Eavesdropping (24 page)

Several witnesses were called. Three were servants in the Harris home. The first to testify was Sarah Simmons, twenty-five, a servant to Mrs. Harris. She began by recounting a Sunday evening in April, 1775, when her mistress came into the kitchen and ordered the servants to bed. Why? It was an odd request since there were always things to be done after dinner. Sarah was also told that her personal services would not be needed that night. Mrs. Harris would undress herself. Confused, and somewhat suspicious, Sarah went to her room.

But she did not go to bed. Nor was Mrs. Harris planning to undress herself.

Sarah and her roommate, Catherine Durnford, tried to interpret Mrs. Harris’s actions. They surmised that Mrs. Harris was planning to spend the night with a man who, in previous visits, had displayed inappropriate affections toward Mrs. Harris, and she toward him. It was the Reverend John Craven, the rector of Woolverton, a parish adjoining Basinghurst. He had been given a room down the hall.

Sarah told Miss Durnford that she intended to catch her employer in the act. Donning a nightgown, Sarah blew out the candle, cracked opened the door of her room, and listened. She heard Mrs. Harris enter her bedchamber—which was directly across the hall—and about fifteen minutes later heard Mr. Craven leave his room, walk down the hall, and open Mrs. Harris’s door.

Sarah was careful to note the time. It was midnight.

Sarah crossed the hall and stood outside her mistress’s door, where she “listened at the key-hole” and “heard Mr. Craven and Mrs. Harris whispering together, and heard them kiss each other.” The room was dark, but Sarah was able to make out some incriminating sounds—first the “movement” of bed clothes, and then the “cracking” of the bed. This continued for about two or three minutes, Sarah testified, “and immediately afterwards every thing was quite silent,” and remained so for the next half hour.

When she returned to her room, Sarah discussed Mrs. Harris’s adulterous activities with Miss Durnford. Perhaps, Sarah suggested, she should tell her mistress that Mr. Harris had come home and was bound to discover her in bed with Mr. Craven. Mr. Harris was a sympathetic character. Nothing in the court records suggests that he knew about his wife’s misdeeds—misdeeds that were carried out under his own roof, some, even, in the marital bed. Miss Durnford tried to talk her out of it, arguing that the better course, considering what Sarah had already seen and heard, was simply to confront Mrs. Harris the next morning. It was a suggestion that Sarah would follow, but not until she had completed her investigation. Sarah made her way down the hall and looked into Mr. Craven’s room. His clothes were missing.

Later, at about two o’clock in the morning, Sarah heard Mr. Craven walk back to his room. Remarkably, she was able to hear him blow out his lamp “at two or three puffs” before he returned to his assignation with Mrs. Harris. Sarah resumed her keyhole vigil, now in its second hour, “and heard Mr. Craven get into, or upon the bed, and heard Mr. Craven and Mrs. Harris
whispering together, and kissing each other; and she also heard the bed crack, and make a noise; and such cracking, or rustling of the bed continued for a few minutes” until, for the second time that night, “all was silent again.”

Sarah crept up and down the hall for another hour or two, waiting for something to happen. At about four o’clock, she told the court, Mr. Craven left Mrs. Harris’s bed and returned to his room.

The next morning, after half a night of eavesdropping, Sarah entered her mistress’s room. She was there to dress her, but Sarah used the opportunity to recount what she had seen and heard the previous night. Mrs. Harris first denied it, then admitted that Mr. Craven had been in her room for “a little while.” Sarah said it had actually been “a great while,” noting that Mr. Craven’s stay had lasted until four in the morning. Mrs. Harris asked Sarah if she could swear to it, and she answered that she could. At this point, according to Sarah’s testimony, Mrs. Harris became visibly “confused and agitated” but made no reply.

After Mrs. Harris went down to breakfast, Sarah and a fellow servant, Elizabeth Holden, fifty, entered Mrs. Harris’s room. They found the bed “very much tumbled,” with “several marks or spots upon the sheets.” Since the sheets had been changed the previous night, the marks and spots, Sarah told the courts, must have been made by Mr. Craven and Mrs. Harris “having lain together that night, and having had the carnal knowledge of each other.”

At the end of the day, Mr. Craven left the Harris house, first calling Sarah to help him on with his great coat. She was rewarded with a guinea. Was this hush money, Sarah wondered?

Something happened the next day to suggest that it was. Mrs. Harris offered her a gown and petticoat, and other things, and asked Sarah “not to tell tales.” As a servant, Sarah was instructed, she was not in a strong position to do so.

Two months passed before Mr. Craven visited the house again. On that occasion John Appleton, a servant to Mr. Harris, told Sarah that Mrs. Harris was in Mr. Craven’s room. He asked her to join
him in a vigil outside the rector’s room. Once again, the rustling of clothing and the sound of whispering could be heard through the keyhole. When someone started to unlock the door, the two eavesdroppers raced back to their rooms.

Later in the proceedings, Elizabeth Holden and John Appleton testified to two other trysts. In each case, the two servants had stayed up much of the night, hearing the sounds of whispering, clothes rustling, bed cracking, and silence, and discovering stains on the sheets the following morning; and in each case they, like Sarah, were specific as to the date, day of the week, and time.

The court had heard enough. Under the law, two witnesses were required, and the court had heard from three servants, with almost identical testimony provided, remarkably, by Mrs. Harris’s younger sister. The verdict? Guilty. By committing adultery, Mrs. Harris had broken her conjugal vows. Her marriage to John Harris was over.

The Harris case raises interesting questions about privacy, intimacy, and morality; and offers new insights into the motives and benefits, and consequences, of perceptual trespassing. Why the all-night vigils, keyhole-klatches, morning-after bed inspections, and behind-the-scenes talks about what was going on and what to do about it? It was one thing to seek out entertainment, or erotic experience. The servants were young and single, and life in a large country house could mean long spells of boredom and drudgery. But there was personal danger here. Why did a servant risk losing her livelihood by confronting Mrs. Harris, even after she had been told that her position, as a servant, was not that secure? Why would three servants testify in a court of law to activity that, if believed by the court, would terminate Mrs. Harris’s marriage? If the household broke up, perhaps these servants would no longer be needed. If, on the other hand, their testimony was unconvincing, their mistress would be in a clear position to strike back. They could lose their jobs in this scenario, too.

One possibility, of course, is that Mr. Harris had assured them that if they testified against his wife, their jobs would be safe, perhaps even upgraded. Servants were usually loyal to the master ofthe house, less frequently to the mistress, and the house was almost certainly his property. A proved charge of adultery was equivalent to an instant divorce, but Mr. Harris would still require some number of (loyal) servants to remain in their posts. By testifying to what they had witnessed, the servants would be, or be seen as, loyal and virtuous, and their employment in the Harris household would continue.

Of course there was plenty of room for moral indignation. Mrs. Harris’s behavior was in clear violation of biblical injunctions and English law. Besides, to carry on so flagrantly was shameful, occurring not just once, but repeatedly; happening not spontaneously, but by prearrangement; and it took place just a few feet from the quarters of young women who would have placed a high valuation on their own personal virtue. Even Mrs. Harris’s younger sister testified against her.

Sarah and the other servants were precise about the month, date, day of the week, and time of each act or scene to which they testified, even though some had occurred several months before the trial. They must have kept written records. Had they planned from the beginning to “get” Mrs. Harris? If so, were they respecting what they believed to be Mr. Harris’s wishes in the matter; or were they following his orders?

As many as five hundred mansions, or “stately homes,” were built in Britain between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and they could not be managed without a great deal of domestic help. In an analysis of English communities it was found that just over
thirteen percent
of the population worked as servants.
²

From the standpoint of home maintenance, some of the servants may have been superfluous, but any extra ones would have carried a symbolic value, signalling that the owner was rich. This was a message that many landowners wished to send. The best way to distinguish oneself from laborers, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, “was to employ labor oneself.”
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Nearly ninety percent of the homes that employed servants had between one and three. But many went beyond the basal rate, and there may have been the equivalent of an arms race going on. “The chief use of servants,” wrote Thorsten Veblen in 1899, “is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.”
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The larger homes had as many as sixteen.
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Exhibit 23
The Washing Tub
, Pierre Vidal, from an engraving by F. Masse

For reasons that we will see later—eavesdropping chief among them—the use of servants eventually fell off. By the end of the nineteenth century, the figure had dropped to about five percent, but domestic service was still one of the largest employment groups in Britain.

It is interesting that the servants, who were culturally positioned to eavesdrop on intimate behaviors, were preponderantly young women, who were biologically disposed to do so as well. From eighty to ninety percent of all those in domestic service were female. About three-fourths of all servants were between fifteen and twenty-four years of age; nearly one in twelve servants were between ten and fifteen.
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Domestic service was highly specialized. If a family member needed something, there was a servant to do it. Some servants worked as maids, governesses, butlers, waiters, or grooms, others as escorts, cooks, stewards, or chambermaids. All were expected to be on hand, night and day, and many slept near the person or thing that they were expected to service. In seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Europe, as in the plantation households of Athens many centuries earlier, valets and chambermaids had bedrooms adjacent to the master or mistress. Others slept in the same room. Some maid servants shared their mistress’s bed.
⁷

If such an arrangement seems unusually cozy, it could also be unusually safe—for the mistress—at least if she intended to remain loyal to her husband. For this would guarantee her a witness—undoubtedly a loyal one—should doubts arise as to her marital fidelity. In ancient Athens, when husbands went away on business
the wives would check themselves into a
gynaecaeum
, a “monogamous harem” where no men were allowed, for the same reason. In a moment, we will see how serious this concern actually was.

If intimately situated, personal servants were also intimately involved. Waiting maids, like Sarah Simmons, helped to dress and undress their mistress, and to bathe her. It was not unusual for servants to see their master or mistress naked or even, on occasion, to see them having sex.
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The intimacies, privileges, and trust between masters and servants all point to the existence of
relationships
, ones that figured significantly in the lives of both. William Blackstone wrote that the contract between employer and servant embodied the first of the “three great relations of private life.”
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The others, he wrote, were between husband and wife, and parent and child. In a
Familiar Summary of the Laws respecting Masters and Servants
, published in 1831, the anonymous author wrote that the relationship between master and servant, was “one of the most important and universal relations of the ordinary affairs of life.”
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Sometimes the intimacies between employers and their servants proved unexpectedly beneficial. In 1751 the wife of Marquis Francesco Albergati Capacelli asked a court to annul her marriage. The Marquis, she said, was impotent, and therefore unable to consummate the marriage. In defense of his virility, the marquis introduced what can only be called “hard evidence.” He was seen “getting out of bed with a perfect erection of the male organ,” according to one valet. Another servant stated that he had seen the marquis “with a hard and perfect erection” while he was putting on his shirt. One evening, Albergati and his friends romped around in the nude, leaving several servants impressed with the marquis’s endowments. One noted that he had “excellent assets.” Another that he had a “fine thing.”
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