Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power. Claudia Renton

and set up in his rooms above the coachhouse. She was fortunate in being able to live with her husband. Married footmen, valets or butlers lived separately from their wives, setting them up in a nearby cottage, and visiting them on their days off. The wife of William Icke, Clouds’ butler from 1892, was housekeeper to two spinster ladies in East Knoyle. Her loyalty was rewarded when they left her their house in their will.⁴² Housekeepers and cooks, who bore the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’, could actually be married – the Wyndham children’s nanny of Cumberland days, Horsenail, had in fact married Forbes, graduating to housekeeper in the days before Mrs Vine. Otherwise, a female servant who married would immediately leave her employ.

      In 1891 there were over one and a half million domestic servants in the United Kingdom – almost 16 per cent of the workforce.⁴³ Service was an honourable profession with loyalty and affection on both sides. Eassy and Bertha Devon both stayed with the Wyndhams until retirement, the former then moving to a cottage in East Knoyle. Nonetheless, in 1898 the average length of stay by a servant in a household was less than eighteen months.⁴⁴ The turnover at Clouds, from the names on the ten-yearly censuses, was not notably different. The reasons were numerous: marriage; a promotion elsewhere; or abandonment of domestic service entirely. Periodicals like the Lady complained of young men and women with ‘ideas above their station’, thinking themselves too good for service. As the century wore on, many did, rejecting the snobbish hierarchy of the servants’ hall for the greater freedom and excitement available in other jobs. All Madeline’s daughters bemoaned the impossibility of finding good staff.

      In 1884, domestic calm was rocked by a young woman’s distress: ‘poor Lucy the housemaid in London I’m afraid she has gone mad – she went for a holiday & came back quite off her head’. The situation, relayed by Mrs Vine to Madeline, and thence to her daughters, was grave, if comical. Lucy, whose head Madeline thought had been ‘turned’ by the marriage of her fellow housemaid Mary Brown, veered between lucidity and moments of ‘wild’ behaviour. Following a composed conversation with Dr Gibbons, the doctor summoned to examine her, Lucy ‘came down and said to Bertha “if I take any one I think I’ll take Dr Gibbons!”’

      While amused by Mrs Vine’s decorous alarm, Madeline nonetheless took the matter seriously. She reported to Mary:

      it is quite too awfully sad … she is full of delusions thinks people are coming to take her away & that something dreadful will happen because Mary Brown had to sign some cheques for her that they will f[i]nd out she could not wright [sic] and a lot more I told her that she must not let her self give way … but … she is so miserable she would break her heart Bertha & Charlotte had to sit up with her & hold her down in bed. Don’t talk about this with anyone but is it not horrid?⁴⁵

      History does not relate what happened to Lucy. She does not appear in the 1891 census either for Clouds or for Belgrave Square. Presumably she was dispatched back to her family: it is likely that Madeline took care to make sure someone would look after her.

      Reportage of such untoward incidents was part of the traffic of communication between Madeline and her daughters: their own children picked up snippets and came to Clouds wide-eyed, alert to a servant to whom such gossip had lent an air of celebrity. Lizzie Beaver, the still-room maid (in charge of cakes, jam and preserves, so a good person for hungry children to befriend), nearly died when, returning from the village to Clouds early in the morning of 31 December 1886, she got lost in snow and fog, and was only found at midday on New Year’s Day, frozen half to death. Howard ‘the married stable-man’ slipped over when carrying a heavy sack and injured his back badly enough to be confined to lying ‘quite still’ for a lengthy period of time. The daughter of Wareham the under-coachman suffered from paralysed legs, ‘the awful result, it was thought, of sitting on a cold stone when she was very hot’. Eassy raised the alarm in 1888 with fears about her own heart, although Dr Collins pronounced her as suffering only from ‘nervous shock’ – most likely a panic attack, for reasons unknown. In 1892, Enfield, who had replaced Forbes as butler in 1888, was struck by a sudden ‘chill’ and ‘rheumatic pains’ one Friday night that left him ‘unable to wait at dinner’, followed swiftly by ‘inflammation of the brain … he died in convulsions at 2.30 o’clock’.⁴⁶ Enfield’s wife, who had gone to London ‘to be confined’, was left to give birth to a fatherless child.

      In her youth Madeline Wyndham had compiled a photograph album of ‘all the dear Servants at Petworth’, with handwritten commentary beneath, explaining who each subject was.⁴⁷ Yet she, like most, thought nothing of loaning her daughters a spare footman when they had large house parties ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’, said an ex-butler, Eric Horne, scornfully in a bestselling memoir published in 1923.⁴⁸ Percy rewarded his favourite, William Mallett, the clerk of works responsible for all maintenance on the house and estate, with a house that was two cottages knocked into one. It allowed Mallett – who had worked his way up from house carpenter – a comparatively palatial four bedrooms for his family of eleven. But Percy’s attitude towards his staff was aristocratic, to say the least. Hyde, Clouds’ head keeper, lost a finger when Percy swung round carelessly and pulled the trigger of his gun. That might have been sheer absent-mindedness. The occasion on which Percy shot a beater called Fletcher in the foot for picking up the wrong pheasant most certainly was not.⁴⁹

       SEVEN

       The Birth of the Souls

      As Percy became East Knoyle’s squire, he abandoned national politics for local. To an extent, his hand was forced. Gladstone’s 1884 Franchise Act extended household suffrage to the countryside, adding 1.7 million voters to the electorate.¹ Of far more radical effect was the associated 1885 Redistribution Act, which in Robin Hood fashion took seats from over-represented rural constituencies to give to the under-represented towns. Manchester’s representatives were doubled from three to six, Wiltshire’s reduced from fifteen to six. Percy’s West Cumberland seat was one of over seventy abolished.

      H. M. Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, whose members included William Morris and Eleanor Marx, daughter of the revolutionary thinker Karl, did not think it went far enough. It showed its socialist colours by renaming itself the Social Democratic Federation and organizing a series of unruly street meetings of the unemployed demanding ‘work or bread’.² At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Percy thought it the beginning of the end of aristocratic rule. Paradoxically he was saved, in his mind, by Gladstone himself.

      In June 1885, Gladstone resigned, discredited by General Gordon’s martyrdom and finally brought down after being defeated on an amendment to the Budget. Lord Salisbury formed a caretaker government. An election was held over three weeks in late November and early December. Almost on the day the election ended, Herbert Gladstone ‘flew the Hawarden Kite’, leaking to the press the spectacular news that his father, deep in thought over the summer, had converted to Home Rule and was prepared to take office to implement it. The election results showed how meaningful this was. Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, now formally committed to Home Rule, held the balance of power.

      That Liberalism should be allied to Home Rule was not inevitable in the shadowy boxing and coxing that took place over Christmas and in the early new year. Herbert Gladstone’s bombshell, partly a ham-fisted attempt to drum up support for Home Rule across the fractured Liberal party, alienated significant Whig and Radical tranches of the party. Gladstone appears to have wanted the Conservatives to put the measure forward themselves. But it became clear that Salisbury’s conception of empire demanded unity, not the pluralistic view Gladstone proposed.³ In January 1886, Parliament reconvened under Salisbury’s minority government. Gladstone moved an amendment to the Address (that is, to the Queen’s Speech). Supported by the Irish, he brought the government down,