If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Read Free Book Online Page B

the fire.
    In innumerable royal bedrooms, it was a trusted and often noble servant who had the responsibility of warming the king’s shirt ‘before the fire, & hold the same till we are ready to put it on’, words which come from the bedchamber rules of William III. When Horace Walpole visited the French court of Louis XV in 1765, he found the king’s public dressing had become so well-established and ritualised that it was almost a tourist attraction: ‘You are let into the King’s bedchamber just as he has put on his shirt; he dresses and talks good-humouredly to a few.’ Yet even this unusually tolerant king had his limits: he would ‘glare at strangers’.
    The same dressing ceremonies were also found in the bedchambers of important ladies. John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist, recorded how he was once invited into a bedchamber to see Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, ‘in her morning loose garment, her maids combing her, newly out of her bed, his majesty and the gallants standing about her’. Many other gallants and cronies of the king had also gathered to see the pleasant and titillating sight.
    A little later at the British court, Queen Anne was also semi-publicly dressed by her extensive bedchamber staff. They descended in rank from the Mistress of the Robes, to the Ladies of the Bedchamber (aristocrats one and all), to the Women of the Bedchamber, to the dressers, hairdressers, and finally, the Page of the Backstairs.
    The items of the queen’s clothing were also ranked from highto low, and the participants were only allowed to touch garments appropriate to their status. So, the Lady of the Bedchamber put on the queen’s shift, which went right next to her skin and was considered to be highly important. The Lady also handed the queen her fan at the end of the whole process, and that was the limit of her involvement. More menial work – lacing the queen into her stays, putting on her hoops and fastening her dress – was done by the Women of the Bedchamber and the dressers, and the Page’s lowly role was limited to putting on her shoes. The Mistress of the Robes had the least physically demanding but most high-status job of all: she handed the queen her jewels. One pities the queen, standing cold and vulnerable in the centre of this dance of ceremony.
    These records of royal dressing rituals reveal that a striking number of people were involved. The number of participants may sound excessive, and you might assume that many of them were mere flunkeys and hangers-on. But it wasn’t just dressing which was subject to overstaffing: in 1512, the Earl of Northumberland had twenty servants on duty in his great chamber, or living room, in the morning, eighteen in the afternoon, and no less than thirty in the evening. Yet a vast entourage became (and remains) an indicator of a person’s power and status. All this would be completely dwarfed by the absolute monarchies of the Baroque period: when Louis XIV moved his household from place to place, 30,000 horses were required to transport his people and possessions. Even people of lower status could never be satisfied with the number of servants they had. Elizabeth Spencer, who wanted her husband to stump up the wages for an additional ‘gentlewoman’, or female companion, wrote in 1594 that ‘it is an undecent thing’ for her sole existing ‘gentlewoman to stand mumping alone’.
    But there was another reason for all the servants: you simply couldn’t get into your clothes without someone else to help. Until buttons were invented in the fourteenth century, you needed anextra pair of hands to fasten up your ‘points’ (the holes through which a string was threaded to attach the sleeves to the body of a gown). The batman to a medieval knight was essential to ‘help to array him, truss his points, stick up his hose, and see all things be cleanly about him’. A medieval treatise recommends that a lord’s ‘chamberlain’, or