Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [41]
Sir Ralph’s son Edmund (known as Mun, who died in 1688) had famously less straightforward relationships with his servants. His chief servant, Nurse Curzon, was described as ‘old, crazy and decayed, and hath more need to have one to look to her, than to look after others’. Edmund was made indignant by servants’ petty thefts: ‘I caused my little boy Thom Warner to be whipped againe this morning for more faults than this sheet will contain, viz picking pockets, opening Boxes that were lockt, picking locks, stealing, lying etc.’74
However, Mun himself was not above having affairs with three women in his own household, and sired at least one child by a servant. Indeed, the mother of one of his illegitimate offspring, one ‘Mathew Verney’, was the wetnurse to his own children. Mun left her a house and income in his will.75 John Verney, the eventual heir to Sir Ralph, is said in his turn to have fathered a child with a servant while a young man.76 Those familiar with Samuel Pepys’s diary will need no reminding of the vulnerability of maidservants to the repeated attentions of their masters.77
Whilst at the end of the seventeenth century many of the servants in the Verney household may have been recruited locally, some migrated to London to improve their opportunities. In 1695, the coachman who worked for John Verney, Sir Ralph’s heir, gave notice ‘not to get a better place, but . . . to set up a hackney coach and drive it himself’. John added, in a revealing aside that could have been written in 1895, ‘His wife is a proud woman and he hath a little of it himself, and they think it below ’em to be a servant.’78
Although the civil war and the Commonwealth may not have changed country-house life overnight, during that period political attention was shifted away from the great households and their country seats, to focus instead on Parliament, London and the court. After the Restoration, the London season is born, following the rhythm of the sittings of Parliament and the location of the court; it was then that the landowner would spend time in the capital and, indeed, invest dizzying sums on his social life there.
The account books of the Earl of Bedford, based at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, show that he still maintained a considerable household at the Restoration, and spent money with the intention of reasserting some of the social prestige and courtliness of the aristocracy, which had been suspended under the Commonwealth. Some relate to the earl’s presence in the procession attending the king’s return after the Commonwealth in appropriate – and highly expensive – glamour, an illustration of the display felt necessary after the years of Commonwealth austerity.79
As it began to expand, there is a sense of the household at Woburn Abbey being gently revived in the same hopeful spirit as the procession of 1660. The account books reveal a somewhat traditional hierarchy, with the steward as the senior officer, and a clerk of the kitchen and the house bailiff as his second in commands. The steward, William Baker, was described as a gentleman and was paid £40 per year, twice the wage of the house bailiff. Baker was succeeded in 1668 by Randolph Bingley, who was still there in 1700, an example of the longevity of senior servants. In 1664, the salaries bill for the whole household was £600.
In what was then the established pattern, the steward was in charge of all the household staff, although responsibility for the footmen and pages was shared between the house and the stables, coming under the steward for duties in the house, and the master of the stables for duties relating to coach or horses. A gentleman of the privy purse, with the splendid name of Dixy Taylor, was authorised to make regular small purchases on behalf of his master, such as ‘a coffee-pot, a china dish and coffee’ for £1 2s 2d in 1670.80
There were normally twelve footmen (double the number listed at Knole in the early seventeenth century), paid between £2 and £6 a year. Two or three of them served the family in closer attendance than the others;