Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [53]
Footmen were genuinely chosen for their height – ideally, all being roughly the same in that regard – their good looks and ability to look good dressed in the family livery. John Macdonald’s memoir alone indicates the problems that male beauty could cause. In 1711, Joseph Addison furnished an amusing account in the Spectator of a good-looking footman who worked for a captain of the guard and was in the habit of courting women dressed in his master’s clothes. As he observed: ‘the Fellow had a very good Person, and there are very many women that think no further than the outside of a Gentleman; beside which he was almost as learned a Man as the colonel himself, I say, thus qualified, the Fellow could scrawl Billets doux so well, and furnish a conversation on the common Topicks, that he had, as they call it, a great deal of good Business on His hands.’ It was only when the impostor passed his colonel on the stairs of an inn, when each had a lady on their arms, that the game was up.24
Addison makes mention in the same publication of menservants who wait on mistresses at their toilette: ‘I remember the time when some of our well-bred County Women kept their Valet de Chambre, because, forsooth, a man was much more handy about them than one of their own Sex. I myself have seen one of these male Abigails tripping about the Room with a looking glass in his hand, and combing his Lady’s Hair a whole morning together.’25
How times had changed. From having been among the most insignificant servants in the medieval and Tudor household, employed principally to run ahead of a nobleman and his party to announce their arrival, and to deliver messages, the footman had become an outward sign of status, as well as playing a vital role in the management of a great house, whether in the country or in London. As well as travelling on the back of a coach, footmen would walk before a sedan chair and follow close behind when their master or mistress went out on foot. Some households maintained a special ‘running footman’ to run ahead of the coach and announce their master’s passage.26
Being so valued by the rich and so associated in the public imagination with ostentatiousness, footmen were probably the prime target in the tax raised on male servants in 1777, effectively as a luxury, to help raise funds for the war against the American colonists. Even the hair powder they used was subject to an additional tax.27 The 1780 return for this tax of a ‘guinea a head’ suggests that it was levied on some 50,000 menservants although many of them would have been London based. The return also shows that, on average, dukes employed twenty-six male servants and barons fifteen. In 1785, to considerable outcry, these taxes were extended to female servants. In response to objections, the tax was amended for families with children although the tax on menservants technically lasted until the 1930s.28
Numbers of staff varied; in the 1720s, ninety individuals managed Cannons, seat of the Duke of Chandos. Forty years later, eighty-six were required at Blenheim for the Duke of Marlborough, while the Duke of Leinster (formerly Earl of Kildare), the premier peer in Ireland, could command as many as a hundred at Carton in County Kildare. The typical aristocratic or wealthier gentry household would have been staffed by between thirty and fifty, with, at the bottom, wages at £4 a year for a stable boy to, at the top, £1,000 for the steward at Chatsworth.29
The status of servants was reflected by where and with whom they dined. At Cannons, owned by one of the richest noblemen of the day, the arrangements at the beginning of the century were particularly elaborate. The comptroller, Colonel Watkins, dined with the duke, while the chaplains, house steward and librarian would dine in the chaplain’s room.
The gentleman of the horse, in charge of the stables, had his own room where he dined in company with the gentleman usher,