Downton Era

C. Parrish Nancy

Description

Who was the most beautiful woman in England in the twentieth century - and why did she become the most hated woman? Who spent GBP500,000 to remodel her house for a king's weekend visit? What country house has a roof that is seven acres in size? What prime minister's mother had at least twenty lovers? How many million individuals were killed in World War 1?The answers to such startling questions show that history is an unnerving mixture of breathtaking moments and punishing reversals. Written as a rattling good read, The Downton Eratakes the reader on a journey through twentieth century England by pointing out the personal landmarks that make up history. When we see elegant country houses, we discover that such great piles of rock record the aristocratic arc of the English upper class from its Victorian heyday onward into the twentieth century. Titles and dances and hunts were social events that linked families and forged governments. By exploring the interwoven family chronicles of the Churchills and their cousins, the Mitfords, we see history at a personalized level. In their lives are woven together stories of great houses, the lure and weight of title, the range and challenge of political influence, and the privileged entrapments that undermined their dazzling social world. As with tragedy, the scale of greatness and disintegration in these families and their class makes for riveting reading.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Inglaterra
• Reino Unido
• United Kingdom
• History of Europe
• Great Britain
• England
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 13 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838597429
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Nancy C. Parrish

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire, LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks


ISBN 978 1838597 429

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Ei
Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1
“Want Buy Castle In England”
Chapter 2
The House Is The Family
Chapter 3
Of Eagles and Gulls
Chapter 4
“I have the crown of England in my pocket”
Chapter 5
The Season
Chapter 6
A Panther Among Nobles
Chapter 7
Rule, Britannia: Empire, Ambition, and Rupture
Chapter 8
The Unwinding of Privilege: Lloyd George, King Edward VII, and Teasing the Goldfish
Chapter 9
World War I: Quest for Glory
Chapter 10
No More “Enjoyable Wars”: David Mitford and Winston Churchill In The Great War
Chapter 11
The Wasteland of Memory and Reaction
Chapter 12
The Mitford Children Between The Wars
Chapter 13
Keep Calm and Carry On
Chapter 14
Caught In A Mighty Wake: Churchill’s Children
Chapter 15
“U and non-U”: Mitford Wars Most Personal
Chapter 16
Chatsworth and The Chatelaine
Chapter 17
Loss and Recovery: The Fall of the Great Houses
Epilogue

Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Prologue
America’s Guilty Pleasure
On a Saturday in May 2018, twenty-nine million Americans set their alarm clocks for 4 a.m., poured Bloody Marys or mimosas, and settled in to watch a seismic shift in British history – an American divorcée becoming a Royal without creating a constitutional crisis. Another American divorcée, Wallis Simpson, did the same in 1936; but her fiancé had to give up his throne and accept banishment from the country he literally was born to rule.
Meghan Markel, a divorced American woman, was marrying Prince Harry Windsor, the man fifth in line to the throne of the United Kingdom. Certainly, the beauty of the bride and the reputation of the now-tamed Prince factored in the blanket network coverage; and, undeniably, the country thirsted for some pleasant news. But still, royals in Thailand, Brunei, and Saudi Arabia have more wealth and power than the English royals. European nobles in Monaco, Sweden, and the Netherlands have titles as ancient and dress as elegant. So, what made this wedding a transatlantic phenomenon?
I suggest one explanation is found by tracing the arc of the British aristocracy through the lives of their family seats and castles – the physical bricks and mortar of privilege and decline. History is generous in offering two intertwined families – the Churchills and the Mitfords – to illustrate this arc. From the 1700s to the 1900s, this titled group lavished a fantastic wealth, took paramours among their friends and families, and passed the reins of political power to their heirs like a birthright. They marched across the continents of the earth, leaving behind them a map recolored in the red of the British Empire. They lived life on a high wire where family rifts played out in the papers and across nations; where politics were so personal that families ruptured over fascism and socialism; where commitments flamed so passionately that sisters would willingly condemn a sibling to prison for holding an opposing view. They dominated the government during peacetime and led armies in the wars their country chose to wage. Their lifestyles achieved the level of artistry.
Yet there were dark seeds sown in this privilege. Regardless of the artistic ideal their country houses and castles may have embodied, those elegant, massive structures walled the nobles away from the economy and morality of the country they governed and sent into battle. It was within these walls –in this rarefied atmosphere–that the aristocracy first flourished and then ultimately declined. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the loosening of their commanding grip revealed history unfolding like tragedy.
As Americans, we pride ourselves on our republican separation from the British monarchy; yet we have never lost our fascination with the British aristocracy. The television audience generated by the Windsor-Markel wedding is not a new phenomenon by any means. American viewership of Downton Abbey , tracing the spiraling fortunes of the fictitious Grantham family-seat, was measured in the multi-millions. American hotels now offer elegant high teas; American tour companies design Stay-In-A-British-Castle lodgings. Perhaps the most striking example of our American passion traces back to the Gilded Age where one newspaper magnate, whose means matched his fascination, just went out and bought a castle.
Chapter 1
“Want Buy Castle In England”
On a hot California day in 1925, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst drove to his construction project overlooking a bay midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. His mountainous 250,000-acre ranch was called Rancho Piedra Blanca – White Stone Ranch – and here, as a boy and a young man, Hearst had loved to camp, hike, and savor the glorious view down to the curving peninsula protecting the bay below. However, at age 56, Hearst confided in architect Julia Morgan, “I get tired of going up there and camping in tents. I’m getting a little too old for that. I’d like to get something that would be a little more comfortable.” So, in 1919 Morgan began designing something “a little more comfortable” that also met Hearst’s other more extraordinary specifications.
Hearst was delighted with the progress on the project. Nevertheless, on this particular day, August 13, 1925, he also took a few moments to send a cable to London. The recipient of the cable was Alice Head, editor of Hearst’s three-year-old British version of Good Housekeeping. She read the message multiple times to make sure she had not imagined it:

WANT BUY CASTLE IN ENGLAND PLEASE FIND WHICH ONES AVAILABLE STDONATS [sic] PERHAPS SATISFACTORY AT PROPER PRICE BUT PRICE QUOTED SEEMS VERY HIGH SEE IF YOU CAN GET RIGHT PRICE ON STDONATS OR ANY OTHER EQUALLY GOOD
HEARST

The brief cable was stunning: in under forty words Hearst had authorized Head to see about the purchase of any English castle of good quality at an acceptable price. The request was probably unique in the history of the world; and, as a personal order from her American boss, it sent a dazed Head scurrying to turn her hand to the task.
Any observer standing beside Hearst at that moment would have been equally startled; because on this day when Hearst authorized the purchase of an English castle, he was overseeing the construction site of what would become the spectacular Hearst Castle. He fondly referred to his castle overlooking San Simeon Bay as “the ranch,” but he formally named it La Cuesta Encantada, The Enchanted Hill. Its construction—which cost over half a billion dollars in current value—would rival those of any British great house and take thirty years to complete.
La Cuesta Encantada became a sprawling complex containing 165 rooms, 127 acres of gardens, tennis courts, swimming pools, and even an airfield. Hearst’s collection of exotic animals – zebras, jaguars, lions, tigers, even an elephant for his guests to ride – swelled in size to become the world’s largest private zoo. Hearst purchased the facade of a Roman temple and had it transported from Italy and reassembled on the site to form a stunning foreground to the Pacific. Here his guests sipped elegant drinks beside the 345,000-gallon Neptune Pool while surveying a spectacular view of the ocean. Many fortunate guests also enjoyed accommodation in one of three stucco guest houses— Casa del Mar, Casa del Monte and Casa del Sol (Houses of the Sea, Mountain, Sun) —ranging in size from a comfortable 2,500 to 5,350 square feet. The entire complex was neatly interconnected and linked to the outside world by one hundred