Aristocrats (31 page)
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 ourselves, 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.
A lot of bacon, ham, beef, butter and cheese would have to
be produced to justify these costs. But the household at Castletown was indeed a voracious maw, consuming huge numbers of animals, dozens of consignments of groceries and hundreds of tons of fuel a year. From the dairy came 19 cwt of cheese, 7,934 gallons of milk (some of which went to feed calves), 1,496 gallons of cream and 1,454 lb of butter, which had to be supplemented by 1,951 lb from outside suppliers. The slaughterhouse and the butcher provided 524 lb of veal and sweetbreads, 160 sheep, 204 cwt of oxen, 94 geese, 112 turkeys and 1301 ‘fowls and chicken’. These and other chickens produced 10,460 eggs for consumption, but they were not enough: 6,206 more eggs had to be bought.
Home-produced food was never enough because enormous numbers of people were constantly dining at Castletown. Sarah explained that towards the end of the century as many as 82 were regularly fed there: ‘60 in the servants’ hall, 12 in the steward’s room and never less than 10 in the parlour or long gallery.’ This figure was reached by adding on to the Conolly’s own establishment labourers working in the park, tradesmen visiting the estate, guests of the family and the servants they brought with them.
Like Carton, Castletown had its own brewhouse where both ale and small beer were produced. In 1787, 182 hogsheads of small beer and 85 hogsheads of ale were brewed, although some small beer and 85 hogsheads of ale had gone sour and undrunk by the end of the year. Higher servants, guests and the Conollys themselves also drank imported English beer – porter and a special brew from Dorchester – and wine. The vinter’s bill for 1787 was £445, a testimony to long evenings with convivial company, tall tales and steady drinking.
Keeping Castletown warm and light was another major undertaking. Fat stripped from sheep carcasses provided some of the tallow for the 2,127 lb of common candles used during the year. The rest came from the local butcher. About 250 lb of bees-wax candles were burned, mostly in the long gallery, the dining-room and parlour. The Merrion Street
house, sitting empty for most of the year, used far fewer candles and by the 1780s it was equipped with oil lamps for the public rooms. Coal was used exclusively for heating. Local brown coal from Kilkenny was supplemented by Welsh coal sent from Swansea; both reached Castletown by way of the new canal that ran west out of Dublin along the edge of the Duke of Leinster’s estate. Castletown’s hearths, which included not only the fireplaces in the house but also those in the brewing house, the laundry and the hothouses, burned over 300 tons of coal a year, at a cost of £282.
A good deal of coal was consumed heating water for washing. Bed linen, cotton clothing and underwear were all regularly washed in hot water. Silk stockings and gowns were washed in cool or tepid water. In 1783, 78 lb of soap powder and stone blue were used in the Castletown laundries, along with over 75 lb of starch and whiting. Only the richest clothes were spared soaping and pounding: they were brushed and aired.
Foodstuffs that could not be produced at home or bought locally were supplied by the grocer. He delivered to Castletown a glorious multinational shopping basket of goods: sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, currants, raisins, almonds, sago, barley, rice, vermicelli, macaroni, anchovies, mustard, brawn, saltpetre (and salt), nutmeg, citron, cinnamon, caraway seeds, pepper, white ginger, ground ginger, cloves, allspice, mace, capers, brandy (13 gallons), oil, vinegar, alcohol, isinglass, hops, drops, oil for the blacksmith, stone blue, starch and powder blue (all for the laundry), prunes, biscuits, split peas, lentils and treacle. Chocolate consumption was small at 20 lb a year. But the 21 cwt 3 stone 22 lb and 4 oz of sugar the two households used added up to about 2,400 lb which came out at about 40 lb a year for each occupant of the house (although that total did include any sugar eaten by visitors and outside servants). Some of this sugar went into the preservation of local fruit but the rest, combined with eggs, butter and cream rounded off the splendid richness of
the Conollys’ diet with syllabubs, trifles, sorbets, fruit tarts and meringues. ‘Being thin … is not a natural state for any of our family to be in,’ said Louisa, although even she expressed some annoyance one summer when she found that the winter’s gourmandising had increased her weight by 9 lb. Sarah, the plumpest of them all, went on a diet in 1776, only to decide that it was bad for her: ‘I took it into my head to be thin … I heard by chance that Lady Ancram had succeeded in making herself thin, and yet not hurt her health, by eating everyday a little bread and butter half an hour before dinner to damp her stomach. I did the same and so effectually damped mine that in a fortnight’s time I grew ill with not eating at dinner. So I left off this scheme.’