DOWNTON ABBEY SPECIAL: The upper and lower classes had very different love lives - but passion their knew no boundaries

Upper class: Lord and Lady Grantham

As Lady Mary, the Earl of Grantham’s eldest daughter, and Matthew Crawley, the unexpected heir to the earldom and the Downton estate, finally kissed in the last series, it was all the more passionate for having been so long delayed.
At last, their complex relationship had found a resolution, and so had the family’s future. We could all relax in the knowledge that they would marry and she would one day be mistress of Downton, after all.
However, the complications of their situation – the issue of class, their own fiery natures – not to mention her shameful secret that she is no longer a virgin – denied such a happy conclusion. She hesitated and, in hesitating, lost him. Suspecting that she only wanted him for his inheritance, he withdrew his proposal of marriage.
For her, the frantic hunt for a husband – essential for a girl of her standing – resumes. ‘How many times am I to be ordered to marry the man sitting next to me at dinner?’ she demands to know.
‘As many times as it takes,’ her mother, Lady Grantham, tells her. As a modern girl, she may want to walk down the aisle with a man she loves, but only if he is of suitable stock. The field, though, is a small one. There are fewer than 30 dukes, the highest ranking hereditary peers in the realm.

Bates the valet and head housemaid Anna (left) and first footman Thomas and Daisy the kitchen maid (right)

So Lady Mary changes tack. She knows that if the scandal of her one-night stand gets out, it will reduce her marital options to almost nothing. When Sir Richard Carlisle, a newspaper magnate with upwardly mobile social ambitions, comes into her life, she realises the possibilities he brings with him.
He is the classic arriviste, and there is consternation when she takes him to Downton. ‘He’s rich and getting richer,’ Lady Mary protests in his defence.

 

‘He wants to buy a proper house, with an estate. He says after this war the market will be flooded and we can take our pick.’

SO, WILL LADY MARY MARRY? Matthew Crawley's departure for France leaves Lady Mary cast adrift...

Sir Richard, meanwhile, sees that the match of his money and power with her class and beauty would make them a formidable couple. Supremely self-confident, he is unfazed by the Granthams’ stuffy ways. He is happy to do his best to fit in with the grand country family (he orders a country suit to go walking in) but is unembarrassed when he doesn’t quite manage it (he mistakenly buys a heavy tweed more suited to shooting).
As for Matthew Crawley, he remains intent on marrying for love, not advantage or ambition. Since being named as the heir to the earldom, his prospects for wealth and position make him a catch for any girl. Enter the beautiful red-headed Lavinia Swire, daughter of a wealthy London solicitor. Will she be the one for him?
While the family at Downton are involved in marital machinations, love is blossoming below stairs, too, though convention was just as restricting in the servants’ hall as it was in the drawing room.
‘No followers allowed,’ female staff were usually warned when they were hired. 
Even on a day off, strict rules meant the girls had to be back at the house by 10pm, which meant, as one real-life maid recollected, that every date was like Cinderella’s ball, ‘except that instead of losing your slipper, you could lose your job’.
Romance was generally discouraged between servants, with the butler and housekeeper policing morals downstairs.

...but when newspaper tycoon Sir Richard Carlisle arrives on the scene, both see the potential a union would bring - joining money and power with class and beauty

But, for all the rules, no one can entirely prevent a kitchen maid such as Daisy developing a crush on a handsome, liveried footman like Thomas. Real servants remember the stern formality of staff meals being punctuated by the occasional giggle and blush as, under the table, all manner of footsie was being played.
At Downton, mutual admiration grows between the head housemaid Anna and his lordship’s valet.

‘I love you, Mr Bates,’ she eventually plucks up the courage to tell him. ‘I know it’s not ladylike to say it, but I’m not a lady and I don’t pretend to be.’
The kindly Bates seems to be just as in love with her, but there is a snag. He has a wife.

That the usually pragmatic Anna should even countenance marrying a man who will be saddled with the stigma of divorce shows considerable mettle. But she’s in love.
‘I can’t think of anything but him. It’s as if I were mad, or ill. I suppose that’s what love is. A kind of illness. And when you’ve got it, there’s just nothing else.’ Above and below stairs, the ‘illness’ catches them just the same.

FOOTSIE WITH A FOOTMAN

Margaret Powell was a housemaid in the 1920s, and her life below stairs was not so different from Daisy’s just a few years earlier.
‘The business of getting a young man was not respectable and one’s employers tended to degrade every relationship.It seemed to me one was expected to find a suitable husband under a gooseberry bush.
Their daughters were debutantes and they could meet young men at balls, dances and private parties, but if any of the servants had boyfriends they were known as “followers”.
You had to slink up the area steps and meet on the corner of the road on some pretext, like going to post a letter.’

'Sex? There's one important thing you should know. It's terrific fun'

Sex as a single woman was the ultimate debauchery during the Edwardian age

The Edwardian age was one in which it was considered risqué for a woman merely to walk across Hyde Park without a chaperone.

Winston Churchill’s cousin, Clare Frewen, did so once and was told that no nice man would want to marry her after that. Sex as a single woman was the ultimate debauchery, a fact of which Lady Mary was left in no doubt.

After she succumbs to a lover (who then dies in her bed), her mother tells her in no uncertain terms, ‘If it gets around, every door in London will be slammed in your face.’

Knowing what Lady Mary would really have understood of sex is hard to gauge, however. Young women of her station would not have been entirely innocent of carnal secrets. But what a young girl knew of marriage would have been dependent on what older relatives could bring themselves to relate.

Julian Fellowes’ own mother, Olwen, was called into her mother’s sitting-room a few days before her wedding and asked if she knew that her future husband, Peregrine, ‘would have new and different expectations’ of her after their marriage. Olwen said she understood. Her mother then said: ‘My generation cannot speak on this subject with any ease, but there is one important thing you should know. It’s terrific fun!’

On the other hand, when another of Fellowes’ relatives of the time had sex explained to her, she exclaimed: ‘How perfectly disgusting!’ and cancelled her wedding. She died a spinster. High society was not puritanical about adultery, however.

Among the upper classes, once a married woman had produced an heir and a spare for her titled husband, it was considered acceptable for her to become another man’s mistress.

Posted in: world stars