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
