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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 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

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