Downton Abbey and our loss of Matthew Crawley
                                       Spoiler Alert!
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            Okay, first an apology for not posting anything in nearly a year. I know I have no excuse except “I’ve been busy.” That’s a feeble one, but it’s all I can offer.
            Busy end of my Spring ’12 semester. Busy summer winding down my five-year tenure as Chair of the English Department here at SMSU. Busy sabbatical semester which included lots of writing and editing and reading; a week-long trip to California for a wedding; a three-week trip to London, Bath, and Canterbury; then home to surgery (needed but not life-threatening); Notre Dame going 12-0 during their regular season; Thanksgiving, Christmas, and an intense Landmark Forum Weekend; and then school resuming with a rush and with me again teaching fulltime.
                     [Insert a longing breath for more sabbatical
                              disguised as a deep sigh…..]
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            And now here I am, heartbroken over the Season Three finale of Downton Abbey.
            I wish I could sing it like Curly does in Oklahoma!, “ol’ Judd is dead, poor Judd Frye is dead…” but I can’t. Judd wasn’t dead, but Matthew Crawley is most sincerely dead. He lies in a ditch; blood running down his handsome, young face; crushed by his sports car that flipped over on top of him after being hit by a furniture remover’s lorry on a beautiful Yorkshire road near Downton Abbey itself.
            Only moments before, he’d held his son, his only child, born of his beautiful wife, Lady Mary, who never looked better even though she just went through labor and delivery.
            And he’s saved the estate, Downton. And he’s saved his brother-in-law, Tom Branson, from poverty and estrangement from the Crawley family. And he’s saved Cousin Rose, Lady Rose MacClare of Scotland, from running off with a married man three times her age and as randy as a goat on the heather-covered moors of Scotland. And he stood by his sister-in-law, Lady Edith, as she strove to become a journalist.
            Oh, Matthew, so middle-class! He once worked as a lawyer, after all, and is the son of a physician whose practice was in Manchester, the hallmark of all things “trade” in Edwardian times. And yet, he grows so aware of what it will take to save an institution like Downton for generations to come and understands why that’s important for his family and the nation. And those will be his generations, since he managed to melt the icy-but-not-so-maiden Lady Mary and produce a one-and-only heir by her.
           I think at times, if it weren’t for bad luck, the Crawley family would have no luck at all.
           Let’s take Lady Mary as an example. She’s born into the most powerful social class ever, the Gentry of the Victorian Period, and she grows up surrounded by limitless Edwardian splendor. But that enormous grandeur can’t be hers; she’s a woman and can’t inherit directly.  This is a historically inaccurate plot line, by the way. Jane Austen used the same last will and testament tension in Pride and Prejudice, but it wasn’t accurate even in 1813. By 1912, women didn’t have all the rights they do now, but it’s reasonable to assume Lady Mary would have been sitting pretty without tying the knot to secure her own home. But, in 2011 when Season One opens, we accept this twist of fate and horrid Crawley luck as history, but it’s not.
          So, Julian Fellowes, our script writer, has taken some liberties with Lady Mary’s fortune.
           And, even before the opening credits for Episode One (Season One) have ceased running (with the spectacular Highclere Castle in the background and swarms of starched servants preparing breakfast and ironing the newspaper to stop the ink from bleeding), Lady Mary is left with an unscathed heart. This is April 15, 1912, the morning that the tragedy of the Titanic makes headlines. Lady Mary’s fiancé died on that emblem of wretched excess gone with the waves.
          In A Room with a View by E. M. Forester and published in 1908, Lucy and her brother refer to all fiancés as fiascos; it’s a running family joke in this Matthew Crawley-like middle-class family. Lady Mary’s never-seen-on-screen-alive-or-dead fiancé fits as a fiasco to be sure. He was a distant cousin of her father’s, the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley, and conveniently close enough in blood to be a lackey for Lady Mary to marry the estate she loves.
          Unlike John Brown, who lies moldering in his grave, this cousin’s remains are never recovered, and he is declared dead.
          Lady Mary wears black, but hardly feels the loss except for the inconvenience of having to find another way “to marry Downton” as it were.
          Her luck runs from rot to riot as a lover dies in her illicitly sensuous bed, potentially razing her social status while her jealous sister, Edith, stokes the fires of ruinous scandal.   
          Now enter Matthew Crawley, by chance, a more-distant cousin and only living male descendent able to inherit Downton from Lord Crawley. Matthew, of course, is smitten at once by the beautiful and haughty Lady Mary, but he manages to insult her even before she’s properly introduced herself and delicately raised the veil of her riding habit, so fashionable in 1890 yet still in style at the Yorkshire Downton estate. Soon, to show how much he really loves her, he even tries to disinherit himself. He knows the law. He tries to give back his future title, and thus Downton, but can’t while he’s upright. No way exists to do so.
          Another unlucky sister of the Downton threesome is Lady Sybil. She’s the youngest, a bit wild, appearing in one scene wearing I Dream of Jeannie Harem garb and in another helping a house maid secure a position as a typist, at the time, a job with a future for a young, independent woman.
          When Lady Sybil is being wildly political by going to a Suffragette Rally that turns violent, Matthew comes along with Branson, the chauffer, to save her. It’s at this point that Lady Mary sees Matthew for what he really is, a decent, smart, kind gentleman who happens to love her and happens to have the key to her happiness—the future ownership of Downton. But, in fairness, I think Lady Mary is more caring and generous than not, but brought up to presume that life will always be fair to her and always gild her way.
          That evening, after Lady Sybil is back safe at Downton, Lady Mary order sandwiches for Matthew. They sit together in a small dining room, just the two. He has wine, which he offers to share but lacks a second wineglass. She accepts but won’t break the enthralling spell by ringing for a servant to fetch one. She drinks from his crystal goblet; one sip’s all it took.
          At the end of The Princess Bride, the grandfather tells his grandson that Wesley’s kiss of Buttercup was one of the best ever given. I would rate Matthew’s leaning over and kissing Mary after he proposes (the first time) right up there. The way she hold his neck to draw him closer, it’s a marvelously done scene. In this informal setting in an all-too-formal world, the seemingly invulnerable woman allows herself to be vulnerable, allows herself to love an honorable man.
          Then, her change of heart: her engagement with Matthew is off and the Great War is on.  Season One closes as that magnificent world ends, at English high summer with its gaiety and splendor, and with thoughts of Sarajevo far from everyone’s mind. No one at Downton that bright day knew the lights were going out all over Europe; no one knew they’d never be lit for these gilded elites again. No one at that summer lawn party has the gruesome vision to imagine the unimaginable horrors of Ypres or Gallipoli or Verdun.
          Season Two begins with Captain Matthew Crawley a gallant officer on the Western Front, the Somme specifically, about the worst hell-hole in the whole bloody, aimless affair. He’s now engaged to Miss Lavinia Swires, like himself, a wealthy middle class denizen. And luckless Lady Mary has snagged a wealthy scoundrel from the heap of conniving opportunists circulating London society but not in uniform.  She takes up this second fiasco, Sir Richard Carlisle, a wealthy up-and-coming newspaper mogul whom no one likes and many fear, even though clearly she prefers the engaged-to-another-woman Matthew. Dante would be hard pressed to know into which circle of Hell to fling this fiasco; he’s mean-spirited and threatening, vindictive, arrogant, and utterly contemptuous of the very privileged society he hopes to marry up to. Even the butler, Mr. Carson, knows better than agree to work for the future bride and her brooding, ill-tempered groom-elect.
          Also in Season Two, Lady Sybil becomes a nurse surrounded by Gentry officers but falls for her father’s worst nightmare, the chauffer:  a commoner, an Irish Catholic, a Sinn Féin supporter, and one solidly principled and conscientious young man. No father could ask for more of his Irish son-in-law except possibly a Trinity degree.
          And this season ends with the Great War reaching its non-conclusive Armistice and the Great Influenza cutting its snarling swath through many of the War’s survivors, including Matthew’s Lavinia. But eventually, Lady Mary sees the light, accepts Matthew’s hand (a second time) and his second memorable kiss in the snow of Christmas 1919. All seems set for a happy Season Three.
          But early in Season Three, Lady Sybil, now Mrs. Branson, dies from complications of childbirth, which paints a cross-hair target on Lady Mary’s back at the end of this season when she, like her sister, becomes pregnant. Was Sybil’s condition hereditary, and thus, would Lady Mary suffer the same fate? Would this pregnancy be another successful live birth that tragically costs the mother her life?
          Circumstances beyond the control of the producers forced Julian Fellowes to let Lady Mary and child both survive but forced Matthew’s death. Dan Stevens’ decision to leave Downton Abbey after three years left few options. So, Matthew, played by Stevens, dies in that ditch five minutes before the end of Season Three.
          It’s a painful loss. Matthew was so upstanding without being a prig, so middle-class in the best sense: fair and open, willing to hear all sides, dedicated to his principled causes, willing to speak up against the disdainful authority and omnipresent precedence of class and society as often represented by his father-in-law. And he loved Lady Mary and let her know it. He actually seemed to me to be the embodiment of everything we brag about as being a modern, enlightened, and liberal-minded American.
          In the USA, Season Four won’t start until January 2014. We’ve ten months to fret, to hope for leaks from across the Pond informing us of what’s up at Downton, and to follow the actors as closely as we are following Princess Kate’s pregnancy.
          I speculate that Tom Branson will shine even more now that he’s not in the glare of Matthew’s stellar status. I’m pulling for Tom and Rose to fall into a stunning and fulfilling love. And I hope Lady Mary will discover she can run Downton as well as our deceased Matthew did. And here’s a plug for Lady Edith finally finding an honorable single man rather than converting to Catholicism and joining an order of nuns heading off to equatorial Africa as a missionary.
          But I fear for Matthew and Lady Mary’s son, who will be old enough in Downton Abbey, Season Twenty-Two to die on the beaches of Dunkirk.