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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.’

      THE REAL-LIFE CORA: LADY CURZON

      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

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