To Marry an English Lord

by gail maccoll

  SURVIVAL OF THE FASTEST

  Al oving husband might smooth her way, but by and large the success of an American heiress in aristocratic England depended on her character and her expectations. Some girls moved easily from heiress to peeress. Others found the transition a great, ultimately unsuccessful struggle. The key to success was the individual heiress’s mix of audacity and innocence. The American peeress would need her audacity to take on a life for which she had not been trained, to assume her place in society without undue commotion but nevertheless with confidence, to maintain the freshness and vitality, pluck and common sense that had got her there in the first place. But the innocence that was an element in her freshness often contained the seeds of her eventual disappointment.

  MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA

  Henry Poole & Co., the Prince of Wales’ tailor, also made clothes for William Collins Whitney, J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt. Poole accepted new customers only by letter of introduction from an old customer.

  INNOCENTS ABROAD

  Most of the American heiresses, no matter how extravagantly rich their families, were raised on solid bourgeois values. The self-appointed American aristocracy was actually nothing more than an ornate version of the middle class. Men worked for a living; women took care of the home and family. Inherited money, in America, would always be tainted. To inherit one’s money was to cheat in the great American game of self-determination.

  A rustling, elaborate but clean prosperity was the American goal. Bizarre behavior and unconventional liaisons were not countenanced by the American aristocracy. Sons were not expected to take mistresses when they came of age. They were supposed to enter the family business or in some other way make themselves useful. Marriages were not dynastic alliances but respectable romances. Of course, the American aristocrats, like the English middle class, had hopes of seeming aristocratic, of acquiring the aristocratic manner. But they wanted nothing to do with the accompanying mores.

  Charles Dana Gibson captures the sadder side of the comedy he was so adroit at depicting.

  In her book on Rosa Lewis, proprietress of the Cavendish Hotel, Edwardian daughter Daphne Fielding points out that it was “particularly fascinating that she knew who really were the fathers of one’s friends.” Which, no doubt, it was. But that sort of attitude, let alone that particular circumstance, was inconceivable to the American, even the American in high society. The lightheartedness of the statement, as well as the practice it implied, was anathema to the American social code. Discreet illegitimacy, in the land of the free, was unthinkable.

  * * *

  “England is all right for splendor, but dead slow for fun.”

  CONSUELO YZNAGA, DUCHESS OF MANCHESTER

  * * *

  CALIFORNIA GIRL

  Nonetheless, it was a situation the American peeress would almost certainly come across, not only in the families of her friends, but in her own. Her capacity to recognize and tolerate such fuzzy—at least by middle-class standards—moral boundaries might very well be the final, crucial feature in her much vaunted adaptability.

  There was a streak of Old World ease in the way Flora Sharon took to the looser morals of aristocratic England.

  There were heiresses who seemed to be natural aristocrats, who married into the Marlborough House Set and quickly, gladly, adopted its manners and mores. They seemed born to the life of the hunt and the house party. They were not frightened by louche old ladies with too much makeup and middle-aged men who made passes. They adored gossip and flirting, were amused by rakes and dandies, wanted life to be a carnival and eventually, naturally, fell into deep, complicated extramarital love affairs.

  Flora Sharon, for instance, married to Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh, was an uninhibited California girl who loved to hunt and was much admired for her style in the saddle. Her Anglomania was of the most primitive sort, expressing itself in her conversion of the drawing room of her husband’s lovely Nicholas Hawksmoor house (c.1700) to an Olde English extravaganza. Her concept of her new country had to do with stuffed bears, King Arthur, suits of armor and exposed beams. Baroque elegance she spurned. Her decorating scheme was exactly what could be expected of the daughter of a disreputable U. S. Senator who had at one time been accused of murder. It was also exactly the sort of ignorant philistinism for which the English aristocracy has been so deservedly renowned.

  When her husband began to bore her (his main interest remained extensive, expensive sailing expeditions like the one he’d met her on), Flora launched herself on a series of affairs. The Prince of Wales, for instance, was a frequent visitor at Easton Neston, giving rise to all kinds of flattering rumors. Eventually Flora preferred to live apart from her husband, leaving Hawksmoor’s stern symmetry for Rufford Old Hall, another family property, which, with its medieval Great Hall and hammer-beam roof, was much more her kind of house anyway.

  In the end Flora preferred independence from Fermor-Hesketh (top left) and Easton Neston, choosing instead to live at picturesque Rufford Old Hall (center).

  Bottom right: Hawksmoor’s plans for Easton Neston probably included symmetrical wings like those at Blenheim, but the Fermor-Heskeths ran out of money and consequently owned a manageable house.

  SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

  Flora Sharon had discovered the other great benefit of married life in aristocratic England. Married couples could share spheres of activity to a degree not possible back home. Conversely, if they so chose, husband and wife could lead quite separate lives. They could each pursue their own interests with their own friends according to their own schedules.

  IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

  The American heiress, caricatured, drawn, described and discussed with increasing frequency in the popular press, finally became a stock figure of fictional romance.

  Notable among the drawing-room comedies and operettas centered around the heiress were | American playwright Winston Churchill’s Title-Mart and Abel Hermant’s Les Transatlantiques, though these were outshone by the Victor Herbert operetta Miss Dolly Dollars and George Edwardes’ 1909 The Dollar Princess, which was also produced in Berlin. (Die Dollarprinzessin, an Austrian production, and El Imperio del Dollar, the Spanish version, were probably related.)

  Though Henry James and Edith Wharton both gave the American heiress careful literary consideration, lesser lights were also intrigued by her. Mrs. M.E.W. Sherwood, an etiquette writer, had the first crack at the phenomenon in her book A Transplanted Rose (1882), which is full of useful tips such as how to dispose one’s train neatly over the feet upon sitting down. Altiora Peto (1883), by Lawrence Oliphant, features characters such as Mrs. Clymer and Lord Swansdowne; Altiora herself is the untamed American. Miss Bayle’s Romance (1887) and its sequel, An American Duchess (1891), by W.F. Rae, are based on the story of Jeannie Chamberlain. Society novelist Mrs. Burton Harrison’s Anglomaniacs (1890) is the wittiest of the genre. An American Girl in London (1891), by Sara Cotes, features a Chicago girl traveling alone in England and is really a guidebook with a skeleton of a plot. Gertrude Atherton, a Californian, wrote several novels on the theme, among them American Wives and English Husbands (1898), which deals with a California girl’s disillusionment in England, and His Fortunate Grace (1897), a cynical tale of a poor duke and a plain Chicago heiress.

  The Dollar Princess ran far two seasons in New York.

  Finally, in the 1910s, Charles and Alice Williamson made a cottage industry of the American heiress, publishing a series of light romances in which rich and beautiful American girls motor all over Europe and after many adventures marry handsome English lords. False identities, tourism and adventure add to the social appeal; Lord John in New York (1918) was even made into a movie, bringing the American heiress to the silver screen.

  Thus Jennie Churchill could travel in a party with the Prince of Wales to shoot at an estate in Hungary with Randolph nowhere in sight. Or Randolph might take off for Africa with a group of male friends while Jennie made the round of country houses. They would write to
each other, of course, and confer on matters of mutual concern—Winston’s education, importunate tradesmen, politics. But at some point that was mutually, wordlessly arrived at in so many aristocratic marriages, they would go their separate ways. They were, in the English view, severing no bonds. They were merely making the alliance more flexible.

  In some instances, the turning point was reached rather quickly. Although Burke’s Peerage covered Katharine McVickar’s tracks in later years, its 1880 and 1881 editions are frank in their unembellished recording of embarrassing dates. Katharine, from a good New York family, initially married Charles Grantley Norton but apparently, upon arriving in England, felt she’d made a mistake. Charles’ nephew John Richard Brinsley Norton, the fifth Baron Grantley, was not only the titleholder but much younger than her husband.

  COMME IL FAUT

  Gentlemen do not smoke in a lady’s presence unless invited to do so. A gentleman who is smoking while out for a walk must instantly jettison his cigar if he meets a lady along the way.

  In November of 1879 Katharine was about to give birth to a child, not by her husband but by Lord Grantley. Since the all-important question of succession was raised by this situation (if the child was male, would he be eligible to inherit the title?), the first marriage was swiftly annulled and a second arranged to take place shortly thereafter. Katharine became Lady Grantley only five days before having issue—alas, a girl. The early contretemps didn’t unnerve her, and society eventually forgot about it. In later years, Lady Grantley enjoyed quite a success hostessing late-night parties from her rented house in Piccadilly, where high-stakes card games were the chief—but not the only—attraction.

  The 1909 Midsummer Fair Fete, benefiting a London children’s hospital, and other charity events provided an outlet for some American women’s energy.

  COMME IL FAUT

  When outdriving with his mistress, a gentleman places her at his left hand so that everyone he meets will know she is not his wife.

  NOT MAKING IT

  Other heiresses were neither as hardy nor as worldly as Jennie Jerome or Flora Sharon or Katharine McVickar. These heiresses’ disillusionment was all the more profound because their innocence was so genuine and their Anglomania so heartfelt. England was supposed to be gentle, regal, ancient and calm. And correct. Above all, correct and proper. There wasn’t anything more correct and proper than England and the English.

  Such heiresses had never heard of men having mistresses, hardly knew that such women existed. Consuelo Marlborough remembered discovering the existence of the demimonde on her honeymoon in Monte Carlo. She wondered who were the beautiful women at the Hotel de Paris, accompanying acquaintances of her husband’s, and only after repeated questioning learned that “these were ladies of easy virtue whose beauty and charm had their price.” She must not appear to recognize the men, Sunny told her, “even though some of them had been my suitors a few months before.” It was the sort of etiquette rule an aristocratic English girl, though she might not speak fluent French like Consuelo, already knew.

  The unfortunate Florence Garner was emblematic of the American innocent abroad in a society she couldn’t understand and a way of life she couldn’t adjust to. She married the classic type of high-living clubman, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, once described by the Sporting Times as “Possibly the handsomest man in London, and certainly the rudest.” The marriage was inauspicious right out of the starting gate—the wedding took place in June of 1891, just as Sir William was making a forced exit from English society.

  The house party for the Prince of Wales’ visit to Blenheim in 1896. Mary Curzon sits on the left of the Prince (center); Jennie Churchill and Consuelo are at the far left.

  Gordon-Cumming had been accused a year earlier, by his hosts at a house called Tranby Croft, of cheating at cards. The Prince of Wales was staying at the house and sitting in on the game. In order to avert a scandal—the hosts were livid, Sir William vehemently protested his innocence—Gordon-Cumming signed a paper admitting that he had cheated. In return, the other guests agreed to keep quiet about the supposed breach of honor. But someone (usually identified as Daisy, Countess of Warwick, or the Prince himself) couldn’t resist spreading such a good story, and it was all over English society in a matter of three days. The outraged Gordon-Cumming insisted on clearing his name by bringing the matter to court—breach of contract—which meant the Prince had to take the witness stand for the second time in his career. For dragging His Royal Highness into court, Gordon-Cumming was banished from society.

  * * *

  “Everyone is doing the same old thing—just flirting, and dining, and dawdling.”

  MARY LETTER, LADY CURZON, in London, writing to her husband George in India

  * * *

  After September of 1890, Tranby Croft was no longer the name of a house but the name of a scandal.

  Florence Garner thought her Bill was innocent, and she was gullible enough to believe he wanted to marry her for love. So she stuck by him in his hour of darkness, though he came to her directly from the courtroom to try to release her from the engagement. She wouldn’t be released, and on June 10, 1891, the workmen installing a new organ at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, had to stop banging for half an hour while a small, subdued party stood at the altar. Florence, in a gray dress and black hat, had procured the special license. Sir William wore a frock coat, pearl-gray gloves and a gloomy expression. They were married by the curate and then hurried away. Three days later, The Times recorded that “Major and Lt. Col. Sir William Gordon-Cumming, Bart., is removed from the army, her Majesty having no further occasion for his services.”

  Sir William Gordon-Cumming testifies in court, while His Royal Highness listens with displeasure.

  Florence did her best. She made brave attempts at giving house parties in huge, gloomy Scottish Gordonstoun. But she couldn’t get the hang of it. When a house guest tried to make love to her, she demanded that her husband order him out at once. Sir William, who had made a career out of making passes at young married women, only replied: “My dear child, don’t be so silly. You must learn to take care of yourself.”

  Poor Florence. Eventually Sir William brought a pair of girls to stay at Gordonstoun as his mistresses. Florence’s response was to turn to religion. She got very fat and stopped going into society. As daughter Elma later explained, Florence and her two sisters (Lita, married to the Marquis de Breteuil, and Edith, wife of the Danish Count von Moltke Huitfeld), owing to “fastidious prejudices over which they had no control, were totally unfitted to the milieu in which they lived.”

  THE INVALID OPTION

  For some heiresses, the discovery of the naughtiness beneath the aristocratic hauteur was too much to bear. Alberta Sturges Montagu, always a little on the pure-minded side, took to her Red for fourteen years, leaving her husband to raise their children with the help of a domineering nurse who guarded Alberta’s bedroom door and took her place at the foot of the dining room table. It was an act of retreat and disillusion that to this day her eldest son, a man in his eighties, bitterly holds against her.

  * * *

  “ Thank God!—the Army and Society are now well rid of such a damned blackguard. The crowning point of his infamy is that he, this morning, married an American young lady, Miss Garner (sister to Mme. de Breteuil), with money!”

  THE PRINCE OF WALES, referring to Sir William Gordon-Cumming in a letter to Prince George

  * * *

  Yet another example of the later, frailer breed was Florence Breckinridge, Flora Sharon’s American daughter-in-law. Hers was an arranged marriage: she was a stepniece of Flora, who’d brought her over to England and cultivated her as a wife for her eldest son (created first Baron Hesketh in 1935). When her children were still quite young, she too suffered a nervous collapse and lived the rest of her years as an invalid.

  THE GLITTER & THE GOLD

  Consuelo Vanderbilt is the most familiar of the American heiresses, partly because her name is synonymous w
ith the archetypal American fortune, partly because she married a duke from a famous family—and partly because she wrote a memoir, The Glitter and the Gold, published in 1952 and still considered one of the best accounts by anyone, English or American, of turn-of-the-century aristocratic life.

  The memoir also gives Consuelo the last word on her marriage. She herself emerges as a gentle, long-suffering, heroine; Alva, her mother, as little more than an ogre; and Sunny, her husband, as an insufferable snob (even though their son, the 10th Duke, “blue-pencilled freely” when he read the manuscript). But another version of the story can be read between the lines. Despite her allegedly violent behavior, Alva never showed a sign of coldness toward her daughter. Consuelo writes movingly of driving away from her wedding reception and glimpsing her mother at the window: “She was hiding behind the curtain, but I saw that she was in tears.” Is this a woman with a heart of stone? When Consuelo had her first baby, Alva was there. When Consuelo separated from the Duke, Alva was there. And when Consuelo wanted a formal annulment of her first marriage so that her second marriage (to French flier Jacques Balsan) could be acknowledged by the Catholic Church, Alva testified. Knowing that coercion was the only ground acceptable, Alva stoutly told the Catholic court, “I forced my daughter to marry the Duke,” and then said to reporters: “This is merely one of those adjustments.”

  A somewhat more sardonic view of Consuelo.

  It may, in fact, have been an adjustment of the truth. Though Alva cited adultery in her divorce from William K. Vanderbilt, it was believed at the time that the gentle Willie K. simply obliged Alva by providing proof. Having cooked up a story for the courts once, why not do so again, especially for a beloved daughter? Furthermore, one wonders if Consuelo hated being a duchess all that much. Certainly, when Sunny died, she was back at Blenheim in short order in the role of doting mother of the 10th Duke. And her will, to the family’s surprise, directed that she be buried not in Florida, where she lived the last decades of her life, not in New York with the rest of the Vanderbilts, not even in France by the side of her much loved second husband—but in the Churchill plot at Bladon, a stone’s throw from Blenheim Palace.