Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [49]
These areas contribute to the whole, for, after all, what is a palace without its dependencies, and even if the relationships differ from those of earlier centuries, what is a lord without his attendants? In this period, the kitchen offices are divided ever more precisely into numerous separate and supporting spaces for the preparation of food, for cleaning, for the doing of laundry and for providing well-organised stables and coach houses, a process that continues to be refined throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The country house is now, more than ever, a machine for living.
The overall sense of order and stateliness expressed in the architecture of these country houses was, of course, entirely self-conscious. Their scale, detail and symmetry were inspired by the buildings of ancient Rome, and were intended to project an image of status and permanence, but it was always as much a projection of an ideal as it was of a convincing reality. Many older country houses were simply adapted modestly to modern needs (often with the addition of new servants’ wings and stables). The fortunes of many landed families waxed and waned with the times, some bankrupting themselves on ambitious building projects.
The commercial interests of England were spreading over the globe. Agricultural improvements, and the beginnings of the industrial revolution (accompanied by an unparalleled political security compared to that of the seventeenth century), meant that for a lucky few there was money as never before, allowing large landowners to sustain surprisingly large numbers of servants.
The great wealth of these men prompted a visiting Frenchman, François, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, to observe in 1784:
In general, the English have many more servants than we have, but more than half of them are never seen – kitchen-maids, stable-men, maidservants in large numbers – all of them being required in view of the high standard of cleanliness. Every Saturday, for instance, it is customary to wash the whole house from attic to basement, outside and in. The servants constitute the main part of the employers’ expenses: they are boarded according to general custom and the food required is immense – they never leave the table and there is a supply of cold meat, tea and punch from morning till night.2
As in earlier centuries, the biggest country houses of this period required a huge body of skilled servants for their running and maintenance, as well as to provide the regular demonstrations of display and deference that an aristocrat expected and required to underline his own prestige. Numerous sets of households rules and regulations were produced in this period, partly in an attempt to control these multitudes, but also resulting from the problems to be expected in managing a large body of staff.
As de la Rochefoucauld suggests, some servants in great houses seem to have lived astonishingly comfortable lives. The wealth and conspicuous consumption of the Georgian country house is captured in a probably apocryphal and certainly preposterous anecdote, related by Horace Walpole, of staying with the Duke of Bedford at Woburn. When a fellow guest dropped a silver coin on the floor, he remarked, ‘Oh, never mind, let the Groom of the Chambers have it,’ to which the duchess replied, ‘Let the carpet-sweeper have it: the Groom of the Chambers never takes anything but gold.’3
Also, with the increase in opportunity for travel came a parallel increase in the availability of new jobs, leading to a greater turnover of staff and a migration of trained personnel, often towards the capital. The chance that life as a servant in a country house offered – for learning new skills, for getting an education and for acquiring some sort of betterment and security, as well as adventure – is exemplified in a very rare document of its kind, written by John Macdonald (1741–96), footman, valet, and sometime butler and steward.4
His vivid memoirs, first printed in 1790, are among the first published accounts of the life