On 1 August 1904 Minnie Paget returned home to Belgrave Square from a dinner party, impeccably and elegantly dressed as usual. She opened the door to the house lift, anxious to retire to bed, and – in a move uncharacteristic of the perceptive woman who fills the pages of this book – she failed to notice that the lift was actually at the top of the house and, stepping out into the darkness, fell twenty feet to the bottom of the elevator shaft. When her servants found her, she was a huddled and broken figure. She had fractured her thigh and kneecap and was in tremendous pain. Although she received the best medical attention England had to offer, Minnie’s bones failed to heal and it would take two years, fifteen operations, a trip to Berlin to see the renowned bone specialist Professor Hoffa and a course of excruciating treatment before her condition improved. Letters poured in from all over the world, wishing Minnie a speedy recovery. Bertie would take a personal interest in her health, asking for updates from her doctors on her progress. Friends would comment that she showed ‘superhuman fortitude’1 during her period of self-exile from society and remembered that, despite the notes she received from the royal family, it was a ‘dirty little note’2 from her washerwoman that she most cherished. ‘I don’t think anything has delighted me more than that she should have thought of me,’3 she was reported to have said.
With the tenacity that was so characteristic of her personality, Minnie recovered, and continued to dominate British society, pressing on with the unique service she covertly offered to the American parvenus. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s first summer as Duchess of Marlborough was punctuated by a visit from Minnie and afterwards the master and her reluctant protégé would often work together with other American notables in London, organising charity bazaars for good causes. In January 1896, Minnie was spotted with the newly married Pauline Whitney in Nice on the French Riviera. ‘Mrs Arthur Paget… is one of the most distinguished Americans here, and with her are Mr and Mrs Almeric Paget… Both women are handsome and carry themselves most beautifully.’4
What her role was at this point – whether she was giving Pauline advice on the steps she should now take to conquer British society or basking in the light of her obvious success the previous year – isn’t clear, but in any case the names of many of the heiresses who had made matches that year were intrinsically linked with Minnie’s for many years to come. Perhaps that isn’t surprising, given the intimate nature of the British aristocracy and the American colony within it, yet Minnie’s position as social godmother and confidante to many of the women was an enduring relationship, and in some cases friendship, which transcended the financial transactions that had dominated their earlier dealings.
She was also credited for other high-profile marriages, like that of Anna Gould, daughter of the notorious speculator Jay Gould, to the French Count Boni de Castallane in 1895 and railroad heiress Alice Thaw to the Earl of Yarmouth in 1903. Both marriages ended unhappily, the former leading to divorce after the adulterous count spent one million dollars5 of the Gould fortune in a single year and the latter granted an annulment for non-consummation. However, Minnie’s social reach extended further than just arranging marriages. She continued to be a cherished friend and confidante of the royal family. Queen Alexandra wrote to her in 1915, commenting, ‘You have never changed since the time I first knew you at court in our happy youth.’6 The Paget papers at the British Library are a testament to the numerous friendships she enjoyed with high-profile public figures, including letters from President Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Asquith and Queen Mary, as well as numerous society figures and members of the aristocracy. Her opinion and insight was often respected and sought out. Edith Wharton, who had clearly maintained a friendship with Minnie despite her failed engagement to Minnie’s brother, asked for her advice on the accuracy of the descriptions of racing at the popular resort of Saratoga Springs in her novel The Buccaneers. ‘Please pick up as many points for me as you can on this subject,’7 she implored. There were rumblings in the press that Minnie’s influence wasn’t what it used to be when Bertie died and his son ascended the throne as King George V. Some reports suggested she was going ‘out of vogue’8 and that she had ‘overdone the running of American nobodies’9. Yet she persisted in acting as a social sponsor right up until the end of her life.
On 17 April 1919, Minnie left London for Paris with the American social climber Nancy Leeds, whom she had been chaperoning around society. The pair had arranged an opulent dinner at the Ritz for Prince Christopher of Greece when Minnie suddenly succumbed to the flu pandemic that had been sweeping the continent. She died of pneumonia on 21 May 1919 at the age of sixty-six. In an echo of the aftermath of her mother’s death in New York some twenty-five years earlier, Nancy Leeds, after some debate (‘It seems so dreadful to give the party with her lying dead here’10), decided to continue with her long-planned dinner on the advice of Ward McAllister’s successor, social arbiter Harry Lehr, who told her to keep Minnie’s death a secret until the occasion was over. ‘No whisper of the tragedy was allowed to cloud the atmosphere of the dinner,’11 remembered Elizabeth Drexel Lehr.
The funeral took place in Paris a few days later, with a memorial service planned at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square, in London afterwards. A few months later Minnie’s treasured wardrobe, which included numerous Worth gowns and priceless costumes exquisitely made by artisans for famous costume balls, was auctioned off. ‘Many articles fetched low prices,’ the newspapers reported. A celebrated Cleopatra costume that had been the talk of London when Minnie had worn it for the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball in 1897 made just nine pounds.
Minnie had outlived her old friend Consuelo Manchester, who died of heart failure after neuritis on 22 November 1909 at her home in Grosvenor Square in London. She was fifty-six years old. The once lively and unconventional beauty had suffered further tragedy when in 1900 her surviving daughter, Lady Alice, died of tuberculosis, aged only twenty. While Consuelo again returned to the life of a society hostess, the loss of her twin daughters profoundly changed her. It was said that, ‘as she lost or suffered, so she braced herself to the day, even where it involved an effort of giving pleasure to others…’12
Later that year, on 14 November 1900, Consuelo’s son, Little Kim, who had inherited his father’s love of extravagance, again followed in his footsteps when he married Helen Zimmerman, daughter of a Cincinnati railroad magnate, Eugene Zimmerman, without informing his mother – who completed the circle by making her disapproval of Miss Zimmerman’s unrefined background well known. The unhappy marriage ended in divorce in 1931. Four years later, in debt again, Little Kim would serve time at Wormwood Scrubs for attempting to pawn some jewellery that belonged to the trustees of the Manchester estate.
In 1901, Consuelo Manchester was finally relieved of the constant money worries that had plagued her life in England. Her brother Fernando died, and in his will he named her as the sole benefactor of his considerable fortune, eliminating the need for her to profit from society. With her innate sense of fairness, she shared the inheritance with her sisters Emily and Natica, but the money meant that she would never again be forced to rely on the kindness of friends to bring dishes for dinner. She continued to entertain and even in 1907 it was noted that, ‘Other favourites might come and go but she was always as she is to-day persona gratissima to Albert Edward [Bertie].’13
Consuelo and Minnie had been in the game for so long, they didn’t know how to do anything else. The fact that they were so different yet perfectly complemented each other did not go unnoticed. The New York Times described Consuelo Manchester as ‘all sunshine and glitter’, Minnie as ‘more cool and calm in her methods. It was the difference between a summer morning and a moonlit night, each charming in its way and full of great possibilities.’14 They had been at the forefront of Anglo-American relations for over thirty years, each in their unique way, each wielding extraordinary power through their ambition, need for survival and fantastic ingenuity. ‘They were the pioneers of the American woman’s influence in England, an influence which in these two distinct influences has gone far beyond mere ballroom popularity or royal favor, and has come as close as woman may to affairs of State and Cabinet councils.’15
Together they had pioneered a new way in for Americans seeking acceptance within the British aristocracy. In their varying ways, either exploiting or concealing their differences to the typical English lady, they had won the affections of a prince and the whole of the royal family, while outfoxing the unsuspecting and rather staid competition. They used their friendship to gossip, hone their skills and share contacts and connections, cementing a partnership that had begun in a schoolroom in Paris and had endured isolation, tragedy, illness and the ruthlessness of the fashionable set. The handwritten card that Minnie sent with her flowers to Consuelo Manchester’s funeral read: ‘In sorrowing, and most loving memory of our lifelong friendship. – Minnie’16
The heiresses that married into the British aristocracy in 1895 met markedly varied fortunes. As was largely expected by those around them at the time, many of their marriages ended in divorce after long years of unhappiness. In relationships devoid of love and romance, they would look elsewhere for affection and many shed their puritanical American morality to embark on affairs in the accepted way of the upper classes of their adopted country. As married women, once their duty to provide an ‘heir and a spare’, as Consuelo Vanderbilt would later put it, was fulfilled, they were largely free to discreetly take a lover and pursue pet projects that would extend their influence in society. Some chose politics, charity or the arts, and found that in England they were not banished to the drawing room and encouraged to remain solely in the realms of society. Instead they could exert real power, using the long-nurtured education of their youth for individual and collective gain.
As Consuelo Vanderbilt, now Duchess of Marlborough, arrived at the station at Woodstock, the small town nearest to Blenheim Palace, in early 1896, she was greeted with a glorious reception, including crowds of ordinary people eager to lay eyes on the beautiful Duchess they had read so much about. The Lord Mayor greeted them, schoolchildren presented Consuelo with bouquets of flowers and the Duke’s carriage was dragged through the streets to the Town Hall by Woodstock’s finest and most robust men in tribute to the newlyweds. The celebrations continued with a reception and a procession to the palace, escorted by the Oxfordshire Hussars yeomanry and a local band. The welcome they received was undoubtedly warm; it was just a pity an icy chill had already begun to permeate the Marlboroughs’ marriage.
When not entertaining at Blenheim – in November 1896 the Marlboroughs hosted Bertie and a large shooting party of over one hundred guests including Mary and George Curzon, requiring months of preparation and refurbishment of Blenheim – they would endure long dinners together when Sunny would push his laden plate away, causing the food to go cold, and endlessly twirl the ring on his little finger, deep in thought. Consuelo took to knitting at the table to relieve the boredom, while the butler read detective stories outside in the hall. Consuelo produced two sons in quick succession to secure the Marlborough dynasty: John Albert Edward William, known as the Marquess of Blandford, in November 1897, followed by Ivor in October 1898. Once she had performed that duty, the chasm that existed between the pair became ever more apparent. Consuelo wrote that they were ‘people of different temperament condemned to live together’17 and consoled herself with brief respites from the misery with a series of affairs. She was rumoured to have had a liaison with French portrait painter Paul Helleu and a more serious affair with Sunny’s cousin Lord Castlereagh.
After spending large swathes of time avoiding each other, both contenting themselves with long periods away from Blenheim, it was clear that the Marlboroughs could no longer endure their marriage. They separated in October 1906, with Winston Churchill, who held Consuelo in high esteem, helping to broker a separation agreement. Despite the agreement, the separation became very public and friends found it increasingly difficult not to take sides. Jennie Churchill’s second husband, George Cornwallis-West (whom she married in 1900), wrote to Winston, saying: ‘I heard every little detail, unsavoury and otherwise, from a man today who was told by Minnie Paget who got it all from Sarah [Lady Sarah Wilson]… Surely the obvious line for all your family to take is to decline all discussion on the matter, let alone volunteering disgusting gossip with the most renowned of gossip mongers.’18
This time Minnie, for reasons known only to her, was disinclined to help Consuelo and Sunny manage their separation discreetly. Instead, Cornwallis-West suggests she was peddling the salacious gossip that made the period intolerable for them both. Consuelo used the time as a single woman to focus on philanthropy, which opened her eyes to the social problems caused by industrialisation. She supported Winston’s Liberal government and its programme of social reforms, and used her influential position on charitable boards and the financial support afforded by her father Willie K to venture into public life, calling for better working conditions for women and extolling the merits of female suffrage. In 1917, she met French aviator Jacques Balsan, who had been at the Duc de Gramont’s ball in 1894 where Consuelo had made her French debut. Since Consuelo now wanted to remarry and Sunny had long been in a relationship with the American Gladys Deacon, the Marlboroughs finally divorced on 13 May 1921. Sunny married Gladys on 25 June 1921, and Consuelo and Jacques followed just over a week later on 4 July. Consuelo then left behind England, the country that had provided her with so much purpose and heartache, where she had arrived a young woman of eighteen charged with the responsibilities of a duchess, and departed for France and a new life.
However, before long it became clear that Jacques’s family, who were staunch Catholics, would not recognise his marriage to a divorcee. Sunny, too, had developed an interest in converting to Catholicism and so, five years after their divorce, they applied to the Pope to annul their marriage on the grounds of coercion. The Rota, comprising members of the Church who would decide on whether the annulment application would be successful, heard testimony from several people, but the star witness was Alva. Knowing that the whole episode would be widely and unflatteringly reported in the press, she finally atoned for her scheming thirty years earlier and stated for the Rota: ‘I forced my daughter to marry the Duke… I have always had absolute power over my daughter… I, therefore, did not beg, but ordered her to marry the Duke… She was very much upset… I considered myself justified in overriding her opposition.’19 After such a dramatic testimony, which would forever vilify Alva, the annulment was duly granted.
Consuelo moved back to America in 1940 and divided her time between Florida and Long Island. She died on 6 December 1964 at the age of eighty-seven and asked to be buried at Bladon in Oxfordshire, close to Blenheim Palace, a little corner of England that, for better or worse, had defined the course of her life.
Alva Vanderbilt married Oliver Belmont in January 1896, almost as soon as Consuelo was installed at Blenheim Palace. She found a kind of contentment with Oliver that had been lacking with Willie K and, although their relationship could often be tempestuous, they were well matched and genuinely happy. Her social rivalries continued but during the years of her second marriage, with a duchess for a daughter, she was firmly established as one of the most prominent leaders of society and seems to have concentrated her efforts on giving ever more lavish entertainments, as the Gilded Age hostesses continually strove to eclipse one another. Oliver’s death on 10 June 1908 led Alva to re-evaluate her chosen course and, with her characteristic verve, she put all her energies and financial support into the fight for women’s suffrage. Motivated as always by the challenge, she was a leading member of the National Woman’s Party and worked tirelessly on the Nineteenth Amendment that granted women the vote in the United States in 1919.
When Alva died on 26 January 1933 of a stroke, with Consuelo by her side, the only possible place for her funeral to take place was St Thomas Church, where so many of the defining moments of her life had unfolded. Female pallbearers carried her coffin draped with an old suffrage banner that read ‘Failure is impossible’. For the girl from Alabama who had taken on the establishment and risen to the very top of the American aristocracy, it was a fitting tribute.
Maud Cunard (née Burke) arrived at Cunard’s country estate only for her husband to be told by an elderly family friend to ‘take her away!’. The bleak grey stone of Nevill Holt through the autumn and winter months that Cunard adored for the hunting and racing opportunities was not what Maud had envisaged when she had imagined her life as a lady of the aristocracy. Cunard’s eccentricities and attempts at romance went unappreciated by his perky young wife. He adored tinkering around with metalwork in a tower above the gateway, which housed a workroom, and worked studiously on an ornamental gate with the words ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ (taken from the Tennyson poem and popular song) carefully crafted out of small horseshoes. Unsurprisingly, his plea went unheeded by Maud, who immersed herself in European literature and playing the piano. From March 1896, after producing a daughter, Nancy, who would grow up to become a notorious bohemian and have a fractious relationship with her mother, Maud took a number of lovers and then eventually fled Leicestershire and Cunard altogether in 1911 for the alluring and fashionable society of London, a place where she felt certain she could climb the social ladder.
There she embarked upon establishing a salon where she supported the arts and favoured intellectuals. Her love affair with Thomas Beecham and her consequent championing of the opera earned her the nickname the ‘Duchess of Covent Garden’ from Evelyn Waugh. She was loved or loathed in equal measure and divided society, with Diana Cooper referring to her as ‘a jewelled bird uncaged’ whereas Virginia Woolf labelled her a ‘ridiculous little parakeet-faced woman’. Deciding one day that Maud was not a suitable name for a woman of her calibre, she changed it to Emerald, her favourite jewel, and was never again referred to as plain old Maud. Emerald was to become an influential society hostess and was popular with Edward VIII and his paramour Wallis Simpson. When the then Prince of Wales ascended the throne, she was confident that her friendship with the couple would ensure her place at court, possibly in the influential position of Mistress of the Robes. It was a shame for Emerald that she backed the wrong horse. When she heard of the abdication, she cried, ‘How could he do this to me?’20. Afterwards, she was ostracised by the more conservative George VI, who cared little for Americans. Emerald died of pleurisy at the Dorchester Hotel on 10 July 1948.
Mary Curzon (née Leiter) found herself quickly pregnant after her wedding to George Curzon, welcoming a daughter, Mary Irene, on 20 January 1896. She was followed by Cynthia Blanche in August 1898 and Alexandra Naldera in March 1904. Mary turned out to be everything George had hoped for. Consuelo Vanderbilt would comment that she ‘had subordinated her personality to his to a degree I would have considered beyond an American woman’s power of self-abnegation’21. George did prove to be every bit as controlling and domineering as his behaviour during their long courtship had suggested, but there is no evidence that Mary wasn’t a willing participant in the mechanics of their marriage. When George was named as Lord Elgin’s replacement as Viceroy of India in 1898, he was overjoyed, feeling that all his hard work and extensive travel in the East had finally paid off. Mary made the perfect Vicereine, the highest position other than the Queen in the British Empire. She performed her duties with aplomb and with the appropriate regal air, particularly during the prodigious Delhi Durbar to celebrate the accession of Edward VII that lasted two weeks, involved 150,000 people and a great deal of imperial pomp and ceremony. Her obvious popularity with the aristocracy and Indians alike was something that her pompous husband witnessed with increasing awe. He wrote, ‘You are everything and the sole thing in the world and I go on existing in order to come back and try to make you happy.’22 She had become his confidante, greatest friend and fiercest champion. However, her time in India and her third pregnancy left her health increasingly fragile. After suffering an illness in 1904 from which she would never really recover, she died prematurely of heart failure on 18 July 1906. George was devastated, writing to Jennie Churchill of his ‘utter desolation’23. He would marry another American in 1917, Grace Duggan, but would never get over losing Mary and was buried next to her in the family vault at their Derbyshire seat, Kedleston.
The twice-widowed Lily, Duchess of Marlborough, finally found the happiness she craved third time around, with William Beresford. Many had speculated that Lily had married once for money, twice for a title and the third time for love, and, given the path that her marriages navigated, it seems likely that this was the case. At their country estate, Deepdene in Surrey, the Beresfords enjoyed a life together untroubled by financial problems or concerns about their place in society. They were popular and content and eventually, after years of trying without success with her previous husbands, Lily found herself pregnant at the age of forty-two and gave birth to a son, William Warren de la Poer Beresford, in February 1897. Their happiness was to be short-lived. William senior had a history of health problems after contracting dysentery during his years in India, which now recurred, causing him increasingly to take to his bed at Deepdene. On 28 December 1900, he contracted peritonitis and promptly died. In a horrible coincidence, Lily had lost her final husband after only five years, the same amount of time she was married to Louis Hamersley and to the 8th Duke of Marlborough. She spent her final years at Deepdene, seldom seen in London, devoted to her son and with regular visits from friends like Consuelo Manchester and Winston Churchill, who never forgot the kindness Lily had shown him when his father, Randolph, died. On 11 January 1909, she died of heart failure. She was fifty-five years old.
After Pauline Whitney and Almeric Paget were married in November 1895 they travelled to the Continent, where they spent January on the French Riveria with Minnie. They lived in America until 1901, when they decided to make a permanent move to England, dividing their time between Suffolk and Berkeley Square in London. By this time the couple had one daughter, Olive Cecilia, born in 1899, and there was another daughter to follow in 1905, Dorothy Wyndham, named after Pauline’s younger sister. Although the marriage had begun so promisingly, it soon became apparent that Pauline and Almeric weren’t entirely suited. Pauline’s continued ill health plagued the marriage and she spent long periods at health spas in an attempt to restore herself. Almeric leased Deepdene in 1911 after Lily Beresford’s death, perhaps in the hope that the country air and spectacular display of rhododendrons and glasshouses of exotic flowers that Lily had favoured would lift Pauline’s spirits. She eventually died on 22 November 1916. Almeric got his title when he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Queenborough. He embarked on another unhappy marriage to an American, Edith Starr Miller, in 1921, which ended in separation in 1932.
Another of the 1895 heiresses, Leonora Van Marter, gained the title of Countess of Tankerville in 1899 when her husband, George, succeeded to the earldom. Throughout their lives they were devoted to evangelicalism, the cause that had initially brought them together and which dominated their courtship. They held meetings in Northumberland, near the family seat of Chillingham Castle. Leonora had four children and generally shunned society for a simpler life in the country. George died in 1931, while Leonora lived until 15 February 1949.
Josephine Chamberlain’s marriage to Thomas Talbot Scarisbrick was to produce two sons, Everard in 1896 and Ronald in 1899. Although tragedy would strike when Ronald died in 1900, the Scarisbrick’s appear to have had a happy marriage. Thomas Talbot was made Baron Scarisbrick in 1909.
American Cara Rogers, who had also married towards the end of 1895, continued to live in America with her husband, Urban, until 1912, when they took their two sons to live in England. Like her father, she retained a keen interest in philanthropy and donated land to the town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts for the purpose of creating a park. Her marriage to Urban was a genuinely happy one and when he died in 1929 and was posthumously created Baron Fairhaven, the new Lady Fairhaven donated Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Carta, to the National Trust in his memory. Cara died in March 1939.
Elizabeth La Roche appears to have led a long and quiet life in England with Sir Howland Roberts. Very little is known about the two and Elizabeth seems to have made no impression on the English aristocracy, although they did travel regularly between England and America, and had two sons. She died on 11 April 1949.
The great Mrs Astor died in 1908 at the age of seventy-eight, after years of decline and failing memory following a fall down her famous marble staircase. The once all-powerful queen of New York society took to planning menus and discussing guest lists with her loyal and devoted servants for imaginary balls and dinners. After a lifetime of hosting New York’s elite in her vast mansion, she wandered its opulent rooms, carefully organising the most prestigious occasions of a faraway New York Season right until the very end. A ten-thousand-strong crowd of New Yorkers gathered in the cold outside her iconic residence on Fifth Avenue on the day of her funeral to pay their respects to a legend.
The impression that American heiresses left on the aristocracy was long and enduring. Today, their influence and their dollars can still be felt in many stately homes around Great Britain, although others, such as Deepdene in Surrey, no longer exist, having made way for urban expansion after the Second World War. It is certainly true that great palaces such as Blenheim would not have survived in the regal splendour that greets visitors now if it hadn’t been for the timely injection of American cash that Lily and Consuelo brought with them. Sites like Runnymede, donated by Cara Rogers, were also safeguarded for future generations by American money. Indeed, the dowries that accompanied many of the heiresses across the Atlantic saved several aristocratic families from bankruptcy in a time when the accepted order of patrician influence was being challenged by the advent of the industrial age. The 1895 heiresses were a product of industrialisation, their new money generally derived from the spoils that rapid expansion after the American Civil War provided, yet in England they sought to provide an answer to the problems that industrialisation caused for the aristocracy. For a price, of course.
That price was a title, which equalled social acceptance, something that in their own country had evaded them. The parvenus who had enormous financial resources at their fingertips discovered that their wealth wasn’t quite enough when it came to the close scrutiny of their heritage to which they were subjected by Mrs Astor, Ward McAllister and the rest of The Four Hundred. In England they found a floundering aristocracy and a bored heir to the throne more welcoming and willing to overlook their questionable background. That’s not to say that the heiresses found their path to a title or the marriage thereafter easy. In some cases the journey was fraught with complications and one social mis-step could see promising debutantes banished to the sidelines. That was why many turned to women experienced in the art of society to help them forge a way forward. Ladies, like Minnie Paget, who had a wealth of resources, the intelligence and the guile, and crucially were American, so understood the complexities of both societies, were primed and ready to assist and benefit from the heiresses’ predicament.
The introduction of these women changed the appearance of the British aristocracy and its behaviour immeasurably. The fun and frivolity that characterised the American upper classes throughout the Gilded Age now extended over the pond to Great Britain, and those stalwarts of the nobility who had entertained their guests conservatively and prudently before soon found that their efforts were no longer good enough to attract the most desirable guests. Not everyone agreed that the vitality, extravagance and direct challenge to the conservative status that the heiresses introduced was for the better. ‘Take away their millions from Americans and how much would one hear of them in the great world? They might have made London society brighter, but they have also made it shallower, more extravagant and more vulgar than it was before,’24 wrote ‘Colonial’ in the Contemporary Review. However, there is no doubt that these American invaders made English society more open, cosmopolitan and interesting than it had been.
It was the end of the Victorian period and the Edwardian era that saw the social phenomenon of transatlantic marriages. In total over one hundred heiresses married into the aristocracy, with 1895 the year that the trend reached its peak. There are several explanations for this, stemming from the time that had elapsed between the making of vast fortunes by the original Swells, like the ambitious workaholic Commodore Vanderbilt, to the leisure generation of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who were by now accustomed to their wealth and demanded a position in society commensurate with their money. It was also more than twenty years since the original buccaneers, Consuelo Manchester, Jennie Churchill and Minnie Paget, had made their journey to England and taken society by storm. They had made their mistakes, yet risen through the ranks to become influential society leaders and now extended an experienced hand to the daughters of friends and contacts who wished to replicate their success. These buccaneers were also now in a position to earn their own income, so had a financial motivation for encouraging the practice. Furthermore, the role of the Prince of Wales in the admittance of Americans into British society cannot be overstated. His penchant for American ladies and his obvious predilection for their company was noted and copied by wider society. And finally, while much of the aristocracy had been suffering from reduced incomes for some years, by the 1890s the financial pressures that had thus far been absorbed finally began to catch up on those with large estates and extended families to support. Faced with the unrelenting pace of social change bearing down upon them, there was little choice but to evolve or perish. One of the options available to unmarried male heirs was to eschew an English bride for an American one, who could provide the estate with a much-needed financial boost.
Whether it was the heiresses themselves or, in Consuelo Vanderbilt’s case, her mother who had desired a title, the life that they had imagined for themselves as part of the aristocracy did not always live up to the ideal. Many were trapped in loveless marriages, in cold and ancient houses that bore no resemblance to the palatial mansions they had left at home. They found the complicated social etiquette difficult to master and made countless mistakes as mistresses of their estates, where an experienced butler who had served the family for years could with a single remark make them feel out of place and irrelevant, and delighted in doing so. However, England did offer them the opportunity to play a more active role in social and political affairs, whether that was through politics, philanthropy or discreet commercial enterprises, and the easy morality applied to married aristocratic women afforded them the chance to experience genuine love and affection. Whether the sacrifices were worth it is difficult to ascertain.
Many of the heiresses’ personal recollections of the period do not survive, so biographers are forced to piece together the fragments of their lives like a hazy jigsaw puzzle. Even personal accounts such as Consuelo Vanderbilt’s are undoubtedly coloured by her own point of view and feelings towards persons involved and, when written so many years after events, can prove unreliable as source material. As was so typical of Minnie Paget, she left very little evidence of her activities arranging Anglo-American marriages, knowing the sensitivity of such information. Resolutely careful and discreet to the very end, these women largely left it to others, through memoirs and contemporary press reports, to provide the evidence of this lucrative sideline. Indeed, it was a feature of the period for instructions to be left for any potentially scandalous personal papers to be destroyed after death, and in many instances theses wishes were meticulously carried out.
The question remains as to why Anglo-American marriages began to decline in popularity. Even in 1895 there were dissenting voices which called into question the merits of such matches. The press variously alternated between extolling their romance and highlighting the blatant transaction of cash for titles that lay at the heart of many of them. Marriages like Consuelo Manchester’s had already proved to be disastrous and the image of a sacrificial American debutante rendered desperately unhappy by a rakish and bankrupt English aristocrat added to their unpopularity. There was also the matter of vast amounts of American dollars leaving the country to prop up the English economy. The United States began to find its feet on the world stage and was no longer a country unsure of its national identity in the wake of the Civil War. It was a burgeoning superpower whose plutocrats no longer needed the respectability and stature that an English title brought. The decline of the British Empire was beginning, while America’s star was on the rise. As was probably to be expected, ambitious mothers looked increasingly at the opportunities for their daughters available on their own shores.
For Minnie Paget and the crop of heiresses that made England their home at the end of the nineteenth century, life securing a transatlantic marriage and its consequences were complex and not always happy. However, very few of the heiresses returned to the land of their birth and, despite the challenges, they seemed to relish the life they built for themselves in their new country. Minnie understood more than most that the future she was offering the heiresses who walked through her door at Belgrave Square was rarely straightforward and would present many twists and turns, which only the most industrious and tenacious would navigate successfully. Judging by the legacy they left behind, it seems the pleasure and the pain of life as a buccaneer was worth it.