To Marry an English Lord

by gail maccoll

  The miscellany of an English house could be oppressive. Banners, chandeliers, urns and statues decorate the banqueting hall at Knebworth in Lancashire. Inset: an elaborate shell-shaped Red on a wave-patterned dais at Stonor Park, home of Mildred Sherman, Lady Camoys.

  The American heiress realized, in a sudden, awful flash, that the county girl was what she was expected to become. Hers was the accent she must learn, the bearing she must assume, the values and the way of thinking she must make her own. By law she had, upon her marriage, lost her American citizenship. She was an Englishwoman now.

  COMME IL FAUT

  A lady never “paints.” She may discreetly powder her nose in private, but makeup is reserved for the demimonde.

  RUNNING HOT AND COLD

  An Englishwoman was, first and foremost, a cold woman. The heiress found herself shivering in the middle of the day, indoors. Just to survive, she had to wrap herself in large, ugly shawls that ruined the effect of her delectable trousseau. Oh, the happy hours she had spent choosing every article of clothing. Who here would know about silk ombre roses and printed faille ribbon and buttercream duchesse satin? Who here cared? Newport heiress Mildred Sherman, as Lady Camoys, simply gave up going to dinner in other people’s country houses because she couldn’t withstand the arctic temperatures in an evening dress; at least at home she could huddle near the fire swathed in fur. If things got really bad, the heiress was forced to consult her sisters-in-law (of whom there were always plenty) on how to treat the painful sores on her hands and feet. They would explain to the weeping girl about chilblains and the proper way to bind them.

  Maintaining her formerly impeccable toilette became a trial. Modern bathrooms had not yet penetrated to the interior of the great house. Instead, a tin or copper tub was set before the fireplace in the heiress’s bedroom, with the requisite mats and towels and jugs strewn in the vicinity. The heiress had had her own bathroom at home, and a porcelain tub with its very own tap for running hot water. This hauling of jugs of hot water from a kitchen that was yards, even miles of corridor away, by skinny servant girls in ill-fitting, by now somewhat damp uniforms, was just plain primitive. It also diminished the grandeur that was, to the heiress’s way of thinking, her part of the marriage settlement.

  * * *

  “From my window I overlooked a pond in which a former butler had drowned himself. As one gloomy day succeeded another I began to feel a deep sympathy for him.”

  CONSUELO VANDERBILT BALSAN, in The Glitter and the Gold

  * * *

  The grand corridor at Windsor Castle. Though even ducal homes were rarely as grand as Windsor, American brides had to get used to traveling immense distances indoors.

  Barely clean, the heiress emerged from her bedroom, her lavender satin day dress with the woven motif of golden flowers obliterated by a black wool shawl that was more like a blanket. Behind the closet door was the matching lavender parasol, trimmed with bobbin lace. (No point in dragging it with her; she’d only be laughed at.) She was making her daily trek to the library, which she knew to be the one room in the house with a blazing fire in the grate.

  But first she had to traverse a vast stretch of dark, unheated, vacant rooms. She lit her way with a candle, for neither electric nor gas lighting had been installed in the great house. In these rooms, England’s grandeur was all but defunct. The crusty drains and musty closets, drafty passages and leaking ceilings, frayed upholstery, bare floors, discolored damask, the faded, tarnished, blemished, warped and wobbling decrepitude dismayed her—and testified all too clearly to why she and her bags of American money were there.

  The American heiress had known only the best in life. Her home had had the prettiest furniture, central heating and electric light, thick carpets and flush toilets. Everything was perfectly kept up and looked after, without a crack or spot anywhere. It unnerved her to find that behind all the polish of her husband’s manner and dress existed such crudeness. She had had no idea that civilization could be so uncivilized.

  FAMILY LIFE

  Or so boring. London had been such an enchanting, entertaining city, so much more exciting than American cities. Life did not stop at 11 P.M. in London as it did in New York; there were always more parties to go to, more dances, more dinners. But she wasn’t in London anymore. And here in the English outback life seemed to have stopped altogether. In the great house, the ticking of clocks could be heard all day long—there was no family noise to drown it out. The heiress had been raised in organized chaos. Her home had been alive with the uncoordinated comings and goings of family members. There was always an enthusiastic stream of guests bustling off to the next activity. And all the servants were at the beck and call of each and every clamoring family member.

  Breakfast en famille: another dull beginning to another endless day.

  COMME IL FAUT

  Gentlemen eat oatmeal standing up.

  * * *

  Butlers ironed the newspapers, to set the ink.

  * * *

  In her husband’s family home, ruled by an imperturbable, centuries-old routine, the servants were as mindful of hierarchy as their masters and mistresses. Each had specific, inflexible duties. The heiress soon trained herself not to speak to the footman; she was supposed to ask the butler to ask the footman to bring in more coal for the fire. She could not pop down to the kitchen to ask Cook for a sandwich or request that the tea tray be brought up at two in the afternoon instead of four; at two, the serving girls were helping with dinner preparations or down in the laundry room or upstairs putting clean linen on the beds. The staff had its schedule, its list of tasks to be done at certain times on certain days, and were not to be blithely interrupted by impertinent Americans.

  The print edition of this book includes an image called A Room With a View.

  Please download a PDF of this image here: workman.com/ebookdownloads

  George Curzon’s father, Lord Scarsdale, whom Mary once referred to as “a despot from the thirteenth century.”

  In order to fall in with these regulations, the husband’s family moved as one through the day. Everyone got up at the same time each morning, ate at the same time, and sat together after dinner every night in the one room with a fire, waiting for one of the ticking clocks to strike eleven. Then, as a group, everyone climbed the stairs to bed.

  HALF HORSE, HALF ALLIGATOR

  At least in her bedroom the heiress didn’t have to listen to any more absurd comments from her husband’s provincial family. Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, described how Lady Blandford, after blaming her failure to appear at her son’s wedding on his refusal to pay her passage to America, made “a number of startling remarks, revealing that she thought we all lived on plantations with Negro slaves and that there were red Indians ready to scalp us just around the corner.” Lord Scarsdale, Mary Leiter Curzon’s father-in-law, made comments like “I suppose you don’t know how to make mince pies in America” and “I suppose you don’t have sea fish.” Price Collier, the American journalist, maintained that there were people in provincial England who pictured the typical American as “half horse, half alligator, with a dash of earthquake.” The heiress soon grew weary of trying to explain America to her English family, of trying to be simultaneously tactful and proud. She particularly loathed the moment when some sign of well-bred behavior on her part was rewarded with the backhanded compliment: “I should never have thought you an American.”

  When her in-laws weren’t being mean, they were being weird. Eccentricity, the heiress discovered to her horror, might be found in her new family as well as in County neighbors. Mary Curzon claimed, for instance, that Lord Scarsdale was “very fond of examining his tongue in a mirror”; he also hated to hear his name and would turn his back on anyone who said it aloud. Calling him “the most tyrannical man I have ever met,” Mary described how he mercilessly bullied his many daughters about getting married even though he refused to allow any young men to visit them at Kedleston. Lord Scarsdale, in hi
s eccentric way, did try to extend kindnesses to Mary, but she was by that time too heartsick to accept them. “He wished me to call him Papa,” she wrote to her parents, “but I have never brought my lips to it, for anyone less like my own beloved Papa I cannot imagine.” Mary sounded so morose in her letters that her parents arranged alternating visits to England throughout her early married life. “My dear Mother,” she wrote to the woman who had once been such a liability, “you made the evening hours so sweet by sitting there with me before dinner. I love the chairs you sat on, and try to see you there, and my eyes fill with tears.”

  * * *

  “I cling like an old ivy leaf to my beloved family. I positively live for the posts when I sit here alone day in and day out.”

  MARY LEITER LADY CURZON, in a letter to her parents

  * * *

  The south front of Kedleston (below left) and the marble hall. Robert Adam did some of his most superb work here, but it is hardly domestic.

  COMME IL FAUT

  A lady must never look into the windows of gentlemen’s clubs.

  TO LOVE, CHERISH AND OBEY

  The American heiress who looked for succor to the man she loved—or had married, anyway—was probably out of luck. Not at all like his American counterpart, the British husband did not want to hear about her little unhappinesses. He did not consider it his duty in life to be ever solicitous of her needs and whims. He also seemed to have expended his entire romantic repertoire on their courtship. The loss of Daddy meant she was deprived of the right to buy something new every day. This was bad enough. But lack of an American husband meant she was also robbed of the hugs and kisses, the daily I-love-yous, the repeated compliments on her appearance that were standard procedure in at least the early stages of American marriages.

  Any intimacy the heiress had gained with her husband during their honeymoon was dispelled as he took up his former life. He didn’t have to lie low. He went straight back to his clubs, to his sport, to playing cards and racing horses. He also returned to his mistress. Just because he was married was no reason to give her up; on the contrary, thanks to his new wife’s money, he was now better able than ever to maintain a second household.

  The heiress was only eighteen, perhaps twenty. She felt herself closed off from home and loved ones, surrounded by resentful dowagers, narrow-minded neighbors, haughty servants, soft-headed sisters-in-law and forbidding, unbending patriarchs. She was in a house that was too big, too old and, most of all, too, too cold. Things looked grim. Was life not going to be, as she had always been led to believe, fun?

  AMERICAN WIVES & ENGLISH HUSBANDS

  Sooner or later—and the sooner the better—the American heiress was released from her country-house prison. No more vast galleries of dark, glowering ancestral portraits, no more lonely midday rides, no more deadly drafts in the dining room. And no more in-laws. She moved to London. She got her own house. Depending on the level of Daddy’s generosity, she now occupied a mansion in Grosvenor Square or a more modest dwelling in the still very fashionable side streets of Mayfair or Belgravia.

  So far, so good. But the American heiress had a few more shocks in store. For one thing, she would actually have to run a household.

  MANY AGAINST ONE

  Running a household was something the American heiress did not know how to do. Too often her formative years had been spent in hotels and train stations. She was acquainted with houses mostly as a visitor. She hadn’t any idea how the menu was arrived at, the clean linen produced, the dust made to disappear. This was the great gap in her otherwise superior education. The practical knowledge in household matters was “one of the triumphs of English education,” wrote Lady Randolph Churchill, and armed the married woman “with the sinews of war.” So the American heiress went into battle on the home front practically weaponless.

  WIFE: “I thought you told me you were well off before you married me.”

  HUSBAND: “I am sure of it now, my dear!”

  She remained the pure-minded, middle-class American princess, always expecting to be looked after, with no skills for looking after others. Florence Gordon-Cumming had read once in a novel, according to her daughter Elma, that “American women could always produce dainty little meals on chafing dishes. She was American; she bought a chafing dish; the only thing she omitted was learning to cook.”

  * * *

  In 1897 New York’s famous Patriarchs had to be disbanded because of too much pressure from outsiders.

  * * *

  The heiress who had so happily taken ship for London might be terribly homesick for the familiar streets of New York.

  This kind of ignorance inevitably led to a servant problem. The servants, as many as fourteen or fifteen in a London townhouse, recognized the heiress’s inexperience immediately. And pounced on it. If they could, they would run the household. Maty Curzon had a terrible time of it. She was reduced to sending her plate back to the kitchen several times over in order to get enough food on it and, since she dared complain about the bills, to standing with the cook in the shopping queues in order to see for herself what the prices were.

  As an American heiress, Mary was unaccustomed to command. Demand had always been her strong suit. She had no experience as the moral captain of the serving forces—what American servants did on their own time had always been their own business. But in England the American heiress found that she was supposed to oversee their personal conduct on and off the job, swiftly dismissing serving girls who came in late or footmen who gambled. So a good portion of the time she had expected to spend riding in the Kow and changing her clothes was instead taken up with advertising for, interviewing, writing references for, training, supervising and dispensing with the services of servants.

  * * *

  “English servants are fiends. They seem to plot among themselves.... I should like to hang a few and burn the rest at the stake.”

  MARY LEITER, LADY CURZON, to her mother

  * * *

  LADIES SECOND

  And all this just to keep her husband happy. Because in England, horror of horrors, the domestic world revolved around the man of the house. “The home is not a playhouse for the women and their friends, nor a grown-up nursery for the mother and the children,” American journalist Price Collier wrote of the English household, “but a place of rest and comfort in which the men may renew their strength.”

  The schedule of the house, the disposition of the furniture, the menus, the guest lists—all were overseen by the English husband. He was, unlike the American husband, a man of leisure with the time to consider the minutiae of daily living. Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, wrote wearily that she and the Duke “seemed to spend hours discussing the merits of a dish or the bouquet of a vintage.” Beneath her boredom is surprise: even a girl raised to be an aristocrat could not quite believe that a man should take an interest in such domestic trivialities.

  Leonie Jerome and Jack Leslie the month before they were married. Unlike a hard-working American, the English husband would have all the time in the world for a midday ride.

  The American heiress thus had to learn what the English wife took for granted: that she was there to produce heirs, run the household to her husband’s pleasure, entertain as he deemed necessary and otherwise stay out of his way. She was not to interfere with his plans or make demands on his bank account. Somewhat akin to the servants and the hunting dogs, she was just another fixture in his congenial, convenient universe.

  The domestic importance of the English husband and the relative diminution in power of his wife made it difficult for the American heiress to produce the one household effect for which she had received training: the “managed” husband, the most crucial and original invention of the American wife. This English aristocratic husband refused to become the obliging, confined figure so familiar in the American landscape, whose circumstances led American heiress husband Sir William Harcourt to comment that “the next great revolution in America will be
the war for the emancipation of the American husband.”

  THE SILVER LINING

  On the other hand, while the American husband had little say in the home, the American wife had no say outside it. Sure she ruled the roost—but that was all she ruled. She was sheltered, petted, adored, given her head, but she was also, essentially, shut out. American social rules were so restrictive that it was extremely dangerous for a society woman to assume any larger role. Public life, even philanthropy on anything but the most minor scale, was considered unseemly and therefore forbidden.

  Lady Orford, née Louisa Corbin of New York. She shared her husband’s passion for travel (they visited Japan, Ceylon and the West Indies), and together they once caught a 183-pound tarpon.

  In England, the American heiress found to her delight, the wife was, in surprising ways, allowed into her husband’s life. Finally the contrast between American and English married life began to work in her favor. All the trouble with in-laws and servants and uppity spouses began to pay off. The English aristocratic husband might have more to say in the domestic sphere, but she might have some say in his world, too. Lord and Lady Orford, for example, the instant her inheritance materialized, went together on a trip around the world; in Florida they both became tarpon-fishing aficionados, and upon returning to England they co-authored a book on the subject. George Montagu, somewhat to the dismay of his American mother-in-law, talked over with his wife Alberta what he planned to say at his next board meeting and pestered her to find out “whether the last chapter of the book he was writing on the history of locomotives had her approval.”