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

by Stella Tillyard

  When meal-times came round servants made for different rooms according to their rank. At the ‘second table’ in the steward’s parlour sat the higher servants and any guests they might have. The wet nurse and all the maids dined in the stillroom, while the other servants headed for the servants’ hall or the kitchen. Though meals were snatched, food was plentiful and loaded with good cuts of meat. The Duke was careful to prescribe a hearty diet for his workforce and eager to impress visiting stewards or factors with the quality of his servants’ table. ‘Particular care must be taken that all meat is well and cleanly dressed and good of the kind.’ Servants dined at one o’clock if the family was in residence, at four if they were away. On Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday they ate ‘boiled beef, cabbage and roots’. On Thursday they were given ‘boiled mutton with turnips etc, if convenient, or boiled pork, pease pudding and potatoes instead of mutton’. Friday was a fish day, in deference to the religion of the vast majority of Carton employees; usually it was salt fish with potatoes and cheese. On Sunday they enjoyed ‘a piece of beef roasted and plumb pudding or any kind of pudding’.

  Supper, served between nine and ten, was bread and cheese: a quarter of a pound of cheese for each servant, with a pat of butter for the men. While the servants waited for supper the butler or the clerk of the kitchen held a roll call, checking off the servants’ names against a list. After supper the servants’ hall was supposed to be locked, but secluded as they were in their own wing of the house, it was easy for servants to flout the Duke’s orders. Sometimes there was gaiety, drinking and dancing. House parties in the main part of the house meant parties for servants too. Ladies’ maids, valets de chambre and coachmen all came with their employers to house parties and they brought with them bustle and fun, new faces for intrigue and fresh material for gossip. In the turbulent summer of 1769, when every post and every visitor seemed to bring bad news, the servants’ merriment was too much for the Duke, and he sent his steward a curt note. ‘I will not for the future permit any dancing to be in any part of the house without my leave or the Duchess of Leinster’s, which occasions neglect, idleness and drinking.’

  Almost every year, to the delight of the staff left behind, the Duke and Duchess left Carton. If Emily was about to lie in she went to Leinster House in Dublin, where she remained for the birth of her child and her month-long confinement. Sometimes Parliament was sitting. Sometimes (though less and less) they went to England. With the state rooms closed and the family away, the housekeeper and her charges had little to do; they might mend and sew, she sometimes showed visitors around. But life slowed and they were able for a few weeks to ape their mistress’s habits, getting up after sunrise and eating dinner in the afternoon.

  When the family were away, Carton servants dined at four o’clock, even later than their employers. They ate the very best that the Carton kitchen gardens offered, feasting like merchants or squires on melons and peas and jugs of milk and cream. ‘Dinner to be on the table at exactly four o’clock. To consist of one or two dishes such as roast or boiled [beef] with garden things, mutton and broth, mutton chops, harricot or hashed roast or boiled pork with pease pudding and garden things or steaks roast and boiled, veal with garden things when veal is killed at Carton. Once a week to have mutton or beef pie and on every Sunday roast beef and plumb pudding or any other kind of pudding. Supper and breakfast to be of such meat as is left at dinner, either cold hashed or broiled as they like adding some potatoes or any kind of garden stuff, cheese or eggs.’

  While they ate, everybody drank. Ale, strong and dark, was served, a pint to each servant. Throughout the day, from the time the breakfast bell rang, servants could drink unlimited quantities of small beer, a very weak, pale beer brewed for refreshment rather than nourishment or intoxication. Those whose duties were hot or demanding were given extra rations. The cook had a quart of ale at eleven o’clock and at two o’clock, laundry maids had a quart twice a week and the wet nurse a pint at night.

  The rules which the Duke laid down for the government of his household conjured up an imaginary scene of order, in which servants came and worked to the ringing of bells, goods were weighed, measured and written up and punctuality and good manners universally cultivated. But try as he might, the Duke could only create a dutiful household on paper. Whenever he lifted his eyes from his desk he saw pilfering, disloyalty and disobedience. Powerless and enraged he would hurry back to his desk and compose lectures to his staff on their professional conduct. ‘The way to perform and get everything done is to be regular and not to do anything but that all the world may know it; for once that anything is done that Lord or Lady Kildare is not acquainted with, and should be displeased if known, he puts himself in the power of others and then all authority is over and not to be got again.’

  For higher servants such disquisitions might have served some purpose. With lower servants it was useless, despite ringing calls to loyalty: they worked for the money, the food, the lodgings and the social life. The Duke disciplined them with threats of punishment and dismissal. ‘Carton Dec. 23 1764. I desire that the shepherd be stopped sixpence for every sheep and lamb that is found in the plantations and that he goes round the fences everyday to see that they are not broke or damaged. If they are he is to put a hurdle or bushes in the place and give notice immediately to the office when they are broke or damaged, for no excuse will be allowed for the sheep getting in. Signed K.’ ‘Jan. 10 1767. I desire that after this day Mary Kelly (commonly called Cocker Kelly) be not admitted within my park gates without my order in writing … If I find she has been admitted I will stop half a crown from the Gate Keeper at whose gate she has got in and if I cannot find out, from each gate keeper half a crown.’

  The disorder continued. Footmen, young and unmarried, were spotted loitering without leave in the countryside; other undesirable women, Anne Strong and Mary McDannatt, got into the park against orders. Labourers pretended to be sick or left without explanation. Carters, allowed five and a half hours for the journey between Carton and Leinster House in Dublin, unaccountably took longer, throwing the Duke into a rage and bringing down heavy fines on their heads. He suspected that they diverted their carts between leaving Dublin and arriving home. Despite the rules and regulations, the ringing of bells and the docking of pay, the Duke felt barely in command. Sometimes he lost control of himself, too, and his anxiety about the estate peeped wickedly out from behind his unbending, authoritarian prose. At the end of an angry letter to Mr Brown at the home farm he wrote: ‘I expect these things all done and not altered or changed without my being first acquainted with it, as I shall lay all blame upon you and will take no excuse for neglect.’

  Cumbersome, leaky and above all expensive, the household at Carton creaked through the years like an ageing man-of-war, industrial in its scale and cost, a centre of employment and production that had few parallels for size and scope. When major works were under way two or three hundred people might be employed there (although the permanent members of the household, employers and staff numbered about a hundred); even the largest linen manufacturies in the country had not yet grown to that size. Only armies and fighting ships, with their crews of four hundred, were bigger.

  When there was serious trouble at Carton among the servants, Emily sometimes came to their rescue. Interceding with her husband to save their jobs, she was like a monarch issuing a royal pardon, or at least a temporary stay of execution, to an unfortunate subject. Sometimes, too, she turned her extravagant attention to details of household management. These bouts of interest in domestic economy usually occurred when her husband was away and time lay a little heavy on her hands, as it did after the birth of her daughter Sophia late in 1762, when she spent £150 (about the annual salary of a middle-ranking government servant) on linen. ‘You don’t imagine, I hope, that I have been buying any fine suits of damask linen for the £150; none but useful and necessary things I assure you, such as coarse sheets of two sorts, children’s sheets, a few fine ones for ours
elves, coarse table linen for the steward’s parlour, pantry linen, … beef cloths and mutton cloths which Stoyte said were wanting.’ ‘The table cloths are not bought yet, so I wish you wou’d bring over some of that pretty kind, of a proper size for a table for six, which is what we most want; two for a table of ten would not be amiss, and ten of the others … Napkins we also want, about eight dozen will do. We have not a napkin or a table cloth in the world that I have not examined, and I am a perfect mistress of the state of our linen at present.’

  Such impulses towards household management usually ended up as yet another contribution to the Duke’s mountain of debt. As Louisa put it to Emily after a spending spree, ‘you was never famed for your economy.’ Over at Castletown things were very different. Louisa not only played a considerable part in running her household but she also thought carefully about the relationship between servants and their employers.

  Louisa regarded social differences, exemplified in the positions of mistress and servant, as part of the divine plan. Her strong faith in God’s power was balanced by a belief that the universe was rationally ordered and thus that God’s purpose fitted in with modern ways of thinking. God created high and lowly, she said, in order that the exalted, like herself, should display their benevolence and in order that all ranks of society could perform their reciprocal duties. Difference was created so that man could show himself good in accommodating it. ‘The little circumstance you tell me about servants, I quite agree with you in,’ she wrote to Sarah in 1772, ‘for certainly the not letting a person feel leur dépendance may be done without taking them out of their station; for it depends on the delicacy of your manner more than in what you require them to do and surely ’tis due to them, … for what merit have we in being placed above them?’ None, she went on, for ‘my opinion has always been that the difference we see in the station of human creatures (certainly all made for the same purpose) was never intended for the indulgence of some and the dependence of others, but for the use of calling forth our good qualities and the exertion of our several duties … As to servants I think we treat them too much as if they were dependents, whereas I cannot think them so much so, for I am sure they give us a great deal more than we give them, and really, if we consider it, ’tis no more than a contract we make with them.’

  As she often did in her letters, Louisa was thinking aloud. The notion that social class was ordained was conventional (and convenient) enough; the idea that servants, though humble, were not dependent, that indeed the dependence was the other way round, was much less commonplace. With it Louisa edged towards the opinion that servants were people who offered their services freely for a reward, not simply an anonymous class pre-ordained to live in servile dependence upon the rich.

  This sort of reasoning could make employer-servant relationships personal as well as contractual. Unequal though the relationships between servants and their mistresses remained, they were also personal in Lennox households. Caroline’s maid Milward lived with her, first at Goodwood and then at Holland House, all her life, and Caroline often wrote about her (sometimes in anger but always with engagement). Mr and Mrs Fannen, steward and housekeeper at Holland House, became personal friends, not accepted in the drawing-room but consulted, visited and above all needed. Equally, Emily’s housekeeper in the 1770s and 1780s, Mrs Lynch, became as Emily put it, ‘a second mother’ to her children. As Louisa suggested, it was the mistresses rather than the servants whose dependence was greater. Mrs Lynch and the Fannens had contracts to provide services for money and with that their duties ended. Caroline and Emily had a duty to pay and to respect their servants, but they also built up an emotional dependence which did not end with their employees’ contracts. When the Fannens retired after a lifetime of service in 1766, it was Caroline who felt the blow most severely. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Fannen grew infirm and old; were, as ’tis very natural, desirous of a house; they have a small, neat house just this side of Kensington. He is still steward and manages all, and she is to the full as great a comfort to me as when she lived with me. Her health is good and she will, with the quiet life she now leads, I hope be a stout old woman, and last years. I frequently walk to see her; sometimes one of my sons and I dine with her [in her] snug. She always comes if I want her, which I do when I want to alter, change or settle anything in the house with regard to servants’ furniture etc.’

  Louisa never had this kind of intimacy with her housekeepers or maids. Instead, as Caroline disapprovingly noticed, she ran a household that was informal from top to bottom. Tom Conolly, mindful of the welfare of his precious hunters and racehorses, was on easy terms with his trainers and grooms. On feast days Louisa and Conolly shared their servants’ merriment, dancing with them in the servants’ hall. Outside Louisa was actively involved in the management of the home farm. While the harvest was gathered in the autumn of 1796, she wrote to Tom: ‘we have finished that immense stack of oats … in the barnyard, and yet could not put up all the corn, so that another small stack (or rather cock) will be made today … and by two o’clock I hope every grain of corn will be at home.’

  Louisa was the only one of the family interested in day-today domestic management. Watching the haystack rise or noting a fall in the price of tea were as much a part of her everyday life as reading or writing in the long gallery. As she strode about, dressed in her heavy-grey or brown-serge walking clothes, shadowed by her dog Hibou, she rubbed shoulders with her servants constantly. When some of them supported the Irish rebellion in 1798 she felt a sense of personal betrayal. She could not understand that betrayal was almost inevitable because they were servants and she the mistress, because they were poor and she was rich, because they were Irish and she was English, a Protestant and a colonist. In her response to betrayal, she unwittingly demonstrated the truth of her pronouncement of thirty years before, that she was more dependent upon her servants than they on her.

  Louisa did everything she could to show herself a conscientious mistress of her household. Besides going out and about amongst her tenants and servants, she regularly stayed indoors checking and cross-checking the Castletown accounts. At Castletown there were accounts for everything: there were tradesmen’s receipt books, servants’ wages books, books that showed the costs of Conolly’s hounds, dairy accounts, books showing taxes paid and due, monthly, quarterly and yearly account books which tabulated all the household disbursements and, finally, memoranda of quantities of food bought and consumed in selected years. Louisa went over them all.

  Running Castletown, with its 46 servants, over 90 hearths, three four-wheeled carriages, running water and constant improvements, was a costly and time-consuming business. Louisa’s steward discharged between two and fifteen bills every day. Outgoings accelerated towards the end of each month when accounts were made up. Monthly, quarterly and annual accounts tabulated expenditure into categories – foodstuffs, wages, apothecaries supplies, taxes, charitable donations and so on. Totals varied more according to extraordinary expenses and personal extravagance than to rises or falls in prices and consumption of ordinary goods although, towards the end of the century, a bout of inflation did mean higher prices. Aside from building expenses and Conolly’s personal spending (mainly on horses and gambling) Castletown and a Dublin house cost between £2,500 and £3,000 a year to run. The accounts for the year 1787, typical in that Louisa rarely left Castletown except to go to Dublin in the spring and typical too in that building work was in full swing, show how the total was reached.

  In 1787, £656 was spent on servants’ wages, £254 on their clothes, £221 on ‘Dublin bills’ and £400 on charities. Louisa’s personal expenditure came to £321, ‘sundries’, which were regular but uncategorisable expenses like polishing the Castletown banisters and cleaning the clocks, came to £107. Food and drink added considerably to the total. Marketing and groceries cost £210 and ‘country bills’ for flour, wheat, oatmeal, peas, butter, candles and letter carriage came to £354. Some £202 was spent on the barley, malt and hops used for
brewing, £445 on wine and £598 on oxen, cows, sheep and hogs. The year’s total, as Louisa calculated it, ‘£2956:11:7½’, was made up with £77 on servants’ travelling expenses, £42 on ‘physicians and drugs’ and £195 on ‘extraordinaries’.

  Into the category of ‘extraordinaries’ went part of whatever building and decorating was done at Castletown that year. Thomas Conolly often discharged a proportion of these costs and his payments were entered into his own, irregularly kept personal account books. In 1787, when Louisa was forty-four, several new buildings were put up at the home farm. Louisa described them in a letter to Emily who was in London. ‘My dearest sister, it is really such an age since I wrote to you that I expect you to be angry, and yet I hope you won’t … I only comfort myself that your hurry in London had made it less perceivable; and that when you come to eat some of the excellent pork, bacon and ham that I hope our new piggery will afford, the good butter, cream and cheese that our new cow house (I hope) will produce, and the fine beef that our new bullock hovel will (I make no doubt) also furnish, I think you will pardon my neglect of writing, and that my time has been well bestowed. Joking apart, we have engaged in a great deal of building of that sort, which has required my constant attention, being the chief overseer and having, as you know, great amusement in it. I am very proud of having made fifty cheeses this summer, which next year will nearly keep the family in that article, and my dairy is grown quite an object with me.’

  Notwithstanding Louisa’s descriptions of the new buildings as ‘hovels’, they were spacious and expensive, as the ‘extraordinaries’ in the account books show: over 30 tons of slates and more than 30,000 bricks went into them, at costs of £62 os. 8d. and £30 11s. od. respectively. Constructing the buildings cost £222 11s. od.