the famous wartime Prime Minister.
MARY
‘You’re American. You don’t understand these things.’
Cora, the daughter of Isidore Levinson, a dry goods millionaire from Cincinnati, arrived in England in 1888, when she was 20 years old, with her mother as chaperone. By this time, even respectable rich American girls preferred to find their husbands amongst the nobility. Thanks to the successes of the earlier Buccaneers and a fashion for all things European, from interiors to dress designers such as the House of Worth, pursuing an English marriage had now become desirable. For these families, the many years in which Americans had fought to escape the clutches of colonial rule and create their own republic appeared to have been forgotten.
In fact, even the early Buccaneers found that getting a title was positively easy: many members of the English upper classes had fallen on hard times and they needed American money to bail them out and secure their estates. In order to achieve such a match, Cora’s mother knew she had to ensure that her only daughter made the best possible entrance into Society. There was only one way to do this: to get presented at Court.
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.’
