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Secrets and lies high in socıety
Downton creator Julian Fellowes’ unmissable new series Belgravia, set among central London’s elite, fizzes with snobbery and scandal. Lisa Sewards met the cast on set, who reveal the...
The sun is blazing down on Hampton Court Palace, horses are swishing flies away with their tails and Tamsin Greig is looking rather regal, sporting a cream parasol as she saunters past in a carriage.
Trussed in a velvet embroidered bonnet over her rag-curled hair and a tight-fitting corset beneath a striped silk dress, the Olivierwinning stage actress, star of TV’S Episodes, Black Books and Green Wing, appears as Anne Trenchard, a mother who tragically loses her beloved daughter, in ITV’S sumptuous new 19th-century period drama Belgravia, from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.
With Anne in the carriage is her daughter-in-law Susan (Alice Eve), and the pair are deep in hushed conversation. ‘That scene is ostensibly about two women going out for a ride in a carriage, but lots of other stuff is going on under the surface as well,’ says Tamsin. ‘In fact it’s an amazingly touching scene about two women tiptoeing around the reality of the inability to have children, or dealing with the loss of a child.
‘It’s so thrilling that Julian has put two women at the heart of the story because it was a very patriarchal century. But actually, what he’s interested in is what happens to families when they’re devastated by emotional turbulence. It’s the women who manipulate things to their ends, so the men are the reactors to it. I thought that was very interesting.
‘For me, the challenge of playing a woman when she’s 25 and then when she’s 60 is intriguing, just to see what happens to a person. To see how different they become, through experience or tragedy, and how they continue to grow when a part of them has been lopped off emotionally.’
Anne and Susan are two of the key players in the sparkling six-part adaptation of Julian’s 2016 novel of the same name, a story of secrets and dishonour in the early 19th century, for which Downton Abbey’s award-winning creative team have been reunited once more. It opens at the opulent and now legendary ball that was hosted by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels on 15 June 1815, the night before the Battle of Quatre Bras during the Napoleonic Wars. The cream of British society gathered here ahead of the fighting, and many of the men then left the dance floor to go straight to the battlefield; some of the young officers were still in their dress coats when they died in the battles ahead.
‘I’ve always been interested in the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, which actually featured quite a lot in my version of Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon,’ explains Lord Fellowes, 70. ‘I think the image of all those glamorous young people dressed up and dancing, with the duchess entertaining them, and then a couple of days later half the young men are dead, some still in the costumes they’d worn for the ball, is very powerful. It’s a contrast between great privilege and great tragedy, with no real bridge in between.’
Among the fictional guests at the ball are nouveau riche businessman James Trenchard (Philip Glenister), chief supplier of provisions to the Duke of Wellington’s troops, his wife Anne and their daughter Sophia (Emily Reid). There Sophia catches the eye of Edmund, Lord Bellasis (Jeremy Neumark Jones), son and heir to the Earl of Brockenhurst, head of one of the most influential families in England. Within a year both Edmund and Sophia are dead – he killed in battle and she in childbirth – but the ill-fated union between the young crossclass couple will create scandal for generations to come.
The plot then jumps 25 years into the future and follows the power struggles between families as secrets unfold among the upper echelons of London society, who reside behind the porticoed
‘It’s thrilling to have two women at the heart of it’ TAMSIN GREIG
doors of Belgravia, then and still now one of London’s grandest postcodes. In a key scene we see Anne, whose husband is hiding his own dark secret, weeping over a newborn baby while confessing, ‘We chose a life of lies, and now those lies have returned to haunt us.’
‘I think it’s intriguing how people live with secrets and lies,’ says Tamsin, 53. ‘It’s fascinating how you adapt to news and how that affects your relationships. But both Anne and her husband are capable of hiding information. Anne is described by Julian as “opaque”, which I think is a telling adjective. She’s someone who has a lot going on with the secret information she hides. It’s about how you live as the seams of that fabrication are unpicked and you are then required to keep more secrets, and so the difficulties continue. If you’re not open, you are sowing new seeds of potential devastation.’
As with Downton Abbey, there’s no hiding secrets from the staff below stairs, some of whom are on the make because in those days they had no pensions so they had to try to build up some money. ‘They’re thinking how they can manipulate the information and allow it to work for themselves,’ says Tamsin. ‘Paul Ritter, who plays the butler, has this line where he says, “I’m not a rich man.” That’s the whole motivating force for him. He’s pulled into, “What can I do with this information?” because he knows his days are numbered. It’s not that he doesn’t like his employers, he’s just trying to survive.’
The well-bred daughter of a country teacher, Anne loves her husband and enjoys his success without sharing his social ambitions. James is a self-made man and social climber of mountaineering proportions. He started out as a market trader but grasped the opportunity that war with Napoleon presented, becoming one of the principal suppliers to the Duke of Wellington. After the war, he joins master builders Thomas and William Cubitt in their construction of a new ‘City of the Rich’ in London – Belgravia – born out of the prosperity the Napoleonic Wars delivered. But while Belgravia is a byword for wealth, the aristocracy must now rub shoulders with their new neighbours, the middle classes, such as the Trenchards.
‘Anne doesn’t care about social climbing, she’s not interested in sta
tus,’ says Tamsin. ‘Yet the Trenchards are upwardly mobile, part of this new echelon of the nouveau riche. Anne is trying to deal with a broken heart, and status and value don’t give her enough to let go of that pain. I found that very compelling.’
So what does she see in James? After all, she has, technically, married below her status. ‘I discovered that, at that time, there were about half a million more women in the country than there were men, for various demographic and war-based reasons,’ explains Tamsin. ‘So I found it interesting that she’s married this man, who some would say is not good enough for her. Philip brings ebullience, natural warmth and energy to the role, and if that’s the sort of man he was when she met him as a teenager she would have been swept along by it.’
Philip, 57, star of Life On
Mars, Mad Dogs and Cranford, agrees with Tamsin. ‘Basically, I’d say that Anne Trenchard is quite happy to have the OBE but James won’t stop until he gets the knighthood. He’s become a very
successful property dealer and is rather enjoying the excesses that brings. Fortunately his wife keeps
him in check. On the eve of Waterloo, Wellington refers to him as “the magician”, which is the sort of thing James will let everyone know about.’
But it doesn’t necessarily win him social acceptance with people like Lady Brockenhurst (Dame Harriet Walter) in the upper levels of society. Once a great beauty, Lady Brockenhurst hides her sadness about losing her son Edmund behind a carapace of aristocratic hauteur, which feeds her sense of superiority. Together with her husband Peregrine, Lord Brockenhurst (Tom Wilkinson), she’s lived her life according to an unquestioned code. ‘When James comes across people like Lady Brockenhurst it becomes a bit sticky, because he’s
fawning up to her and she just sees him as coarse,’ says Philip.
The Trenchards’ son Oliver, played by Richard Goulding (who appeared as Prince Harry in the first two series of The Windsors), desires everything his father has but is not prepared to work for it, and his marriage to the beautiful but petulant Susan is an unhappy one. ‘Oliver’s got a temper and he flies off the handle, so I spend most of my time storming out of rooms and slamming doors,’ says Richard. ‘But I try to do it differently every time! I think he’d like to be a serial womaniser if he had the confidence, but Susan is quite fierce and wears the trousers. They’ve been married 11 years and they’re still living with his parents. There is no child yet but they need an heir.’
It seems Susan is unable to have children. ‘She has extra-marital sex and tries to have a baby with someone else, but because it was a very class-driven society and he’s above her in station he could make or
‘Susan’s lover could make or break her’ ALICE EVE
break her,’ says Alice Eve, who has appeared in Black Mirror and Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence. ‘Julian explained to me how, for women like Susan, society was a career for them. It wasn’t just a game, it was actually the way they kept themselves housed. This story is about the birth of a new industrial class, and new money infiltrating society, and how they covered up the sex and the illegitimate children that occurred when a whole new bunch of people started coming to the grand
parties. Susan has a lot of respect for Anne and James because they lost a child, and there’s no greater tragedy than that. The relationship with Anne is the meat of the character. It’s so complex and so female, and there’s so much being exchanged between them that’s really juicy to play.’
Meanwhile, Oliver is preoccupied with his rival in his father’s business affairs, the dashing young entrepreneur Charles Pope (Jack Bardoe), who’s determined to make his mark in this new world. ‘Oliver’s got no instinct for his father’s business and he’s lazy, all he wants is to live in the country, ride horses and go shooting,’ says Richard. ‘Charles is his rival and Oliver is vying with him for his father’s attention.’
Julian Fellowes is thrilled with the new series. ‘I felt six hours was a lovely space to tell this story in,’ he says. ‘I’m always interested in periods of great social mobility and the years after Waterloo, into the beginning years of Queen Victoria’s reign, were a time of tremendous change.
‘There was the expansion of empire and certain industries and the coming of the railway. The whole country was in a state of flux, and that’s what this story is about. You’ve got the Trenchards, part of the new people, and on the other side you’ve got the Brockenhursts, part of old society. They would have been great a hundred years before, but in a sense the Trenchards are ahead of them. They’re part of the developing country whereas the Brockenhursts are looking back to a less complicated time for their own kind.
‘So we exploit this, because there’s a relationship between the Trenchards’ daughter and the Brockenhursts’ son at the time of Waterloo, and the consequences of that relationship are what the story is about.’ Does he think viewers will make comparisons with the success of Downton Abbey? ‘They can if they wish, but it’s a very different period of history. I have a sort of scattergun policy in that I try and do a lot of things, and I hope some of them land. I don’t expect everything to win prizes, but I think you just have to bang on and keep going and keep doing your best.’ n