On 2 April 1832 the Marchioness of Stafford attended a soirée at Downing Street given by the Whig Prime Minister’s wife Countess Grey (her old admirer Prince Talleyrand, the French Ambassador, proffering his arm in the absence of her doddery husband). The same day James Loch wrote a letter to William Lewis from his offices in Bloomsbury Square.
Her Ladyship desires me to say that Mrs Doar has announced her pregnancy–and that after deliberating very maturely on the subject she has written to her to say she cannot stay. I am quite certain that her determination is correct and I really gave it every consideration. It would be a bad example to others, and a Housekeeper who has Maids to look after should not be bearing children even to their husbands.
Lady Stafford wishes you to see her as soon after you get this as you can and to soothe her–she wishes the expense of her journey wherever she may wish to go to, to be defrayed.
Her Ladyship laments this circumstance exceedingly as I must say I do if this is of any importance, as she was a most excellent and zealous and faithful person and who did her duty fully, amply and conscientiously. Lady S wishes you to say so to her.
It had been a hard decision, even for a tough old Marchioness. The maternal cluckings of ‘Doar’ were now reversed: Lady Stafford wanted her ‘soothed’ as she knew exactly the damage this decision was about to wreak in her housekeeper’s life. Even James Loch, who knew Lady Stafford of old, was impressed by her genuine regret. He added in a postscript, ‘She does not wish her hurried away by any means.’29
Letters travelled fast in 1832. William Lewis received it the next morning and digested its contents with some surprise (how could he not have noticed?). He braced himself anxiously for a change of regime. What had Mrs Doar been playing at all this time? Foolish woman! Lewis put off knocking at her door until after midday dinner, as it was an interview he was rather dreading.
What were Mrs Doar’s rights, as a pregnant servant? ‘A Woman with Child may be discharged by a Justice’, stated the legal appendix of The Complete Servant. ‘Should a woman with child be hired for a term, and her master knew not of it, or should she prove with child during her servitude, he may discharge her, with the concurrence of a magistrate.’ In modern terminology, it was a sackable offence with no compensation.
‘But if, when he knows it, he does not discharge her before a magistrate, but keeps her on, he must provide for her till her delivery, and for one month after; when she is to be sent to her place of settlement.’
It was entirely up to the whim of the employer. Crucially, Mrs Doar had revealed her pregnancy. But beyond a few weeks’ grace, she had only Lady Stafford’s goodwill standing between a life of relative comfort and one of great difficulty. Lady Stafford was right: her housekeeper would require a great deal of soothing.
By next day’s return post Loch received a letter from a distraught Dorothy Doar. It starts in a firm hand in flowing cursive script, but soon becomes incoherent and illegible, littered with spelling mistakes. It is the only letter in her hand to survive and it reads as a howl of despair, straight from the heart.
3 April
Sir
You will excuse my troubling you but having experienced great feeling and kindness of hart from you on former accations made me take the Liberty. I sincerely hope you will intersede with Lady Stafford on my behalf–you have hard from her Ladyship of my Situation. I was in hopes her Ladyship would have let me keep my Situation as usual–after my Confinement which will take place early in June I would put the child out to nurce so that it could not in any way interefear with my Buiseness.
I hope and trust Sir you will be my friend and prevail on my Lady to allow me to stay if its only for a short time as God knows what will become of me–my poor husband for a long time has been so very unfortunate and the Education of my Little Girl has [been] taking every shilling we had so that I have not the means of going in any way of business that I could be getting a little to inable us to live. Doar has got a Situation however and I hope he will be able to make it answer–but the sallery is low so that I must dow what I can to inable us to live.
She did have another plan, hatched with her husband. She had thoughts of opening a small shop in nearby Newcastle-under-Lyme, though she didn’t know how she would manage it without help. But Mrs Doar’s heart was not in this new career. She held out hope that Her Ladyship might reconsider, with Loch as her powerful go-between. The letter returns to the open sore of her dismissal:
I assure you at this time my heart is almost broke I have been upwards of 14 years in the Marquis of Stafford’s family and it grieves me much very much indeed to leave it–indeed Sir to describe to you the distress I am in would be impossible–but I hope by leaving me case in your hand who I had always concidered my friend that you will be able to prevail on Lord and Lady Stafford to dow something for me.
I remain Sir your most humble and obedient servant
Dorothy Doar.30
James Loch was an exceptionally busy man. He had been with the Staffords for twenty years, and was at this time involved in a myriad other activities: pushing through the Scottish clearance systems, chasing rick-burners across rural Salop and Staffordshire, manoeuvring with the railway and canal men over Lord Stafford’s awkwardly overlapping interests, keeping up with the auditing and administration of the various landed estates. All this kept him daily at his desk until late, much to his wife’s chagrin. He was also an MP, for Scotland’s northernmost constituency of Wick Burghs, and was immersed in the growing excitement of the Reform Bill question, a motion the Staffords supported unambiguously. At home his own family was getting larger: he and Anne now had nine children. In 1832 Loch was 52 years old and at the height of his powers, a managerial entrepreneur employed by a millionaire aristocrat. He was a man who held real power.
Mrs Doar’s troubles might have seemed like a dot on the map to James Loch. But this was not how he treated them. Hearing again from Lewis that Mrs Doar seemed ‘in very great distress’ and had ‘not saved a single shilling but is desirous of setting up a little shop in Newcastle [-under-Lyme] to sell Groceries & confectionary goods’, Loch–who is damned by history as the intransigent, inhuman architect of the Highland Clearances–turned his mind to extracting some good from this unfortunate case.
Our most intimate glimpse of Dorothy Doar comes from this series of letters between the two agents: the push and pull of power as senior and junior together decide her future. The letters sit in two musty bundles in the Sutherland archives, sandwiched between missives on animal husbandry, new roofs for the Lilleshall tenants, road-building projects and rick-burning culprits: the stuff of estate management. And at first it seemed as if this particular staffing problem could be dealt with in the same drily efficient way.
Lewis, anxious to help (and keen to avoid another emotional, recriminatory interview with the housekeeper), had got behind the shop idea: he’d already identified a vacant premises on Newcastle Road owned by Lord Stafford. ‘I doubt not she would soon get a little business that would maintain her’, he wrote to Loch. ‘I should be most happy to throw my little influence in her favour for I do consider she has been a very good and faithful servant to Lord & Lady Stafford but of course I will not say a word to her on this subject until I hear from you.’
First, Loch had to contact the Staffords. On 6 April he replied, in his fast-flowing, rapid-thinking, almost illegible hand, to Lewis–three days before the Reform Bill’s first night debate in Parliament. ‘Your idea for Mrs Doar is upon the whole approved of’, he wrote. Lord Stafford would help with start-up costs, providing the money didn’t go straight into her husband’s debts. It was a generous offer, and it was the final offer.
Both Lord and Lady S. are very sensible of Mrs Doar’s being a very faithful servant–but it is quite impossible in such an establishment to permit of her breeding and bearing a family in the House and if she went away for a time who then would look after the girls–besides it would be an example for the other Upper Servants and it would be Castle Howard over again in its worst times.
(One wonders what sexual liberties the Georgian upper servants had been taking at Castle Howard, the Yorkshire seat of Lord Stafford’s nephew George Howard, 6th Earl of Carlisle.)
‘You may perhaps have an opportunity of explaining this to Mrs Doar’, he continued, ‘and tell her I have got her letter, that I shall be most happy to help her in any other way but in the way she wishes, and if she fixes upon going to NCastle we will do what we can for her.’
On 10 April Loch managed, in the midst of great political fervour, to talk to the Marchioness about her housekeeper’s plan. ‘You may take steps to put Mrs Doar into her shop and give her a little assistance’, he wrote to Lewis; ‘of course her own health and situation are to be first consulted–and let it be known that she has her Ladyship’s support and that she goes on good terms.’
In the Midlands, Mrs Doar learns of Her Ladyship’s financial and moral support and is a little mollified. She has a focus. She has a plan. A shop is not so very different to her various store cupboards; she will make a good shopkeeper. As she lies sick in bed, the baby kicking in her belly, I imagine her mind turning to the material world of stock and supplies. She begins, as is her way, to make lists. ‘She seems now at rest in her mind’, Lewis writes to Loch, ‘and is much satisfied with Lord & Lady Stafford’s goodness toward her.’
So much oil poured onto troubled waters, so much soothing and praising of Mrs Doar’s talents and loyalty. And yet she is to be let go, rather than be granted six weeks’ leave. The Staffords are barely at Trentham for six weeks each year. Attitudes have changed since Dorothy bore her last baby: this time it is the principle of the thing that counts, not the logistics.
That evening, Lady Stafford left her husband at home once again to attend a ball at Westminster’s Ashburnham House, hosted by Princess Lieven, formidable wife of the Russian Ambassador, famous for introducing the waltz to London society (and for the remark, ‘It is not fashionable where I am not’). It was an evening ‘numerously and elegantly attended’ by a clutch of Marchionesses–Titchfield, Londonderry, Salisbury, Clanricarde…and of course that old intriguer and womaniser, Prince Talleyrand.31
A fortnight later, the Staffords took ten horses, four carriages and numerous servants to another of their splendid houses–West Hill, a mansion in leafy Wandsworth, just south of the capital. The servants’ hall buzzed with talk of ill health. ‘A Murrain appears to have got among our housekeepers’, as James Loch puts it, rolling his Scottish Rs with enjoyment at the biblical term. A murrain: a plague. Poor Mrs Galleazie was virtually under house arrest in town, Mrs Kirke dangerously ill at Lilleshall, Mrs Spillman at Dunrobin was at increasing risk being so near the infected Scottish ports and Mrs Doar not just ill but pregnant. Who would replace her?
West Hill’s housekeeper, Mrs Cleaver, was herself still learning the ropes. According to the servants’ wage ledgers, we can see that she took over from Mrs Maben in January, a step up from her previous position at the Marquess of Landsdowne’s house. Her old employer might be in Lord Grey’s Cabinet, but the Staffords were incontestably Britain’s most powerful family. No doubt she thought it most unorthodox that Trentham should have a married housekeeper: more still, one with a daughter and another baby on the way. But Mrs Cleaver prudently kept her council. She knew better than to gossip this soon into her tenure.
At West Hill the Staffords fall into a quieter regime, and Lady Stafford’s attention alights on her new housekeeper, poached at new year from her acquaintance, Lady Louisa. Cleaver is, it must be admitted, an impressive figure: sensible, efficient, tolerably well educated. After not quite four months at West Hill she is running the house with far more zeal than old Maben who, for all her loyalty, had most definitely let things slip. Goodness knows, it was hard enough to find a replacement housekeeper, not once but twice in a year…and–if Lady Stafford is to act upon the plan taking shape in her mind–to have to start all over again at West Hill…Quel ennui.
Before she is called back to town for an intimate soirée at Kensington Palace (just the Duchess of Kent, the King and Queen and a dozen other titles) the Marchioness comes to a decision.