A major and ongoing plot in the later seasons of "Downton" involves Lady Edith's illegitimate daughter, Marigold. Born from the one night Edith spent with her boyfriend Michael Gregson before he left for Germany, Edith covers up her pregnancy by spending several months in Switzerland with her aunt who knows the truth. Marigold is initially put up for adoption with a Swiss couple, but Edith winds up missing her daughter so much that she has her brought back to England and placed with a family on the Downton estate. Eventually, she wrangles it so that Marigold becomes a ward of the Crawley family, an open secret among their family, and she's even able to essentially adopt Marigold and bring her with her when she gets married.
Heartwarming as it may be on screen, this would have been almost impossible in real life. Children out of wedlock were the kind of scandal that would ruin a woman's life in the era of "Downton," and a thin fiction like "adopting" the supposed child of a dead friend wouldn't stop the gossip. If Edith had actually been married to Michael, that would have been one thing — widows with children were seen as respectable — but as a legally single woman, she would have had few options.
