Consuelo (née Yznaga) with her husband Viscount Mandeville, the Duke of Manchester’s heir, at Tandragee Castle, the Manchester estate in Ireland, in around 1875.
Consuelo Vanderbilt, before she was forcibly married to the Duke of Marlborough.
The Vanderbilt mansions dominated New York City’s Fifth Avenue.
Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s New York mansion
Left to right William K. Vanderbilt and Oliver Belmont, Alva’s first and second husbands.
Sexy, aggressive, iron-willed: Alva Vanderbilt was the supreme embodiment of both husband-hunter and social climber.
Alva Belmont (formerly Vanderbilt) (second from right) in her later years, still dripping with jewels, at the 1915 Women’s Voter Convention as a keen supporter of women’s franchise.
The Marble House, built by Alva and William K. Vanderbilt, where their daughter Consuelo was kept a prisoner until she agreed to marry the man her mother had chosen for her.
Newport’s most famous ‘cottage’, The Breakers, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice. It had seventy rooms, thirty-three of them for the necessary servants.
A game of mixed doubles at the Casino, Newport, Rhode Island. The Casino was built in 1880 and its first tennis championship held in 1881.
Swimming in the sea for ladies who wanted to cover themselves and preserve their pale complexions was a difficult affair.
Consuelo Vanderbilt’s brothers Willie K. Vanderbilt II (left) and young Harold Vanderbilt (middle) bathing at Newport’s Bailey’s Beach with Harry Lehr, the smart set’s joker.
Above left Newport harbour, with the yachts of the New York Yacht Club at anchor, and above right spectators watching a yacht race.
Mrs Jerome and her three daughters before their marriages, at the house they rented in Cowes. Eighteen-year-old Jennie stands on the right, the eldest daughter, Clarita, holds her mother Clara’s hand and Leonie stands behind.
‘More panther than woman’: Jennie Jerome and her first husband, Lord Randolph Churchill.
Jennie Churchill with her two sons, John (left) and Winston.
Above May Goelet at the time of her marriage to the Duke of Roxburghe, shown here in his uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, and below the huge stack of trunks and dress baskets containing May’s trousseau.
Ward McAllister, illustrated here with donkey ears, was often mocked for his social pretensions, founded mainly on English customs. In this cartoon, Uncle Sam is laughing uproariously at the English model he apes.
Grace Wilson, who as Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt III succeeded Mrs Astor as the ruler of New York society.
Adèle Beach Grant, as Lady Essex, was one of the beauties of her time
Mrs Bradley-Martin as Mary Queen of Scots at her famous ball in February 1897
Cornelia (née Bradley-Martin), the Countess of Craven
Cornelia Bradley-Martin at the centre of a family group. Her father stands behind her with her mother on his left.
No. 4 Chesterfield Gardens, the London house of the Bradley-Martins – today it is the Egyptian Embassy. They bought its neighbour for their daughter.
Anna Gould and her husband Count ‘Boni’ de Castellane after their wedding in New York in March 1895. Boni was a noted dandy.
The Empress Eugénie was known for her taste and glamour and that of her court
The Angouleme rubies, bought by Mrs Bradley-Martin and eventually inherited by her daughter Cornelia.
Maud Burke, an heiress from San Francisco, who later rechristened herself Emerald.
Mrs Stuyvesant Fish (right) and a friend taking a stroll together
New York’s financial centre: the corner of Broad Street and Wall Street, c.1900.
Tennie Claffin, who became the devoted wife of Sir Francis Cook
The beautiful Virginia Bonynge, whose marriage to the blond and handsome Lord Deerhurst, heir to the Earl of Coventry, was something of a Gilded Age fairy tale.
Minnie Paget (née Stevens) in her dazzling, bejewelled Cleopatra costume at the Duchess of Devonshire’s Jubilee Ball in 1897.
The bustling streets of London’s Knightsbridge in the late 1800s
Coaching in Central Park, where elegance of turnout was another form of social competition.
Top left A Worth dress of 1887, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with sumptuous material enhanced by intricate detailing; top right another Worth creation worn by Mary Curzon c.1903; above a portrait of Empress Eugénie, wearing a dress possibly by Worth.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. By 1871, 65 per cent of the population was urban.
2. Pronounced Goo-lett, with the accent on the second syllable.
CHAPTER 1
1. Income tax did not start edging its way in until 1894.
2. Between 1846 and 1851 Ireland lost about a quarter of her population through death and emigration.
3. An 1873 dollar was worth about $20 in 2016. In later years this figure rose, so a rough-and-ready way of calculating the vast sums spent in the Gilded Age in today’s money is to multiply by twenty-five.
4. This great restaurant finally closed in 1923 as a result of Prohibition.
5. Edith Wharton’s aunt.
6. See Chapter 8.
7. The phrase ‘the Four Hundred’ did not become shorthand for ‘society’ until 1892, when McAllister provided the press with the names of 400 of society’s most distinguished members.
8. The census of 1900 showed that there were more than three million inhabitants of New York but no more than .001 per cent were ‘in society’.
CHAPTER 2
1. In Free Opinions, Freely Expressed, Archibald Constable, 1905.
2. The father of the ‘marrying Wilsons’.
3. Enamel was a white face paint made with white lead (now known to be toxic).
4. Enlarged pupils are now considered a sign of sexual arousal.
5. In ‘A Dramatic Review of Olivia’, 30 May 1885.
6. A loose-knit group of friends who, though drawn mainly from the same background as the Prince’s set, set store on wit, cleverness, originality and romance rather than on racing, gambling and card-playing. Their members included many of the most distinguished English politicians and intellectuals.
7. Now in the National Gallery.
8. There was a large English colony in and around this town, with English sports like fox-hunting.
CHAPTER 3
1. Later to become Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron.
CHAPTER 4
1. Short for Kimbolton, a Manchester title.
2. Lady Waldegrave was then married to Chichester Fortescue, a Liberal Minister under Gladstone, but held on to her former title all her life.
3. A hand is four inches, measured at the highest point, the horse’s withers, just above its shoulder blades.
4. Fog also clogged up the leaves of plants and trees, inhibiting growth, hence the success of the London plane tree – its shiny leaves were quickly washed clean by rain and its bark peeled regularly, thus was self-cleansing.
5. In 1886 there were eighty-six foggy days in London.
CHAPTER 5
1. Bridge was first played in London at the Portland Club in 1894. The rules gradually changed and by 1904 the game had developed into Auction Bridge.
2. In Rosina Harris’s Gentlemen’s Gentlemen, Sphere Books, 1976.
3. It was not until the 1880s that women were able to gain custody of their children and control their own properties.
CHAPTER 6
1. There was also an annual rental of 6 to 8 per cent of the purchase price.
2. Frederick Martin, brother of Bradley Martin.
3. Her foresight and success were such that they gave rise to the saying ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.
4. The Duke of Marlborough’s daughter, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchi
ll.
5. This was the literal truth.
CHAPTER 7
1. The married Charles Erskine Scott Wood, author, civil liberties advocate, artist and soldier.
2. Quadrilles were square dances of five movements, danced in costumes designed round a theme; they needed weeks of organisation and rehearsals and were popular at society balls.
3. A bell-crown hat was a top hat wider at the top of the hat than where the hat meets the wearer’s head.
CHAPTER 8
1. Madeira, a wine that can stand rough seas, was a favourite drink with the officers of sailing ships.
2. In 1895, the 2,229 servants living in Newport (a town of less than 20,000) made up over 10 per cent of the population. Over half of them had emigrated from Europe.
3. When a sister-in-law, Jessie Sloane, who had made no secret of her passion for a brother of Alva’s admirer August Belmont and had abandoned her husband and two daughters, was divorced, she was cast out of society for good. Her daughters were brought up never to know, or even to mention, their mother.
4. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
5. Or, as Alva put it in her autobiography with breathtaking disingenuousness: ‘I threw them together and an engagement resulted.’
CHAPTER 9
1. Boss Tweed, the corrupt politician who drained the city of New York of millions, was arrested in 1873.
2. He was the model for the glamorous Sebastian in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians.
CHAPTER 11
1. This allowed 160 acres of unoccupied land to be sold to each homesteader on payment of a nominal fee.
2. Known as a quarter section. Land was surveyed, sold or awarded in square grid sections of 640 acres, which could be broken down, still in squares, to the smallest (quarter-quarter) size of forty acres.
3. Gold was first discovered there in 1848; 1849 saw the Gold Rush as thousands piled in as miners.
4. By 1876, Nevada produced over half of all the precious metals in the US.
5. The population increased from 4,000 in 1862 to over 15,000 in 1863.
6. Daily Alta, California, 18 March 1884, from a syndicated report.
7. He successfully married another heiress, Margaret Anderson, who became the noted society hostess Mrs Ronnie Greville.
8. San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1919.
CHAPTER 12
1. In a publicity article for the League of Opera.
2. Quoted by Daphne Fielding in Emerald and Nancy.
3. Many years later, to a member of his family.
CHAPTER 13
1. Widows mourned two and a half years for a husband, in bombazine and black crêpe for the first year and dullish black silk for the next, twenty-one-month stage. During the last three months, embroidery and lace could make their appearance again. Many widows went into half-mourning – mauves and greys – for the rest of their lives.
2. From letters shown to biographers Celia and John Lee by the widow of Jennie’s grandson, Peregrine Churchill. ‘Geisha’ implies concubine and would in any case be an inappropriate word to use to any woman in the context of an ordinary, non-sexual friendship.
3. Thanks to the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, Consuelo was now able to keep these earnings.
4. At his Coronation on 9 August 1902 his particular friends, who as commoners could not attend, were seated in a special box known as ‘the Loose Box’. Among them were Jennie Cornwallis-West and Minnie Paget.
5. She had been his mistress for many years and married him on the death of her first husband, hence she was known as the ‘Double Duchess’.
6. On 24 March 1912.
CHAPTER 14
1. A list of game slaughtered up to the beginning of 1889 included 3,000 rabbits, 2–3,000 grouse and pheasants, and numerous stags.
2. It was sold by the 5th Earl in 1923.
CHAPTER 15
1. One estimate said that American girls had brought $50 million into the country.
2. Except, of course, in those days, women and black Americans.
3. The Great Reform Act, as it was known, was the first to effectively challenge the electoral status quo. It increased the size of the electorate (though not by very much) so that around one in five adult males could vote, and granted seats in the House of Commons to the large cities that had sprung up in the Industrial Revolution.
4. Quoted by Paul Jonathan Woolf in Special Relationships: Anglo-American Love Affairs, Courtship and Marriages in Fiction, 1821–1914. University of Birmingham, 2007.
5. The year before had seen the Tranby Croft gambling scandal, in which the Prince of Wales was involved, which hinged on one of the guests in the country house Tranby Croft cheating at baccarat.
6. From Domestic Service by Lucy Maynard Salmon. Macmillan, New York, 1901.
7. Town Topics, 5 January 1888.
8. In ‘A Study of New York Society’ by Mayo William Hazeltine, The Nineteenth Century Magazine, 31 May 1882.
CHAPTER 16
1. Black franchise officially became part of the Constitution with the Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, that stipulated: ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,’ but in practice such things as white terrorism, literacy tests and local state laws meant that few blacks got the chance to vote.
CHAPTER 17
1. She had bought both the grapes and the necklace from the sale of the French crown jewels in May 1887.
2. The War Revenue Act of 1898, to raise money for the Spanish–American War, introduced taxes on a wide range of goods and services.
CHAPTER 18
1. According to the Portsmouth Herald of 3 March 1903.
2. The eldest died soon after birth.
EPILOGUE
1. In his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899. The term refers to the buying of expensive items to display wealth and status rather than to meet any real need.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first and greatest debt of gratitude is to Simon, Earl of Kerry, for his huge help in researching this book and for his thoughtful ideas that led to new discoveries.
I would also like to thank Robert Bard for his generosity in making available to me so much of his material about the earls of Essex, as well as Lord Essex himself; Nicola Cornick for all she told me about Cornelia Craven; Sir Christopher Cook for confirmation of the story of his great-great-grandfather’s marriage to Tennessee Claflin; Ian Curteis for his help on the Grantleys; Dr Elizabeth Kehoe for so generously making all her notes on the Jerome sisters available to me; David Donaldson and Sir William Molesworth for the Molesworth letters I was kindly allowed to see; Lord Grantley for letting me see the memoir of his great-grandfather the sixth Lord Grantley; Richard Jay Hutto for his wonderful photographs and great help over the Craven family; Sarah Lutyens for letting me see the privately printed Warren House Tales featuring her great-great-grandmother Minnie Stevens; Marge McNinch for her invaluable research into the letters of Anna Robinson in the Hagley Museum and Library, Delaware; Gill Neal (formerly of the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre) for her speed and helpfulness over the Lady de Grey correspondence; Christine Sapieha for her decipherings of some appalling handwriting; the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire for telling me about his grandmother Daisy Leiter; Sir Charles and Lady Wolseley for their kind permission in letting me use the letters of Anna Murphy; and of course the wonderful staff of The London Library, who seem able to find anything. I am also very grateful to the Royal Archives for letting me see the letters between Mary Leiter and Queen Alexandra. My thanks go to Paul Friedman of the New York Public Library who produced some wonderful stuff for me.
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