can be arguing fiercely one minute and loyally defending each other the next. Edith, squashed between the beautiful Mary and the ambitious Sybil, sets herself up in competition with her elder sister, scheming to win their battle to land a suitable husband. Mary, as the first born, feels the pressure to get the very best husband possible; when potentially brilliant suitors appear to be making overtures to Mary, the whole household is on tenterhooks.
When not plotting invitations to eligible sons, writing carefully worded letters to them, or practising any of the skills that are supposed to improve their marriage prospects, the girls spend most of their time changing their outfits throughout the course of the day. The choosing of skirts and accessories, finding clever ways to update details and trying out new hairstyles, turns the chore of dressing into something rather more pleasant. At least this side of life is unashamedly fun when they are all together and getting on well, gossiping with each other and the maids, who are helping them dress. At all other times, the lives of the daughters and the servants could not be further apart, but in those moments they share in the simple delight of being young girls together.
Dan Stevens is Matthew
‘There’s no such thing as a typical day’s filming, but if it’s a full day, I’ll be collected by car at 5.30am and driven to Highclere to meet other bleary-eyed actors. After breakfast and 20 minutes in the make-up chair, I’m ready to start shooting. Sometimes we manage two or three scenes in a morning, but often it takes that long for a single scene. Lunch is a good chance to sit on the bus and chat to the other actors and crew. We shoot more scenes in the afternoon until tea and cake at 4pm, which causes a flurry. We can’t take any food or drink that’s not water into the house, so we usually cower under a rain shelter, but if there’s glorious sunshine we can have tea on the lawn. We wrap about 7pm and then I’m driven home.’
Elizabeth McGovern is Cora
‘I think Cora is very much an emotionally connected mother. As an American she would have a distinctive approach, different to the English aristocracy’s way of doing things. Her instinct is to be involved with the day-to-day and to go about things in a more hands-on way.’
Mary: ‘I hope you’re not dreading it too much?’
Robert: ‘Not dreading it exactly, but it’s a brave
new world we’re headed for, no doubt about that; we must try to meet it with as much grace as we can muster ...’
To be truly accepted into Society at the turn of the last century, you had to be born into it. While there were books published on etiquette, there were pages and pages more of unwritten rules that should be observed – and a knowledge of these marked out those who were grand as opposed to those who were not. For someone like Violet, the Dowager Countess, the notion of her world changing and allowing a broader cross-section of people to enter it was insupportable. Some things were preordained and immutable: Society, and the circle of people who encompassed it, was one of them.
Violet is an aristocrat through and through and, as a firm believer in noblesse oblige, is committed to its principles. Although aware of the changes occurring, or threatening to occur, in the younger generation’s way of life, Violet nevertheless believes that the rules of Society are fixed. So when she is faced with a middle-class interloper, with his ‘weekends’ and his bicycles, taking over her late husband’s family’s title and estate, she expects that the sheer might of her aristocratic power and privilege will win out and preserve the status quo.
VIOLET, THE DOWAGER COUNTESS
‘I have plenty of friends I don’t like.’
ISOBEL CRAWLEY
‘What should we call each other?’
VIOLET, THE DOWAGER COUNTESS
‘We could always start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham.’
However, the situation is not as bleak as Violet would paint it; although he has a lot to learn when it comes to the subtle politics of life as a nobleman, Matthew is not a man without social standing. He is, in fact, a part of the prosperous, professional upper-middle class. Brought up in Manchester by well-educated parents, he could certainly conduct himself with ease in even the upper tiers of Society – he can ride and is affronted when Thomas infers that he may not know how to serve himself at dinner. Yet Matthew is also a liberal: he understands the argument put forward by the suffragettes and is sympathetic to their cause. He is on the side of social change and so when he discovers he is to inherit a new position in the higher ranks of Society, as an earl with a great estate, he does not immediately feel it is a good thing. Matthew is not socially ambitious, but his feelings are irrelevant; whatever happens he will become an earl, what matters is how he handles this transition.
Violet, the Dowager Countess
‘Violet believes that if you take a brick out of the aristocratic wall the whole thing comes crumbling down’, says Julian Fellowes. Violet knows that she can do nothing about Matthew Crawley inheriting Lord Grantham’s title – in 1912 there was no legal mechanism in place which would enable someone to renounce a peerage – but she decides she must do all she can to save Cora’s money for Mary, if not the whole estate itself. As she herself said: ‘Mary holds a trump card. Mary is family.’ After all, Violet worked for years to keep the estate going and continues to live on it as the Dowager Countess; she cannot allow this remote cousin to threaten the formidable walls of prestige that buttress her own existence.
More sympathetic to Matthew’s plight is Cora, who, as an American, is well versed in the treatment meted out to outsiders. Her mother-in-law has, after all, managed to be insufferable to her for 24 years. While Cora is educated in the strange ways of the English upper classes and has adopted most of them as her own, she is not a snob and she does not denigrate people who try to make their own way in the world. ‘I can’t see why he has the right to your estate or my money,’ Cora tells Robert later. ‘But I refuse to condemn him for wanting an honest job.’
MATTHEW
‘I still don’t see why I couldn’t just refuse it.’
ISOBEL CRAWLEY
‘There is no mechanism for you to do so! You will be an earl. You will inherit the estate.’
Cora’s story is a familiar one amongst the English aristocracy at the time. She was part of a wave of eligible American girls who came to Britain from the late 1870s for the next 50 years; they were known as the ‘Buccaneers’. These girls were often daughters of self-made men who had originated in the backwaters of America but had now left that life behind them with newfound wealth. Having made their money and built opulent houses, these entrepreneurs wanted to secure their daughters’ futures with good marriages. They wanted the thing that money couldn’t buy: class.
But there was just one problem. The upper echelons of Society in Virginia or Wisconsin, let alone New York, were almost impenetrable. Usually there was a formidable society hostess at the top, and she would decide whether you were in or out. If there was even a hint of scandal in the past or your family was not deemed ‘old’ enough, you weren’t in –and there was very little you could do to get there. So the more determined matriarchs made their way to Europe, where the aristocrats were secure enough in their titles and estates to welcome the pretty, rich and fun young women to the party. And, they liked the smell of the American girls’ money. One of the earliest of these matriarchs leading the wave across the Atlantic was the mother of Jennie Jerome. She managed to secure a noble marriage
