How Accurate is Downton Abbey? Show vs. Real Life Difference
What "Downton Abbey" Gets Right (and Wrong) About 20th Century England
Watch out! This post contains spoilers.
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Watch out! This post contains spoilers.
Women being barred from receiving inheritances seems like the stuff of an 18th-century Jane Austen novel, not of the 20th century. But the legal quandary that kicks off "Downton Abbey"'s story is, in fact, based in historical (and present-day) reality. British peerages still follow male-preference primogeniture laws, with the exception of a few titles that have unique loopholes that allow them to be passed to female heirs. As recently as 2019, a bill to change these laws failed to pass in Parliament, although another attempt kicked off in 2021, according to Tatler. If a law like this passed, heiresses like Lady Mary could inherit directly, rather than being passed over for younger brothers or male cousins.
Intriguingly, these laws actually put the peerage behind the royal family! For royal heirs born after October 2011, absolute primogeniture reigns instead of male preference, meaning that daughters cannot be leapfrogged in the line of succession by younger brothers. Princess Charlotte is the first in the immediate succession to "benefit" from this: the birth of her younger brother, Prince Louis, did not affect her place in the line of succession.