that one cannot have any chamber maid that will serve under 4 or 5 pound a year wages at least and besides they will neither wash nor starch’.66
Finding English female domestics when in exile in France had also been a challenge: ‘I know no English maids will ever be content (or stay a weeke) to faire as these servants faire . . . Noe English maide will be content with our diet and way of liveing: for my part, I have not had one bit of Rost meate to dinner.’ Of one possible local maid, Sir Ralph