I’ll begin with an apology.  When I wrote out my thoughts about Episode 7, I thought that Episode 8 was the end of the series.  Had I realized that there was still one more episode to come, I might have drawn different conclusions on one or two subjects.  In my defense, when I looked at “Scheduled Recordings” on my DVR, I saw that Episode 8 was longer than a standard episode — some 80 minutes, including the Viking Cruise commercials – and I also saw that the recording for the following Sunday was a “Making of Downton” program.  That seemed to confirm my understanding that Episode 8 was going to be the end.  I drew the wrong conclusion.  In compensation, this commentary is offered free of charge except for a small fee for handling.

With so many story lines needing to be tied off, it is just as well that we have one more episode.  Looking back with now perfect hindsight, I can see that it was too much to hope for that both Mary and Edith could accept their respective fiancés and celebrate their respective weddings within the span of a single episode.  Mary needed most of Episode 8 to get to the altar.  Fresh from the tearful phone call that concluded Episode 7, she sent off a confirming letter of rejection and then sent off Henry himself when Tom maneuvered him to Downton’s front door.

Henry presents so many issues for Mary that we can take pot luck.  He is not Mary’s financial equal and will be of significantly inferior financial and social status to his stepson.  He will spend his married life living in someone else’s house.  If he and Mary have children, they will be relative paupers compared to their half-brother.  But most important, Henry will walk past the Grim Reaper, nodding his head to a familiar acquaintance, every time he goes to his job, never knowing whether this day is the one when the G.R. decides to ride with him.

It’s that last problem that sends Mary into tears.  Fortunately, Violet reappears after Tom sent for her.  I should have known that she would not abandon the audience before the finale.  She adopts a novel attitude, completely devoid of the financial and dynastic calculations she made when we last saw her discussing Henry with Lady Shackleton a few episodes back.  Now she is the Mr. Mason of the upper classes and counsels Mary to follow her heart and throw caution to the winds (I think two clichés are enough).  And so Mary says Yes.

I would also say that Henry, a fellow who is scraping along with no money to speak of, manages to appear in each scene with perfectly tailored clothing appropriate for each occasion and with elegant and expensive transportation whenever he needs to travel.  He does well for a man without any money.

As busy as Mary was on her emotional shuttle, she still found time to wound those around her.  She was able to blame her father for Barrow’s attempted suicide in the time it took to pour a cup of tea.  And she was able to wreck Edith’s chances for happiness in less time than it took to butter a piece of toast.  Of course, it was idiotic for Edith to think of keeping Marigold’s parentage from Bertie.  One of the reasons the British upper classes gave, probably still give, for their place in society was that they set an example.  It should have been clear as crystal to Edith from the beginning what the right thing was to do.  Not only that, but no one could expect to build a marriage with a deception sitting right at the heart of it.  And there is the practical problem that the truth always does come out eventually.  In this case, the truth’s appearance came early, aided by a heartless and vindictive sibling, but it was only a matter of time.

So Bertie has gone off to Tangiers without Edith.  But this is the benefit of having an entire additional episode, one that I did not budget for, in which to work out the problems that remain after the general roundup of Episode 8.  Does anyone doubt that Bertie and Edith will end up married?  How it will happen we cannot say.  Bertie may come back to Downton, or he and Edith will meet somewhere by chance, or Edith will write, or Tom will intervene, or Violet will be wheeled into action again.  A long-shot possibility is that Mary, experiencing remorse for the first time in her life, will contact Bertie on Edith’s behalf to make one final sisterly plea.   I remain confident that Bertie and Edith will wed however it may be arranged, and I’m sure that 90% of the viewing audience is of the same opinion.

Quite a number of other story lines were resolved in this episode, suggesting that the final episode (or The Final Episode if you prefer) will have enough slack to allow plenty of time for the tale that will bring Edith to the altar to be complicated and slow moving.  At each development, there are numerous characters who will want to talk about it among themselves: Robert, Cora, Rosamund, Violet, Isobel, Mary, Henry, and Tom, not to mention all of the downstairs staff who might spare a thought now and again for Mary’s less glamorous sister.

Two other characters who were settled in Episode 8 are Mr. Barrow and Mr. Molesley.  Barrow was another beneficiary of the additional episode that I failed to anticipate.  If the writers had only eight episodes to deal with, they might have been tempted to close the series with the shocking discovery of Mr. Barrow doing his best imitation of Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II.  But with an episode in hand, there is time for Barrow to recover, to receive a restorative orange from Master George, and to be allowed to keep his job “if only for the time being” as Mr. Carson so cheerfully put it.

Molesley starts his new job as a teacher.  He gets off to a rough start when the students behave badly.  A bit of encouragement from Miss Baxter and from Daisy is all it takes to buck him up and he proves to be a natural, as Daisy says.  If he had been teaching in the same school today, he would probably have bled out from knife wounds on the first day.  Oh, and thanks to Mr. Carson for his words of encouragement to Mr. Molesley.  What a perfect antidote he provides to ambition and a desire for self-improvement.

Mr. Carson was not content to limit himself to discouraging Mr. Molesley.  As an equal opportunity pessimist, he was willing to paint a picture of ruin for Mrs. Patmore to contemplate.  You may recall that my first guess about Mrs. Patmore’s guests was that one of them was a co-responding witness.  That didn’t pan out, but my second guess did.  (The reader is respectfully invited to examine footnote 4 from the comment on Episode 7.)  This is enough to cause Mrs. Patmore’s cottage to become a “house of ill repute.”  Surely that phrase does not have the connotation in British English that it has in the United States.  Mrs. Patmore can hardly be expected to vet the marital status of each guest who books a visit to the cottage.  A “house of ill repute” is one whose purpose is to conduct the activity that gives it that reputation.

Whether the term is fairly applied or not, Mr. Carson helps to increase Mrs. Patmore’s sense of desperation.  He claims, falsely, that he always thought the house was a bad idea.  He announces that he is going to take steps to ensure that his investment is not ruined the way Mrs. Patmore’s has been.  To top things off, when the family agrees to rally to Mrs. Patmore and allow themselves to be photographed leaving her cottage after taking tea there, Carson tries to discourage them.  Like Denker down the road, he is more snobbish than the nobs themselves.  Mrs. Patmore’s immediate problem seems to be on its way to resolution.  The only missing element is her eventual union with Mr. Mason and again we are thankful for the extra episode (as I will continue to think of it) to give us time for that loose end to be knitted up, should Mr. Fellowes be so inclined.

The fate of Isobel and Lord Merton is also in Mr. Fellowes’s hands, acting through his agent Larry Grey (whom I have called Larry Merton in the past because I forget that these upper class people have a family name as well as one or more titled pedigrees).  Isobel seems to have decided that she will accept Lord Merton if Larry gives his blessing.  Presumably she wants to feel that she has his heartfelt assent.  It will not be enough for him merely to speak a form of words.  We shall see whether Larry is up to it.  My hope is that Isobel remains independent, but she hasn’t asked for advice.

I would like to add a note about Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  I agree with Samuel Johnson: “He who aspires to be a serious wine drinker must drink claret”[1].  There are some 10,000 producers of Bordeaux wine, so to sample even a small fraction would be the work of decades (for people who intend to be sober for at least part of their day).  Although I consume more than my share of the wine of Bordeaux, I had never tried or even heard of Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  I was intrigued by the name when it was mentioned a couple of episodes ago.  I decided to try it.  Total Wine had only one vintage, 2009, a very good year in Bordeaux and drinkable now, so I bought a couple of bottles.

The wine has a pleasant dark garnet color, but I thought the tannins were still too pronounced to enjoy the fruit.  I drank the first bottle over three days and I will put the second one away for a couple of years.

I remained curious about the unusual name of the wine.  There are numerous theories.  I mentioned that Lord Byron visited the chateau from which Chasse-Spleen was eventually hived and commented that the wine was a “remedy to chase away the spleen”, spleen meaning “the blues”.  But was he speaking of this particular wine or of wine in general?  Lord Byron was a man who enjoyed his wine and one can find many quotes attributed to him on the subject.  Not all of them were spoken while he was on this property.

Interestingly, the word “spleen” entered the French language via Lord Byron’s use of it.  The word “spleen” naming the digestive organ entered English via the French word “esplen” but “spleen” in the sense of melancholy or the blues entered French from English and specifically from Byron.  The poet Charles Baudelaire used the word “spleen” extensively and an entire section of his foremost work “Les Fleurs du Mal” or “The Flowers of Evil” is titled “Spleen et Idéal”.  Several of the poems in the series have the word Spleen in their title.  But what does this have to do with wine?

We get closer to an answer when we learn that Beaudelaire wrote another series of poems, he called them prose-poems, titled “Le Spleen de Paris” or “Paris Blues”.  This series was published in 1857, the year in which the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was published.  One of the poems is titled “Enivrez-vous” or “Get yourself drunk.”  It contains the lines: “Enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu a votre guise.”  A possible translation: “Be drunk all the time!  From wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose.[2]”

Those lines appear on the front label of each bottle of Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  What French winemaker would not want to name Charles Beaudelaire the national poet of France?

The final connection is that the artist Odilon Redon illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, apparently after Beaudelaire’s death in 1867.  Redon came from a town just down the road from Chasse-Spleen.  The suggestion that he proposed the name is plausible.  I feel the connection is complete.  There is no definitive explanation, but one can imagine how the name came to stick through a series of coincidences.  The surprising thing is that there are not more chateaux in Bordeaux using the name “Spleen”.  No one could be melancholy after a couple of glasses of good Bordeaux wine.

I realize that this digression may be of limited interest.  Possibly I can make it up to you by sharing two quotes about wine that I found when I was tracking down the background on Chasse-Spleen.  First, from an otherwise unidentified Spanish bishop: “I have enjoyed great health at a great age because every day since I can remember, I have consumed a bottle of wine except when I have not felt well. Then I have consumed two bottles.”  Second, from W.C. Fields: “I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.”

Three final thoughts.  First, was it not a lovely thing that three of Mary’s closest relations – her father, sister, and brother-in-law – were able to take a turn unloading on her?  Her father gave her only a single sentence, but one dripping with contempt.  Tom lit into her more extensively and Edith delivered a quarter-century of pent-up resentment with a single word.  Very satisfying for those of us who are not fans of the elegant Lady M.

Second, Bertie’s description of his mother making “Mr. Squeers look like Florence Nightingale” is surely unfair.  The distinguishing feature of Mr. Squeers – the headmaster of a Yorkshire boarding school in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” — was not that he was strict or maintained high standards.  He was sadistic and dishonest.  Bertie’s mother can’t be that bad!  I’m sure she and Edith will get along beautifully.  No doubt she will be delighted to welcome Marigold as well.

Finally, the name of Bertie’s new home, the place where we had the bird shooting last year, is Brancaster Castle.  P.G. Wodehouse is looking in on Downton once again.  At some point before he was employed by Bertie Wooster, Jeeves was the butler to Lord Brancaster.  I think these little coincidences are worth a smile if not an outright chuckle.

My glass of Chasse-Spleen is drained.  The blues are chased away, and I await the last episode of Downton the Sunday after next.

[1] Claret, to the British, is dry red Bordeaux wine.

[2] The label attributes the lines to Les Fleurs du Mal.  I hesitate to suggest a correction to a French winemaker on a point of French poetry, but I believe the label is incorrect on this small point.

The writers have dangled death in front of us in recent episodes.  Robert didn’t have a simple ulcer attack.  Instead, he had to worry us by shooting blood all over the tablecloth and any guests or family members who were within spitting distance (literally).  But he lived.  In Episode Seven, we have an auto race and right before the start, Henry gives Mary a kiss full of meaning and says that he’ll see her at the finish.  You might as well paint “Someone’s Going to Die” in place of all those Dunlop signs.

I thought Henry might be shipped out of the story, but he survived.  Minor characters often bear the brunt of these foreshadowings.  Fans of the old Star Trek TV show will recall that on those occasions when Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beamed down to a new planet and took a fourth person along — usually an ensign that we hadn’t seen before – that character was dead within minutes.  Same thing here.  I’m surprised the fellow lasted as long as he did.

Of course, this completely ruins Mary’s relationship with Henry.  He already had two strikes – lack of a title and lack of funds – but a career that invites death into the marriage every time Henry goes to his job, that’s a little too much, don’t you think?  Only kidding.  Mary clearly is going to end up with someone at the end of the series and it appears that there is only one more episode.  There isn’t time for anyone besides Henry[1].  Besides, he suits Mary.  He has the right tone, style, and manner.  He just lacks ready money.  I predict that she’ll come around.  I don’t say that they will live happily ever after, but I think they’ll make it past the end of Episode Eight.  After that, they are no longer our responsibility.

Edith has at last received a proposal of marriage from a man who is not (a) twice her age or (b) already married.  I think she will have to do more for Marigold than just ask whether the child can come along.  Possibly that is what she needs to think about.  If she turns this fellow down, the next most likely place to look for a beau would be where she works, in Fleet Street, where it will be difficult to find someone who is both temperamentally suitable and of her social class.  Also, Edith is operating under the same time constraints as Mary.  We have only one more episode to get this story line resolved.  I think we have to assume that Edith is going to tell Bertie about Marigold.  He’ll be fine, she’ll say yes, and we’ll have another Crawley settled.

There seemed to be no reason for the writers to bring the editor of Edith’s magazine to the auto race except to have her meet Tom.  He likes feisty, independent women.  She fits the bill, and as a dividend, when dining among the upper classes she does not goad her host into uncontrolled rage.  If that works out, there’s another Crawley settled, although I recognize that I am speculating.

One question I had about the editor was how she managed her change of clothing.  She couldn’t show up at Rosamund’s house for dinner wearing the togs she had on at the race.  Everyone else at dinner was staying at Rosamund’s, or possibly at the Crawley mansion in London, so they had a place to keep their dinner clothes and to change into them.  Did the editor pack a bag and bring it with her to Rosamund’s, or did she go home between entertainments, or what?  In an age when people had to wear exactly the right clothing for each of the varied events in their lives, how did someone who was not a member of the leisure class manage it?

It is good that we have unraveled the mystery of Larry Merton’s sudden change of heart.  Now that we know the truth – and thank you Violet for getting to the truth so quickly and efficiently – it’s obvious that the only person who could have been attracted to Larry Merton would be someone equally unpleasant.  I confess that I was taken in, but I’m glad that Violet was not.  If Isobel does decide to wed Lord Merton, she will do so with her eyes open.  I hope that she will retain her independence.  We shall soon know.

Violet is leaving to cruise the Mediterranean and then to spend “a month among the French”.  Someone pointed out to me that Maggie Smith made a movie in 2015 (The Lady in the Van), so it is possible that Violet left the story when she did to allow the actress to go to work on her new role[2].  We may not see her again.

When Mrs. Patmore and Mrs. Hughes – let’s stay with her professional name – put their heads together, they can solve any problem, even the problem of Mr. Carson.  Three pennies’ worth of bandages was all it took to effect a complete role reversal.  We can expect to see a more reasonable Mr. Carson at our next meeting, now that he appreciates the hard work it takes to organize a meal that will meet his standards.  And Mrs. Hughes was able to induce Mr. Carson to sit on the family’s own sofa!  Next, he’ll be discussing Wat Tyler and Karl Marx with Daisy.

When Mrs. Patmore first purchased her house, I got the idea that it was at some distance from Downton.  I think I remember Mr. Carson traveling with her to see it.  Now it turns out that the house is a short walk away from the Abbey.  She has had her first guests, a nice prosperous-looking middle class couple.  I am going to throw caution to the winds and speculate about the man waiting with a camera out in the lane.  I think the woman at Mrs. Patmore’s cottage may be what was called a professional co-respondent.  In those days, a divorce, even an amicable divorce, would be granted only for cause, and cause meant adultery.  One of the married pair would be supplied by counsel with a professional witness, a member of the opposite sex.  The two would spend a night in a hotel or a BnB and would arrange to have their picture taken for evidence[3].  If my guess is correct, Mrs. Patmore may find that her cottage will be used regularly by one half of an unhappily married couple and a hired witness.  Possibly not the respectable source of retirement income she was looking for, although it would be steady.  Again, I am guessing.  If it turns out I am wrong, I will come back and edit this paragraph out[4].

It’s nice to see that Mr. Molesley will be able to fulfill his destiny and become a teacher at the local school.  His performance on the general knowledge examination may have exceeded the schoolmaster’s expectations, but Mr. M’s fans in the audience knew that he would come through.  We were not surprised.  It’s not clear whether dear Miss Baxter will join Mr. Molesley as he moves ahead.  If the two of them end up together, it will be one more piece in the general pattern of pairing off all available hands above and below stairs.

Mrs. Patmore has brought Daisy around on the subject of Mr. Mason, and Andy and Daisy each know where to find each other, so the only odd man out seems to be Mr. Barrow.  And he seems to be in a very bad way.  He tries to sit with the Carsons to enjoy a quiet moment in the family’s own parlor, but Carson refuses him.  He has obviously made some progress with Andy’s reading, as Andy can sound out quite a few words in a text that is too difficult for a beginning reader.  However, Andy’s trouble has been exposed in front of the kindly schoolmaster (whose name I don’t recall), whose role in life seems to be to improve the members of the Downton staff one by one.  As a result, Mr. Barrow is now pushed out as Andy’s teacher.  To add to his troubles, whenever he sees Mr. Carson, all he hears are questions about when he will be gone.

But as he told us, Downton is the only place where he has put down roots.  We will soon know how this ends for Thomas, but I see two possible paths (assuming that a handsome stranger does not arrive in the village during Episode Eight).  One possibility is that Mr. Molesley’s good fortune will provide Thomas with the opportunity to stay at Downton.  He can accept a demotion to footman, or perhaps “under-butler”, and remain at Downton, hanging on to the place with his fingernails.  The other is that he reacts to the inexorable decline in his fortunes . . . badly.  I would appeal to Mr. Fellowes.  Thomas has served you well through six seasons.  He has not been an angel or even a particularly good person, but he has had a lot to deal with.  I hope for the best, but I think we should be prepared for the possibility of a dark ending.

But let us not predict.  Let us wait for developments, which are only days away.

[1] I suppose Evelyn Napier could be bussed in at the last minute.

[2] According to the movie’s website, her character is a homeless woman who lives in a van.

[3] I am not suggesting that they would have gotten up to anything.  Their time together was strictly for the purpose of providing evidence.  There is a Fred Astaire – Ginger Rogers movie that uses this plot, The Gay Divorcee (1934).  The song “The Continental” is featured in the movie.

[4] Another possibility is that the woman may not be a professional witness at all, and this may be actual adultery, the photographer being employed by the wronged spouse of one of them.  If that turns out to be the story, I may leave the paragraph in.  I hope people read the footnotes.

This week’s episode did not grab me by the collar.  My attention wandered.  I began thinking about what the characters might do with their time after the series ends.  I imagined a series of self-improvement books.

Team Building at Home and at Work by Charles Carson

Successful Succession Planning by Cora Crawley

Getting Started in Matchmaking by Daisy Mason

My Secrets for Attracting Upper Class Women by Evelyn Napier

101 Sick Room Entertainments by Robert Crawley

When the tour was in full swing, it was obvious that the three guides – Cora, Mary, and Edith – had never learned much about the grand and historic house in which they live.  On the other hand, Mr. Molesley was obviously ready to answer any of the questions that the visitors had, but as a lowly footman he went unnoticed.  If a weekly open house becomes a regular part of the business of the Abbey (which I believe is a common practice these days), perhaps Mr. Molelsey will be taken more seriously.  These chaps who are good at general knowledge, as Mr. Molesley is about to prove himself at the local school, often make serviceable docents as well.

One characteristic of Mr. Molesley’s that I find annoying is his willingness to offer advice to Baxter when he hasn’t been asked.  In this episode, Baxter receives a letter from the cad Coyle asking her to visit him in prison.  When she tells Molesley about it, he doesn’t ask her what she is thinking of doing or how she feels about it.  He tells her what to do and then repeats his advice later, again unsolicited.  Being good at general knowledge doesn’t turn you into Ann Landers, and even she waited for people to ask for advice.

Otherwise, the pairing off seems to be going along on schedule.  Mary and Henry, Edith and Bertie are both on the verge of a big commitment, each needing just one more plot point to be resolved.  Mary will have to get over her car phobia.  Really, just because your husband and the father of your child was killed while driving his favorite car is no reason to get all morbid about automobiles.  Edith will have to tell Bertie about Marigold.  I expect it will take her a while to work up to it, but I doubt it will put him off for an instant.  Once those two details are taken care of, the Crawley daughters will be nicely settled.

It appears that Isobel and Lord Merton will be able to wed now that Larry has been defanged by his new wife.  He is so unpleasant that it’s difficult to see how she is going to manage him, but she may have reserves of strength that were not evident during this episode.  It’s also possible that she is supplying the money.

Moving down the social scale, let us hope Mr. Mason and Mrs. Patmore will be able to overcome Daisy’s neurotic possessiveness so as to achieve their modicum of domestic happiness.  An episode or two ago, Andy gave Daisy a look that I thought had more than a hint of a twinkle, but he has not followed up, so perhaps that particular story line is not going to unfold for us.  Of course, it’s possible that Thomas has turned Andy’s head without even meaning to.  Perhaps Andy’s earlier attempts to avoid Mr. Barrow were masking an attraction that dared not speak its name.  Highly unlikely, naturally, and if there were anything to it, the Patmore-Carson axis would quickly end it.

Our congratulations to Mr. Napier on rejoining the story.  During his last appearance, he did not speak one complete line.  This time, he managed several sentences before being eclipsed by characters who have a stronger claim on our attention.  Still, a respectable showing.

What is the over-under on how long Mrs. Carson is going to put up with Mr. Carson’s passive-aggressive badgering?  I would not like to see the series end with their relationship in its current state.  Mrs. Hughes is not a woman to remain silent for too much longer.

Finally, the wine that Mr. Carson brought to Lord Grantham, secreted in a flask “for ease of carriage”, was Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  The legend is that Lord Byron visited the Chateau in 1821 and on tasting the wine declared “Quel remede pour chasser le spleen” or “What a remedy to chase away the spleen [i.e., melancholy].”  It’s a nice story, but in 1821 the vineyard that is now Chasse-Spleen was part of a larger property then known as Chateau Grand-Poujeaux[1].  It is possible that the owners wrote down the quote, planning to use it in the event that the vineyards were ever split up.  In fact, the process of splitting up began the next year, but it was several decades before the vineyard now known as Chasse-Spleen took that name.  Another theory is that the wine is named after the poem “Spleen” by Charles Baudelaire.  The difficulty with that story is that the poem does not mention wine.

At one time, Chasse-Spleen was classified as a Cru Bourgeois, the grade of Bordeaux wines lying between the 55 “classified” growths and “Bordeaux Supérieur”.  At some point, it lost that designation and is now Bordeaux Supérieur[2].  Hugh Johnson’s comment: “Good, often outstanding, long-maturing wine; classical structure, fragrance.”

I hope that Robert will once again be able to enjoy a glass of Chasse-Spleen before the series ends.

[1] http://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/bordeaux-wine-producer-profiles/bordeaux/haut-medoc-lesser-appellations/chasse-spleen/

[2] The Cru Bourgeois website does not list it, but some websites still refer to it as a cru bourgeois.

Robert has had his medical crisis and has lived.  We knew that the crisis was coming – leading characters don’t spend weeks clutching their abdomens for no reason – but I doubt that any viewers expected such a dramatic presentation of symptoms.  Fortunately, there was not only a doctor but also the Minister of Health in the house.  My concern was that the writers would kill Robert.  His funeral would have been one way to close out the series.  End of an era, changing of the guard.  Barring a surprise, Robert will be with us when the series closes.  I would prefer to say goodbye to him then.

Mr. Mason’s move into the Yew Tree Farm has caused far more ripples in the plot than his modest demeanor would have led us to expect.  He quickly establishes a small circle of friends.  Daisy and he are already on friendly terms, of course, as she is the widow of his son and they have remained close.  Mrs. Patmore brings a basket of food to welcome Mr. Mason to the farm.  I thought she might be sweet on Sergeant Willis, but there are signs that she is transferring her affections to Mr. Mason, and who can blame her?  Willis would probably have more interesting tales to tell about his work, but Mason has demonstrated wider interests.  He has that sparkle in his eye that suggests a warm heart and a sense of humor.

If Mrs. Patmore were to connect with Mr. Mason, it would help her to keep an eye on Daisy.  Mr. Mason plans to keep Daisy close to him, possibly even have her to live with him.  Daisy herself does not seem keen to share Mr. Mason with the other members of the Downton staff.  Odd that she would become so protective and defensive all of a sudden.  A few more hampers full of Mrs. Patmore’s cooking may be needed to fortify Mr. Mason, but eventually he will get across the narrow moat that Daisy is digging.

The only time since we met him that I recall seeing Mr. Mason get his back up was when Mary and Tom visited him in this episode and suggested that perhaps he was no longer up to the management of the pigs that are to be entrusted to his care.  For an instant, the curtain parted and we saw behind Mr. Mason’s cheerful exterior the hard man full of Yorkshire pride who can handle stoat, sow, and suckling as well as any man in the county and who resents anyone who suggests he can’t.  Tom and Andy save the situation.  Tom suggests that Mr. Mason’s confidence is evidence that he has already hired a helper and Andy steps up to say that he had just been in the process of signing up with Mr. Mason when Lady Mary and Mr. Branson arrived.

Andy leaves Yew Tree Farm with an armload of books on pig rearing.  The casual viewer might be surprised that there is such a wide literature on pigs, but those of us who have read P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books know that Lord Emsworth relied on The Care of the Pig by Augustus Whiffle (whose last name is sometimes given by Wodehouse as Whipple) to keep The Empress of Blandings in top form.  It’s definitely a reading person’s game.  However, it doesn’t matter how many books you carry or how hard you stare at them if you can’t read.  Andy has done a good job of hiding this problem until now, but he will not be able to join the pig keeper’s guild without the ability to read.  Thomas now has the chance to help young Andy.  It seems that he wants nothing more than honest friendship.  His actions as volunteer tutor will put that to the test.

He is not the only gay man in the story who has sublimated his desires.  Edith’s beau, the Agent, whose first name is Bertie, tells Edith, and us, about his cousin, the fellow who owns the castle where we had the bird shooting last year.  The cousin spends his time in Tunisia painting local young men.  Edith draws the obvious conclusion, but I think the reason the writers have tossed us this piece of information is to let us know that the cousin is not going to put any road blocks in the way of Bertie’s eventual succession to the title.  Bertie is about as close a relation to his cousin as Mathew was to Robert.   The only difference is that Mathew and Robert didn’t know each other.  I continue to believe that everything is going to work out for Edith.  Incidentally, Edith has had two romantic flings (not counting the farmer she kissed during the war and forgetting the older fellow who left her at the altar), both in the same apartment.  No doubt she will be more careful this time.

Mary’s path to an eventual marriage to Henry will be less straight.  As she and Tom are walking to their dramatic encounter with Mr. Mason, Mary explains that while she would not want to create the false impression that she is a snob, she won’t marry “down”.  Doesn’t sound a bit snobbish.  You just have to put it the right way.  But saying that to the man who was the family chauffeur before marrying her sister could come across as a little insensitive.  Tom is not the least put off by Mary’s comment.  He and Sibyl were equals, each bringing different advantages to the marriage, and he has enough self-regard not to mind Mary’s indelicacy, realizing that it is a by-product of her self-centered approach to life.

Throughout the episode, Tom acted as a catalyst, facilitating developments without himself undergoing change.  When he is sitting in the pub with Mary and Henry – he and Henry drinking pints of manly ale and Mary drinking possibly the first glass of sherry sold in the pub that year – he challenges them to cut through all of their fencing and just announce that they would like to spend more time together.  It’s not the way the British upper classes like to get on, but perhaps the chuckle that he gave them helped to move things in the right direction.  Incidentally, I thought that when Henry referred to Mary as “la belle dame sans merci” and Tom asked him what he meant, it was condescending for Henry not to explain himself.  Perhaps keeping Tom in the dark was a way for Henry to signal to Mary that he would maintain upper class solidarity.  I thought it was rude.

At the end of the episode, Tom acted as a catalyst with the Minister of Health, getting him to tell his secret.  Neville Chamberlain served as Minister of Health three different times.  In 1925, he would have been in the early part of his second tour of duty.  He was a cabinet minister almost continuously from 1923 through October 1940, when he resigned due to ill health.  In addition to his service as Minister of Health, he was twice Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He was a very capable and intelligent man, who evidently performed well in all of his government jobs until he became Prime Minister in 1937.  Now, of course, his name is associated with one of the great cases of diplomatic malpractice.  In fairness, it didn’t look that way to a lot of people at the time.  He was cheered when he got back from Munich.

Those events occurred well after the end of the Downton tale.  His little conversation with Tom was based on a considerable amount of historical fact.  Mr. Chamberlain married a woman named Anne de Vere Cole.  Her older brother, Horace, was a notorious prankster.  As related in the episode, he did persuade the commander of Britain’s most important capital ship, HMS Dreadnought, to give a tour to the visiting King of Abyssinia and his entourage, who were in fact Cambridge students in disguise.  On another occasion, he bought up a large number of tickets to a theatrical performance and handed them out to passersby in the street, seemingly at random, but only seemingly.  All the seats were in the orchestra level and all of the recipients of the tickets were bald men.  When they took their seats, someone viewing the orchestra level from the dress circle would have seen a four-letter Anglo-Saxon obscenity spelled out by the bald heads in the seats below.  Even the “i” was dotted.

The exploit that Chamberlain talks about with Tom was another accomplishment of Mr. Cole.  He organized a group of fellow pranksters dressed as workmen and dug a trench through Piccadilly right under the noses of the police.  However, there is no reason to think that Neville Chamberlain was among the participants.  But if he had been, is it likely that he would have told Tom about it?  He attended the dinner in order to ensure that his wife’s godfather’s widow would keep a secret.  To announce it to a new audience, a stranger with a pronounced Irish accent, would seem imprudent.  Well, the same malleability, the same unwillingness to call a bluff that Violet took advantage of in 1925 was also evident to the eventual Reichskanzler in 1938.

As Violet and Cora were leaving Downton to go to the hospital, Violet said something about Marigold.  I couldn’t make out what Cora said to put Violet onto that subject.  Perhaps the concern was how Marigold would be left in Robert’s will?  Whatever the reason for bringing Marigold into the conversation, Mary overheard it and will take no time at all to learn the truth.  She already knows that Anna is being sly on the subject, so it’s only a matter of winkling the truth out of her, or simply deducing it.  That will leave Molesley as the only character in our story who doesn’t know Marigold’s parentage.  I don’t anticipate that we will have a scene where the scales fall from Mr. Molesley’s eyes.

Denker has displayed the dangers of being more royalist than the king.  She is very good at making cutting remarks in private.  She should avoid making overtly insulting remarks in the street.  Fortunately, she has something to hold over Mr. Spratt (whose first name, we learn, is Septimus, right up there with Atticus) and he is able to leverage his powers of persuasion with Lady Grantham in order for Denker to keep her place.  If only Sergeant Willis had interviewed Denker and Spratt separately, as he ought to have done!

Finally, I would like to suggest to Mr. Carson that, while he may complain of the dull state of the dinner knives in his house, the day may be coming when he will be glad that they are no sharper than they are.

Last week, I mentioned Edmund Burke in a blog about Downton Abbey.  As a result, I dipped into his “Reflections on the Revolution in France”.  Burke was a man with a powerful mind and the ability to express himself in clear and robust English.  It is a pleasure to read him.

One remarkable thing about the Reflections is that the work was written when the French Revolution had barely begun and yet seems to anticipate what was to come.  Sometime in the summer of 1789, Burke received a letter from a young friend in France asking for Burke’s thoughts about what was then taking place across the Channel.  Burke wrote a reply that was ready to send in October 1789, but he held back on sending it “for prudential reasons”.  Ultimately, he wrote a longer response and then published the work in November 1790 as a single essay.

At the time of writing, Louis XVI had not yet been tried for treason nor beheaded.  The Terror and the Thermidorean Reaction were years in the future.  Napoleon rose to power after Burke was already dead.  Yet, he saw the potential for all of it, even if he did not predict the particulars.

He did all this without the benefit of reports on the scene from a 24-hour-a-day news service.  He knew enough of France and of human affairs to generate a remarkably clear picture from the limited hard information available to him.  Consider this passage from the early pages of the work (and therefore I assume, without knowing, from his earliest impressions):

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. . . .

I thought of those words during the “Arab Spring” of 2011.  You will recall that the political and intellectual leadership of the West was head over heels crazy for the flowering of liberty and progress that was then opening before our eyes.  The journal “Foreign Affairs” summed up the American attitude this way: “President Barack Obama described the uprisings as “a historic opportunity” for the United States “to pursue the world as it should be.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed these comments, expressing confidence that the transformations would allow Washington to advance “security, stability, peace, and democracy” in the Middle East. Not to be outdone, the Republican Party’s 2012 platform trumpeted “the historic nature of the events of the past two years — the Arab Spring — that have unleashed democratic movements leading to the overthrow of dictators who have been menaces to global security for decades.””

Egypt deposed a military dictator and held free and fair elections as a result of which the electors returned a parliament two-thirds of whose members favored the imposition of Sharia law.  A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose long-term goal has been the implementation of Sharia, was elected president.  Yet, the news coverage had focused on the students and professionals who gathered in Tahrir Square, where not a single member of the Muslim Brotherhood was to be found.  (“Those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.”)

In neighboring Libya, coherent government, even by Libya’s loose standards, ceased.

Consider as Exhibit B, these comments on the Russian Revolution by Woodrow Wilson:

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.

Wilson was addressing a joint session of the United States Congress on April 2, 1917.  Having won re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war” Wilson went to Congress less than thirty days after his second inauguration to ask for a declaration of war against Germany.  He was asking the Congress to send American troops to Europe, something that no American government had done.  Such an undertaking was justified on the grounds that the war would make the world “safe for democracy”.  The alliance of the liberal British and French democracies with Czarist Russia was inconsistent with this view.  The Provisional Government then nominally in control in Russia enabled Wilson to tie the Russian Revolution to his request for a declaration of war.

Wilson was one of the best-educated, most literate and knowledgeable men to hold the presidency.  When he made this statement, he was in possession of all the information held on the subject by the United States government.  Yet, before the year was over, Russia had fallen under the control of one of the darkest tyrannies in human history.  Perhaps he took solace from the fact that the summit of Russia’s new political structure “was not in fact Russian in origin”.  Karl Marx was German, after all.

At the other end of the dark history of the Soviet Union, we have this prediction from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent historian, who told us in 1982: “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”  I believe this comment was intended to put Ronald Reagan in his place.  When Reagan was asked about his desired outcome for U.S.-Soviet relations, he said “We win.  They lose.”  This lack of sophistication had to be answered, and Professor Schlesinger lent his prestige to remind us that a rube may become president but he is still a rube.  By the end of the decade, the Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union was no more.

The list could go on.  Eminent, learned individuals with access to the best available information allow their hopes or their agendas to cloud their vision.  And there sits Edmund Burke in his London room with a quill, an ink well, and some paper, turning limited but accurate information and a profound understanding of human affairs into insights whose depth we can still admire after 225 years.