The World of Downton Abbey Text Only

American heiresses

Unlike their English counterparts across the pond, American women were able to be – and frequently were – the heiresses to their fathers’ millions. As a general rule, the American rich divide their money between their children (which is why so few American fortunes last), meaning the daughters of a rich man are wealthy in their own right. Consuelo Vanderbilt was an American heiress who famously married into the Marlborough dukedom, bringing with her a dowry of $9 million, an almost unbelievable sum at the time, even though she had two perfectly healthy brothers. This would never have happened in England.

This wasn’t as difficult as it sounds – while the daughters of dukes and earls obviously had an easy route in, the net of invitees was thrown relatively wide. There were three criteria: you had to be a girl of upstanding morals, you had to be introduced by someone who had themselves been presented (you could arrange this for a fee with some of the less scrupulous former debutantes); and you had to be either aristocratic or of the ‘ranks’ – the amorphous body which included the clergy, military, merchants, bankers and large-scale commerce dealers. Once presented, Cora would have enjoyed a packed Season (her daughters would later attend the same parties, with almost all the same families) – in itself a thinly veiled excuse for husband-hunting.

Learning your place in Society

The intricacies of aristocratic etiquette were explained to Consuelo Vanderbilt by her husband’s friend, Lady Lansdowne, and came as a shock to her more informal sensibilities: ‘I gathered from her conversation that an English lady was hedged round with what seemed to me to be boring restrictions. It appeared that one should not walk alone in Piccadilly or in Bond Street, nor sit in Hyde Park unless accompanied … that it was better to occupy a box than a stall at the theatre, and that to visit a music-hall was out of the question. One must further be careful not to be compromised, and at a ball one should not dance twice with the same man. One must learn to take one’s place in the social hierarchy … One must, in other words, learn the “Peerage” [the book that lists all the noble families in Britain] … Indeed my first contact with society in England brought with it a realisation that it was fundamentally a hierarchical society in which the differences in rank were outstandingly important.’

However, despite the enthusiasm with which these rich American girls were welcomed onto English shores, Cora’s entry into Society would not have been entirely easy. While there were those who courted her because of her beauty and in the hope of a slice of her cash-rich pie, there were more who would have looked down their noses at her too-fashionable dresses, her lack of knowledge of the finer points of etiquette and her American nationality itself. Without much help, Cora would have had to learn quickly the English way of doing things – even if she already thought she knew which fork to use and how to compose a menu. She would, for example, have been thrown by the fact that while Americans were happy to introduce themselves, the English waited for a formal introduction, which for someone like her might not always have been forthcoming.

By the end of her first Season, Cora had become engaged to Robert, later Lord Grantham, who was in dire need of money to rescue his estate. Their marriage was born from convenience but grew into romance, as they fell in love the year after they married. But marriage to an earl did not mean that life would now be easy for Cora. Once settled into her new home, Cora would have found herself in a land that was almost alien to her upbringing. As the wife of a peeress, she would be entitled to wear velvet and ermine at coronations, as well as often taking the place of honour at dinners; her writing paper would bear the family crest and her bed sheets would be monogrammed.

Elizabeth McGovern is Cora

‘My approach to the part is about my own experiences as an American living in England. Things aren’t addressed in conversation openly, but by inference, nuance and understanding.’

Not all of the new elements would be welcome to someone who was an enlightened, educated and lively American girl. ‘It also probably meant inheriting an ancestral home full of creaky ancestral machinery: shooting parties for which the guest list hadn’t changed in three generations, family jewels that could not be reset no matter how ugly they were … Marrying the peer turned the heiress into an institution, incessantly compared to the last woman who’d held the job and, because she was American, frequently found wanting,’ wrote Gail MacColl and Carol Wallace in To Marry An English Lord. In an enormous house miles away from the excitement of London, let alone the vast ocean that separated her from her family and friends, Cora would have been inhuman not to have felt lonely and bewildered in the early days of marriage.

VIOLET, THE DOWAGER COUNTESS

‘I mean, one way or another, everyone goes down the aisle with half the story hidden.’

Fortunately, Robert is a kind man and became a loving husband: one who would be a much-needed pacifier between his wife and mother. Violet did not change her views and decide to be more welcoming of her daughter-in-law because, as Julian Fellowes explains: ‘She understands about money but she sees aristocratic virtues as more important. She didn’t encourage Robert’s marriage where his father certainly did. She would rather have taken less of a dowry with someone who knew the ropes better.’ Above all, Cora failed to provide a son, and as the years went by this would have diminished her to almost nothing in Violet’s eyes. According to Julian: ‘The lack of a son is an issue. In those days the selection of the sex – in fact, anything “defective” about a child – was thought to be the woman’s fault. By definition, of course, your mother-in-law had always managed to have a son.’

Without a son, as we know, the matter of the passing on of the title and Downton Abbey is greatly affected. On marriage, Cora’s sizeable dowry and later inheritance had been wrapped up tightly within the estate. This was not unusual; primogeniture – when only the eldest male heir may inherit – was a law that had ring-fenced the British aristocracy for hundreds of years. Tied up with it was the policy of entail, which meant that estates were bound in trust so they could only be passed on whole from one generation to the next, which ensured all the ancient properties remained intact, preventing bits being divided off and sold or given away to any other person. Younger sons or daughters could never inherit more than a token amount of cash or trinkets: the house and its contents – from jewels to paintings and furniture – and all its land would go solely to the next male heir. Usually that was the eldest son, but when no son was forthcoming, as in Cora and Robert’s case, it went to the nearest male relation. So while her mother had been an heiress, Mary could not be. Even to her, steeped as she was in the traditions and expectations of her class, this was beyond the pale: ‘I don’t believe a woman can be forced to give all her money to a distant cousin of her husband’s. Not in the twentieth century. It’s too ludicrous for words.’

THE REAL-LIFE CORA: LADY CURZON

The idea for Cora was born when Julian Fellowes read about Mary Leiter in To Marry An English Lord, by Gail MacColl and Carol Wallace. Mary, was a dark-haired beauty, the daughter of a fantastically rich Chicago real estate speculator and a very vulgar, ambitious mother. Riding on the crest of the Buccaneer wave, Mary came to Europe following social success in Washington, New York and Newport. However, she failed to make much of an impression during several visits in the late 1880s, until 1890, when in a single day she met the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII and a well-known champion of American girls), a Duchess and a former Prime Minister. Later that Season she went to a ball, entering as ‘a statuesque beauty in a stupendous Worth gown’ and the Prince of Wales asked to have his first dance with her.

After that, she was made: invited by the inner London social circles to every luncheon, dinner and ball. Men were throwing themselves at her feet, but she had fallen in love with the Honourable George Curzon, a very bright but equally broke young man. He, too, had certainly noticed her at that first ball but, afraid that to propose to her would be too obviously a fortune-hunter’s move, he held back. In the summer of 1891 they saw each other every day but his feelings remained ambiguous. Mary waited for him for years, always believing he would come to her, despite only measured responses from him. Even when he did propose in 1893 he told her to keep the engagement secret, leaving her mother wondering impatiently why her daughter was yet to marry despite her numerous suitors. Only in 1895 did he finally talk to her father and his, and then they were married.

Her father bought them a house – 1 Carlton House Terrace – and gave them £6000 a year. He also settled a sum rumoured to be somewhere between $700,000 and $1 million on Mary, with an additional amount set aside for any children they might have (they had three daughters: Irene, Cynthia and Alexandra – the last was born in 1904).

While Mary had always been utterly in love with George – she once said that when he came through a door, she felt ‘that the band is playing the Star Spangled Banner and that the room is glowing with pink lights and rills are running up and down [my] back with joy’ – it was only after he had been posted to India as Viceroy, three years after their marriage, that he came to love her with equal fervour. Sadly, just over ten years after their wedding she grew ill in India and died, in 1906. But she died a happily married woman and, as Vicereine of India, the highest-ranking American, man or woman, in the history of the British Empire.

Yet even in a remote seat like Downton Abbey, Cora is not bereft of influence, as the aristocracy tended to be a matriarchy. Downton is one of the great houses of England, and if anyone locally wants an invitation or support for a project, it is Cora that they have to get on their side. As a peeress, she could invite several young men to the house on any one of her daughters’ behalf, because most of their mothers would be only too pleased to be thought of as a friend. Her only difficulty would be that there weren’t all that many available. ‘I’m afraid we’re rather a female party tonight, Duke,’ she explains when the raffish Duke of Crowborough is staying. ‘But you know what it’s like trying to balance numbers in the country. A single man outranks the Holy Grail.’ (A sentiment that many a country hostess would feel even in the twenty-first century.)

Perhaps her most modern achievement has been to imbue her daughters with the sense that power is theirs for the taking. The only difference is in the manner with which they take it. ‘Mary wants power but is prepared to play by the old rules,’ says Julian. ‘Sybil wants it by the new rules. And Edith just wants anything she can get.’

As the girls reach eighteen, the time arrives for them to ‘Come Out’. For Cora’s daughters, their entry into Society as debutantes took a more simple route than that of their mother; as aristocracy they had an automatic ‘in’ that had been denied Cora. The Season was their opportunity to meet the right circle of men from which to choose a husband. ‘For marriage market it was,’ writes Anna Sproule of this annual ritual in The Social Calendar. ‘Nobody in the pre-1914 era made any bones about the fact that marriage was a woman’s sole career, and she owed it both to herself and the family that had so far supported her to get on with it.’

The girls’ entrée into Society would begin, as it had for their mother, with their presentation at Court. Despite the different years in which they were presented, each of the daughters would have worn more or less the same outfit for the occasion: a long, low gown and three ostrich feathers pinned to their head (a dictat of King Edward VII), a veil and a decent length of train.

SYBIL

‘There’s nothing wrong with doctors. We all need doctors.’

MARY

‘We all need crossing sweepers and draymen, too. It doesn’t mean we have to dine with them.’

Presentation would be followed by the Season, which traditionally began with the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. With no shooting or hunting at that time of year, and the men in London to attend Parliament, they were available to escort their wives and daughters around the social whirligig. Four thousand of the richest and smartest people in England descended on the capital from the end of April to the latter part of July for the Covent Garden opera season, the Eton and Harrow cricket match, Royal Ascot (in 1910 everyone wore black mourning for the King who had died the month before), lawn tennis at various venues, including Wimbledon, the Henley Regatta, and a series of garden receptions, private concerts, balls, dinners, receptions and just plain parties.

LADY ROSAMUND

‘I’m sorry you haven’t received more invitations. But then, after four Seasons, one is less a debutante than a survivor.’

The Season was really all about parties, especially those given in the great London palaces, which many of the most significant families still owned and lived in. They would host enormous gatherings every night and every day the newspapers would report who had been present, as well as who had hosted what the previous night – who went and who was giving the next one. Essentially it was an endless succession of opportunities for young people to meet and for their parents to catch up. Even in the daylight hours there was no time lost in finding a way to see and be seen, as young men and women on horseback cantered up and down Hyde Park’s Rotten Row for exercise.

Come 12 August, the grouse season opened in Scotland and everyone shut up their London houses again. You had to hope that by that time you had already caught your future husband as securely as a salmon on a fly hook.

To make her mark, a girl had to be pretty, finely dressed and of excellent parentage. Mothers chaperoned their daughters everywhere, sizing each other up across the dance floor. They would be assessing the competition, as well as the potential suitability of their daughters’ beaux. No one could be seen to dance with the same man for the whole evening, so the opportunities to gauge whether you liked him or not were scant. Instead, opinions were formed on the gossip and stories that related to his fortune, background and character. Naturally enough, the men did the same about the women.

The ceremony of ‘Coming Out’

In 1911, Lady Diana Manners, the third daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, was presented at Court: ‘I had made my own train – three yards of cream net sprinkled generously with pink rose-petals, each attached by a diamond dewdrop. The dress was adequate and the three feathers springing out of my head looked less ridiculous when everyone was wearing them… I was nervous of making my double curtsy. The courtiers are very alarming and martinettish – they shoo you and pull you back and speak to you as they would to a wet dog, but once the trial is successfully over you have the fun of seeing others go through the same ordeal.’

Not that a deb’s troubles were over once she had ‘caught’ a fiancé. Any potential husband would be checked out by both the family and the servants. When Mary brings home Sir Richard Carlisle, he is seen as the classic arriviste and there is consternation in the ranks. But he enters their lives in the middle of the war: all around them there is change, and Society is changing too, as impossible as that had seemed to the older generations. Bringing with him money and confidence, Sir Richard is unfazed by the stuffy ways of the Crawleys. He is happy to do his best to fit in with the grand country family (he orders a country suit to go walking in) but is unembarrassed when he doesn’t quite manage it (he has mistakenly ordered a heavy tweed more suited to shooting). As unpalatable as he may be at times, Sir Richard represents the future – a way into power that doesn’t depend on blue-blooded connections but an agile mind and ambitious drive instead.

With new pathways to the top of Society being laid in this decade, Matthew may feel the pressure to be a pioneer on top of his duty to Lord Grantham to preserve the traditions of Downton Abbey. His future earldom will give him a seat in the House of Lords but it might be, after all, his upper middle-class background and professional career that enable him to make his peerage a success rather than, as Violet and Lord Grantham fear, hold him back.

THE REAL-LIFE SIR RICHARD CARLISLE: LORDS BEAVERBROOK AND NORTHCLIFFE

Sir Richard Carlisle is loosely based on the newspaper magnates who made their fortunes out of the First World War. The Canadian tycoon Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was a prominent figure largely because of his political friends as well as his rousing leaders in the Daily Express. But it was Lord Northcliffe who led the way in tabloid journalism with the establishment of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail – his descendant, Lord Rothermere, is still the majority shareholder of his newspaper group.

Aitken is compelling for his political bombast. A protégé of the Conservative party leader, Bonar Law (who formed the wartime coalition government with Lloyd George), and a friend of Winston Churchill, his personal alliances guided his newspaper editorials, which were hugely influential in directing politics after the war. But it was the brash effrontery of Lord Northcliffe, born Alfred Harmsworth in Dublin to ‘a tough mother and a feckless hard-drinking father’ in 1865, that could be said to be responsible for influencing some of the major decisions of the war cabinet, including – with Beaverbrook’s Express – the destruction of the Liberal government.

When the Daily Mail was first printed in 1896, the immediate effect was electrifying. Gone were the word-for-word dull reports of political speeches; in were first-person accounts of events. Easy on the eye with lots of white space on the page and an early use of big pictures, one could say that the founding principles still operate on the paper today. ‘The three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things,’ Northcliffe told a reporter. Cheap to buy and titillating to read, the paper made him a millionaire. Northcliffe died in 1922 quite mad, probably due to a blood infection, and a newspaper man to the end; he telephoned his night editor and told him: ‘They say that I am mad: send your best man to cover the story.’

Change CHAPTER THREE

EXT. NORTHERN ENGLAND. DAWN.

At dawn, a steam train travels through this lovely part of England. As the camera moves in, we can see a man, whom we will know as John Bates, sitting by himself in a third-class carriage. Above him run the telephone wires, humming with their unrevealed, urgent messages. The train flies on.

TIMELINE

1912

On 17 January Captain Scott and his team successfully reached the South Pole, only to perish in March as they made their way home. On 15 April, tragedy struck again when the ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. It sank within hours, killing over 1500 people, mostly men from first and second and passengers from third class. The summer brought more scandal as the British government was accused of profiting from information about the Marconi Company.

1913

The suffragette movement continued to claim headlines when Emily Davison ran out in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in June. She died of her wounds a few days later, but she lived on in the minds of many as a controversial figure whose actions may, in fact, have blighted the suffragette cause.

1914

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914 by a Serb nationalist heralded the start of tensions between the two nations. As other countries across Europe took sides, military momentum gathered that could only lead to the announcement of the First World War and Britain’s call to arms.

1915

1915 saw no let up in hostilities, and for the first time London suffered the effects of the First World War directly when streets were hit by Zeppelins. Meanwhile, Britain tried to carry on as normal, bringing in change in these shifting times. In this year photographs were required on passports for the first time, and the Women’s Institute was formed in response to the demands made on women to help the war effort.

1916

July brought the commencement of the Battle of the Somme; an offensive by British and French armies against the German Army which lasted until November. It became one of the bloodiest military operations ever recorded, causing over 1.5 million casualties, with over 60,000 British soldiers lost in the first day alone. Over in Dublin, Irish republicans mounted an insurrection during Easter week, aiming to end British Rule in Ireland. The Easter Rising was suppressed after seven days but succeeded in bringing the issue to the forefront of Irish politics. As the year drew to a close, back home the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, lost the support and confidence of the press and his government and resigned his position in December. He was succeeded by David Lloyd George.

1917

After the dramatic losses sustained during the Battle of the Somme, 1917 saw another, equally horrific battle take place, notorious for the horrendous conditions endured by the troops. Passchendaele saw fighting from July until November in the muddy quagmire of Ypres, resulting in heavy casualties. After a failed harvest back in Britain, the Government’s Food Production Department swiftly set up the Women’s Land Army, which mobilised women in farming to ensure food reserves could supply the nation.

1918

A year of great changes began with the passing of the Representation of the People Act, which finally gave women the vote – if they were over 30 and owned property – as well as to men in residence over the age of 21. Food supplies continued to be regulated with the introduction of ration books. In Russia, the incarceration of the Russian royal family came to an end when the Bolsheviks executed them in a panic on 16 July, believing that Czech forces were on their way to rescue them. On 11 November the news came that everyone had been waiting for – the Allies had won the war and the Germans had signed the armistice that ended the conflict.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.