by Ian Mortimer
If you are one of ‘the poor’ and not a mariner or soldier, you are probably serving as a farm labourer or a servant in someone else’s house. As we have just seen, farm labourers depend entirely on the quality of the harvest. A bad year might result in you not being paid – exactly when food prices are double their usual level. You and your family will have to live on beans or mashed turnips, and make your bread from oats or ground acorns. For this reason, particularly if you are unmarried, you may well be better off if you are employed as a live-in servant in a gentleman’s household. But be warned: ‘employment’ is a relative term here: sometimes servants are not paid for years. And they are often subjected to beatings. Samuel Pepys is not a cruel man by the standards of the time but he thrashes his servants. In 1660 he beats a maidservant with a broom for laying out things incorrectly about the house. The following year, he whips a servant for stupidity after the man puts gunpowder and match in the same pocket. He boxes the ears of one servant boy simply for wearing his cloak slung over his shoulder.32 His female servants can expect a degree of sexual attention, whether they invite it or not. In some houses the master’s sons and male visitors will take advantage of low-status women, safe in the knowledge that, if they are reported for their licentiousness, it will generally be to the servant’s discredit and the loss of her position. If you want to know what life in service is like for many women, think in terms of Cinderella’s daily grind of scouring, scrubbing, washing and polishing from before dawn to late at night – and having to comb the lice out of the hair of a man who regularly beats you and forces you to have sex with him.
The financial rewards for this semi-ritualised mass exploitation of the poor are, as you might expect, minimal. Gregory King’s detailed notes show that he thinks about 150,000–200,000 live-in servants have wages of £3 or more per year, but 350,000–400,000 earn less than this.33 Normally £2 per year plus board and lodging will pay for a chambermaid, a dairy maid or a laundry maid. A housekeeper normally earns £6 or more; a male cook £4; a female cook about £2 5s. Butlers and coachmen earn £3 or more.34 Young boys and girls earn less – often nothing at all – on account of their serving an apprenticeship. The famously miserly Robert Hooke pays his housekeeper Nell Young £4 per annum in 1672, which includes having sex with her; her successors as housekeepers receive just £3.35 Ralph Josselin pays his maidservant £2 10s per year.36 Pepys pays his maidservant Jane Birch £3 per year in 1662 and thinks it a lot of money to pay a woman. The following year he engages a cook’s maid for £4 per year and exclaims that it is ‘the first time that ever I paid so much’.37 While it is possible that tips might increase a servant’s earnings, very few people tip their own servants. Pepys and his guests each give his cook 12d for clearing up after a feast in 1663, but that is largely because they make such a colossal mess.38
All this illustrates why there is no such thing as a ‘servant class’ in Restoration Britain. There is a world of difference between the earl of Bedford’s steward – educated, respected and paid £40 per annum, plus board and lodging – and a menial drudge who is regularly abused and paid just £2. Both are servants, yet the steward is squarely in the third of Defoe’s status groups – the middle sort, along with professional men – while the drudge is in the sixth, ‘the poor’. If it weren’t for the fact that her board and lodging are provided by her master, she’d sink right to the bottom. You can hardly doubt that Defoe is right when he declares that people like her ‘fare hard’.
THE MISERABLE
People do not ignore the miserable. They can’t – because they are everywhere. When John Evelyn visits Ipswich in 1677 and is not pestered by a single beggar, he is astounded and remarks on the fact in his journal as ‘a thing very extraordinary’.39 However, he adds that this is not because there are no beggars in the town: it is because begging is prohibited ‘by the prudence of the magistrates’. The distressing fact is that ‘the miserable’ are not a small minority. In Devon in the 1690s, approximately one-fifth of the population falls into this category, being dependent on poor relief.
As a result of this ubiquity, high-status people discuss the question of poverty on a regular basis. Why do the poor exist? they ask. What should be done about them, for the benefit of society? What should be done for them for their own benefit, if anything?
Daniel Defoe has an answer to the first of these questions. Extreme poverty exists, he believes, for two reasons: casualty and crime. The first means that people end up as penniless beggars and thieves because of a sickness in the family or an accident resulting in the loss of a limb or eyesight. The second reason is that some people are too given over to luxury, sloth or pride to work for a living. As he puts it:
There is a general taint of slothfulness upon our poor; there’s nothing more frequent than for an Englishman to work till he has got his pocket full of money, and then go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till it is all gone, and perhaps himself in debt; and ask him in his cups what he intends, he’ll tell you honestly, he’ll drink as long as it lasts, and then go to work for more.40
As you can see, Defoe does not believe that a shortage of work leads to poverty. He would rather blame the poor themselves for their plight. As a workaholic himself, he is not alone in finding the accusation of laziness a convenient way to remove any vestige of responsibility from his own shoulders. But ‘responsibility’ is a moot point. Who should take responsibility for the poor?
The starting point is the Poor Law Act of 1601, which directs parish overseers to levy a rate on solvent householders to pay for the maintenance of the impoverished people of the parish. (The Scots receive a similar piece of legislation in 1649.) The able-bodied are set to work; children are placed as apprentices with those who will feed them in return for their service; and the infirm are sheltered and given food. By the end of the century, more than £400,000 is raised in England every year to assist the poor.41 Most of this is distributed as cash payments of between 6d and 12d per week per person, with widows receiving the most. Money is also paid by overseers to medical professionals for the treatment of sick paupers. The system is regulated by a settlement policy: if a destitute stranger enters a parish and seeks help, he is to be interviewed and sent home to his place of birth, where the overseers have a duty to look after him. Despite these measures, groups of vagrant thieves and beggars still threaten the occupants of isolated rural houses. Measures are accordingly passed in some places to pursue all strangers, interrogate them and commit them to the local magistrates if they cannot give a good reason for being where they are.42 Very few people are as philanthropic as Hannibal Baskerville (father of the aforementioned traveller Thomas Baskerville). At his Berkshire home he builds a large dormitory for vagrants, and puts up a little bell at his back door so that any beggar who requires anything may summon a servant and ask for it. Hannibal spends three-quarters of his income on helping the poor.43
Apart from the parish poor-relief system, there are two new strategies employed by the authorities to deal with those who cannot support themselves. The first is the system of ‘indentured servants’, briefly mentioned above. This entails you agreeing to the terms set out in a legal document (an ‘indenture’) that you will be bound as an unfree servant in ‘the Plantations’ (the West Indies or America) for four years. You are completely under the orders of your new employer and will obey him in everything. The costs of your emigration, your food and accommodation will be paid for, and when you come to the end of your term, you will be allowed to settle freely in your adopted country. It is only one step up from slavery. On the plus side, some men sentenced to death are offered indentured labour as an alternative to execution. The problem for the law-abiding poor is that unscrupulous people take advantage of the system. Some children are kidnapped, sold off as indentured servants and sent to the Plantations – and never find their way home.
The other new measure for dealing with extreme poverty is the workhouse. That very word might make you shudder but the idea of resolving poverty and its
attendant hunger by providing work is not to be dismissed out of hand. Also, as many people will tell you, the work is therapeutic, in keeping you safe from ‘idleness and debauchery’.44 The first workhouse is set up by the London Corporation of the Poor during Cromwell’s administration. The 1662 Settlement Act allows for official workhouses to be established in and around the capital, and in 1665 a businessmen, Thomas Firmin, sets up a private workhouse in London to teach children from the age of three to read and to spin. This, mind you, is only for children: Firmin’s view of adult paupers is even more extreme than Defoe’s – in his opinion, they come ‘from the suburbs of Hell itself ’.45 Although other workhouses follow, it is only at the end of the century that they become properly established as a means of providing for the poor. The first of the type that will become common in the eighteenth century is set up at Bristol in 1696. By 1712, there will be fourteen towns in England with fully functioning workhouses. Grim though they may be, for many people they mark a step up from the days when, to quote Defoe, the miserable ‘pinch and really suffer want’.
THE PROBLEMS OF PRECEDENCE
There is every reason why you should take one look at the foregoing hierarchy and feel fury and rebellion bubbling in your veins. But that is a sign of your modernity. Most people in Restoration Britain simply accept it. They realise that the people shouting at them do not have anything against them personally, it is simply due to their low birth. At the same time, everyone is aware of how they are viewed by those of higher and lower status. A tradesman and a farmer of similar rank might meet as equals in a town, but if the tradesman is significantly wealthier than the farmer, and dresses accordingly, there will be no pretence at equality. In this period, fawning and forelock-tugging are as natural as coughing and scratching. An apprentice will rarely look his master in the eye. In church, even if you think you are equal in the eyes of God to everyone else who has come to worship, don’t presume that you can just sit anywhere: pews are private and are allocated according to social rank. Even within the family there is a hierarchy at work, so an older daughter gets a better place in the family pew than a younger one, unless her younger sibling is married and she is not, in which case the order of precedence is reversed. Samuel Pepys relates the story of how, when the young heir to the earldom of Kent is waiting on the earl of Bedford as a gentleman servant, a letter arrives informing them that the old earl of Kent has died. As the earldom of Kent is older than that of Bedford, it takes precedence, so the earl of Bedford dutifully gets up out of his seat, bows to the new earl of Kent, invites him to sit in the place of honour that he has occupied and waits on the new earl as his servant for the rest of the meal.46
In no area of life is status as important as it is in marriage. It does not matter whether the apple of your eye is a suitable age (sometimes people marry partners thirty or forty years older); nor does it matter whether he or she is similarly attractive. What matters is whether your intended partner is of a suitable social status. On the whole, ‘the great’ marry among themselves. A duke might marry a commoner, in the shape of a knight’s or baronet’s daughter, but it is rare for a lord to marry outside the ranks of ‘the great’ unless he himself was originally of humble stock, like General Monck, duke of Albemarle (who, when he was a prisoner in the Tower in the 1640s, seduced his servant and later married her). Huge dowries might be arranged between a gentleman’s daughter and a lord’s son, but money only becomes a factor when the match is appropriate in terms of rank. The earl of Sandwich is absolutely furious when his wife suggests that their daughter should marry a rich merchant: he declares ‘he would rather see her with a pedlar’s pack on her back but that she should not marry a gentleman’.47 Rarely does love get a say in the matter. In 1675, a young gentleman, James Graham, falls in love with the beautiful Dorothy Howard, the daughter of Lord Dundas and the widow of an earl’s son. Mr Graham asks John Evelyn to speak on his behalf. Evelyn agrees to do so ‘more out of pity than that she deserved no better match, for although he was a gentleman of good family, yet there was great inequality’.48 Thanks to Evelyn’s silver tongue, Mr Graham does win the honourable lady’s hand. When it comes to his own family, however, Evelyn is less amenable to overlooking differences of rank. When Sir Gilbert Gerrard comes to see him about wedlock between his son and Evelyn’s daughter, Evelyn is horrified to learn that Sir Gilbert’s fortune is based on coal pits near Newcastle, and forbids the marriage.49 Such concerns affect the ‘middle sort’ too; for them, the wealth conveyed by marriage is even more of a sticking point. In 1662 Samuel Pepys’s brother, Tom, who has no great income, falls in love with a woman whose parents initially offer a meagre dowry of £200. Pepys persuades his brother to refuse. The parents scrape together £400, but Pepys demands £500. After lengthy negotiations between them and Pepys, nothing can be done. The relationship is terminated, leaving Tom broken-hearted.50
THE KING
Now that you have been introduced to the multi-tiered society of Restoration Britain, it is time to look at the figure on top of the whole wedding cake. Three men rule the kingdoms of England and Scotland in our period: Charles II (1660–85), James II (1685–8) and William III (1689–1702). William reigns jointly with his wife, Mary II (daughter of James II), until her death in 1694, but she does not rule equally with him: power is vested in him alone. Thus three men serve as the royal lynchpin that holds the whole of the social structure together.
It is important to recognise at the outset that the king is not ‘first among equals’: he possesses a unique pre-eminence in both spiritual and temporal matters. He is the Head of the Church of England and, because of that semi-divine status, he affects the lives of everyone in the country. For example, he appoints the bishops and archbishops who govern the religious and moral life of the people. No one is permitted to curse the king – whether in private or in public. Even to imagine his death is treason. He can pardon anyone for any transgression of the law. His predecessors were the feudal lords of England – outright owners of the whole country, from whom the lords and prelates merely held their land – and although the feudal system is formally abolished in 1660, the monarchy is reimbursed with a permanent grant, funded by the taxpayer. A committee of the House of Commons decides this should amount to £1.2 million per year, for the maintenance of the royal household and the government of the country. Consider this massive sum in relation to the incomes we’ve just discussed, from the earl of Bedford’s £20,000 down to a chambermaid’s £2, and you can see how far the king stands outside the normal parameters of society. Moreover, he has powers of patronage: the ability to confer titles on people and thus ennoble them, and to appoint men as magistrates to govern locally. He can summon and dissolve Parliament. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He can sue anyone in any court. And yet he himself stands above the law. He cannot personally commit a crime – with the sole exception of treason, as Charles I clearly demonstrated.
But no one mentions that.
In theory, Charles II rules on the same basis as his father. In practice, he rules with far less authority. No one can escape the fact that a revolution has taken place (in the form of the Civil Wars) and that Charles I was powerless to stop his trial. It is therefore tacitly acknowledged that the king is not at liberty to enact policies against the will of the people. This is demonstrated in 1662 and 1672, when Charles II tries to deliver religious toleration for all and is forced to back down. It is shown again in 1688, when James II’s religious policy proves so unpopular that he has to flee for his life. As for William III, he is forced to accept the Bill of Rights in 1689, which further limits what a king can practically do. All three kings thus have less authority than Charles I. However, in administrative terms, they are more powerful than he was. This is not because they can defy Parliament but because they increasingly work with Parliament. From early in Charles II’s reign, the king rules with the advice of a ‘cabinet’ of ministers – so named after the ‘cabinet’ or private chamber where they meet – and the king
himself normally attends their meetings. He also occasionally attends debates in the House of Lords. In short, as Parliament grows more powerful, so does the king.