Mrs Cleaver arrives at Trentham Hall with her bags after two days’ travel by stagecoach. She has her instructions. She knows she is on trial, and that this could be an unprecedented chance for advancement. Gingerly, she knocks on Mrs Doar’s door.
‘Who is it?’
The housekeeper’s voice sounds thin and strained to Mrs Cleaver’s ears. She hopes Mr Lewis has paved the way for the transfer of power, as she doesn’t want a fight on her hands.
On 9 May Lewis writes to Loch: ‘Mrs Cleaver arrived on Monday.’ He has also received a note from Lady Stafford, increasingly tetchy as the political tension mounts in London: ‘Her Ladyship will never again have a married House Keeper it is attended with many bad consequences.’
Mrs Cleaver is put straight to work drawing up an inventory: every new housekeeper must know how things stand. It is a way of taking possession–to finger and itemise every sheet, every cloth, every teacup and saucer. No cupboard or room escapes her eye.
Lewis’s letter, interrupted, continues in an irritable hand. ‘I am this moment told Mrs Doar has packed up 8 dozen of sweet wine to be sent off. Is this allowed? Mrs Doar has not pleased me these last few days, for I think she does not estimate properly the great kindness shewn her by the family and thinking she ought to be continued.’
Dorothy Doar is still sick in her bed and won’t be moved: it is her only way of hanging on. How could they bring in her replacement so quickly? After all these years! Her store cupboards, her systems, her girls, her rules. Is it her replacement? Mrs Doar finds Mrs Cleaver coldly efficient and reeking of ambition. She becomes resentful, contrary, territorial. But most of all she is frightened. It is time to stop procrastinating, as her uncertain future now stares her baldly in the face.
While Mrs Doar was packing up her ninety-six bottles of sweet wine, Britain was teetering on the brink of revolution. On 7 May Earl Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, requested an interview with the King and asked His Majesty to create sufficient Whig peers to push the Reform Bill through the House of Lords. It was a bill that aimed to enfranchise the growing middle classes (those living in homes worth at least £10 annually–£500 in today’s money–which cut out most of the working classes) and give proper representation to the newly industrialised cities of the English Midlands and North–and thus far it had been systematically and cravenly blocked by the Tories.
William IV then had sudden doubts about meddling with Parliament. He misjudged the ugly mood of the nation and refused. On 9 May, with the Reform Bill vetoed yet again by the House of Lords, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet resigned in disgust.
On 10 May, town councillor Mr Lee wrote to James Loch from Birmingham, where the police were trying to prevent ‘an explosion of public feelings’. ‘Disastrous news from London. The country is I feel in an awful state of difficulty. People of England have lost their faith in royal pledges [and are] disgusted with privilege and aristocracy.’32
It was not a good time to be a lord. Nor was it a good time to be a king. William IV had mud slung at his carriage and was hissed at in public; Queen Adelaide was left with the ‘fixed impression [that] an English revolution is rapidly approaching, and that her own fate is to be that of Marie Antoinette’.33 Whig clergyman Sydney Smith described a ‘hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear’ as London’s streets crackled with anger.
On 10 May James Loch, sitting in his office in the well-to-do suburb of Bloomsbury Square, turned his rapid-fire mind to Dorothy Doar’s health and the matter of the sweet wine. His suspicions were now aroused, and his tone had subtly changed. There was a clear wish to resolve this matter and move on. ‘We are in a state of ferment on public matters’, he wrote to Lewis.
I have time only to say that Mrs Doar when she is fully able must go to her lodgings at Handford–she appears to repay badly her Ladyship’s kindness–take care that directions are given that all her linen is kept separate from the rest of the household–and that Mrs Cleaver know that it is her Ladyship’s orders that every thing in Mrs Doar’s room be well scoured–let a temporary female wait on her and let the House Servants attend to their own duty.
He was slightly irritated by the detail of the wine. ‘Surely the sweet wine must be her own making’, he wrote; ‘she never could think of packing up his Lordships?’
The worry was that the housekeeper might have contracted the cholera morbus. But there was also a sense of wishing to erase Mrs Doar from Trentham Hall. She had become an embarrassment; she was surplus to requirements. As she went about her packing, sending box after box out of the back door with the help of the girls and the boot boy, gossip began to travel along the basement corridors.
Loch’s letter crossed that of William Lewis, who was now obsessed with the sweet wine. If he didn’t have access to such perks, why should Mrs Doar? Lewis tried to pull rank. ‘Hope you will let me know if Lady Stafford allows her to claim the sweet wine. I should think not. But if so, such indulgences may and will lead to great abuse if House Keepers have such privileges.’ The answer from the Marchioness–communicated to Loch before she readied herself for a splendid Friday-night ‘rout’ at Devonshire House–was not what Lewis wanted to hear. Do not interfere in this matter, came her instructions. It was, in all probability, some home-made wine of Mrs Doar’s own. Let the housekeeper be.
By 12 May William Lewis’s careful, audit-book mind felt under attack from conflicting sources of chaos. First the state of the nation, still without a government: ‘The people are generally speaking very much disappointed and disgusted at the conduct of the Lords’, he wrote to Loch, ‘and it will be well if they in the manufacturing towns remain quiet under such a disappointment.’ Stoke-on-Trent sat just outside the gates of Trentham Hall. What if the people were to storm this pleasure palace with cries of ‘Go it! Go it! This is our time!’? Where would this leave the servants?
Within the house all was not well either. ‘Mrs Cleaver has nearly gone over the inventory’, he continued:
she seems a very correct & proper person. I am exceedingly annoyed at Mrs Doar’s conduct. She has I understand behaved in a very unkind and improper manner to Mrs Cleaver. But Mrs Doar has told her to take upon herself the entire control and management of the house, which she has done. Mrs Doar has a person to wait upon her & the Girls are all kept to their own work. Everything will be well scoured that has been used or connected with Mrs Doar’s rooms.
James Loch did not involve himself further with these acrimonious hints and allusions. He had his hands full. At Westminster the anti-Reform Duke of Wellington was trying in vain to form a new Tory Cabinet. Protesters with placards were urging a run on the banks: ‘To stop the Duke, go for gold!’ As frantic crowds cashed in their savings for solid gold, some £1.5 million was withdrawn from the Bank of England. The Duke of Wellington, leaving St James’s Palace in his carriage, was attacked by a mob which ‘set up such an astounding hissing and yelling, as to frighten the horses; and in plunging about, one of them fell near the Queen’s entrance’. Military precautions were taken ‘to preserve the peace of the Metropolis’.34
On 15 May, Wellington resigned and Earl Grey was recalled to office. The news was greeted in the capital with peals of bells. Now that revolution was looking slightly less likely, William Lewis could contain himself no longer. Seventeenth of May: ‘There has been some very unpleasant reports about Mrs Doar packing up and sending off some heavy packages from the Hall’, he wrote to Loch, enclosing a defamatory letter written by one Mr Kirkby, another upper servant, probably the butler. ‘This is altogether a most distressing circumstance. If anything is wrong that the woman should have so far forgotten herself in the honest discharge of her duty–(I was not by any measure reconciled to the sending off the sweet wine…).’ No longer able to arbitrate, Lewis appealed to his senior, Loch: what should he do next?
On the morning of 19 May Loch replied with customary sangfroid. He was reluctant to think the worst of the housekeeper. ‘You will investigate carefully the stories regarding Mrs Doar & if after a calm and deliberate enquiry you think her conduct really liable to suspicion you may & should then give her the enclosed letter.’ But he cautioned Lewis ‘how easy a thing it is to whisper away a person’s character–& how serious a matter it is to so do’. Recollect also, he advised, how some think they can gain favour by bad-mouthing others behind their backs; spreading rumours while seeming to ‘fawn’ before them.
Why suspect Mrs Doar, he asked, if her own mistress didn’t? ‘Don’t forget that her place entitled her to certain perquisites, and that system being approved of by her Ladyship it cannot be thrown up against Mrs Doar.’ As to Mr Kirkby’s malicious letter: ‘I must caution you also at being led away entirely by Kirkby–he is as honest a man as breathes, but he is a man of strong passions and liable to be prejudiced–& he never liked Mrs Doar for she resisted his authority.’
He concluded by placing full responsibility on Lewis’s shoulders. You be the judge, he said. Give her my letter if you think she deserves it. But remember that this will reflect badly on your own character if she is found to be blameless.
By now the gossip lines between the Stafford residences were humming. Later that day, as the gas lamps were being lit in the square down below, Loch was forced to pick up his pen to Lewis again.
I regret to have to mention that various reports have reached me of Mrs Doar making up large packages some of which are already sent away from the House–including some wine. It is never my habit nor my inclination to listen to stories or suspect others upon loose grounds of improper conduct, but as these reports have reached me in a way that prevents my neglecting them, I must call your attention to them.
I confess that I am very slow & most unwilling to believe anything against Mrs Doar–I have always considered her a good & faithful servant, and being still of that opinion I am quite sure that she will not hesitate to show you what has been conveyed away & packed up and then put an end to all the stories that are propagated, and by doing so enable me to proceed in doing what I have been authorised to do for her.
And with this, after the near revolution of the past week, Loch the workaholic took three days’ holiday.