Cavalier, p.3
Cavalier, page 3
The contents of an Evidence House are extremely valuable and must be checked quarterly for 'dust or ratts &c'.32 At Welbeck, a certain 'boundary book' has to be prised out of the grasp of a bailiff who has been accused of embezzlement because, in the words of the senior servant John Booth, it 'contains many secrets of my Lords interest [and] it will (in my opinion) be very requisite that he have no longer custody of it'.33 When the bailiff Andrew Clayton falls spectacularly from the Cavendishes' favour, he is found to have a mass of important 'books papers writings' in his own chamber where he has been accustomed to 'tell money and paste accompts' all day long.34 The system cannot work unless the family trusts its officers, and this means accepting an element of sharp practice. In one of the verses about his own life, loves and servants that he is in the habit of jotting down almost daily, William complains about his unscrupulous bailiff:
In short, the Truth I'll tell, & will not jeer
You steal in selling cheap, &C buying dear.35
The Great Chamber and their own chambers are not the only rooms available to the members of the household. Rumours about Sir Charles's health now circulate through further servants clustered in the Long Gallery, a room used communally for exercise and leisure, as well as for listening to the harpsichord and claviorganum (an organ and harpsichord combined) kept there.36 It is easier of access than the Great Chamber, and members of the household of different ranks may intermingle here. The news that William has gone in to see his father is passed along to other servants with more specialised technical skills, such as the musicians, or to Henry Lukin and his colleagues in the household's surveying department, and to the bailiffs Thomas Atkinson and John Wood.37 Lukin is talented in the writing of ingenious verses, in mathematics and in the closely related skills of mapmaking and estate and building surveying. It is his job to oversee building works. He is courting a woman named Katherine Jessopp, and when he marries her, will have to move out of the household to become the tenant of nearby Soukeholme Manor.38 This is the pattern for household officers: on marriage they leave Welbeck Abbey to set up households of their own. Lukin suffers from 'melancholy' and will eventually commit suicide in the attic of his manor house. For hundreds of years to come, his ghost will occasionally be glimpsed in the room known as 'Lukin's Garret'.39
Another servant skilled at surveying is John Smithson (d.1634). While he appears to be just another member of the household, he will become famous to posterity as one of the greatest architectural designers of the early seventeenth century. John has modernised the spelling of his family name, though he too is occasionally referred to as 'Smythson' as his father customarily was. John's father Robert was the great country-house designer whose work includes the vast and innovative Elizabethan palaces of Longleat in Wiltshire and Wollaton Hall in Nottingham. Once he had risen up from the rank of mason, Robert served as an officer in a succession of noble households. His son likewise serves in a variety of capacities, including estate surveying and design, though he is described as merely a 'servant' to the Cavendishes.40 John is another favourite of Katherine's, and she has become godmother to one of his sons. The occasion of Sir Charles's sickness has brought him to the abbey, although he now lives elsewhere and is engaged in supervising Sir Charles's building work at Bolsover Castle.41
These stately semi-public chambers at Welbeck Abbey - the Great Chamber, the Gallery, and in particular, the Chapel (which was once the frater, or refectory, of the monastery) - often ring with music. Today the Gallery is silent, but the players are not far away. Perhaps they are repairing their instruments - viols, theorbos and citterns instead of conducting their daily rehearsal.
Positions in this music-loving household are highly sought after among professional musicians. A violist and singer called Martin Otto bragged in 1608 that he had 'almost a promise' of becoming organist to Sir Charles, and found his future master 'honest religious and exceeding studious'.42 Such a luminary of the Elizabethan musical world as the madrigalist John Wilbye described Sir Charles as having 'excellent skill in musicke, and [a] great love and favour of Musicke', and himself lived in the Cavendish household at one time.43 The six-part harmonies of the old-fashioned Elizabethan madrigals must occasionally sound along the stairs and passages of the house, as do the more up-to-date Italian madrigals collected by Nicholas Yonge in a book dedicated to Sir Charles's stepbrother Gilbert Talbot. Yonge writes that the lyrics to the songs had been translated 'by a Gentleman for his private delight'; the anonymous 'Gentleman' was Sir Charles Cavendish himself. 44 William's great love is the viol, and he possesses many different models of the instrument, including the two known by the household as 'The Lyon' and 'The Foole' because of the carvings that replace the more usual scroll at the head of their fingerboards.45
The musicians will not remain silent for long. The Cavendishes are passionate about music, ascribing to it remarkable powers of healing and redemption, and it is closely intertwined for them with love and grief. In another of his poems, William writes that music can melt the hardest heart:
Your Lady's snow white breasts, though frozen were
Thaw them, & each eye drop a loving Tear,
At least soft smothering sighs, we mean to Raise,
With amorous speeches, & sweet Roundelays,
For musick hath such power you have no choice
Moving all passions, with her warbling Voice
And soft toucht string, Harmoniously a long
Taking your Hearts all prisoners in a song
And to your selves shall softly whispering say
Though Came not lovers, lovers went a way.46
The musicians must be hoping that Sir Charles will call upon them to play for him once again.
Descending the wide stair from the stately chambers of the first floor, we now sink into the cavernous gloom of the Great Hall and the world of the lower servants. Their voices rise up to the Hall's venerable rafters, hidden in shadow between the shafts of light coming in through the vast windows; once the servants of the medieval abbots ate their meals here. The household's lower servants loll on the long tables and benches in unaccustomed idleness, heads turned towards the great stair, as their daily orders have not been issued. They are not usually allowed to enter the upper, richly decorated parts of the house such as the Great Chamber or Gallery unless specially summoned to a meeting or to bring refreshments. Today, however, the stair - a conduit for news from above - holds a magnetic attraction for them. The Usher of the Hall makes only a perfunctory effort to raise his silver staff of office to maintain order and to keep the lower servants away from the stair's foot, himself aware that a household meeting could be called at a moment's notice.
These household members, male and youthful for the main part, are united in appearance by their livery. All the servants in the household receive an annual wage, lodgings, meals (known as 'diet') and medical treatment: the Cavendish family book of recipes, for example, includes instructions for 'the manner of making that water which Dr. Davison did Prescribe for Sir Charles' footman, where with he was Cured of a great, & strange Coughe'.47 The servants also receive a coat or cloak in the Cavendish mallard green. In his will, Harry Ogle will dispose of his highly prized livery, 'a green velvet suit laid with silver lace [braid] for my Lady Newcastle's service'.48 Each noble household has its own peculiar livery colour, and the servants belonging to it wear the family badge on their clothes. Blue is the most common colour for household wear, so much so that gentlemen avoid wearing blue because of its menial associations. During his tour of England in 1611, the traveller Fynes Moryson noticed that the servants of gentlemen are:
wont to wear blue coats with their Masters badge of silver on the left sleeve, but now they most commonly wear cloaks garded [trimmed] with lace, all the servants of one family wearing the same liverie for colour or ornament.49
Each of the servants gathered in the Hall today displays the coiled Cavendish reptile - described in heraldic terms as the 'snake noue' or 'knotted snake' - on a metal plate sewn onto their sleeves.
Despite the momentous circumstances, there is still a good deal of noisy work in progress on the ground floor of the house today. In the great kitchens, brick-built and tacked onto the extremity of the east wing, the cooks are busy preparing for the household's midday meal in the Great Hall. Beer is being brought up from the brewhouse to the buttery adjacent to the Hall, loaves of bread are being stacked in the pantry, and vegetables brought in from the garden. Lambs are being butchered in the slaughterhouse, horses are being watered, fish plucked from the brewhouse pond and fruit from the walls of the sheltered orchard. Other forms of sustenance came from the stillhouse, liquorice yard, rabbit warren, dovecote and deer park at Welbeck. Vast quantities of milk and grain are sent up daily to the house from the Grange, as the home farm is known. Over a period of four months, the household consumes 4,840 eggs, twenty-three lambs, 173 slaughtered 'Muttons', fifty-two pigs, twenty-five carp, twenty dozen 'Larks and small birds', two barrels of herrings and three hogsheads of 'Claret wine'.50 Even today, the household will still need to eat, although the sick man's wife and sons may shun the household meal in the Great Hall in favour of dining alone in their private parlour.
CAVALIER
Members of the household of the Duke of Albemarle - specifically his watermen - wearing his badge on their sleeves.
Appetites sharpen towards midday, for the servants have risen early; five o'clock is not an unusual hour. Breakfast is an informal affair, and there are two set meals: dinner at noon and supper at five or six o'clock. Unlike many other noble families, the Cavendishes themselves still occasionally show themselves at the top table in the Hall and eat with their household. Today, as noon approaches, the preparations are nearly complete. At one end of the two-storey Hall, a raised dais contains Sir Charles's empty table; at the other, a carved wooden screen hides the entrances to the offices, such as the buttery (so called because it houses butts of beer) beyond. While the usher seats the household and guests at tables appropriate to their rank, the pantler brings out bread from the pantry and the butler approaches with the beer.
Catering on the grand scale that the household requires takes up a large proportion of the Cavendish family's considerable annual income from its vast estates, including the profits from mineral extraction, farming and forestry. Thomas Wentworth, who will become the first Earl of Strafford and a powerful political patron of William Cavendish, received useful advice from his father on limiting expenditure on his retinue: 'if you spend but a third part of your revenue in your house you shall do the wiser and better'.51 The Cavendish estates bring in £22,393 a year, while the very highest-paid servants earn an annual wage of £25.52 That even a third of the turnover of this large estate and house might be spent on the household is staggering.
What is the point of this expensive, ravenous and sometimes riotous organisation called the household? It is the basic and most important unit of seventeenth-century society. The average size of a household has been shrinking since its medieval heyday, yet the Cavendish household now gathering in the Great Hall at Welbeck has grown in size and status in recent years as the family has progressed up the social ladder.
The word 'family' is used in two senses: both for the master's blood relations and for his constantly changing body of household members. Visitors bring with them their own 'families', and despite the enormous size of great houses such as Welbeck Abbey or Hardwick Hall, accommodating them all is problematic. Beds are placed two or three to a bedchamber and are similarly arranged in the service rooms, lobbies, on landings and even in the stables. It is this rich, complex layer of ever-changing occupation - cacophonous and stinking, as well as ceremonial and splendid - that creates the atmosphere of a great household.
Today, in 1617, there is a growing concern that the status of household service is falling. In medieval times, a lord's closest servants were always well-born; now it is becoming harder to find appropriately genteel staff. The anonymous writer 'R. B.', who compiled a list of putative regulations fit for the household of an Elizabethan earl, recommends that the senior servants be 'not only well born and of good livings, but also grave and experienced, not proud and haughty, neither too affable and easy'.53 There are few women in an old-fashioned noble household: R. B. suggests that in a household of two hundred only a dozen - including the mistress of the house, her gentlewomen, chambermaids and laundry maids - need be female.
The Cavendishes' Nottinghamshire neighbour Sir Francis Willough-by compiled a similar book of rules to regulate his own establishment. As at Welbeck, his household of forty-five was managed through a strict chain of command extending down from the Usher of the Great Hall to the Usher of the Great Chamber, the butler, the underbutler, the pantler, cook, gentlemen waiters, yeomen waiters, slaughtermen, carter and grooms, the pages and finally the kitchen boys. Their responsibilities were closely defined, from keeping the dogs out of the hall to bearing a lighted torch at the head of the procession of servants carrying the master's dinner from serving place to dining room.54
Every household member must know and keep to his allotted place in this slow dance of ceremony that revolves around the head of the household. In general, the lower servants are proud of their master's munificence rather than resentful of their own servitude. According to the writer Sir Thomas Overbury, a household servingman is commonly a fiery fellow, proud but lazy:
He tells without asking who ownes him, by the superscription of his Livery. His life is, for ease and leisure, much about Gentleman-like. He hates or loves the men, as his Master doth the Master. He is commonly proud of his Masters horses, or his Christmas [. . .] He never drinks but double.55
Meanwhile, his female equivalent, the maidservant, should be 'careful, faithful, patient, neat and pleasant [. . .] cleanly, quick and handsome, and of few words, honest in her word, deed and attire, diligent in a househould'. Women have a lesser role in household ceremony, and while her tasks include washing, baking, brewing, sewing and spinning, the maid's most important skill in the male-dominated world of the household is said to lie 'chiefly in holding her peace'.56
Sir Charles, happy-go-lucky by nature, has made no will. It was only earlier this morning that he finally faced up to the fact that he might not recover from this illness, and his purpose in sending for his eldest son was to tell him how he intends to dispose of his worldly goods. Now, in his bedchamber, he begins to whisper his wishes aloud. Also discernible, in the shadows of the room, is the hunched figure of a secretary: Sir Charles's will is to be 'nuncupative', or dictated.57 His sickness has taken him by surprise and he no longer has the strength to hold a pen.
The great four-poster in which Sir Charles lies is commonly the most expensive item of furniture in a house; the master's bed often costs more than the rest of the furnishings put together. He intends that the bed and its expensive hangings will become the property of his widow. Along with the marital bed, Katherine will receive all the family silver and gold plate that stands upon her cupboard, a piece of furniture that is still literally a construction of boards for 'cups' to stand upon rather than a cabinet with a door. She will also have the use, for her lifetime, of the rich tapestry hangings that have been packed up, transported and unrolled at each of the couple's constant changes of residence as they progress from estate to estate. Sir Charles, perhaps suspecting his son's weakness in matters of money, makes his wife the executrix of his will, and leaves her in charge of the family finances for the time being. But in due course everything else - riches and power, responsibility and expectation - will come to William. The motley group of individuals making up Sir Charles's household have high hopes of their future master, as he begins to prepare himself for the challenge of governing, loving and chastising them.
If Sir Charles dies, the servants will expect a magnificent funeral, possibly organised by the heralds from the College of Arms who travel the country ensuring that families' coats of arms and badges are correctly composed and displayed. The cost will include food, drink, black clothes for the household, black drapes for the house and gifts for the poor; a generous funeral 'dole' will ensure that a large, status-enhancing crowd attends. The upper servants will expect gifts of mourning cloaks. Twenty years before, members of a great household in mourning would have worn tailored three-quarter-length mourning coats with tight wristbands, but now swinging, heavily embroidered cloaks are becoming fashionable; long pointed mourning hoods are likewise dying out in favour of black sashes or scarves.58 Servants of even the lowest rank will also be hoping for cash legacies in Sir Charles's will. When Sir William Paston of Norfolk died six years ago, eleven servants signed a receipt recording the payment of their promised legacies, eight of them merely making the cross of the illiterate.59
The old servants will perhaps fear for their places under the new regime. They will hope to receive their wages at regular intervals, something never to be taken for granted. In his own role as an officer in Gilbert Talbot's household, Sir Charles had to write in 1610 that he was 'laboured by my Lord's servants here to write [. . .] about their wages, and to say truly they need it greatly for they have no clothes nor any money'.60 Even Sir Charles, as an occasional servant of the earl's, was entitled to 'diet' or a food allowance when he went to London on Talbot business: he and Katherine submitted receipts as part of an expense claim for £20 spent during ten days in London in 1604.61 The upper, managerial servants will also be anxious about the annuities, farms and tenancies of manor houses that they have been promised on marriage or as the reward for a lifetime's service.
