Downton Abbey: No God Allowed

Except for anti-Catholicism, Downton Abbey has steadfastly ignored the theme of religion throughout its run. The chapel has shown up when weddings were celebrated, but otherwise the vicar has had little to do.

This article explains why: we can't have historical accuracy when atheists might be offended!

The trials and tribulations of the Crawley family have enthralled Downton Abbey viewers for six series. But some have questioned why Christianity, which would have formed a central part of the lives of the aristocracy in the early 20th century, is largely absent from the show.

Now the man tasked with ensuring the historical accuracy of the series has revealed why Downton does not do God. Alastair Bruce, who serves as the show’s historical advisor, said that executives in charge of the series had ordered producers to “leave religion out of it”, for fear of alienating an increasingly atheistic public.

Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that the Crawley family is never shown in the process of sitting down to dinner, with the action instead shown from part-way through the meal. This, Mr Bruce said, was to avoid having to show the characters saying grace.

He added: “In essence you hardly ever see a table that isn’t already sat at. We never see the beginning of a luncheon or a dinner, because no one was ever allowed to see a grace being said, and I would never allow them to sit down without having said grace.

“I think that the view was that we’d leave religion out of it, and it would’ve taken extra time too. I suggested a Latin grace, but they decided that was too far, and no one would’ve known what was going on.”

Here's where it gets silly:

Mr Bruce said that he was even banned from featuring napkins folded in the shape of a bishop’s mitre, for fear of breaching the religious edict. “Everyone panics when you try to do anything religious on the telly,” he said. “I still wish we could’ve got some decent napkin folds, but I was always left with my triangle.”

I liked the show when it was set in World War I; there was briefly some real historical impact to the family's response to the crisis that decimated English youth. Otherwise to me it has become a period costume soap opera. Perhaps the producers should have trusted their audience more: surely atheists are a little more broad-minded than that!

No Way to Treat a Diva--or a Dame

I'm sorry for the lack of posting lately: I've had that horrible RSV that's going around. After watching the Denver Broncos defeat the New England Patriots, I was in the midst of watching the NFC Playoff game when I realized that Downton Abbey was on. I wasn't able to watch the Dame Nellie Melba/Dame Kiri Te Kanawa episode last week because our local PBS station had sync problems (like watching the proverbial mis-synced Japanese movie), so last night I switched from football to Masterpiece Theatre.

The episode had other developments of course, but was all focused on the performance of Dame Nellie Melba because everyone had gathered to hear her--and the Downton Abbey producers had another Australian (sort of: she is from New Zealand) to portray her: Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Well in my opinion, they wasted the opportunity, both historically and operatically.

There is no way that Dame Nellie Melba would have consented to being shuffled off to a room with a tray for dinner. The butler, Carson, certainly did not know how to treat a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (the honor Melba had received in 1918). With all the charity work Melba had done during World War I, the honors and welcome she had received around the world, etc--I think she and Lord Grantham, and Lady Grantham, would have had more to talk about than claret. Melba was a diva: she was not just a professional opera singer from Australia! The Granthams just don't seem to be aware of culture at all: they can't get used to Catholics being full citizens in England and they don't know about the great artist about to perform for them. They also seem to lack common hospitality.

Then, after the faux-pas of her arrival and sequestration in her room, the episode gave her no grand diva entrance. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's performance was underwhelming: I was expecting the lush, lyric quality I'm used to and it just wasn't there--not even the usual precise diction. Of course, she has retired from the operatic stage (she is 69 years old), but the last performances I had heard of her did not prepare me for what I heard last night. Finally, of course, her performance is undercut by the violence occurring downstairs, which was awful.

Finding some real Nellie Melba on youtube, I listened to this 1926 recording from Covent Garden--made while the Dame was on one of her unending farewell tours! And when I searched for that, I found this article from The Telegraph, in which the professional critic Rupert Christiansen confirmed my disappointment and identified the problems technically with Dame Te Kanawa's performance:

Confined to her room with a cup of tea and treated by Carson as though she was a visiting tradesperson during her visit to Downton Abbey? The real Dame Nellie Melba wouldn’t have tolerated such treatment for a nanosecond. In 1922, she had enjoyed 30 years of being received as a social equal by crowned heads and aristocrats throughout Europe, and she would only have sung at a private party as a personal favour to her host. Melba was nobody’s hireling: she called all the shots, and the Granthams and their staff would have quaked at her approach. . . .

But she sounded rather worse - recordings of the Australian soprano dating from that era demonstrate singing far more secure and shapely than Dame Kiri’s. Sharp unsteady intonation, heavy vibrato and tastelessly swooping portamento vitiated what fragments we heard of her performance of two arias by Puccini and a song by Dvorak: the dastardly Green’s reference to the noise of ‘a cat on a bonfire’ was unkind, but Mrs Patmore’s expression of heavenly rapture was scarcely convincing, and no wonder that poor Anna Bates whisperingly complained of a headache.

Downton Abbey and Anti-Catholicism

I watched the episode of Downton Abbey in which Lady Sybil's husband's Irish Catholicism and Irish nationalist acvities come to the fore. Lord Grantham proclaimed his anti-Catholicism, although he does not want torture or execution for Catholics in twentieth century England--how modern of him! He expresses the belief that Catholics are foreign--"something Johnny Foreigner" about them--so he has never met any English Catholics from the old Recusant families? That seems unlikely. (Lord Grantham was not his best in this episode at all: ignoring issues of his management of the estates, being proud of being a bigot, mocking his daughter's efforts to write a letter to the editor about women's suffrage, etc.)

Spoiler Alert:

The issue of Catholicism will continue in later episodes because Lady Sybil is pregnant--will the baby be baptized in the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church?  The Catholic Herald addressed the issue last year during the original BBC run of Season Three in England:

Downton Abbey, which I confess to not watching very attentively, is now broaching the question of anti-Catholicism.

Up to now I have been puzzled by the way Tom Branson, the Fenian ex-chauffeur and son-in-law, seemingly has no religion. I assumed he was a Protestant (some Irish nationalists were), but it turns out that, no, he is a Catholic after all. Funny it has only surfaced now, as I am pretty certain that someone like the Earl of Grantham, a self-proclaimed anti-Catholic, would not have employed Catholic staff, and would have died of apoplexy att he thought of his daughter marrying one.
How rife was anti-Catholicism in the 1920’s?

Drawing on my admittedly partial knowledge, among the upper classes it was common. It is possible that the aristocracy were less anti-Catholic than the people in the rungs directly below them: after all the Earl of Grantham would have known several Catholic peers, whom he would have seen regularly at the House of Lords. (The Earl in Downton never seems to go there, which is one of the many historical oddities of the series, but let that pass.) Edward VII, the recently deceased King, had several Catholic friends. So, one would imagine that Catholics were socially acceptable in the highest ranks of society, though this would not have extended to intermarriage, partly because of the Church’s laws on that. But further down the social ladder it was a different matter altogether.

The creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes IS Catholic, and he commented on the theme in this article from The Telegraph:

The unseemly debate in last night’s Downton Abbey over whether the late Lady Sybil Branson’s daughter should be baptised as a Catholic touches on prejudices that its writer Julian Fellowes knows about only too well.

“It is really to illustrate that casual, almost unconscious anti-Catholicism that was found among the upper classes, which lasted well into my growing up years,” says Fellowes, 63, who is a Catholic and an old boy of Ampleforth.

Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, has, in a previous episode of the series, opined that Catholics have “something Johnny Foreigner” about them. “It wasn’t that they were nasty – Robert certainly isn’t – but they thought that somehow Catholics were un-English and so 'not quite right’,” says Fellowes. “I am not aware that anyone else has ever touched on it, so I thought it might be interesting.

Downton Abbey and Henry VIII

I just started watching the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series Downton Abbey during its second season. The building in which the show is filmed is obviously not an abbey, but it could be on former abbey land. That means that sometime in the sixteenth century, a noble bought the land and buildings from Henry VIII through his Vice Regent in Spiritual's Court of Augmentations. Monsignor Owen Campion of the Our Sunday Visitor newspaper recently reflected on that background in the power context of Henry VIII's reign:

Bringing into line the nobility and the religious communities, such as monasteries and convents that literally were sprinkled across the map of England, was something else. The monarch was not almighty.

Nobles owned, and often occupied, vast tracts of land. Untold thousands of people depended on them. For generations, nobles had developed ties with the people living on their lands or working for them. (Admittedly, not every circumstance was happy.)

The nobles inevitably were rich. The king needed revenues from taxes. Nobles sat in Parliament, in the House of Lords. The king needed their political support, especially in a matter then so revolutionary as breaking religious bonds with the pope.

Then there was the reality of the monasteries. The abbeys and convents were more than houses of prayer. They were magnets for local towns and regions. In them were schools. Often, there were hospitals, at least as such were known in the 16th century. In the monasteries, the poor found relief. They were centers of worship and devotion. Finally, many abbots sat in Parliament.

If unchecked, the monasteries very likely could frustrate the king as he sought to change religion in England.

So, he instituted a policy to dissolve the monasteries. It was an amazing, stupendous undertaking, as if Congress today ordered the closing of every college and university in this country. Brute force played a role. Resistance varied. For example, among the first martyrs of those days were Carthusians from an abbey. They would not acknowledge the king’s order separating the Church from Rome, so they were executed. . . .

As a result, the king in a relatively short period of time had at his disposal huge areas of land, once occupied by the monasteries, along with everything that the monasteries had owned.

A few of the monasteries were kept as Anglican churches, although the monks were expelled. Westminster Abbey is an example.

In many other cases, the king simply seized whatever had belonged to monasteries as his own. Then, on some occasions, he gave the land to nobles whom he wished to placate. Some real-life English nobles today own and occupy land once the site of a Catholic abbey.

In another OSV publication last year, I also wrote about the dissolution of the monasteries, in the November/December issue of The Catholic Answer Magazine: "Henry VIII's Achievement".