Cavalier, p.26
Cavalier, page 26
Aspiring English horsemen have long been under the necessity of travelling to Naples in order to see the masters of their craft, or else to the Palace of the Louvre in Paris, where Monsieur de Pluvinel runs a similar school. Apart from the exclusive Royal Mews, there was no proper school of horsemanship in England before the Civil War, although the art did make a brief appearance on the syllabus of Sir Francis Kynaston's Museum Minervae in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, which opened in 1635. William therefore commissioned a proposal to be drawn up for a full-scale college of horsemanship here in Clerkenwell.44 According to his plan, the posts and rails in the yard would be similar to those at de Pluvinel's academy. There were to be five individual vertical poles for training horses to turn in circles, equipment familiar from William's book on horsemanship. At one end of the yard an enormous stable with twenty-six stalls was proposed. At the other, an extensive residential building would be arranged in a series of independent suites round a courtyard like a college. It seems that the plan was for young horsemen to live and train in a collegiate atmosphere dedicated to horsemanship.
Yet William's proposed college was never built - perhaps the Civil War intervened - and it remains the pipe dream that he now expounds upon to Evelyn. In 1649, Sir Balthazar Gerbier succeeded in opening a similar academy, aimed at avoiding the necessity (as he put it) of sending 'young Gentlemen to any of the Forraigne Academies (where they shall learn no more qualities then now they may get at home, not altogether so many)'. Today, nearly twenty years later, manege is an art in decline. It will never regain the high place it held at court and society in the Cavalier years just before the Civil War.
It appears - perhaps to Evelyn's disappointment - that he and his host are going to dine alone. Both William and Evelyn are temperamentally inclined to talk about old times, and continue to do so over their meal. The room in which they take their dinner has been specially set up for the occasion, with table, chairs, sideboard and wine cooler standing by; the dining room dedicated solely to eating and not used for anything else will not evolve until the next century.45 Evelyn waits for William to begin, for, as Antoine de Courtin remarks, a guest 'must not be the first to put your hand in the Dish, unless you be desir'd to help your Neighbour'; nor must you 'by any awkward gesture show any signs that you are hungry, nor fix your Eyes upon the meat, as if you would devour all'.46 Napkin unfolded, William reaches for his cutlery. The use of a knife and fork is now quite normal: as the Marquis de Coulanges observes in the 1660s, 'Today everyone eats with a spoon and fork from his own plate, and a valet washes the cutlery from time to time at the buffet.'47 A duke's dinner is served with much less of the towel twirling and bowing of William's masque in 1634, and the food on the table is likewise rather different.
Having lived so long abroad, William and the rest of the royal court have become accustomed to the continental fashion in food, especially the French fondness for sauces and stews, in addition to the traditional English roasts and puddings. Continental cookbooks such as The French Cook (1653) and A Perfect School of Instruction for the Officers of the Mouth (1682) are appearing in England in translation.48 Courtiers dining with each other may well find the food served according to the 'French ease' or 'a la francaise', which means that each guest serves him or herself from a table spread with dishes, with the host doing the carving. The servants' roles in the performance are by now much diminished, being restricted to bringing bread and clean plates.49 After their residence abroad, the Cavendish family cookbook contains novelties such as a rich spiced sauce to accompany a boiled carp containing vinegar, half a pound of sweet butter, the blood of the fish, nutmeg, cloves and mace. 'When you dish it up,' the recipe concludes, 'strew a little ginger a bout ye brims of ye dish.'50
William certainly knows how to entertain according to the highest expectations of the king and his courtiers. In Antwerp, in 1658, he invited the exiled court to a stupendous entertainment at Rubens's house, with two hours of dancing and a banquet brought in on 'eight great chargers, each borne by two gentlemen of the court, wines and other drinks [. . .] being dispersed to all the Company', before dancing lasting another two hours. The guests were further amused by a song with lyrics written by William himself, sung by Margaret's Moorish pageboy 'dressed all in feathers'.51
Despite his ability to provide hospitality appropriate to court occasions, William is actually rather conservative in his tastes, and John Evelyn may well find the fashion for French-inspired 'kickshaws' (quelque-choses) or ragouts conspicuously absent from his dinner today. In one of her books, William's wife Margaret describes the foolishness of the fashionable 'Lady C. C, a 'mode' lady, who sent back an old-fashioned 'chine of beef to the kitchen because she considered that serving plain beef was 'not only an old but a country custom'. 'The truth is', Margaret pronounced decidedly, in a manner which says much about the tastes of the ageing Cavendish household, 'she showed herself a fool and behaved herself as mad.'52
Along with plain roast meat, there are vegetables on the table. It is only now, in the 1660s, that people begin to write down information about the varieties of, and dressings for, the vegetables that accompany the hearty meat dishes of the seventeenth century. Hannah Woolley, in the section of her book The Compleat Servant-Maid devoted to the cook maid, recommends the following menu for the month of May:
First Course
1. Boyl'd Chickens
2. Roasted Veal
3. Roasted Capons
4. Rabbets
Second Course
1. Artichoke Pye hot
2. Westphalia Bacon and Tarte
3. Sturgeon, Salmon, Lobsters
4. A dish of Asparagus
5. A Tansie [a bitter herb with yellow flowers]53
The Earl of Northumberland owned silver dishes for 'salet' even in the 1620s, but now cruets for oil and vinegar or imported flasks of Italian glass are beginning to make regular appearances on polite tables.54 John Evelyn loves vegetables and will even devote a whole book, Acetaria, to the subject of their preparation and dressing. He likes his 'sallats' to contain 'crude and fresh herbs [. . .] eaten with some acetous juice, oyl, salt, &c. to give them a grateful gust and vehicle'.55 He gives very precise instructions: herbs must be washed and shaken in a cloth and cut with a silver rather than a steel knife; artichokes may be fried in fresh butter with parsley while small, but when larger must be 'bak'd in pies, with marrow, dates, and other rich ingredients'.56 Garlic 'is not for ladies' palates nor those who court them'.57 William, on his doctor's advice, eats raw vegetables only with circumspection. 'Sallads', Dr de Mayerne counsels him, 'cannot be without lemon or vinegar, eat not much, & no lettuce, they being hurtful to the Brayne.'58
The few servants who do remain in the room frequently bring clean glasses to the table. When William wishes to take a drink, he calls for a glass of wine. A waiter fills a glass (possibly one of the newfangled engraved variety, intended to imitate the qualities of rock crystal) at the sideboard and stands it upon a small salver to hand it to his master. William then drains it at a single draught (rather than sipping) and returns it to the servant's hands for rinsing and refilling. This, again, is an English practice, and a Frenchman notes that in his own country, 'if we be many in a company, we make no scruple to drink all out of a Glass, or a Tankard, which [the English] are not used to do: and if a Servant would offer to give them a Glass before it was washed every time they drink, they would be angry at it'.59 On William's sideboard, the cistern and wine cooler are essential conveniences, and in newly built houses a special alcove is beginning to appear in the wall of a dining room to house them.60 If his cistern and wine cooler are made of silver, they will be among a nobleman's most expensive purchases.61 William's love of wine and drinking is frequently the subject of his poems:
Give me the Canary the wholesome Sherry
The Radical maligoe makes Us merry
Sometimes the Claret, the Rhenish, the white
To Heighten our wits, the Poet's Delight:
The strong Greek wines with Sacrem Christey
If drink of them much, will make your eyes misty.62
Here John Evelyn and his host are at odds. Evelyn has often complained about the English tendency, once the cloth is removed from the table, 'to drink excessively'. He notes that 'It is the afternoon's diversion; whether for the want of better to employ the time, or affection to the drink, I know not; but I have found some persons of quality, whom one could not safely visit after dinner without resolving to undergo this drink-ordeal.'63 William perhaps makes use of Gervase Markham's cure to 'preserve a man from drunkenness', which is to take powdered betony and cabbage each morning,64 but his servants have to deal with their master's inevitable hangovers:
Thus we will drink, both day & all night
And Quarrel some times, but never to fight
When Ev'ry ones nod doth aches each head
We'll have sum Porters to lead us to Bed.65
At Newcastle House, the dinner and other domestic arrangements appear to run like clockwork, yet this has not always been the case. The Cavendishes regained control of the house only as recently as 1662, and even then by a piece of legalistic thuggery characteristic of the returning Royalists exploiting their party's recapture of the upper hand. Even before the Civil War, William was in debt to the Copley family for unpaid loans.66 In 1654, the trustees of William's estates had begged John Copley, with 'urgent importunity', to buy Newcastle House in order to settle the debts of William's dead son Charles, which he did.67 After the Restoration, an Act of Parliament was passed restoring to William all the estates he had owned before May, 1642. William tried to reclaim Newcastle House under this act, but Copley, understandably, refused to release it. Only after a long legal struggle and a down payment of money did William regain his London home.
Even in William's absence in Nottinghamshire or elsewhere, Newcastle House is ably run these days by Mr Benoist. John Benoist was tutor to William's sons, and with the familiar loyalty and adaptability of the household servants who have accompanied William through his vicissitudes, he is now employed in administering accounts and sending bills up to be paid by the Welbeck treasury. The pedantic Mr Benoist accompanied William into exile before travelling back to England to try to raise money. He works hard at his figures and correspondence every morning until ten o'clock, when he goes out on business errands.68 In London his tasks include buying books for Margaret, sending up 'silver buttons and loops', Dutch quills, boxes of lozenges and melons to Welbeck, paying an upholsterer and trying to resolve a dispute over the location of a leak in the conduit pipe that passes through William's and other neighbouring gardens.69 Performing this last task, Mr Benoist will become enraged by the apothecary who lives next door to Newcastle House. The conduit is blocked beneath his garden, yet he refuses to allow Mr Benoist to dig to rectify the problem.70 The pipes running beneath the streets of London are made of elm or lead, and frequent leaks and punctures mean that pressure is low and the supply only runs for two or three days a week. Fires are supposed to be doused only with water from carefully determined hydrant points. However, during last year's Great Fire, panicking householders dug up the pipes beneath the streets indiscriminately, causing all the pressure to drain away and the supply to fail.71
After the Restoration, William soon resumed his peripatetic life, travelling between Newcastle House, the court and his houses in the country. His arrival in London causes something of a stir throughout the city, one observer reporting that 'My Lord Duke of Newcastle entered this city the other day with a princely train, many of the nobility (his friends) meeting him out of town, and to-day gone to Court in great state and his good duchess.'72
Each time he changes residence, the upholstered chairs, writing desk, carpets and hangings of William's bedchamber and closet, in addition to a stable of his choicest horses, follow him from house to house in an immense logistical operation. He is ambivalent about the task of moving house. On the one hand, he complains about the 'many preparations for a London Journey' that 'to a Country man is more difficult then an East India voyage to some merchants', yet on the other, preparing to leave Welbeck for London, he shivers in anticipation of a trip to court: 'Trunks all packed up for London all could tell, Ready to take the Coach for heightened pleasure of Court &C town.'73
While the master and mistress are absent, a skeleton staff of servants is left behind to look after the house, and they continue to be issued with their diet and annual wage. Only a weak, tentative heartbeat of life remains in houses left dark and quiet by the lord's absence. Sir John Hobart of Blickling Hall in Norfolk reduced his staff of twenty-seven to seven when he left the house for London; those remaining had the tasks of airing the rooms, 'looking to the gardens', caring for the furni- ture and on one occasion, making a swan pie to be dispatched to Sir John in London.74 These servants sometimes find themselves under-occupied and quarrels can break out. Thomas Bamford, left in charge of nine servants at Welbeck 'since my Lord went' in 1656, complained that he had 'taken down the hangings in the best bed chamber 3 pieces, In the dining Chamber next it, 2 pieces, and the old bedchamber 5 pieces, brushed and laid up [. . .] as well as I can amongst such ugly and inanimate fellows as some of them be here'.75 Of the one hundred and fifty suites of hangings that William had possessed before the Civil War, only ten or twelve were saved for his return.76
William travels between Welbeck and London by private coach. Since the Restoration, there have been some significant improvements in coach design that make the jouncing journey more comfortable, such as glass windows (in place of leather flaps) and sprung suspension.77 William and Margaret possess a travelling coach as well as the striking model they use for visits to court; it is the sight of Margaret's black and silver vehicle for urban use that causes Samuel Pepys, an inveterate shopper, to acknowledge that his 'mind is mightily of late upon a coach'.78 Sir Richard Powle of Shottesbrooke in Berkshire likewise possesses a best coach, a travelling coach and, indeed, an old coach 'past using', but then his prodigality might be explained by Andrew Marvell's opinion that he was incapable of riding on horseback because of venereal disease.79 The secondary expenses of having a coach include parking fees in London (even in 1636, it was estimated that there were over six thousand coaches in the city80) and employing a postillion or boy to ride one of the front pair of what might be four or six horses. The postillion is a useful back-up in the event of an accident to, or the incapacity of, the coachman; William's postillion, Thomas Ramster, earns £2 and 10 shillings a year for his service.81 In 1654, John Evelyn visited a friend whose household's hospitality to his coachman made him 'so exceedingly drunk that returning home we escaped incredible dangers'. On another occasion, the servants of his host at a house in Blackheath 'made our Coach-men so drunk that they both fell-off their boxes upon the heath, where we were fain to leave them'.82
When Margaret and William make the short journey from Clerkenwell to the Palace of Whitehall, they are attended by as many servants as possible. Samuel Pepys describes catching a glimpse of Margaret in her coach in the park:
That which we and almost all went for was to see my Lady Newcastle; which we could not, she being followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her; only, I could see she was in a large black coach, adorned with silver instead of gold, and so with the curtains and everything black and white, and herself in her cap.83
Her footmen in their velvet coats were much remarked upon, and as Pepys reminds us, 'the whole story of this lady is a romance and all she doth is romantic'.84
After eating and drinking, John Evelyn is finally judged worthy of the privilege he seeks. He is conducted through further first-floor rooms to Margaret's own suite and is allowed to sit 'discoursing with her Grace in her bed-chamber'.85 It is still commonplace for a lady to welcome important male guests in her bedchamber, for it remains a multipurpose room, used for reception as well as rest. In fact, Evelyn has even been with the king into the bedchamber of the royal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, in order to see her 'in her morning loose garment, her maides Combing her, newly out of her bed: his Majestie & the Gallants standing about her'.86
The lady now sitting opposite Evelyn is always unconventional in her appearance and manner (Plate 30). Evelyn shyly averts his eyes from her low-cut corsage and black-speckled face for fear of embarrassment. On his first visit to Newcastle House, some weeks previously, he found himself strangely attracted to Margaret's 'extraordinary fanciful habit',87 and Margaret herself claims that she takes 'great delight in attiring, fine dressing, and fashions, especially fashions as I did invent myself.88 Samuel Pepys heard Margaret described by others many times before he saw her for himself, 'for all the town-talk is nowadays of her extravagance'. When he finally met her in person, he found her 'a very comely woman' dressed in a 'velvet cap, her hair about her ears, many black patches because of pimples about her mouth, naked-necked, without anything about it, and a black juste-au-corps [a close-fitting, knee-length coat]'.89 Margaret is justly proud of her neck (which she sets off with a necklace of large pearls) and her bosoms. In order to make them appear plumper, she is accustomed to 'trim them up [. . .] by binding a gentle piece of Ribbon at the top of every one, and so appearing au Tour a la mode'.90 Margaret is also an enthusiastic follower of the short-lived fashion in the 1660s for female cross-dressing and is sometimes to be found 'dressed in a vest' (or waistcoat) and 'instead of courtesies, made legs and bows to the ground with her hand and head'.91
