If Downton Abbey took place in a world teetering on the brink of change, Belgravia, Julian Fellowes’s six-part series on Epix, examines a society that is resolutely poised. Picture a tightrope walker at the height of his confidence. His shoulders are squared, his pole is perfectly balanced, and his step lacks so much as a wobble.
The location of so staunch a civilization is London, 1841. Victoria is a young queen, the empire is at its peak, and architect Thomas Cubitt has recently completed a “spangled city for the rich” in the district surrounding Belgrave Square. Among Cubitt’s partners is a logistics man and former military supplier by the name of James Trenchard (Philip Glenister), who, along with his wife, Anne (Tamsin Greig), is moving steadily up the social ladder, parlaying newfound wealth into ball invitations and summonses to afternoon tea, itself a phenomenon of recent invention.
Despite the couple’s success, Anne is well aware of the fact that the laws of social stratification can be bent only so far. “Your father has traveled a long way,” she once informed her daughter Sophia (Emily Reid), “and so he does not see the natural barriers that will prevent him from going much further.” If the job of a man in James’s position is to dream of a life among the upper classes, the business of the woman is to “beware of castles in the air.” To aspire to a place at the edge of society is one thing. To pursue the son of an earl, as Sophia does in the pilot episode’s lengthy flashback, is quite another.
It is this courtship, unfolding 26 years before the main action of the series, that sets Belgravia’s central drama in motion. Defying her mother’s advice but with the reluctant assistance of her father, Sophia marries Edmund Bellasis (Jeremy Neumark Jones) in the days before Waterloo. When the young lord falls in battle, Sophia discovers that she is pregnant and dies giving birth to a son. Making matters worse, the marriage is revealed to have been a cruel sham. A fellow soldier has posed as a parson to help Edmund lure Sophia into bed, and the fruit of their doomed liaison is both an orphan and a bastard.
What will become of Sophia’s now-grown child is the question with which Belgravia is ultimately concerned, but Fellowes and director John Alexander wisely keep their focus on the boy’s grandparents for much of the series. As James Trenchard, a lifelong striver who scrapes to the nobility but can’t stop producing his business papers, Philip Glenister lends a quiet decency to a character who might otherwise have been a one-note grotesque. As Edmund’s father, the Earl of Brockenhurst, two-time Academy Award nominee Tom Wilkinson is characteristically excellent, imbuing his steely aristocrat with a palpable sense of weariness and grief.
By far the finest performances, however, belong to Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter as the grandmothers of Sophia’s oblivious son. At odds over how and what the young man should be told about his parentage, the two actresses shine as representatives of competing interests. For Greig’s Anne Trenchard, the difficulty is how to inform her daughter’s son of his identity without destroying Sophia’s reputation and that of her family. (“Sophia will be remembered as a slut, and we’ll be down in the dirt with her,” an anxious James predicts.) For the Countess of Brockenhurst, meanwhile, a grandson is an unadulterated blessing: a remedy for her many years of childlessness as well as a potential heir. Though Greig’s work as Anne is precise and subtly powerful, Walter’s turn as Lady Brockenhurst is a revelation. A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and of acclaimed screen productions such as Sense and Sensibility and The Crown, Walter moves from arrogance to tenderness with such nuance of expression that Fellowes’s dialogue is nearly rendered unnecessary.
Filling out the rest of the cast are the scheming servants, grasping relatives, and lovely ingenues one expects from the writer of Downton Abbey. Yet it is another Fellowes script, the screenplay for Robert Altman’s superb Gosford Park, to which Belgravia owes its greatest debt. Here, as there, Fellowes proves himself to be the master of ensemble plotting, connecting each thread until the tapestry hangs together. If the story rushes to too neat an ending, what of it? An audience that came for the ball gowns and butlers is unlikely to leave because the obvious pair seems fated to be married.
Indeed, if Belgravia misses any opportunity, it is to put to the test the Trenchards’s vow in a late episode to withdraw from their grandson’s life if doing so becomes necessary to protect their daughter’s memory. A better show might have held its characters to such a promise in order to weigh the relative merits of happiness and respectability — the duty one owes to the living and the obligation one has to the dead.
Alas, Fellowes hasn’t written that better show. But he has created an exceedingly good one.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
