We know a great deal more about Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Marchioness of Stafford, than we do about her housekeeper. Dorothy Doar held one of the most senior posts of the period for a working woman. But in the annals of the Sutherlands she barely figures. If you want to track down her ghost today, to see where she worked, you will find that the house is gone. The far grander Victorian house that replaced Mrs Doar’s Georgian Trentham Hall is gone too; just some pock-marked walls and a grassed-over bumpy footprint remain, overlooking the now restored formal gardens and lake. Yet there is a palpable sense, in the audacious scale of that lake–fed by the diverted River Trent, overlooked by a grim-faced 1st Duke of Sutherland on a Nelson-like column–of this family’s tremendous self-regard. The house is gone, but an atmosphere remains.
Elizabeth, Marchioness of Stafford, was orphaned when her parents died of ‘putrid fever’, or typhus, while taking the waters in Bath in 1766. She was one year old. Her grandmother brought her up in Edinburgh, an only child, to inherit a wild, northern estate of one million acres and a castle, Dunrobin. Aged 20, Elizabeth married George Granville, then Earl Gower, a dull, nervous man with a large beaky nose and prim mouth, an obsession with collecting paintings and an aversion to the bagpipes (he swiftly converted Dunrobin’s piper into a porter). With the blending of her Scottish acres and his Staffordshire and Yorkshire acres, they created the largest estate of any landed gentry in the country.
They passed two brilliant years in Paris where George was Ambassador, their four-year-old son romping with the Dauphin and Elizabeth confiding in Queen Marie Antoinette. Just before the Terror they beat a hasty retreat, but retained a love of French food, society and bons mots. Mrs Doar would have studied the French appendix of her manual The Complete Servant for help with the phrases that peppered her mistress’s speech:
Outré–‘oot-ray’. Preposterous.
Ennui–‘ang-wee’. Tiresomeness.
Dernier ressort– ‘dern-yair-res-sor’. Last resort.5
Elizabeth was everything her husband was not: brilliant, socially voracious, fun-loving, fearless. In her time she possessed great beauty–and many lovers. In 1799 Lord Stafford, his eyesight failing, was advised by his physician to ‘strictly abstain from all conjugal intercourse with his wife’–who then, ‘unluckily’, fell pregnant. Lord Francis was born on New Year’s Day of the new century, 1800, his father rumoured to be Lord Carlisle, Stafford’s brother-in-law.6
This was her life–but what was she like to work for? Aged 50, she displayed a steeliness over the Sutherland Highland Clearances, done in her name, encouraging their chief land agent James Loch to continue removing the crofters from the impoverished interior to the coast despite the Sellar affair (an agent who was put on trial for his cruel and needlessly violent evictions). She wrote to Loch, asking him ‘to encourage Sellar in trouncing these people who wish to destroy our system…I do hope the aggressors will be scourged’.7
Physically she was large and indomitable. The Whig diarist Thomas Creevey wrote in 1833 of the newly widowed Elizabeth that ‘it was as good as a play to see old Sutherland moving her huge derrière by slow and dignified degrees about in her chair’. Two years later he remarked that the Duchess-Countess of Sutherland, now aged 70, had ‘all the appearance of a wicked old woman’.8
Her constitution was ox-like. She was the sort who mannishly pooh-poohed physical danger–as when she travelled by paddle steamer up the North Sea coast to the Moray Firth in October 1831. ‘A delightful voyage’, her scratchy letter to the ailing Lord Stafford began, on a gold-edged sheet folded like a book; ‘I triumphant riding in the storm…All sick except myself who was famished & ate roast beef like a Dragon. No calm as yet. It is very odd that though tiresome enough it has not frightened me at all.’ Her maid Betty, meanwhile, was ‘Half dead’.9