House of Guinness Recap Episode 6: Wanting What You Can’t Have
- Cherish
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
House of Guinness Season 1 Episode 6
There was a scene late in the episode, when Potter was helping Edward get ready for dinner with Adelaide at Ashford Castle, a trip that was arranged for them to fall in love, with everyone, including Arthur, pushing the match. Potter asked Edward if he told Adelaide about the other woman, meaning, Ellen. Edward said yes. Potter asked him if it worked; people, according to Potter, only wanted things they thought they could not have. Adelaide had long stuck her nose at the thought of marrying Edward. Potter, and Edward, too, if we go by that small smirk, thought that it did work, that Adelaide knowing there was another woman in the picture, that the cold fish that was Edward apparently had feelings though they were for someone else, made her consider Edward more favourably as a husband than she did before.
Was the mention of Ellen as cynical a ploy as Potter made it out to be? Edward may have tried to dismiss his night with Ellen as a f when Arthur found out, but his feelings for her were more than that. Arthur knew that. Arthur, who had prior experience with impossible love, may have enjoyed his brother’s discomfort, but he was all too aware of the social cost and pain such love brought. Just as he made the decision to marry Olivia when he found in her someone he got along with, and someone who understood him and could handle life with him, Arthur knew it was time for Edward to marry Adelaide, a woman society would accept as his wife but also, a woman who could polish up the Guinness image with her good works.
Was Edward in love with Ellen? She was someone who made him think the birds sang too soon in the morning. He respected her intellect. He yearned for her. He may not have been in love with her yet, but given time, he could fall in love with her. That was a complication and could be solved in part with marriage to Adelaide.
So, no, I don’t think Edward mentioned Ellen as part of a ploy to win Adelaide. I think he was tired of Adelaide thinking everything he did was to impress her (though she was right) when he was going through the motions because that was the logical thing to do for a man in his position, and he had already illogically let a known Fenian leader get under his thick Guinness skin. Edward was brilliant in business but he was not great with people. Manipulating Adelaide into wanting him by telling her he wanted someone else did not feel Edward-esque. What happened, happened, and when he realised Potter may have been right, he went with it.
And what of Adelaide? Methinks the lady doth protest too much. She enjoyed Edward’s attention. She may even have enjoyed ignoring his letters and turning him down, knowing that he would not give up. When Arthur turned up when she thought she was meeting Edward, to get his signature for the planned housing project, she looked visibly disappointed.
Anne, too, pushed Adelaide toward Edward, even as she continued pushing the family’s charitable arm. Addressing rural poverty was next on the agenda. That meant Cloonboo, a mile away from Ashford Castle and a world away in comfort. Adelaide seemed particularly offended that there was ice in the castle, brought in by a ship from Greenland, but the nearby village did not even have potable water (there was a stream, a maid helpfully told her). Well-meaning though sheltered, Adelaide walked alone to the village, where the exhausted Sultan told her for them, it was either the cholera or America.
The choice of America was a death sentence for too many. The ships were overcrowded, disease-ridden and poorly maintained; these eventually came to be known as coffin ships. Adelaide’s anger at Edward, who followed her on horseback with armed men and no aid for the struggling poor, was understandable. But Sultan’s dismissal of her as a fool from the big house was also bitingly accurate. Aid for Adelaide meant food and water and blankets; of course they should be given, and Anne and Adelaide deserve praise for their good works. But their understanding of aid was limited to what the Guinness money could purchase without anyone in the family feeling the pinch. The Guinnesses were part of the entrenched social structure that allowed the famine and the decades long sheer poverty that followed to happen. Even when Edward himself announced that things would change, a young boy yelling a profanity in response felt right for the scene. These were people who had suffered too much to be grateful for a rich stranger’s promise.
When Edward, standing on that muddy grave in Cloonboo, told Adelaide that Ellen (though he did not mention her name) unlocked something in him, he was pushing back against her accusation that he was just trying to impress her and acknowledging that his acquaintance of Ellen moved him. Arthur’s solicitor Isaac Butt came up with a solution to the problem of the 15% promised by Byron Hedges to Eamon Dodd – someone trustworthy would need to get a message to the Brotherhood to arrange a discrete method of payment in exchange for their silence. Isaac, Arthur, and Edward were still in their meeting when Potter came in with a letter from Ellen.
Because of the increased Fenian activities in the colonies, especially the raid in Canada, the police had also amped up the arrests of known local Fenian leaders, amongst them, Ellen’s brother Patrick “Paddy” Cochrane. Ellen found him beaten inside a prison, and furious at her for sleeping with Edward. Apparently, Paddy has had men working in shifts watching over Ellen’s flat. Angry though she was at her brother, Ellen still appealed to Edward for his release.
Edward had Ellen meet him at the same hotel where they first met, and though Ellen accepted his proposal for her brother’s sake, she was also angry with him, and the meeting felt like a breakup of their non-relationship. The British had agreed to free some Fenian prisoners and send them to America as a gesture of goodwill. Paddy would be amongst them. There, he would serve as honorary representative of the Guinness company in New York and Boston. He would be paid what Byron later told him was an absurdly large amount of money, which he would then donate to the Fenian cause as a private individual. It was an elegant solution; the Brotherhood would still get the Guinness cash but there would be no direct transfer from the Guinness company to the Fenians. Paddy chafed at this forced new role, but Byron made it clear, with Eamon Dodd’s backing, that Paddy would either accept the proposal or die.
From the outside looking in, even from both Adelaide and Ellen’s points of view, Edward may seem like a schemer whose plans were coming to fruition, who was getting what he wanted, but the way this episode portrayed him, he looked more like a very privileged young man who struggled to reconcile life as he knew it with the awareness of other sides, of other points of view, of other lived experiences, that Ellen had woken in him. Everyone may want Edward to marry Adelaide, including Adelaide herself, but her privilege-tinged cynicism missed part of Edward that Ellen saw. Edward was doing what was expected of him and trying to charm Adelaide, but though Ellen was currently furious at him for making her do what she viewed as dirty work and sending her brother to America, her hold on him remained. The aristocratic Adelaide felt sorry for the poor and wanted to help. Ellen was fueled by righteous fury and a desire to be free. If that montage that ended the episode was any indication, this love triangle was far from over.
Rating: B
Strays
👑As Isaac Butt entered the Guinness house, a newspaper boy handed him a bullet, a gift to Mr. Guinness from the Dublin poor. Which Mr. Guinness, it was not clear; Arthur had his election tampering case whilst Edward had the New York problem.
👑Olivia telling Rafferty post shg that she had no intention of feeling anything for him was a great way to telegraph that she would absolutely catch feelings for him.
👑Arthur had his new lover Patrick promoted and moved to the day shift. Patrick suggested going dancing, so Arthur invited him to a house party. But, Patrick was secretly being blackmailed by Uncle Henry into helping him expose Arthur’s secret life; Uncle Henry threatened to expose Patrick as well, which could result in him spending 20 years in jail.
👑The news of Edward and Ellen’s one night tryst made it all the way to New York.
Episode Writer: Steven Knight
Episode Director: Mounia Akl
Original Air Date: September 25, 2025