Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [52]
Macdonald went on to work for the Earl of Crawford, but this position soured when the countess took a liking to him, remarking at one point, ‘certainly he is . . . some nobleman or gentleman’s bastard.’ Even though he had rescued the Crawfords from a fire in 1757, he still felt he had to move on. In 1760 he returned to Hamilton’s service as a bodyservant but he remarks: ‘I did not know the value of luck, nor of money. Coming into two such plentiful families, I thought the whole world was the garden of Eden.’
A recurring problem was that he was ‘put out of my latitude by contrary winds – I mean women’.19 Lady Anne ‘turned off [dismissed] the house-keeper, chambermaid, and her own god-daughter, when she thought there was any love between them and Jack’. Mr Hamilton himself began to fear some intrigue, although Macdonald professes his innocence. Yet some understanding could exist between master and servant; there is an illuminating moment when he and Hamilton are riding near Kilburnie, and Hamilton asks him: ‘Have you not a child in this parish?’ Macdonald replies: ‘Yes, sir, in that village before you.’ Hamilton makes the quiet rejoinder: ‘Well, you may go and see him: I shall ride gently on.’20 It is difficult to imagine such a conversation even a hundred years later.
Macdonald’s life story is instructive on many levels, not least because this was a key period for the establishment of the footman as the conspicuous, gorgeously liveried manservant. Although footmen continued to be a familiar feature of country-house life throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is in the Georgian era that they reach their peak as an item of display in entrance halls and dining rooms – serving at the table where the aristocracy spent such vast sums on entertaining – as well as ornamenting expensively appointed family carriages in town.
It is thought that the word ‘flunkey’ (apparently derived from the word ‘flanker’) was first used early in the eighteenth century as a term for the ostensibly useless and ornately dressed decorative servant, footmen in particular. More than any other such group, they seem to have irritated tradesmen and townsfolk who considered them idle and scornful, possibly because they were (unfairly) seen as superfluous. As we have seen from Macdonald’s earthy memoir, the footman’s role could be multi-layered, to encompass specialist cleaning and manual duties, as well as physical attendance. A footman was chiefly required to attend at table under the supervision of a butler, and to help with the cleaning of glass and silver, but he must also run messages and act as a quasi-bodyguard.21
In his perceptive and mordant work Directions to Servants (published in 1745, but written somewhat earlier), the cleric and satirist Jonathan Swift summed up the characteristic self-possession of footmen of the period, conscious of their fine appearance and gaudy plumage. However, it also revealed the surprising complexity of their duties, for in laying bare the common faults of all servants, he devotes the greatest space to the footman.22
Swift tartly addresses the footman thus: ‘Your employment being of a mixed nature, extends to a great variety of business, and you stand in a fair way of being the favourite of your master or mistresses.’ Therefore, he says, ‘you are the fine gentleman of the family, with whom all the maids are in love’. He pertly notes that footmen learn from observing the lives of the aristocracy at close hand, while other servants were not given such close exposure: