The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era (22 page)

Agricultural revenues had been falling for 50 years by 1920. Although grain prices
had been artificially increased during the war, this was set to change with the coming
of the peace. And, in any case, it had been more than compensated for by increased
agricultural wages. A large estate such as Downton Abbey required careful and
innovative management in order to make money.

Matthew
I want us to get to know each
other, to learn about who we both are
without everyone being there.

Mary
It is quite a big house.

Matthew
It’s a lovely house. It’s your
home and I want it to be my home, too.

M
atthew Crawley is a man trying to walk in a straight line on shifting sands. Brought up as the middle-class son of a Manchester doctor, he trained to be a solicitor and was prepared for a conventional life. He expected little more than to work, marry a girl-next-door and raise a family of his own. Instead he has been thrust into the role of earl-in-waiting, in line to inherit a vast house and estate, and he has fallen in love with a woman who is not so much next-door as next-county. A fundamentally decent person, driven by a strong sense of fairness and the need to toe the moral line, in his changed circumstances Matthew finds it increasingly difficult to say with any certainty what is the right thing for him to do. It’s less a question of what is right and what is wrong, so much as which ‘right’ he must choose: whether he upholds his principles as a modern man or those of the ancient aristocracy.

Matthew’s unexpected claim to the earldom of Downton Abbey opens a door into another world, and introduces him to Mary. Thus began the love story that would encounter many obstacles before a happy end could be reached. After breaking off his first engagement to Mary because he couldn’t trust her motives for marrying him, Matthew thought he had made a better decision in asking for the hand of Lavinia Swire, a sweet girl with his interests very much at heart. Only, she then died – as he believed, of a broken heart – shortly after she discovered him kissing Mary. For this, he can never forgive himself, explains Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew: ‘The situation with Lavinia haunts him. He feels responsible for her death, even though that doesn’t really make sense. And it takes him a long time to come to terms with that.’ Indeed, burdened by these guilty feelings, Matthew needs the passing of time and the persuasiveness of his mother to reunite him with Mary, despite his love for her. But having made the leap at last, he is determined to do his best by them both.

Matthew
Are you looking forward
to the wedding?

Mary
What do you think?

Matthew
I’m looking forward to
all sorts of things.

Mary
Don’t make me blush.

Somehow it’s rather lovely to hear Matthew enjoy the frivolous, flirtatious pleasures of a love affair. He is so frequently tortured by his conscience that one doesn’t always think of him as a happy-go-lucky young man. Matthew needs to learn to enjoy their carefree moments together; their union means he is firmly part of the Grantham clan, which also means he is expected to behave in a certain fashion – in ways that are not only unfamiliar to him but that make him feel uncomfortable, too.

Matthew is the perfect symbol of the tension between the old and new worlds that was simmering away as the decade began. By the start of Series 3, he has acclimatised himself to Downton Abbey and its way of doing things, but he also sees the opportunity for change. This desire for change is not only driven by social politics, but more soberingly comes from the aftermath of the war. Matthew is the only person at Downton Abbey to have seen active service in the war and survived physically unscathed (Thomas’s injury sent him home and William died of his wounds). This is a huge burden that Matthew bears, and bears alone. He, like almost all his comrades, is unwilling or unable to discuss his experiences with the civilian population. The returning soldiers were simply viewed as ‘heroes’ and were expected to deport themselves as such. That was enough. Everybody else was anxious to move on and away from the horrors of the war.

It was hard to escape from the searing experiences of four years of trench warfare, though. Having fought and lived, Matthew was vulnerable to those complex feelings of remorse and regret that we now call ‘survivor’s guilt’. And there was, too, for all who had endured the horrors of the Front, the constant threat of nightmare images and memories which recurred unexpectedly, interrupting the flow of everyday life. The poet Robert Graves recorded how he would awake screaming from dreams of exploding German shells, and that he found strangers might suddenly assume the faces of his fallen friends, or the ringing of a telephone could induce a feeling of panic.

Now, all these reactions are recognised and treated as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, but in 1920 they were just a grim and little understood fact of existence for those who had survived the war, one shared by millions of men who were trying to readjust to life at home. And even if Matthew was not subject to the most debilitating forms of attack, he had to live with the knowledge – and the anxiety – that such feelings lurked below the surface.

But having survived the war – no mean feat when officers had a life expectancy of around six weeks on the frontline – and recovered from what had appeared to be a permanent paralysis of the lower spine, Matthew is a lucky man. What’s more, he has the possibility of gaining a large fortune, and is due to marry the woman he loves.

Yet, he is not a man at ease. His conscience is easily pricked by the requirements that lie ahead of him in the role of Earl of Grantham: he was brought up to believe in social justice and he is still adjusting to the necessity of having servants do everything for him. He yearns for a simpler life but is reminded that the duty of an aristocrat is to provide employment, and though he sees that he can be a good landlord for the farming tenants, he would still rather hire men to work the land than a valet to fasten his cufflinks. But if he sacked the servants because of his personal discomfort in being a master, then he would be putting people out of work.

When it comes to the future of Downton Abbey itself, under threat now that Robert’s investments have gone seriously awry, Matthew puts his principles ahead of its rescue, something that Mary finds hard to comprehend. To Matthew’s surprise, Lavinia’s father, Reginald Swire, has named him as an heir, but Matthew cannot see how he could ever accept the money that comes with the inheritance, because of the guilt that he feels over the way his relationship with Lavinia ended. Mary, equally fervently, feels the opposite. It is anathema to her (and her class) that he should put his feelings before his loyalty to the Crawley family and saving their ancestral seat.

Matthew
I sometimes think it’s time
we lived in a simpler way.

Matthew
Reggie Swire will have put
me in his will because he believed I was
his daughter’s one true love.

Mary
So you were.

Matthew
Yes, but I broke Lavinia’s
heart and she died. He never knew
that.
How could I possibly allow myself
to profit from her death?