‘An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady, her age and looks are immaterial, but her character must be irreproachable; she must be a widow or spinster – not a divorcée. If among your clients you know such a lady, who is willing to purchase the rank of a peeress for £25,000 sterling, paid in cash to her future husband, and who has sufficient wealth besides to keep up the rank of peeress, I shall be pleased if you will communicate with me in the first instance by letter when a meeting can be arranged in your office. I beg you to keep this confidential. The peer will pay handsomely for the introduction when it is arranged.’
* * *
By the time this advertisement appeared in England in 1901 in the widely read Daily Telegraph, the transatlantic traffic of dollar-laden young women on the one hand and impoverished members of the peerage on the other was so well established that it would have brought no more than a wry smile to the faces of those who read it.1 Its message was even summed up by a song in a popular musical comedy of the time, The American Girl:
‘The almighty dollar will buy, you bet,
A superior class of coronet
That’s why I’ve come from over the way
From New York City in USA.’
Yet across the Atlantic the attitude of Americans – or perhaps I should say that expressed in the American press – to titles or anything that smacked of an aristocracy of birth was ambivalent in the extreme.
There were now endless declarations of their innate republicanism, together with frequent quoting of that famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’2 There were ideological objections to hereditary aristocracies, with two main reasons why they should not be countenanced by the true-born American citizen. The first was that they concentrated land, wealth and power in the hands of just a few families, who would then try and hang on to these; only ‘the threat and apprehension of revolution’, commented The North American Review, ‘wrung from the reluctant hands of the English aristocracy the reform legislation of 1832.’3 The second was that while the original holder of the title might have deserved it, there was no logical reason why any of his descendants should. The effete Englishman and the dowdy Englishwoman were familiar figures of mockery.
Yet at the same time England, its culture, its mores and its fashions, was the model to which American smart society turned its enthralled eyes. The instant the Prince of Wales appeared with three studs on the front of his shirt instead of two the young dandies of the US rushed to their tailors, an English coachman and grooms were the sine qua non for the serious coaching aficionado, while hereditary titles seemed to hold an unholy allure for these sturdy sons of the Republic. ‘I could not help thinking, as I looked on the unwonted throng, of how Thackeray’s remark “Tommy loves a lord” applied even more closely to Americans than to his own countrymen,’ wrote The Saunterer when the Duke of Marlborough arrived to stay with Alva in Newport.
Pages and pages, in even the smallest provincial newspaper, were given over to the doings of any aristocrats who visited; in the lengthy intervals between, the obligatory social columns focused relentlessly on the antics of their own upper crust, noting when Mrs Astor gave a dinner and how many for, who had been asked to lead a cotillion at the Bradley-Martins’ dinner and dance, who sat in who’s conveyance at the annual Coaching meeting – trivial social details that were lapped up as if they were Holy Writ.
Nowhere was this conflict between principle and worldly interest better exemplified than in the marriage of the various dollar princesses to the scions of aristocratic British families. There was a curious dichotomy between two opposing attitudes – triumph at an American girl having scooped up such a prize in the teeth of native opposition, interwoven with resentment at the thought that an American husband was not good enough – which were often found in uneasy reconciliation in the same article.
Such marriages were frequently treated as an implicit snub to Americans. Falling in love was not then given the weight it is now; and with a woman’s absolute dependency on her husband, the head as much as the heart was concerned in marriage (if a girl did not see this, her mother certainly would). So that the reaction of her compatriots to an American woman falling in love with a foreigner was that she was demonstrating a conscious, unpatriotic preference for another country.
In England, where the best-selling romantic novelist Marie Corelli thundered, ‘Heirs to a great name and title sell their birthrights for a mess of American dollar-pottage,’ few of these heirs, envied by their contemporaries for this sudden shower of gold, took any notice. For one of the attractive qualities in an American bride was not only that her fortune passed to the possession of her husband, but that she actually approved of the spending of money. In her own country, the spending of money by the wife of a rich man was not simply a pleasure, an indulgence or a needless extravagance but a solemn, indeed a quasi-religious, duty.
If she did not spend, covering herself with jewels or bedecking her house with wonderful Louis XIV commodes, how would anyone know how immensely rich her husband was? His business rivals certainly would not broadcast any evidence of his success. Or how else could she entertain on a par with these rivals’ wives? For without the stable caste system of England, constant jostling and struggling was needed simply to keep one’s place in the competitive arena of high society. The wife who did not spend was failing in one important marital duty: that of proclaiming her husband’s success to the world.
Yet although the transatlantic marriages continued, in the more puritan society of the US a zeal for moral reform was publicly taking hold from the mid-1890s. Journalists and preachers more and more frequently compared title-heiress marriages to prostitution, presumably hoping to shame their subjects by associating them with one of society’s most disreputable activities. In 1901, the English journalist William Stead coined one of the more famous nicknames of the international marriage phenomenon: ‘Gilded prostitution’.4
(There was an even stronger reaction if an American man left the country. When William Waldorf Astor, unable to stand the constant battles with his aunt, the social leader Caroline Astor, left the country in 1891, saying that ‘America is no place for a gentleman,’ American newspapers described his departure as flying to ‘the land of lust and baccarat’,5 and there were even effigies of ‘William the Traitor’ burnt in the streets.)
There were also plenty of caveats from the other side of the Atlantic. There had been historic links with the South: many impoverished younger sons and English squires had gone out there to seek their fortune, and a Southern accent still charmed and reassured. But with the defeat of the Confederate States most English felt that all that was civilised and gentlemanly in the US had also been defeated, leaving only a tribe of voracious, unhealthily rich tycoons with little sense of how to behave.
As Jennie Jerome later wrote: ‘In England, as on the Continent, the American woman was looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature, with habits and manners something between a Red Indian and a Gaiety Girl. Anything of an outlandish nature might be expected of her. If she talked, dressed and conducted herself as any well-bred woman would, much astonishment was invariably evinced, and she was usually saluted with the tactful remark: “I should never have thought you were an American” – which was intended as a compliment.’
The young American Belle Wilson bitterly resented the patronising attitude of the English upper classes towards herself and her countrymen and women. In 1886, when she was staying in Cowes for a week, she met a Mrs Cust, a woman with a tongue so sharp that her house, opposite the entrance to the Royal Yacht Squadron (familiarly known as the Club), was known as ‘The Seat of the Scornful’. Mrs Cust lived up to her reputation by greeting Belle with the remark that she ‘thought America must be a dreadful place, she had heard no one had any servants there’. Belle replied that one or two families had. Then Mrs Cust said that she thought no one there had a lady’s maid and that she would hate to be without a lady’s maid. Belle replied again that she knew those with lady’s maids. ‘I thought Americans did not like to be servants,’ said Mrs Cust. Finally, driven beyond endurance, Belle allowed her good manners towards an older woman to slip slightly. ‘They don’t,’ she replied, ‘all our working class are English!’
It was true. Americans were used to a different kind of servant, who was very seldom a fellow countryman or woman: for an American, being a servant was looked down upon. Out of a sample of 562 American women, by far the largest number – 157 – gave as their reason for not wanting to be a domestic servant ‘Pride, social condition, and unwillingness to be called a servant – I don’t like to be called a menial.’6 Many would not wear uniform, a sine qua non in the houses of the rich, a habit that was catching. Delmonico himself, when asked to put his waiters in knee breeches with silk stockings and pumps for a special dinner, refused.7 ‘Servants who have been here even a very short time will not mark themselves out by assuming a distinctive livery of this kind,’ he said.
Almost all those who did work in Fifth Avenue and its environs were foreign immigrants – many Irish – who had only gone into domestic service because, as one remarked, ‘I was not educated enough for any other work’ and because they could be certain of employment while picking up an ad hoc training as they went along, since servants in New York were in perennially short supply. ‘Even now the number of servants employed in the town house of a Manhattan magnate is considerably less than would be thought indispensable in a Belgravia mansion of equal pretensions,’8 said the Nineteenth Century Magazine.
One reason for this friction was the gulf in expectations and attitude. English servants, just as socially conscious as those they worked for – there was an equally strict hierarchy in the Servants’ Hall – knew exactly what was expected of them and how they themselves should behave. They would have been well schooled in their duties by years in a great house under the supervision of the upper servants, and almost all would have gone into domestic service as a matter of choice.
To them, Americans, often including the new brides of their masters, were upstarts who had no idea of the traditions and responsibilities inherent to a great family. No English peeress, for instance, would have done as Alice Vanderbilt did, inspecting for dust and grime every morning by donning a clean pair of white gloves to run a finger along every surface and picture frame. If this had been done at all, it would have been done by the housekeeper.
Sometimes servants would discreetly sneer at their new mistresses; Consuelo Vanderbilt tells a story about sitting in her freezing drawing room in Blenheim and deciding that she needed a fire. She rang the bell and the butler appeared, but when she asked him to oblige her by lighting it, he looked at her with intense disapproval. ‘I will ask the footman to see to it, Your Grace,’ he told her, deeply shocked that she would ask him to perform so menial a task.
It was the same for Maud Burke, who often dismayed her husband Sir Bache Cunard by giving orders direct to the footmen instead of through the butler. Once, she committed a sin that would have been unforgivable in an English girl: when she saw Sir Bache standing at the window of his club, horror of horrors she waved to him from the street below. In the world of English society, women were not even supposed to walk down clubland streets.
Mary Curzon, too, found the servants incredibly difficult when she had to run 5 Carlton House Terrace. At one point she was served so little food that she had to send her plate back to the kitchen ‘three or four times’ to get sufficient. She found them tyrannical, goods were never delivered on time and when she said that the grocery bills were too high, the cook gave notice. It was not what a belle expected. ‘English servants are fiends,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘They are malignant and stupid and make life barely worth living, and I should like to hang a few and burn the rest at the stake.’
Sometimes the new arrival was treated with sympathy. Sophia Wells Williams, who had been brought up in China, where her father had been the United States Minister in Peking, met the Hon. Thomas Grosvenor, second son of Lord Ebury, when he was a young attaché there. When they married, he took her to Moor Park, his father’s wonderful Palladian mansion at Rickmansworth. As she stepped out of the train, the footman who met her at the station whispered to her: ‘We are all very sorry for you.’
On her first morning at Moor Park she did not know what to wear. When she asked her husband Tommy, he simply begged her to put on ‘something nice’. Not much wiser, she put on a dress she knew was expensive and smart, a black silk one that she had worn for a court mourning at The Hague and went down to family prayers, feeling worried and unhappy. After prayers, she stood beside a table in the hall, not quite knowing what to do next. Her new sister-in-law, Tommy’s elder sister, came up to her and asked her not to stand about ‘looking silk-gownified’. When she told the story later, Sophia always added: ‘I could cheerfully have killed her.’
The ordeal of her arrival continued when her new husband took her to visit his father’s old gamekeeper, who looked at her dubiously and said he hoped she would make Mr Thomas a respectable wife. But she was determined to love them and win them over and she did, writing later: ‘It took a little time to learn all the ins and outs of life in that beloved household. None of them had ever really grown up; they had all [just] grown older doing the things they had always done, in the same way.’
Not everyone was greeted as warmly as Belle Wilson by her future sister-in-law, Lady de Grey. ‘Mungo [Herbert] came down here yesterday looking much brighter and happier than I have ever seen him for years & he told me that there was perhaps some chance of yr marrying,’ wrote Gladys de Grey in 1888. ‘Knowing how much and how long he has cared for you, I am writing at the risk of yr thinking me intrusive to tell you how very much I hope it may be settled. I am so devoted to him that I cannot say how grateful I wld be to you for making him happy, and my one dream for him has always been that he should marry someone he loved very much as he does you.’
When the matter was finally settled, she was even warmer. ‘I cannot tell you, my very dear future sister [in law], how joyful yr letter has made me. Now that Mungo has got the wish of his heart, I have nothing left to wish for and my gratitude towards the person who has brought us such happiness is beyond expression. I love him so much that even if you were to take him away to America for ever, I shld feel quite contented knowing he was happy with you. How glad I am to think that I shall see you next week.’
And when Mungo died aged only forty-seven (in 1903), Gladys wrote entirely from the heart: ‘you are always in our thoughts, darling, & I wish that for a few minutes, sometimes, this could make you feel a little less lonely. More than this one cannot hope for, for when that overwhelming sense of desolation sweeps over you continually I know that nothing can be of any good. Good bye now, darling, I love you very much, & long for you to come back. Yr devoted Sister.’
* * *
Mary Curzon had a tougher time. After being fêted as a young and beautiful single woman, with the friendship and protection offered her by – among others – Margot Asquith, a close friend of George Curzon, the man with whom Mary had been hopelessly in love for several years, things changed when she eventually married her George. ‘As yet I am not attached to my new country,’ she wrote sadly, adding of her rather horrible father-in-law Lord Scarsdale, ‘Lord S. is the most tyrannical old man I have ever seen, besides being the most eccentric.’
‘Eccentric’ was a kindly way of describing Lord Scarsdale’s rude and irritating manner. When he asked his new daughter-in-law a series of questions implying that life in America was primitive beyond belief: ‘Do you have sea fish in America?’ ‘I suppose you don’t know how to make mince pies in America,’ she was eventually goaded into replying: ‘Why don’t you ask if we are civilised or white in America?’ Whereupon George leapt to her defence: ‘Papa, what sort of notion have you of America anyway – I never heard such absurd questions in all my life.’
It took some time for acceptance to be reached, and at first she was bitterly lonely (‘It is not all a bed of roses to live in a strange country and I am as strange to the people and their ways as they are to me’), although by marrying Curzon she had achieved the wish of her heart, hence the comment in her diary: ‘My path is strewn with roses and the only thorns are the unforgiving women.’
Many of these, of course, were displeased that she had stolen Curzon, one of the most eligible of partis, from under their noses – one less eligible in the pool for their daughters to pick.
It was in any case far more difficult for the daughter of an aristocrat to marry than her brothers. She seldom had the advantage of a large dowry: after a few years of taking a house for the London season and subsidising the balls and dinners that went with it, the less well-off peers might jib at the expense and that meant fewer chances of meeting someone ‘suitable’. There were, too, likely to be fewer of these than there were girls because of the aristocracy’s own rigid, self-imposed caste system.
Just as a wife not only became a husband’s property and took on his name, she took on his status as well, so that if a younger son, short of money as many were, married the daughter of a rich merchant, she immediately rose to his rank. But if his sister married the merchant’s son, she moved down – and out of the close-knit circle of kinship. When Lady Charlotte Bertie married the wealthy Josiah John Guest, a successful ironmaster and Member of Parliament, the fact that he was much lower in status than his aristocratic wife caused her significant social strain for some years.
So unthinkable was such a fate considered that mothers often forbade their daughters to make such matches, or the daughters themselves rejected them. The arrival of American girls, irresistible to so many, cut down even further the chances of making a really good match – or even any match at all.
For the American girl who arrived in England unprepared, the clash of cultures was sometimes deafening. If she turned down an eldest son, the shock and surprise was considerable, not least to the peer himself who, having known from babyhood that he was numero uno in the family, had seldom been denied anything. Belle Wilson, who had been proposed to by several, wrote in a letter to her sister: ‘the men get so nasty when they are refused over here’.
Others around her looked at the American girl as someone to be viewed with suspicion, if not avoided altogether. From the comparative freedom with which she had been brought up, her manner and expectations were quite different. ‘I gathered that an English lady was hedged around with what seemed to me to be boring restrictions,’ recorded Consuelo Vanderbilt, on becoming a duchess.
‘It appeared that one should not walk alone in Piccadilly or in Bond Street, nor sit in Hyde Park unless accompanied; that one should not be seen in a hansom cab and that one should always travel in a reserved compartment; that it was better to occupy a box than a stall at the theatre and that a visit to a music hall was out of the question.’
The American girl might be pretty, well dressed and lively but – where did she come from? Few English could understand that Americans, too, had a class system which, though unadmitted, was every bit as meaningful as their own, that their opposite numbers in New York, Boston or Newport were hedged about with similar restrictions and conformed to shibboleths equally important in their world. (When the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1866, its backers had proposed co-operation with the New York Historical Society, in which lay many treasures that should have been in a museum. Their offer was rejected simply because the patricians who ran the Historical Society considered some of the backers of the museum unacceptable socially.) When Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, the son of the former Grace Wilson, as a small boy saw a woman hanging out clothes and asked his mother, ‘What’s that lady doing?’, Grace smiled and said: ‘That’s not a lady, darling, that’s a woman,’ going on to explain that a lady never turned her hand to menial tasks, and always wore silk stockings and silk gloves. And while in Newport nothing was too grand or too formal, in the English equivalent, Cowes, everyone walked out to dinner as carriages would have been considered ostentatious.
To most English, all Americans were the same, so that it was a shock to realise that most of these girls were far better educated than the home-grown variety.
* * *
From the American girls’ point of view, adjusting was just as difficult. They sparkled in an urban setting, but as much of the British aristocracy’s life was spent in the country the long months living either on their own in the great houses on their husbands’ estates to which marriage brought them, or the weeks-long visits to other such houses, often tried them sorely. ‘From my window I overlooked a pond in which a former butler had drowned himself,’ wrote Consuelo of a winter at Blenheim. ‘As one gloomy day succeeded another I began to feel a deep sympathy for him.’ Even Englishwomen sometimes found life on the estate trying. ‘Solitude at Studley, with de Grey out all day, breeds in me the germs of Melancholia,’ wrote Lady de Grey. Then there was the question of physical comfort.
Despite these drawbacks, one of the great attractions of upper-class English life to American girls was that in England married women had a much better time than they did at home, something admitted even in America. ‘Naturally, one of the chief reasons why American women have so great a liking for European society is to be found in the fact of the far more important position that married ladies occupy in that society than they do with us,’ commented Lippincott’s Magazine.
Thanks to their repressive upbringing, it was only after marriage that English girls blossomed, and thanks to the greater social mix – politicians, ambassadors, leading writers, the financiers befriended by the Prince of Wales – it was at their dining tables that the most fascinating conversations could be heard. In England, to be a beautiful young married woman with the talent and money to entertain was to be courted, admired and the centre of a circle.
In America, by contrast, most of the rich were too interested in and too busy at making money to involve themselves in politics. In New York, they spent most of their time in their offices or in the grand mahogany-walled bar of Hoffman House, with its famous cocktails and equally famous nude paintings; in Newport, husbands would depart on Sundays to return to their offices, leaving their rich, pampered womenfolk behind – politics, for most of them, happened in Washington. In England, most of the men in society did not do jobs but ran their estates, where they spent most of the year; when in London, many of them ran the country. In all this their wives, albeit only in a supporting role, were very much at their sides.
At home, the belle, so brilliant and popular while single, retired to the ranks of matrons once married, and although there was constant entertaining, but with writers and artists frowned on, husbands constantly involved in business, and few politicians – most were in Washington – conversation usually ran along narrow, predictable lines. The Four Hundred ‘would have fled as a body from a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman,’ said Mrs Winthrop Chanler, from a prominent New York family but with widened horizons from her upbringing in Rome.
‘The English married ladies are like our American girls,’ said Chauncey Depew, adding loyally that ‘they never get the spring and dash, quickness of repartee and chaff that our girls have,’ although he conceded that ‘they are the brightest and most venomous politicians in English society. Their houses are frequently political centres from which emanate influences that govern the nation.’
So the girls from the US came – and they kept on coming. Between 1875 and 1905 over forty American girls married into the peerage, bringing with them the dollars that saved many a stately home from ruin. There were many attempts to calculate the total amount of American dollars spent in dowry payments; one estimate said that American brides had brought in $50 million to Britain, but the probability is that it was nearer a billion dollars – money that went straight into the pockets of the men they married.
Such was the concern about the economic drain on America of title-heiress marriages that when another Vanderbilt bride, Gertrude, married the son of an American railroad tycoon in 1896, the New York Journal reported jubilantly: ‘it will be an American wedding. There will be no noblemen in this – no purchased titles. The millions all belong in America and they will all remain here.’
But not until the Singer sewing machine heiress, Marguerite Decazes de Glucksberg, married a young French duke in 1910 did the press spell out unambiguously what they saw as the sordid reality. For these nuptials, the New York Tribune’s headline was: ‘She pays all the bills – he thinks himself cheap at the price.’