The day the housekeeper’s boxes were prised open, 28 May, was the King’s sixty-seventh birthday. The Marchioness of Stafford joined the crowds of grandees at a one o’clock ‘Drawing Room’ in St James’s Palace. So thronged was the grand staircase and Throne Room with obsequious aristocrats that the Queen was a full three hours receiving guests. The Morning Post went on to give a detailed sketch of each noblewoman’s outfit. Dorothy Doar’s mistress wore
A dress of rich white satin, elegantly embroidered in gold lama; the corsage and sleeves handsomely trimmed with beautiful blonde lace; ornamental vandyked stomacher, with gold, enriched with diamonds and emeralds, very superb; train of Acanthus green moiré, lined with white satin and embroidered with a rich gold lama bordering to correspond. Head-dress, gold, with plume of feathers and costly diamonds.
On her return, she learnt of Mrs Doar’s crime.
On 29 May, James Loch replied to William Lewis. ‘The accompanying letter contains your instructions regarding Mrs Doar–who has by her conduct forfeited all the favour of Lord & Lady S.’ They would not now help her in any way. She had burnt her boats. ‘You will tell Mrs Cleaver that her Ladyship approves much of her conduct as reported by you. Let me know whether you (privately) think Mrs Cleaver’s wages are enough–to make people honest & above suspicion they should have enough.’
The thought that nagged at the back of Loch’s brain was this: Dorothy Doar had been underpaid. As a father of nine children, he knew only too well how money simply disappeared. James Loch condemned, but he also understood her crime. Regrettably, the woman had fallen prey to temptation. On a fresh sheet he wrote another letter addressed to Lewis, to be read out to Mrs Doar. She had now passed the point of meriting direct correspondence.
I have received your letter about Mrs Doar with the most sincere concern and have read it to the Marquess & Marchioness of Stafford, who desire me to express their severe disappointment that a person in whom such confidence was placed for so many years, should have behaved so little worthy of it.
They desire me to say that they cannot agree to her remaining any longer at Trentham and that you intimate this to her. And they have further told me that they cannot now agree to that being done for her which they have previously ordered for her. In regard to the things that she has taken, it is their wish that what clearly belongs to the house should be retained…They commend your conduct in this most distressing affair, feeling that while you maintained their interests, you have done so without any unnecessary vigour or hardship.
Perhaps Lewis wonders whether he should have been more vigilant. How long has this pilfering been going on? Days? Years? He stations a grim-faced Mrs Cleaver and one of the more sharp-witted girls outside Mrs Doar’s bedroom door while he deliberates on what to do next. Lewis is a decent man, a man with a natural delicacy of manner and all the proper inhibitions surrounding women and bedrooms. For Loch’s sake, he must personally see this excruciating matter to its close. But inside that room is a crumple of unwashed bedding; a heavily pregnant woman with flushed cheeks and hair awry; the sweet smell of the sick room. He cannot bring himself to conduct a final search of Mrs Doar’s boxes and bedroom on his own.
The lowest point of Mrs Doar’s long life in service comes that afternoon, on the first day of June. There is a knock at the door, and a man’s voice: ‘Dorothy?’ It is her husband. Behind him is William Lewis, unable to meet her eye, and behind Lewis crowd Mrs Cleaver and that maid, on tiptoe, craning to get a look.
By six o’clock that evening, she is out.
Lewis woke at dawn after an exceptionally bad night. He drew his chair up to the black leather-topped desk, dipped his pen and wrote one further, detailed letter to Loch. Pray God the last.
The second of June:
It was necessary for securing back what belonged to the family to have another examination of the boxes and a general look through every drawer in the room which took place yesterday. I thought proper to send for the husband–he came and went through the unpleasantness with me and behaved himself with much propriety–the articles which we claimed were taken from her & the boxes again packed.
I would not allow Mrs Cleaver & one of the Girls to leave her until all was packed and her out of the house. I went to the inn for a room for her it being a wet day. She goes off tomorrow to her friends in the north. I of course told the husband that Lord & Lady Stafford could not be expected to do anything for her after her infamous conduct.
Lewis blamed ‘the connivance of the Girls’ for letting Mrs Doar pack up and send away so many things. ‘This deficiency annoyed me much’, he wrote, ‘and when the Girls were told of it by Mrs Cleaver they all declared their innocence.’ The Girls, for their part, had no doubt long known about their housekeeper’s growing belly and had imagined, as girls do, petting and spoiling the baby when it arrived. Of course they closed ranks against Mrs Cleaver.
The woman that attended the wretch, for I can call her nothing else, was also examined & from her we found that she had been sent out of the room and on her return found the room in an untolerable stench such as if from burning hair brushes, mops and flannel. Glass had been found in the ashes and the nail of a new mop. Not a doubt remains in my view but that the vile wretch had committed many articles to the flames.
His Lordship may here say that I ought to have taken the boxes away out of her room. But the whole was so bundled up with her own apparel that I felt a delicacy in doing so.
Lewis was deeply shaken. He blamed himself, but couldn’t see how he could have done anything differently. That he had trusted her, wanted to help her–then had to search, accuse and banish her! ‘Who could have guessed of such depravity?’ he wrote to Loch. ‘Who could guard against such a Devil?’
On 4 June, the day the Reform Bill was finally passed in the House of Lords by 106 votes to 22, James Loch wrote the last letter on the matter:
The disposition that could have led to the destruction of the things you mention must have been of the worst description. I am only thankful that it has led to nothing worse or more criminal–I say so most sincerely. As to yourself, I only know I should have acted entirely as you have done. No one could have expected such depravity.
*
The housekeeper set off the next day in the rain, in a jolting public carriage. She was heading for her friends in the north.
Within the year her employer, the newly titled Duke of Sutherland, was dead. His son George set about flexing his muscles. The family seat should, he felt, reflect more sumptuously the status of its owner. His wife Harriet (pregnant with her seventh child) agreed. Within two years Trentham Hall was razed to the ground. Like its cast-off housekeeper, it seemed to belong to a different world. On its footprint rose a swaggering chunky Italianate palace with a square tower at one end, designed by the man of the day, Charles Barry. Few staff at Trentham survived the change of regime, and not Mrs Cleaver. When the new house threw open its doors to guests in 1840, a young queen was on the throne and a wholly new team of professionals was at work in the back of the building.
I searched at length for Dorothy Doar, post-Trentham Hall. Civil registration did not start until 1837 and the first census took place in 1841, but neither of these produced the woman I was looking for. I tried parish registers, records of baptisms, marriages (in case she had remarried and changed her name) and deaths. I looked in local newspapers, lest she was involved in some tragedy or crime that might be reported. I combed through emigrations records and digitised workhouse records. Like her ghostly presence in the Sutherland archive, I felt sure she was languishing in an un-indexed parish register somewhere, her name so badly misspelt that it couldn’t be found.
And so Mrs Doar slipped away without trace. Did she manage to make a new life for herself with her friends in the north? Her daughter would surely have left school and come with her, but did Mr Doar also leave his new and hard-won situation? Did Dorothy survive childbirth? Did the baby live? Her attempted crime denied her the chance to work again in a country house–and most certainly not as an upper servant, lacking as she did the all-important reference from her mistress.
Perhaps the Doars emigrated to Canada or America, crammed in squalid conditions on a passage lasting several weeks. Today there are more Doars living in the US than there are in the UK; the family might have been part of the Doar diaspora from Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire across the Atlantic. More likely, though, it was worse.
When health failed, savings were exhausted and the last bit of respectable clothing was pawned, the workhouse was almost inevitable. In 1832, the year of Mrs Doar’s disgrace, it was still possible to seek financial support directly from one’s parish of birth. Under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the only relief possible was to be found within a workhouse. Did Mrs Doar exchange her black silk for a prison-style uniform and give up her husband and two young children to the rules of segregation? Did she finish her days eating gruel?
Just two months before her downfall she was held to be ‘a most excellent and zealous and faithful person who did her duty fully, amply and conscientiously’. Then, almost overnight, she was converted in their minds to a ‘hardened’ wretch; a ‘devil’ to be ejected swiftly. Agent William Lewis seems to have thought Dorothy Doar got off lightly thanks to the aristocracy’s aversion to scandal. She was a thief, and as everyone knew, Embezzlement of a Master’s property is Felony. ‘If he shall purloin, or make away with his master’s goods to the value of 40s it is felony, and he shall, himself, his aider, or abettor, on conviction, be transported for 14 years.’36
But thieving alone cannot explain how molested the Trentham agent felt. It was as if the whole house and the society it sustained, with all its elaborate hierarchies and rules, had been violated. One moment Mrs Doar was one thing, and then–suddenly–she was another. By dropping the mask of duty and subservience so readily she had somehow conned Lewis. This ‘good and faithful servant’ had roundly duped him, and he was furious.
Mrs Doar’s duplicity threatened all that the nineteenth century would come to hold most dear: the sanctity of the home. The black bombazine dress and bunch of keys–symbols of sobriety, dependability, morality–were revealed to be just a cloak, a veneer. Inside, she was human.