Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [68]
Swift also famously held a saturnalia modelled on the Roman festival in which slaves would be served by their masters, as a gesture of humility before the Roman gods, but when a manservant sent back the meat just as Swift was apt to do, it caused him to fly into a temper and chase the servants from the room. Swift himself started life in the service of Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey and, according to Temple’s nephew, who disliked him, he was not in those days allowed to dine with the family. This throws an interesting light on the psychology behind his satire.28
The real-life issues of the day are perhaps reflected more accurately in the letters of Elizabeth Purefoy, the mistress of Shalstone, a moderately sized establishment in Buckinghamshire. They contain numerous references to servants getting into unfortunate scrapes, either petty theft or unwanted pregnancy, such as the one for 3 May 1738: ‘’Tis not my dairy maid that is with child but my cookmaid, and it is reported our parson’s maid is also with kinchen [i.e. child] by the same person who has gone off & showed them a pair of heels for it. If you could help me to a cook maid as I may be delivered from this, it will much oblige.’29
The following year she is driven by similar circumstances to write to a Mr Coleman: ‘About 6 weeks ago, I hired one Deborah Coleman who tells me you are her father. I am sorry to tell you that she is very forward with child. She denied it and I was forced to have a midwife to search her, upon which she confessed it was so, and by Mr Launder’s manservant whom she lived with.’30 By 1743, Mrs Purefoy had become more circumspect in her hirings: ‘am obliged to you for enquiring after a maid, & if her living at home in a public house has not given her too great an assurance to live in a civilised private family, I think there will be a probability of her doing’.31 Unwanted pregnancies seen to have been a perpetual hazard for young maidservants, and then for their employers too.
It was the duty of every mistress to manage a happy household, and misery ensued if she could not. Lord Cowper wrote to his troubled wife Mary on 5 June 1720:
As vexatious as your very naughty servants have been to you, I am glad you could so far forget their ill behaviour, as to omit it in your former letters: you find turning away one, is no example to mend another, or prevent ye like offence, as you imagined it would . . . the only way to govern them, is to make them so content with their places, yt shall fear turning away; otherwise we hav no restraint upo[n] them.
Lord Cowper went on to remind his wife of the negative impact of too-frequent criticism: ‘Their places are good, but they are often so sharply reproached for small faults, yt they grow desperate, hate their places, & so become very easy to comit great [ones].’ He noted that the servants ‘do not, as I observe, use me or anyone so very ill, as they do ye.’ However, he concluded it was up to her to ‘turn em away & take em at your pleasure, & when you have [th]em use [th]em as you think fit’.32
The Grand Tour featured largely in the lives of young aristocrats of the period, principally young men, but also women. Usually, these tours were conducted in the company of a supposedly trusted servant and tutor, which could sometimes leave the noble traveller in a vulnerable position. In 1773, Lady Coke wrote home in despair after finding herself in the hands of a dishonest servant, one Diehans: ‘Think of my distress to be at this distance from England and this Man in my service, who I am obliged in some things to trust, as I have nothing but footmen. I have reason to believe