WORKING FOR LORD Portsmouth, whether as a household servant or as an estate labourer, was certainly a unique experience. Charles Green had trained as a shoemaker, but times were hard so he had gone into service, working in at least one other household before his position at Hurstbourne began in 1808. Service was a full-time occupation, and meant living as well as working in the same house as the employer. So servants like Green saw Portsmouth on a daily basis, and at close hand. ‘I observed his manner much,’ Green later stated to the Lunacy Commission. He was initially shocked at how the Hurstbourne household was run. Everyone took their orders from Lady Portsmouth, not her husband. Grace held the purse strings, and Lord Portsmouth had only ‘pocket money’ to spend. Lord Portsmouth was master and head of the household in name only. ‘I was astonished at the manner of the servants to him,’ Green remembered. ‘They would take such improper liberties with Lord Portsmouth. I was astonished they would attempt to behave so to a man of his rank. I soon found out why it was.’1
Portsmouth spent his time in places usually reserved for working men. It was funerals of workers and their families that attracted Portsmouth, but another reason why he rushed to church whenever a person died was because he wanted to ring the bells. Indeed, as soon as any church service at Hurstbourne was over, Portsmouth rushed out of his pew, and hurried up the steep stone steps that led to the belfry. Once there, Portsmouth threw off his hat and coat, and stripped to the waist just like his fellow bell-ringers. Calling himself ‘Jack’, and declaring that he was the head bell-ringer, Portsmouth would excitedly announce, ‘come Boys we must have a peal!’ Portsmouth ordered that several days a year were bell-ringing days, including his birthday. At weddings, Portsmouth stood at the Communion Table with the Minister until the ceremony was over and then addressed the congregation by saying that he hoped they would remember ‘us poor ringers’. If any payment was made, Portsmouth insisted that the sum was divided equally, much to the annoyance of his fellow bell-ringers, who were all working men, some of them his servants.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for a man who could not sing in tune or time, Portsmouth was a ‘very bad ringer’. One Hurstbourne labourer who heard Portsmouth ring the church bells thought he did not know the difference between ‘doing well and ill’. He did not understand the idea of ringing in a peal, so another man always had to stand beside Portsmouth to catch the rope and hand it to him when it was his turn to pull. Portsmouth seemed blissfully unaware of his lack of ability, and bell-ringing became one of his many pleasures. Along with pretending logs were coffins in an attempt to keep Portsmouth amused, his servants strung ropes across hooks in the stables to let Portsmouth pretend that he was ringing bells.
Green knew that his master loved music, for he was invited to play in his household band. Portsmouth took their performances very seriously, and gave all the band members special clothes to wear. Yet all the musicians knew that their patron was a fool. If Portsmouth asked what key they were playing in, they would answer ‘O’, and ‘he was satisfied’.
Portsmouth’s lack of attention meant that even an apparently innocent pastime such as ringing bells could be dangerous for others involved. He constantly messed around, sometimes using his rope to hit his fellow bell-ringers. But he caused greatest alarm when one day he placed a rope around another man’s neck, and ‘someone removed it, or, as the bell was going up, he would have been hanged’. Following this near-fatal incident, ‘my Lord laughed’, remembered the man’s father.2
Portsmouth also spent time with his men when he visited the stables on his estate. He derived enormous enjoyment from riding his phaeton, a light four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage that was very popular at this time. This could be viewed as merely eccentric, as was the case with Portsmouth’s Surrey neighbour at Clandon Park, the 2nd earl of Onslow, whose passion for driving four-in-hand was captured in one of Gillray’s caricatures. Onslow favoured black horses and, because he also had his carriage painted black, ‘the whole turn-out had more than the appearance of belonging to an undertaker’.
But whereas Onslow’s macabre appearance had something in common with Portsmouth’s pursuit of funerals, Onslow was commonly thought of as strange, and as a source of mild amusement, never concern. Portsmouth, on the other hand, took his interest in horses to new extremes. Coachmen and stable workers saw Portsmouth whipping his horses mercilessly. He had a large collection of whips for this purpose. Charles Webb, who was head coachman for Portsmouth from November 1808, thought that it ‘was a sort of childish mischievous sport to his Lordship to cut them as he did. It was not from passion or malice in his Lordship; but it was what a mischievous boy might do.’ But if whipping his horses was the childish play of an idiot rather than a madman, then Portsmouth’s orders to have his horses bled seemed far more sinister. His servants simply pricked the animals with a pin, and made it look like they had been bled, and Portsmouth did not know the difference.
Although Portsmouth said that he was fond of horses, in the words of George Twynam, his gentleman neighbour, ‘he was no sportsman’. He drove his phaeton in such a fast and furious manner that there was surprise that he did not cause an accident. To Webb, Portsmouth was too much of a coward to know how to manage a horse. If a horse started to kick as he whipped it in the stables, he ran away. At the slightest sense of danger while riding his phaeton, Portsmouth threw down his reins. And if ‘any little thing happened to carriage or harness when they were out his Lordship would begin to halloo and cry, and call and beg to be let out, like a big blubbering boy’.
Horses were needed on the Portsmouth estate for work as well as leisure. To all his farm hands, it was extraordinary that Portsmouth insisted upon driving the heavy well-built cart horses around his farms. This was the occupation of a labouring man, not a peer. Portsmouth even drove dung from his stables to the fields, and such was his thoroughness at this task that a gardener needing manure was forced to get up early in the morning to beat Portsmouth to the stables.
While Portsmouth could prove himself a competent dung remover, he got in the way of other farm labour. Portsmouth was unable to distinguish between play and work; everything was a source of fun to him. Portsmouth acted as a young child, oblivious to danger. He went ‘within the sweep of the scythe’ as grass was being mowed; had to be pushed out of the way as carpenter Litchfield sawed off a beam; stood in the path of a tree that was about to be felled; and got too close to other farm carts as they were passing.3
Portsmouth was in his forties, but he was still behaving like a little boy. He played ‘the most silly and absurd tricks’. ‘If a servant had a new coat on Lord Portsmouth would find some means of spoiling it’; and he thought it amusing to try to stick rabbit skins and dishcloths to the back of their clothes without their noticing. If a servant was cleaning the plate, he would tarnish it; pinch the tools of a worker to slow his progress; throw water on to a fire that had just been lit; and blow out the candles in the parlour and servants’ hall. In the fields he put a halter around the neck of one of his favourite labourers and said that he had a dancing bear, and he thought it was funny if he pushed the men into nettles or ditches. If he wanted to play hide and seek with his farm workers, they pretended that they did not know where he was so that he left them alone for a time. At least one bailiff was forced to employ a group of labourers specifically to keep Portsmouth amused and out of the way so that farm work could continue uninterrupted. Portsmouth was particularly fond of pulling the ears of his servants. One labourer, who started work at Hurstbourne as a boy under his father, told the courts that it would take him a year ‘to tell all the childish foolish tricks he has witnessed in Lord Portsmouth’. He ‘did not much like it’ when Portsmouth pinched his ears. Portsmouth’s conduct mocked and demeaned his workers; at the time it was mildly irritating and tiresome, but with repetition it could become unbearable.4
Many found his treatment of animals disturbing. He flogged his horses until they were ‘mad’ and ‘did not know’ what they were about. He not only mistreated his horses on occasion, but also took an unnatural interest in the slaughter of his cattle. Whenever butcher John Pottecary drove the cattle from the Hurstbourne estate to be slaughtered, Portsmouth met him and beat the animals severely with a large stick. Once at the slaughterhouse, Portsmouth started knocking the ox on their heads with an axe he had made specially for this purpose. In his eagerness to be part of the killing, Portsmouth started hitting the animals before they were properly secured, meaning he put himself and others at risk of being trampled. Among the blood and gore, Portsmouth ‘mangled’ the animals, and ‘put them to great torture’. As the animal was ‘struggling and roaring thro’ pain’, Portsmouth ‘seemed much pleased and laughed’, shouting out above the din, ‘It serves you right you vicious Devil.’ Pottecary could do nothing to prevent this bloodbath. When he told Portsmouth ‘it was a shame to beat the creatures so’, even arguing that ‘he would spoil the meat’, Portsmouth grew angry and threatened to fire him.
Describing Portsmouth’s behaviour at the slaughterhouse, the grieving father William Litchfield bitterly remarked, ‘anything cruel and death of any kind delighted him’. ‘He was very cruel to dumb creatures,’ reported a lodge keeper at Hurstbourne. In the hay fields and water meadows ‘where there are a good many frogs’, Portsmouth ‘used to stick them with the prong of a fork’. ‘The poor things’ would cry out ‘almost like a child’. If anyone objected, Portsmouth would shout, ‘Damn them!’ and ‘Serve them right: they eat plenty of them in France.’5
Not all of Portsmouth’s employees stood by as their master inflicted such cruelty. But if they intervened, they risked becoming the targets of his violence. When a coachman objected to Portsmouth trying to make a horse pull a load that was immoveable, ‘smack went the whip in his face’. Grace arranged for the man to receive five pounds in compensation. Litchfield seemed to be right: Portsmouth enjoyed inflicting pain on creatures or people who he believed were less powerful than himself. He ordered a mix of jalap and mustard to be put into the beer of servants he did not like, and held the men down while they were forced to drink. The cook was told to feed servants who had fallen out of Portsmouth’s favour with nothing but water-gruel and mustard for a week, and, if he found that she had not followed his orders, he whipped her out of the kitchen with stinging nettles.
Yet any power-kick that Portsmouth may have gained from these occasions was short-lived. Beneath a thin veneer of bravado and self-importance (he scolded any servant who addressed him as ‘Sir’ rather than ‘Lord’) was a giant coward. Just as he ran away from any horse or bull that threatened to trample him, he was easily intimidated by the words and actions of his servants. When Portsmouth tried to strike his valet, Charles Lee, because he said ‘the servants should not burn his candles’, Lee resisted and Portsmouth was ‘cowed’. Coachman Webb put up with Portsmouth whipping the horses, but he could stop Portsmouth trying to strike him, by threatening to go to Bow Street to get a warrant against him. Green experienced his master’s unpredictable behaviour and unwarranted anger one day as he followed Portsmouth, Grace, and Miss Gordon around the garden at Hurstbourne. Portsmouth suddenly turned and hit him so hard on the head with a stick that Green fell to the ground. Green was taken to bed, where Grace sent him some white wine and whey to aid his recovery. ‘I was not much hurt,’ Green later admitted, ‘but I thought to frighten his Lordship’ by pretending to be more seriously injured. Servants like Green were well aware of their rights, and with Portsmouth they were not afraid to voice them. ‘I knew it was not fit that a gentleman should knock down his servant,’ stated Green, ‘so I said to my Lord, the next time he offered to strike me, I will put you in the Crown-office and take away all your property from you.’ At this, Portsmouth ‘was very much frightened’, and his violence towards Green was never repeated. His servant had put him in his place.6
Who would work for a man like Portsmouth? Servants like Green were told when they were employed ‘that they were to put up with a great deal’. Suffering ‘pulling of the ears’ and suchlike would have to be endured, but in compensation they were promised greater wages than most. However, the Portsmouths were not known to be generous employers, and, as working-class agitation mounted in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the labourers at Hurstbourne joined many others across the country by going on strike for better wages. Trouble lay ahead.
Of course, servants and labourers were always free to give their notice and seek work in a more conventional setting. Some did so, such as the valet, Lee, who left sometime after his master had tried to strike him. Lee was ‘much about Lord Portsmouth’s person, and observed his conduct’, he later explained to the Lunacy Commission. ‘I quitted his Lordship’s family because I felt myself uncomfortable,’ he said.
But whether out of fear of unemployment and hunger, or from loyalty towards Grace, who was universally admired by the Hurstbourne workers, the majority remained. These working-class men could show a patience, tolerance, and understanding of Portsmouth’s behaviour that was remarkable. William Lock spent the whole of his working life as a labourer on the Hurstbourne estate, first for Portsmouth’s father, and then for Portsmouth himself. In Lock’s view, Portsmouth ‘knew no more than a child what was proper to be done about the Farm … all he cared for was having his day’s amusement’. Lock saw Portsmouth at funerals when he helped to carry the bodies to the grave, and stood next to Portsmouth in the belfry as a fellow bell-ringer. Yet, describing an incident when Portsmouth cut him across the back with a long cart whip as he was lifting hay, he told the Commission, ‘it could not be from malice’. Portsmouth was the boy who had never grown up. He was ‘always of the same description,’ explained Lock, ‘for he was the same man and behaved in the same way day by day and year by year’. When Portsmouth talked ‘foolishly’ about how the whip strike could not have hurt, it took all of Lock’s willpower not to respond by hitting Portsmouth back. But there was no retaliation because he did not believe Portsmouth had intended to harm him. Like Webb, who did not think Portsmouth whipped his horses out of malice, Lock had decided that Portsmouth was too simple-minded to be cruel. Cruelty required a state of mind that Portsmouth did not have. So Lock kept his fists by his side, and plainly told Portsmouth that ‘he would not stand it’.
While such forbearance earned the gratitude of Grace, who trusted Lock sufficiently to ask him to keep a special watch over her husband, over time it was wearing. ‘It was the hardest matter in the world to keep him in any tolerable humour,’ Lock later explained. ‘Hundreds of lies were told him almost daily to keep him quiet: such as telling him that somebody was ill and likely to die. No one could hardly believe the nonsense and lies they were obliged to talk to his Lordship.’ Green remembered putting a broomstick between Portsmouth’s legs, and getting him to chase him around a room; lifting his master on to a pole and carrying him about like a horse; and taking hold of Portsmouth’s ‘pig-tail’, rapping it against his neck or shoulders ‘as he would a knocker’, and calling out, ‘is anybody at home?’ At the time this was great fun for Portsmouth and perhaps for his servants, but, on reflection and when they were asked to describe their work for Portsmouth in his trials, such playful antics caused deep embarrassment. Green later admitted that this was the last way he would behave with another master, and that he was ‘almost ashamed of having done it’.
The problem with Portsmouth’s relationship with his workers was that he did not behave as their master. His personal habits left everyone appalled. When out riding Portsmouth told his postilion that ‘he must get off and have a piss’. Once off his horse ‘he turned round and showed his private parts’ to his servant, ‘in the most plain and gross manner’, telling him ‘to look at him’. On other occasions, he would ‘whistle to the labourers and they to him (just as to a horse) when they and he have been making water’. ‘His Lordship had no more sense of decency in that respect than a little boy in petticoats,’ declared park keeper Godden. ‘He used to stand and do it in the middle of a field exposing himself to the labourers at the time,’ Godden remembered.
Servitude, with its expectations of deference and obedience, could only function while there was respect for those in command. As lawyers in one of Portsmouth’s trials explained, ‘All persons look up for example to those who are in higher stations in life … this Nobleman forgets all that belongs to high rank and great opulence.’ Portsmouth’s mental limitations reduced him to the capabilities of a child, but they also prevented him from exercising authority over his social inferiors. At Hurstbourne, ‘all distinction of Master and servant was lost’, remarked one observer. ‘I knew how to manage him,’ Green told the Commission: in this upside-down household, it was the servants who controlled their master, not the other way round. Portsmouth, according to Green, was not a ‘perfect madman, else I should be afraid of him. I was never with a gentleman of that kind before. I considered him strange, but not mad. I consider a madman one who does all sorts of things and is not conscious of it, and cannot be ruled.’ But ‘we used to rule my Lord’.7
So far, the only non-family members who really knew Lord Portsmouth were the servants and workers who lived alongside him. They saw him for the man he was. But their social position meant that they just had to put up with it. For decades they had to tolerate his bizarre behaviour, or else quit and find work elsewhere. Within the Portsmouth household, the reversal of roles, where servants like Green could rule their master was maintained for so long as there was a mistress who inspired loyalty. That mistress was Grace, Lady Portsmouth.
It was not until 1815 that Portsmouth’s servants and estate labourers were asked to provide accounts of their experiences working for him. Testifying during legal proceedings that aimed to obtain a Lunacy Commission, they were put in an unenviable position. Unconvinced that there was need for a Commission, the Chancellor refused to call one. A raft of employees who had given evidence in favour of a Commission were dismissed for daring to call their master’s sanity into question.
Even when the Commission was called in 1823, the words of working men were more likely to be questioned than Portsmouth’s better-off acquaintances. Were the stories of ordinary working people really to be believed over those Lords and Ladies with whom Portsmouth mixed socially? The character of working-class witnesses could be questioned to raise doubts about the reliability of their accounts. In bereaved father Litchfield’s case, friends were asked if he was addicted to drinking. No credit should be given to the words of the blood-letting women Sarah Adams, Ann Pope, or Hannah Curtis, it was argued. These women ‘were and are persons of bad fame, character and reputation, who for gain or reward’ could be persuaded to say anything.
Telling a convincing story was not easy when for so long they had been expected to keep silent. Called to travel to London, and then being asked to speak before a room crowded with people, and to answer questions posed by highly educated lawyers could be an overwhelming experience. Still, having bottled up these stories for years, perhaps only sharing them with friends and family, working men and women could finally speak out. Some jumped at the opportunity. Green had no hesitation in declaring that Portsmouth’s mind ‘did appear to be like a boy four or five years old’.
Yet the unsophisticated way in which Green and other workers spoke provoked mockery. When Green explained he knew ‘how to humour’ Portsmouth, he chose a metaphor with which as a former cobbler he was familiar: ‘I found the length of his Lordship’s foot’. This, The Times noted, caused laughter to break out in the Freemasons’ Hall. Laughter was frequently heard during Portsmouth’s lunacy trials, usually in response to some answer or expression given by one of his workers. In what should have been a serious matter, laughter provided a welcome release. For, while men such as Green were questioned and their responses recorded, a deep sense of unease filled the room. Portsmouth’s trials were an occasion when the social order was thrown out of place. Just as Portsmouth’s mental condition reversed the usual roles of master and servant in his household, so these legal proceedings permitted working people to give their views about the conduct and future life of a social superior. When Green provoked humour by comparing how he measured his master’s capabilities with the way he would a customer’s foot, or following his testimony about Portsmouth a Hurstbourne carpenter declared, ‘I am a married man and so is my wife’, the laughter they caused was almost a relief. It allowed the jury and audience at the trials to put these witnesses back into their place: these were humble, unsophisticated, and ill-educated people. What did they know of the workings of an aristocrat’s mind?8