Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

by Stella Tillyard

  Sarah and Louisa chose the subjects for the long gallery decorations together. Their sources were the books of engravings from the antique and from Renaissance painters which were staple fare of gentlemen’s libraries, frequently brought back from the Grand Tour. L’Antiquité expliquée, the books of engravings by the French engraver Montfaucon, provided Louisa and Sarah with many of their originals. They knew it well; Reynolds had used the volumes to provide him with patterns for the jug and serpent-ringed urn in his portrait of Sarah sacrificing to the Graces.

  Sarah and Louisa picked out four engravings from Montfaucon and Reily turned them into oil panels: a marriage ceremony taken from a Roman marble frieze, which showed the bride and groom being prepared for their wedding; the young bride weeping as she leaves her home for the first time; the wife and her first child; and a group of women spinning and preparing cloth. The two remaining panels, derived from engravings of Sir William Hamilton’s collections of Greek vases, showed the daughters of Atlas, captured and taken from their homes by pirates in the service of the King of Egypt because of their beauty and wisdom.

  Together these panels, framed in gold and grouped across the south wall and around the portraits of Tom and Louisa at each end of the room, offered a melancholy commentary upon marriage from the woman’s vantage point. Beautiful and intelligent women captured by barbarians, a daughter mourning her childhood home, a bride nervously awaiting the ceremony and, finally, wives carrying out their marital duties of child-rearing and domestic husbandry – none of these offered a positive gloss on an institution that was central to women’s lives. There are no pictures of courtship, no snuggling couples or classical lovers and no happy family groups. Together they seem to provide an alternative narrative to the publicly joyful union between Tom and Louisa, suggesting at the very least that married life is built on a sacrifice of childhood happiness. Sarah’s bleak vision of her own marriage may, especially by 1775, have contributed to the pessimism of the images; even so, Louisa made no attempt to stop this negative picture taking shape on her walls. On the contrary, she was delighted with the scheme, and even took the lion’s share of the credit for its selection, writing to Emily in June 1777, ‘Mr. Reily is now painting our gallery in a most beautiful way. Sarah’s taste is putting the ornaments together and mine in picking them out so that we flatter ourselves that it must be charming as Mr. Reily executes them so well.’ Discreet as ever, Louisa, even if she was aware of the sad portrait of marriage she was putting up, remained silent about it and never offered a hint about her own interpretation of the pictures.

  As if to take the sting out of the message of the panels, Louisa and Sarah planned a plethora of more lighthearted decorations in the gallery, vignettes, roundels and statues which gestured towards happier aspects of married life at Castletown. Tom Conolly’s passion for sport and its attendant revelries was given ample due. In a niche between the two doors on the south wall stands a busty statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. Dotted round the room are panels showing bacchanalian rites, medallions with Cupid and Bacchus, small paintings of a lion adorned with grape and vine leaves, a lady with silver dishes, a peasant pouring wine from a sack and dancing women.

  Sarah arranged Louisa’s selections in groups, Reily copied them and another decorative artist (perhaps Thomas Ryder) filled in the blanks with leaves, flowers, swags and scrolls. Complementing the allusions to Tom Conolly’s convivial sporting life were indications of Louisa’s more contemplative aspirations: busts of Homer, Venus, Hesiod, Plato, Cicero, Niobe, Sappho and Julius Caesar. Supporting this gallery of distinguished ancients were Pindar, Hesiod (again), Philemon, Gracchus, Cato, Hypocrates, Zeno and Socrates, whose painted eyes gazed out over their heads from medallions on the wall. Opposite them, on the north wall, Apollo and the nine Muses, each surrounded by their props and symbols, stared back. Joining all the figures were layer upon layer of temples, masks, cornucopias, eagles, griffons, leaves, cupids and bows. When Louisa, Sarah and their decorators had finished not a square foot of wall was left uncovered. The paintings surged round niches, over bookcases and up mirrors. They were stopped only by the wainscoting and cornices. The effect was idiosyncratic and amateurish, but it gave the room exactly the informality that Louisa wanted. When it was finally finished at the end of 1775 she wrote delightedly to Emily: ‘’tis the most comfortable room you ever saw, and quite warm; supper at one end and the company at the other and I am writing in one of the piers at a distance from them all,’ adding it ‘really is a charming room for there are such a variety of occupations in it that people cannot be formal.’

  The same desire for informality governed Louisa’s schemes to transform the forbidding flatness of Castletown’s park. Just as she broke up the length of the gallery into several spaces, so she began to fragment the surface outside, putting a shrubbery here, a lake there, creating vistas, walks and flower gardens. In the early 1760s she built herself a ‘cottage’ by the river, a garden house which served some of the same purposes as Waterstone at Carton. The cottage – really a well appointed little house that theatrically declared its modesty – was a place where Louisa went without her servants. Multi-coloured pheasants strutted stiffly about; the Liffey wandered sinuously by.

  Observers came gradually to notice a contrast between this sort of cottage and those beyond the Castletown gates. But Louisa, when it was first built at any rate, saw her cottage as a symbol for a rural idyll whose contrast was with the city and the Court rather than a mean subsistence life. Sitting in her cottage one warm June morning in 1764, when she was twenty years old, she wrote to Sarah (who was still smarting from rumours of her complicity in Susan’s elopement): ‘You say in your letter Do I think there are no liars but in London? I think that there are in every great town and I therefore detest a town and wish to live as little as possible in them. I must only describe to you my delightful pleasant situation. I am sitting in an alcove in my cottage with a park before it, in the wood three quarters of a mile from the house, a lovely fine day, the grass looking very green, honeysuckles and roses in abundance, mignonette coming up, seringa all out, the birds singing, the fresh air all about … my work and my book by me, inkstand as you may perceive and a little comfortable table and chairs, two stands with china bowls, filled with immense nosegays.’ The only thing lacking from this bucolic picture was a rippling stream. The sluggish Liffey had to do the duty of a babbling brook and Louisa soon became impatient with its dilatoriness, calling it ‘my troublesome tho’ beautiful Liffey’, and tried to make the river foam by piling up rocks on its bed. The river continued unperturbed, held up very little by her efforts.

  Castletown and Carton, with their cottages, lakes and shady walks, stood at the centres of complexes of buildings whose scale was industrial rather than domestic. Around the main houses were offices, wash-houses, kitchens, coal-houses, stores, hothouses, ice-houses, potting-sheds and stables. Beyond them stood bakehouses, breweries, the granary, the tannery, the kitchen gardens and, by 1766, at Castletown, ‘very comfortable’ ‘octagon water closets’. In the park of each was a home farm which produced foodstuffs for consumption in the main house. Carton even had in the coach-house courtyard, a carriage wash. This lozenge-shaped arrangement of stone walls enabled the stable boys to reach up and polish the roofs of the Duke and Duchess’s carriages. As they drew up to grand front doors, their hosts, standing on the steps above them, would see the Leinster carriage gleaming from top to bottom.

  Keeping this immense, almost factory-like unit going was the responsibility of its master and mistress and the task of their senior servants, the steward and the housekeeper. Emily and Louisa approached and executed their managerial duties with very different expectations and abilities. Emily was absorbed by her children and bored by household management. Louisa, on the other hand, was a meticulous housekeeper. She prided herself on the efficiency and loyalty of her staff or ‘family’ as they were known. Rich though she was, she worked closely with her housekeeper, butler and steward
to cut costs and keep the household running smoothly. Nothing came in or went out of the house without her acquiescence and she made up the household accounts herself.

  Households like those at Carton and Castletown had a complex command structure. At its apex were the master and mistress themselves. Beneath them came the steward who was both the main household officer and the bridge between the household and the world outside. Under him worked the housekeeper, the butler and the clerk of the kitchen. At Leinster House in Dublin a ‘maître d’hôtel’ took the place of the steward.

  Bere, the Carton steward, was a man of considerable power. He collected rents (often not all that the Duke was owed) and, from the sanctuary of his office on the ground floor of the house, he ran the estate and paid the servants. In his charge were not only his own personal servant but also the pantry boy, the gentleman of the horse and the small army of servants who worked outside: lodge keepers and labourers, the farrier, the miller, the chandler, the brewer, the carters, wheelwrights, smiths, grooms, stable hands and even the shepherd who gazed glassy-eyed over the sheep in the park. The mill, the granary, the brewery and the tannery were all his province. On baking days it was his job to open the mill, weigh the grain as it went in, weigh the flour as it came out and to check those amounts against the weight of the finished loaves, in order to ensure, as the Duke of Leinster himself put it, ‘that nobody has stolen the flour’. In the same way Bere weighed the tallow and the candles into which it was made and he marked each cask of ale and small beer with levels and dates.

  Bere had a heavy ring of keys that denoted other incarceratory duties. Keys to the gates of the park, keys to the mill, the granary, the brewhouse, the chandlery, the smithy, the carpenters’ shop, the stables and the offices: all these had to be unlocked and relocked, their contents checked against pilfering and their floors cleaned and polished. If something broke down – a carriage, a kitchen range or a bell pull – it was Bere’s responsibility to summon the wheelwrights, smiths or handymen and see that it was mended. Coaches and carriages – the heavy four-horse chaise for long journeys, the lighter, more compact landau for jaunts to Dublin and Emily’s beloved one-horse chaise in which she was driven on fine evenings around the Carton grounds – needed constant maintenance; many journeys were interrupted by broken axles or shafts and the Duke was a demanding traveller.

  Day after day, as the huge household worked, ate and played, Bere had to tabulate all that it consumed: numbers of candles used by stable hands, the quantities of loaves, the weight of butter, the barrels of beer and bags of apples. When supplies ran short it was his job to restock the pantry and the stores. Wherever possible supplies came from the Duke’s own tenants who reared cattle and grew grain in the rich lands of county Kildare. Once a month Bere took his accounts to the Duke, who signed them promptly, only to complain later to his wife about the cost of his own extravagance. ‘Bere has not brought near so much money from his circuit as he used to do,’ he complained in 1759, as if this rather than his own expensive habits and schemes for improvement explained the parlous state of his finances.

  In compensation for his arduous duties Bere had a substantial salary, his own servant and a parlour to himself. He lived on a friendly footing with the family and often dined with them. But the Duke took care that Bere remained a servant. He was forbidden to shoot or hunt, he was told ‘not to encourage visitors’ and his first duty was ‘to live always in the country’.

  The housekeeper, the butler and the clerk of the kitchen were collectively responsible for the day-to-day running of the house. The housekeeper took, or anticipated, commands from Emily herself. Her provinces were the laundry and the rooms in the main house. The housekeeper’s maids, divided into upper-house maids and lower-house maids, washed and cleaned, laid fires and made beds. Immediately below the housekeeper in the female hierarchy were the wet nurse (one was more or less continuously resident at Carton in the 1760s), Emily’s own maids and the nursery staff. Lastly, grouped among the lower servants – who were the cleaners and washers rather than the fetchers and carriers – was the plate maid. Her job was to wash the plate in bran and water, and then polish it to a sparkle with lamp spirits, whiten and alcohol. She worked for the butler but came under the housekeeper’s protection.

  The Carton housekeeper was paid £30 a year. She had a maid of her own and, in deference to her gentility, she was in charge of the tea caddies and sugar loaves. After 1762, she also had a bell pull, a luxury which, Emily explained to her husband, had become a necessity because of the laziness of the maids. ‘Mrs. Clarke grumbles sadly about the maids; they won’t get up in a morning and she catches her death with cold going to call them. I have given her leave to have a bell, which she is mighty desirous of, tho’ as I told her it will do no good, and that the only way to make them get up early was to make them go to bed early; that they won’t do – why, because they have nothing to do, and so sit up gossiping and prating – give them work to do, make them mend and make the linen, you’ll find they will be ready enough then to go to bed as early as you please.’

  Working closely with the housekeeper was the butler Stoyte. Stoyte operated from his sanctuaries the pantry and the stillroom, where the plate, linen, tableware, bottles, candles, condiments and groceries in everyday use were stored. The pantry and the stillroom formed the command centre for provisioning the household. Under-servants brought candles there from the chandlery, bread from the bakery and butter from the home farm. Maids carried freshly washed and ironed damask tablecloths and napkins from the laundry. Pantry boys took empty wine bottles out, brought new ones in and replenished the ale casks. Footmen, to the fury of the Duke, hurriedly put on their uniforms there, as guests arrived and bells began to ring. The Duke, aware of the noise and merriment issuing from under the pantry door, once sent the butler a stiff reminder that ‘he must not by any means admit the pantry to be a meeting or gossiping place for the under servants’.

  Such laughter and intrigue were snatched and hurried, at least until the household was settling down for the night. Footmen and other liveried servants had to be in constant readiness to attend the family, as did the Duke’s personal servants, his groom of the chambers and valet. They lurked in corridors and antechambers waiting for a bell or a sign: footmen in the public rooms, the valets de chambre in the family’s bedchambers and dressing-rooms. Eight pounds a year, board and lodging and an allowance for their splendid uniform was their reward. Not surprisingly it was a job for young men; married men could not live in the house and, besides, one of the job’s few compensations was the after-hours social life.

  In the late 1760s Carton footmen wore black worsted shag breeches, tailored coats and fine felt hats with a silver chain loop, a button and a horse-hair cockade. Thus attired they waited on family and guests alike, expecting from the latter handsome tips for their assiduity. The abolition of tips, or vails, cost the Duke £4 a year for each footman by the 1770s, a sum they could add to their wages. Still, they left in numbers, tired of the drudgery, moving on to other houses perhaps or departing for matrimony and family life. In a desperate attempt to keep his servants with him the Duke introduced a bonus scheme in the 1760s, adding a year’s wages to the pay packets of those who would stay with the household for five years.

  If the pantry was one social centre for servants, the others were the kitchen and the servants’ hall, run by the clerk of the kitchen, the cook, the confectioner (a specialist sweetmeat and pudding maker recruited in France) and their staff. It was the duty of the clerk of the kitchen to make sure that all the Carton servants, both indoor and outdoor who lived in the house, got fed. Married servants who took board wages to pay for their board and lodgings elsewhere – outside the gates in Maynooth, for the most part – were only fed on Sundays, ‘to live in harmony’ with the rest of their workmates.

  Planning, ordering and co-ordinating meals was a complicated business. Like much of the work around the house, meals were timed by the ringing of bells and they were ea
ten in shifts and at different times according to circumstance and season. A simple rule of thumb prevailed: the lowlier the servants the earlier they ate because the earlier they began work.

  For those at the bottom of the heap, the Carton labourers, the day began as soon as the sun crept up above the park gates. ‘It is my orders,’ the Duke wrote in 1765, ‘that all the workmen and labourers do come to work as soon as day in the morning, at which time the bell is to ring as warning and a quarter of an hour after that time to go to work; the bell to ring at nine o’clock for them to go to breakfast; quarter past ditto to go to the place of work, and twenty minutes past ditto to go to work. The bell to ring at one o’clock for them to go to dinner, half an hour past ditto for them to go to their place of work and three quarters past ditto to go to work and to work as long as they can see till further orders from me … NB any workmen or labourers that don’t conform to these orders let them be discharged.’

  From daybreak to dusk with only an hour and five minutes rest was a punishing stint, even allowing for the Duke’s anger being in proportion to his failure to enforce the rules. Other servants, particularly upper-servants in the public and family rooms of the house, had a better time. They too rose early, to set and light fires, and to clean rooms before their master and mistress got up for breakfast. But their duties were less exhausting than those of outside labourers or the staff in the kitchen and laundry. For maids and footmen there were times of quiet, after meals, or when the family went out, when they could loiter in anterooms, tell jokes and swap gossip and stories.