Within the surfeit of charms "Downton Abbey" shares with its devoted audience are many notes of wisdom concerning change. Accepting change, says Lady Cora in the third season, "is quite as important as defending the past." Two seasons later even the manor's butler and stubborn traditionalist Carson (Jim Carter) had to agree: "The nature of life is not permanence, but flux," he observes.
This is all very true . . . although, when pressed, the story's devoted fans might claim that what keeps them coming back to their favorite fantasy Yorkshire estate is knowing that at their core the Crawleys remain the same genteel characters as ever. What they can't change is time. When Julian Fellowes ("The Gilded Age," "Belgravia") first introduced Hugh Bonneville's Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, along with his wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) and mother Violet, the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), it was 1912.
