Jessica Fellowes - The World of Downton Abbey Text Only

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 for her daughter to Lord Randolph Churchill, which gave Jennie her entrée into Society. Their son was Winston, who became 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.