Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [61]
There were one or two other rare marriages between the classes worth mentioning. In 1785, Mary Cole, an eighteen-year-old lady’s maid of great beauty, first received the attentions of the 5th Earl of Berkeley and bore him seven children before he married her formally, causing great confusion later over the inheritance, as the title went to the son born after their marriage.86 However, one of her younger sons recalled that she had managed the house with great competence. He wrote: ‘When she found herself mistress of Cranford and Berkeley Castle, with unlimited sway over the domestic establishment, and the command of an entire revenue of the estate, she exhibited extra-ordinary natural talent for management, and unquestionably saved Lord Berkeley a good deal of trouble that he particularly disliked.’87 Sir Henry Harpur of Calke Abbey in Derbyshire married an accomplished lady’s maid in 1792.88
Lady Henrietta Wentworth (the sister of Lord Rockingham) married her footman, John William Sturgeon, in 1764, upon which they withdrew not to France but to Ireland. Horace Walpole in his letters remarked on her legal settlement, which gave her husband £100 a year and entailed the remainder on any children of the union. She had, he said, ‘mixed a wonderful degree of prudence with her potion’.89 Marriages between master or mistress and servant were outnumbered by the illegitimate off spring of similar unions.
The outdoor staff of a country house could be just as critical to the prestige of the country house as the regiment indoors. The stables might be managed by a clerk of the stables (the successor to the gentleman of the horse), who organised the coachmen, grooms and footmen when they were accompanying a coach or a horse. In many households his role might be absorbed into the duties of the coachman, another senior liveried servant who not only had to drive the coach but, along with the other footmen, could act as a bodyguard to the family. His responsibilities extended to the continual maintenance of the horses and the carriages.
In the eighteenth century, the display made by a fine coach and horses of quality, together with the attendant coachman and footmen, was exceptionally important. A visiting American, Benjamin Silliman, wrote in 1805 that ‘One great point of emulation is to excel all rivals in the number of footmen. Some of the coaches had two, three, or even four footmen, standing up, and holding on behind the carriage, not to mention a supernumerary one on the coachman’s box.’90
A coachman would usually be given his livery in addition to his wages. Every second year, Ambrose Campion, the coachman in 1776 to Philip Yorke of Erddig, received a pair of plush breeches, another of buckskin, a waistcoat, a frock greatcoat and boots.91 His work began at 6 a.m., preparing the stables and the horses, and ensuring that the carriage and harness were cleaned and ready for use.92
Tam Youall, coachman to Lady Grisell Baillie at Mellerstain in Berwickshire, was employed as a groom in 1706, at an annual wage of £1 10s, plus his clothes. When he became coachman and moved with the family to London, his annual pay rose to £3. He was still in post in 1740, but was later fined for misconduct or carelessness and injuring another servant when drunk.93
The stables of many country houses had space for many kinds of horses, not only to draw the carriage and for riding, but also for hunting, an increasingly popular sport in the late eighteenth century. The supporting servants were often depicted in paintings by George Stubbs, such as the Hunt servants of Lord Torrington.94 Apart from the twenty-plus stable staff at Holkham Hall in Norfolk in the 1720s, there was a hunt staff, including a fox huntsman with an assistant, a hare huntsman, a whipper-in,