When Jennie, aged twenty, first arrived at her new husband’s ducal home, Blenheim, far from being overawed by its hugeness and splendour and the grand title of its owner, her near-patronising attitude quickly made her unpopular with her sisters-in-law. She had been her father’s favourite, her sense of entitlement was at least the equal of theirs and, thanks to her astonishing beauty which brought with it the confidence of sexual desirability, she had a natural arrogance. Nor did she hesitate, in her letters home, to point out the deficiencies of taste in both the house and her in-laws’ clothes: the thick tumblers on the dining tables were ‘the kind we use in bedrooms’, the table mats were the wrong shape and so were the shoes the females of the family wore. She mocked the frumpy clothes of her English sisters-in law – she herself had twenty-three Paris dresses, eighteen of them from Worth. When Lady Wilton appeared one morning in a dress of electric-blue velvet and, on being asked who made it, answered with an air of pride: ‘It’s a Stratton’ as one would say ‘It’s a Vandyke’, Jennie admitted to ‘laughing immoderately’.
She was also far better educated. Used to practising four or five hours a day, she played the piano better than anyone at Blenheim; thanks to the exhausting hours spent with French and German governesses she was fluent in both languages and she was very well read. No wonder they resented her. ‘It is no use disguising it,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘the Duchess hates me simply for what I am – perhaps a little prettier and more attractive than her daughters. Everything I do or say or wear is found fault with.’
In London, with her sparkle, intelligence, gift for light but unthreatening flirtation and physical beauty set off by her wonderful clothes, she found her feet at once and, when they were installed in a house in Charles Street given to them by the Duke, became as popular a hostess as she was a guest. It was not long before she became a close friend of the Prince of Wales, often invited to meet him because he so obviously enjoyed her company.
Almost as soon as it had begun, however, this friendship came to an abrupt halt. In October 1875, only a few weeks after the end of Jennie’s first season as a married woman, the Prince set off for a tour of India. With him in his retinue was one of his great friends, Lord ‘Sporting Joe’ Aylesford. While the two were in India, Randolph’s elder brother, Lord Blandford, began an affair with Lady Aylesford. It became so serious that Edith Aylesford wrote to her husband, telling him that she and Blandford planned to elope. The letter arrived when the Prince’s party was camping on the borders of Nepal.
The reaction was immediate. The Prince was furious: an elopement could not be kept secret and would probably cause a divorce – and a public scandal could not be tolerated. The intertwining love affairs of the Marlborough House Set were only possible because of complete discretion – after all, he himself had had an affair with Lady Aylesford and no harm done – and now this social omertà was about to be broken. Lord Aylesford set off for England in all haste, while the Prince fumed against Blandford from Nepal.
Randolph then stepped in on his brother’s side – who was the Prince to pass strictures? What about his own behaviour? Then he said that he, Randolph, had a packet of love letters written by the Prince to Lady Aylesford and that if the Prince did not stop criticising Blandford he would publish them.
Randolph’s next step was to visit Princess Alexandra and tell her that if Aylesford sued for divorce he would produce the Prince’s letters as evidence in the court. In which case, he told her, according to the Attorney-General the Prince would never accede to the throne.
At the thought of anyone daring to threaten him the Prince became incandescent, and declared that he would not set foot in any house that continued to receive the Churchills – when Jennie and Randolph were guests at a ball where the Prince arrived unexpectedly they had to be quickly smuggled out down the back (servants’) stairs so that he did not see them.
With their heir now living openly with a married woman – Blandford and Lady Aylesford were together on the Continent – and a younger son persona non grata with the Prince, the de facto ruler of society, the black shadow cast by the actions of their sons fell over the unwitting heads of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. It had become clear that the absence of Churchills, at least for a while, would be the best policy.
Reluctantly, in 1876 the Duke accepted the post of Viceroy to Ireland, which he had previously turned down, including the proviso that Randolph should serve him there as his Private Secretary. Here, until 1880, he provided a home for Randolph and Jennie. Randolph spent much of those years away from Jennie, who took happily to the outdoor, sporting life in Ireland.
Five years after the quarrel, at a London ball, the Prince smiled at Jennie – with whom, after all, he had never had a disagreement – but would still have nothing to do with Randolph. Gradually, however, Jennie and Randolph – now a brilliant orator in the House of Commons – re-established themselves in society, though the row was not patched up until 1884, when the Prince and Alexandra agreed to attend a dinner party – later known as the ‘Reconciliation dinner’ – at which the Churchills would be present.
CHAPTER 4
The First Duke Captured
Two years after Jennie Jerome’s marriage came that of Consuelo Yznaga, to the heir to the Duke of Manchester. It was a coup that sparked frenzied interest: here was an American girl who had captured a husband from the highest rank in the British peerage! No one, not even Mrs Astor, could climb higher than that.
The future duchess was born in 1853 in New York City, the second of four children of Antonio Yznaga del Valle, a diplomat from an old Cuban family who owned a plantation and sugar mills near Trinidad and a large house in Newport.
The Yznagas may have been rich and connected to several aristocratic Spanish families, but they were yet another family outside Mrs Astor’s social circle – and Mrs Yznaga was another mother with whom this rankled. Though Consuelo’s blonde-haired beauty, her vivacity and charm, meant that at a junior level her path crossed with the offspring of the established New York families, this was not enough to secure the coveted invitations to the grander balls and dinners.
So, like many other mothers, Mrs Yznaga took Consuelo and her three sisters to France, where they became welcome at the court of the Empress Eugénie and were often invited to the Tuileries for the grand State Balls and Monday-evening musicales. Although only thirteen, Consuelo got to know the Empress well and in the same year, 1866, made an even greater friend, Alva Smith (later Vanderbilt) who, like her, came from the South.
In 1875, when Jennie was marrying into the ducal Churchills, the Yznaga family visited Saratoga Springs. It was a place that was, as the New York Times noted on 4 July, ‘famous for its flirtations for, after all, people do not come to Saratoga to drink the waters. Miss Nellie, Miss Abbie and Miss Fanny are here to find someone … who may fall in love with them and … who may be considered eligible’. Consuelo was one who did.
In the mornings, through the heat, the lovely blonde Consuelo was one of the tightly laced young women in sprigged muslin, holding parasols in their kid-gloved hands, who strolled up and down the United States Hotel piazza, eyed by the young men lounging by the railings. At the weekly dances in the hotel’s 100-foot ballroom, its parquet floor rubbed to a glassy sheen with cornmeal, she was one of the girls in silk flounces who danced with young men introduced to them under the stern eye of their mother or chaperone.
One of these young men was the twenty-three-year-old George Victor Drogo Montagu (always known as Kim),1 Lord Mandeville, the Duke of Manchester’s heir. He had left England in bad odour but he had a certain charm, and if he gambled at the Club and went racing at Saratoga’s famous track – well, so did a lot of other men. And he was a friend of the Prince of Wales, from whom he received a cable of congratulations on his birthday signed ‘Sandringham’, the Prince’s private code name, which he showed around proudly. To all the mothers there, he would have seemed the catch of the season.
Kim had been ADC to S
ir Garnet Wolseley in the Zulu War, and when he fell ill with a lingering fever at Saratoga, it was diagnosed as something he had picked up in Africa. Mrs Yznaga invited this seemingly highly eligible young man, attracted by her daughter, to the Yznaga ‘cottage’ in Orange, New Jersey, to rest and recuperate. Here he was nursed by Consuelo and her mother, thus neatly bypassing the iron rule of courtship that no young girl should be alone with a man who was not a close relation – the idea that her daughter might become a duchess must have held enormous attraction for Mrs Yznaga.
As for Kim, already fascinated by this Southern girl, so different from the young women he had met at home, when her father promised him a dowry of £200,000 it was the clincher for the spendthrift viscount. He proposed to Consuelo and was accepted. His family were furious but the couple stood firm and were married in New York’s fashionable Grace Church in 1876.
At that time only one other American girl, Consuelo’s friend Jennie, had married a British peer, and here was another, not even from the Four Hundred, about to enter the highest rank of the British aristocracy. The papers crowed with delight and the feeling of triumph in the Yznaga family must have been such that all of them would have been prepared to overlook any misgivings as to the unsavoury reputation Kim had already earned.
Every newspaper devoted columns to the wedding details and the route to the church was almost blocked by a cheering, excited crowd. (One of Consuelo’s bridesmaids was Minnie Stevens, who with her mother had already been husband-hunting for four years; one of the bridegroom’s ushers was Sir Bache Cunard, later to marry Maud Burke.)
The couple arrived in London in May, in time for the season. Consuelo, with her sweet, seductive Southern voice and unforced gaiety, ‘took Society completely by storm by her beauty, wit and vivacity,’ wrote the Duke of Portland admiringly, ‘and it was soon at her very pretty feet’.
Undoubtedly the Yznagas were delighted that Consuelo had made such a sizeable step up the social ladder, but the reality of her life turned out to be very different from that which a future duchess might normally expect. To begin with, her father-in-law, the old Duke, had spent everything he could lay his hands on and his son had copied him, flooding London with what were called ‘post-obits’ – promises to pay what he owed out of the estate when he succeeded. The Mandevilles could only afford a small house in Mayfair, but Consuelo’s looks, originality and bubbling charm meant that ‘everyone’ came to the small salon she held every Sunday and at first her life seemed set fair.
It did not stay so for long. Consuelo had been brought up with the American reverence for marriage but was quickly disillusioned. Soon she was making excuses for her husband. ‘Mandeville’s movements are so erratic that I think I had better say he won’t come with me on Sunday, nor on the 13th either,’ she wrote to the noted hostess Lady Waldegrave.2 ‘He so often disappoints me that I generally make up my mind to go without him.’
For Kim had returned to his old dissolute ways and louche companions, forming a liaison with a music-hall actress called Bessie Bellwood, a male impersonator with a hoarse, gravelly voice. He spent on her freely, getting through so much money that first year of marriage that his father banished the Mandevilles to Tandragee Castle in County Armagh, the Manchester seat in Ulster.
It was cold, run-down, ill-kept and draughty, and the rainy Irish climate depressed Consuelo even further. All the time, her husband was squandering the fortune she had brought into the marriage but she was determined to do her duty by him. Her son William was born in 1877 and in 1879 she gave birth to twin girls, Mary and Alice.
By 1883, Kim was under such siege from his creditors that the couple decided to go to New York, where they stayed with Alva Vanderbilt in her sumptuous new house at 660 Fifth Avenue. There was a further link between the two friends: Consuelo’s brother Fernando had married Alva’s sister, Jennie Smith. It was while the Mandevilles were staying with Alva that she gave her famous fancy-dress ball of 1883, ostensibly in honour of Consuelo, that enabled her to storm the icy north face of New York society.
When they returned to England that April, the Mandevilles became more and more estranged, with Kim spending long periods abroad and Consuelo trying to make a life for herself in Ireland and London, where she eventually settled.
* * *
The London in which Consuelo had arrived was a brilliant sight during the season. Window boxes were bright with flowers, striped awnings shaded windows, the dust covers that shrouded furniture and curtains for the rest of the year were removed and holland bags taken off chandeliers. Flowers were sent up from the country, along with hothouse peaches and grapes and whisky in barrels from Scotland.
Every weekday, between eleven and one, the fashionable world congregated by Rotten Row, some to walk and chat, others to watch beautiful women in tight, braided habits riding side-saddle on thoroughbred hacks, sometimes with a cavalier – equally elegant in a frock coat, pearl-grey trousers, boots and tall silk hat – escorting them, sometimes followed by a liveried groom with cockaded hat at a respectful distance. Even dray horses wore straw bonnets trimmed with flowers.
Close by, the children of the hundred or so families who lived nearby in Mayfair played in the Hamilton Gardens, a small strip of Hyde Park then railed off, with governesses – often the daughters of the clergy – knitting on seats while their charges played rounders, bowled hoops, or simply made friends.
On fine afternoons there was a parade of carriages; these ranged from large four-horses barouches with postilions, bewigged coachmen and powdered footmen with plush breeches and flashing shoe buckles to sporty little phaetons and ‘sociables’ (a cross between a barouche and a victoria, with two facing double seats) like Lord Salisbury’s, drawn by his famous ‘Salisbury Blacks’. Women in lacy, ruffled dresses could be seen in barouches for which seventeen-hand horses,3 difficult to find, were needed. Every evening, near Grosvenor Gate, people lined up to see the Princess of Wales pass, bowing to right and left.
Though the occupants of these equipages were usually protected by leather aprons or hoods if the rain came down, not so the coachmen and footmen, who whatever the weather were not allowed greatcoats from 1 May to 15 October. Other afternoon occupations for society were drives to Hurlingham, Roehampton or Ranelagh, where there were inter-regimental polo matches, watched by women wearing the badges of their husbands’ regiments or, if Parliament was sitting, observing the proceedings from the Strangers’ Gallery.
It was a small, exclusive world, in which almost everybody knew each other and into which few outsiders managed to penetrate. ‘The army, the navy, the diplomatic service, the church or the bar were the only undisputed professions of “Gentlemen”,’ commented the novelist Elinor Glyn. ‘Those who earned money in other ways, whether by professional, literary or artistic ability, or by business interests, were ruled out, and were only seen at hunt balls and charity entertainments.’ Elinor knew what she was talking about: her older sister Lucy, despite being married to a Scottish landowning baronet, was not received at court because, to support herself and the child of an earlier union, she had taken up dressmaking and was therefore considered to be ‘in trade’.
Footmen, whom only the rich could afford (employers were taxed a guinea for every male servant they employed), were one indicator of the wealth and status of a family, from their height and powdered hair to their gorgeous liveries – Lord Lonsdale’s servants wore canary-yellow coats with dark blue facings, white buckskin breeches and tall white beaver hats; Lord Salisbury’s footmen were to be seen in sky-blue livery frogged with silver. A ‘matching pair’ was considered ultra-chic and often given ‘suitable’ names by their employers – James and John were favourites.
Away from Hyde Park or the grander areas of Mayfair, noise from the street was constant and intrusive. There were the sounds of horses’ hooves and wheels, often on cobblestones, organ grinders, the cries of news vendors – especially on Sundays, when cheap weekend editions of newspapers were on offer – of street vendo
rs selling muffins, ‘Penny pies – all ’ot!’, fresh eggs, lavender or groundsel for canaries, and the shouts of workmen.
Not far away – some as close as Westminster – lived the miserable. London, already the largest city in Europe, was expanding at a huge rate. As well as the move from the land to towns, successive waves of immigrants flooded in, to settle mainly in the East End. As existing houses had degraded or been pulled down to make way for new roads, factories or railways, those that still stood were often divided up into separate dwellings – even by the end of the nineteenth century many families still lived in one room.
This lack of housing meant that slum landlords could put up rents, thus exacerbating the crowded conditions, and afford to disregard necessary repairs; often, if windows were broken, they would not or could not replace them so that rags were stuffed into holes in the glass or paper stretched across them. The filthy conditions, and the overcrowding, made diseases like cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis and typhoid rampant.
Orphan children, or those of the most impoverished, had to survive as best they could. ‘I went barefoot up till about twelve, I should say,’ said William Luby, who in 1883 aged nine earned sixpence a week by leading a blind man about, gaining another few pence by selling wax lights. ‘We used to buy wax lights at a halfpenny a box and we sold them for a penny.’
The inhabitants were described by the writer Arthur Morrison as ‘Dark, silent, uneasy shadows passing and crossing – human vermin in this reeking sink, like goblin exhalations from all that is noxious around. Women with sunken, black-rimmed eyes, whose pallid faces appear and vanish by the light of an occasional gas lamp, and look so like ill-covered skulls that we start at their stare.’
Even the better parts of London were not immune to the tide of human wreckage that seeped westwards. The Embankment, with its gardens, its electric lighting, and where the Salvation Army dispensed soup tickets, became an especial target for the homeless.
The Husband Hunters Page 7