From the first tide of invaders, as the Gilded Age began, Englishmen from the Prince of Wales downwards tended to find American girls irresistible.
The American girl was completely different from her opposite number, the girl that one of these peers would otherwise have married – perhaps the sister of one of his friends, perhaps a distant cousin, but certainly drawn from within the tight little circle that the English aristocracy then was. The transatlantic visitor’s looks were polished, her clothes impeccable and – within the bounds of complete propriety – her manner was inviting and lightly flirtatious. She also exuded that compelling quality, complete self-confidence.
For she did not, like an English girl, regard herself as a second-class citizen, nor had she been treated, as English girls were from birth onwards, as much the least important member of the family. All her circumstances conspired to make her feel that she was mistress of her fate – or to believe that she was. ‘She expects to be worked for, worshipped and generally attended to – and she gets her way,’1 said the best-selling novelist Marie Corelli.
In England, primogeniture meant most of the focus was on the eldest son, with a certain amount on any brothers he might have – after all, in case of accident, one of them might inherit – while his sisters were treated very much as subsidiaries, remaining so when they married, for as far as the law was concerned, husband and wife were one person, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, vote or keep a salary for herself.
American girls, by contrast, were brought up to believe in themselves, to demand respect, even veneration, from their men, whom they treated as equals. In front of them, all the time, was the example of their formidable mothers, women who reigned over their households and their husbands alike, women who perhaps two generations earlier would have stood shoulder to shoulder with their men as they carved out the beginnings of a fortune in their brave new world. Marriage in the early republic had been thought of as a partnership, perhaps not of equals, but of two mutually supportive people, each of whom contributed complementary and equally valuable skills, and this spirit still infused the American household.
It was said that American husbands were the best in the world, and from the standpoint of American women this was true. For the early part of the century, men had greatly outnumbered women and the value attached to this scarcity still lingered. American daughters saw their mothers make decisions on everything, from the building of a house to where in Europe the family should visit that spring, with the funds to do so automatically handed over.
‘American women are more indulged than English women because they eclipse English women in their ability to inspire their husbands; and they are also more extravagant in their personal expenditure, but in this particular they are encouraged by their husbands,’ confirmed John Morgan Richards, an American who had come to England at eighteen and spent the next sixty years living there, interspersed with visits to the States. ‘In all matters of pleasure-making, amusements and travelling the American woman sets the pace.’
Sons were of course welcomed, especially as able successors in the care and increase of family wealth, but daughters were seen as the way forward, the family member who could boost the status and fortunes of a whole generation. The girl who made a successful marriage could lift herself and her whole family upwards, so that daughters were cosseted and cared for like hothouse plants, cherished not only for themselves but for their potential. Almost from birth they were educated in everything, from riding to music, languages, painting, history and dancing, that was supposed to fit them for a position in American society – or for marriage into the English aristocracy.
To a father, accustomed to the position of power held by women both in his own home and in society, a daughter was often a little princess rather than, as in England, a somewhat disregarded junior member of the household. As Juliette Adam put it (in the North American Review): ‘The young girl is the aristocracy, the luxury, the art, the crown of American society.’ As such, American daughters were used to demanding – and having their demands met.
Thus when Grace, the daughter of Richard Wilson,2 cabled her father from Paris: ‘Father, what shall I do? I’m supposed to sail on the Teutonic and Worth doesn’t have my dresses ready,’ he did not hesitate but immediately sent for his brother-in-law, who worked for him, and despatched him to Paris that afternoon to pay whatever was needed to secure Grace’s dresses and allow her to sail as planned. It is impossible to imagine the owner of a stately home in England doing the equivalent: sending his agent to Paris to chase up a daughter’s dresses – if only for the very good reason that such a daughter would never have been lucky enough to have a Worth dress. Any spare cash would have been spent on the estate, or perhaps a couple of new hunters for his sons.
In 1890 George W. Smalley, the American correspondent to The Times, was writing that ‘in matters of costume the Englishwoman of today is a far more admirable person than she was ten years ago,’ as he marvelled at the chic of the women in the Sunday-morning promenade of the smart in Hyde Park. It was, he concluded, because ‘the American has taught her English cousin how to dress, and her cousin has learnt the lesson and now dresses almost as well as her teacher’.
For to young American girls wonderful clothes were not a luxury but a necessity, making them infinitely better, and more seductively, clad than their English counterparts. After a ball she went to in Cowes where she wore a beautiful grey tulle dress, Belle Wilson wrote to her sister: ‘it was so lucky that I had pretty dresses as everyone talked so much about our clothes … I don’t believe I should have found it [Cowes Week] so amusing if I had not worn my best clothes and been conscious that we were decidedly the best-dressed women there.’ She ruined most of her dresses walking in the gardens afterwards and said Cowes was harder on clothes than Newport – but no matter, she had a devoted father to buy her more.
The equality of the American girl with her brothers was reflected in her financial status. American fathers often left sons and daughters equal portions or, if they did not, made sure the girls were handsomely provided for. By the time the Gilded Age dawned the American girl’s individual rights were enshrined in law: by about 1850 most states had given married women the right to hold on to their own property (in England the Married Women’s Property Act was not passed until 1870, nor, once married, did a married woman have a legal identity).
Women in America were powerful entities; in a few states they even had the vote. And as the novelist Elinor Glyn wrote: ‘The traditional contempt for woman, as the weaker vessel, which the average Englishman has inherited as a second nature, was cancelled in America by genuine respect for the gallantry of the women who endured the hardships and shared the risks of pioneering days, and the chivalrous feelings natural to virile men were fostered to a wonderful degree in their sons by the influence of Victorian idealism.
‘The second cause … of the enslavement of American men by their women is very easy to understand … The American woman is unquestionably the most beautiful, the best-dressed, best-turned-out and consequently the most attractive of all women. She takes infinitely more trouble about her looks…’
It was quite true. Preserving their complexions, all-important in those days when little or no make-up was worn, was an article of such faith among well-off Americans that often even little girls wore veils when sent out to play to avoid the damaging rays of the sun. Silk gloves protected the hands, and veils were worn by smart women during most of the summer, including for activities like tennis and swimming; porcelain skins were the result. This freshness, often with vivid colouring thanks to their more athletic lives, was one of American girls’ chief beauties. It compared favourably with the ‘enamelling’3 used by some Edwardian beauties (including Queen Alexandra), often dusted with a light veil of pearl powder. Make-up was considered ‘fast’, but women often used aids like burnt matchsticks to darken eyelids or Indian ink to draw in eyebrows – a focus of beauty for Edwardian women – with belladonna to brighten eyes and enlarge pupils.4 Some used geranium or poppy petals to stain their lips.
Later on in their lives, American women, always to the forefront, spent time dyeing their hair. For redheads, as red hair holds its pigment longer than any other colour, this was particularly difficult, as the process took two days: first the hair was dyed black, then green, then finally red (Alva Vanderbilt and other russets would retire from society for forty-eight hours to accomplish this, a disappearance tactfully overlooked by everyone else).
Another trait that allured Englishmen was the American girl’s ability to talk to boys, a skill she had been practising all her life. While English boys went to boarding school and their sisters, taught mainly by a series of governesses, spent their days in a large house often down a long drive with no nearby playmates, and very few other children deemed ‘suitable’ as friends within carriage-driving distance, young Americans, especially girls, were groomed during their teenage years in preparation for the adult social life awaiting them, meeting boys on an easy basis from childhood on.
‘This afternoon was dancing school and I wore my white dress and some lilies of the valley,’ recorded the sixteen-year-old Gertrude Vanderbilt in her 1891 diary. ‘The nice fellow who asked me last week for the german danced the lancers, the court quadrille and several round dances with me. The one who has no ear for music I danced several round dances with (he is beginning to improve) and the german. I danced with a good many other fellows that I don’t often dance with.’ And a week later: ‘Alfred had a party of fellows and we went to the circus after lunch.’
Teenage Americans also learnt many of their social skills through a series of small parties almost like a junior ‘season’, such as the one noted by Gertrude Vanderbilt: ‘Bill had a dinner of young girls and fellows tonight.’ These gatherings, called ‘Sociables’, were groups of forty or fifty young people who played parlour games, sang songs and danced or in summer went driving or picnicking. There were no such excitements for their English upper-class opposite numbers.
Although they saw plenty of the opposite sex, these young American girls were always chaperoned, with mothers ever vigilant. Even at twenty, when Gertrude, clad in a black jacket and dark sable furs, wanted to go for a walk with a young man with whom she had made an afternoon date hoping her mother would be out, she had to resort to subterfuge.
‘I had come in from lunch hoping to find Mama out. It was on the strength of that I made the appointment. The man at the door, in response to my question, informed me she was not out and had not ordered the carriage. I saw the only plan for me was not to go upstairs for to get to my room I would have to pass Mama’s boudoir, where she would almost certainly be.’ They managed to slip out and ‘we no sooner got outside the door than his whole manner changed. His face lit up and he began to laugh. I did the same, out of pure happiness being out alone like this, and without Mama having discovered.’
Spending so much of their time with their contemporaries, with more freedom and far fewer restrictions than in Europe, gave these future American debutantes a social confidence and ease of manner missing in their English contemporaries – and helped them develop the quickness and repartee so fascinating to Englishmen. In contrast, many English girls had hardly spoken to a young single man – the sort that in a year or so they would be expected to marry – before they had ‘come out’, so that they were shy and nervous rather than natural and friendly.
As Corelli remarked of the American girl: ‘Perhaps the chief note in the ever-ascending scale of her innumerable attractions is her intense vitality … She is full of energy as well as charm. If she sets out to enjoy herself, she enjoys herself thoroughly. She talks and laughs freely…’
Their very Americanness was another point in their favour. A young English girl from a lower level of society who had been married for her money could shame the aristocrat in many ways, from insisting that her parents be produced on public occasions to speaking with the wrong accent – to sum up, by obviously coming from a different class. As for accent, the only American accent that some English recognised was a Southern one, which was regarded as gentlemanlike – many younger sons had settled in the South to try for a cotton fortune – and to the average untuned English ear it was impossible to place any other.
Few of these perceived drawbacks affected the American girl. ‘We are apt to accept without further enquiry, provided they come from a sufficient distance, people who are charmingly dressed, appropriately housed, and boundlessly hospitable,’ said the magazine Vanity Fair. ‘It has happened that members of that exclusive body, the “Four Hundred”, have been dreadfully shocked to find some compatriot who is taboo on the other side of the water received with open arms in Mayfair and Belgravia.’
American parents were usually too far away to embarrass. ‘The American mother is a tedious person,’ wrote Oscar Wilde.5 He could have been speaking of Mrs Leiter, mother of the beautiful Mary, whose malapropisms were a byword. She expressed admiration for a sharp-witted person’s quickness at ‘repertoire’; when she received someone in her negligée she begged their pardon for appearing in her ‘nom de plume’; and when told by someone at Newport that Mary looked too delicate to sit on the porch in the evening, replied: ‘You are mistaken, my daughter is one of the most indelicate girls you ever knew.’
The American father, thought Wilde, was better, largely because he was never seen in London. ‘He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher,’ while Americans were so different and so far from the English system that the word ‘class’ was meaningless when applied to them. Their very openness and lack of shyness emphasised this. As Frederick Martin, socialite and writer, observed of his young female compatriot: ‘[she] starts her social progress unhampered by caste and tradition’.
This freedom, however, did not extend from the social to the moral sphere. Sons, and particularly daughters – destined to be the moral compass of the home – grew up with the ideals of purity and innocence. For girls, even their names added to this impression of flowerlike innocence – Daisy, Violet, Pansy, May, Rose, Lily; Lilian Price, aware of this, changed her name to Lilly when she came to New York and added to her aura of fragrant purity by invariably dressing in white. She would create a sensation when she arrived at the Coaching Club Parade, dressed in foaming white, from the ostrich feathers curling over her huge hat to the tips of her shoes. Once in her seat, she would open her white silk parasol, conscious of the effect she was producing.
This ideal of blameless, rigorous morality naturally carried on into marriage. With society ruled by women, for whom the retention of a rich spouse was all-important, fidelity – or rather the appearance of fidelity – was everything. Nowhere in the American ideal of marriage was there room for the discreet affairs and liaisons between members of the same social set that took place across the Atlantic in the Prince of Wales’s circle or among the Souls6, with the tacit complicity of those around them.
Most young American girls were ferociously chaperoned, their mothers sticking to them like burrs and any contact that could possibly sully their purity forbidden, including, of course, any mention of sex. Edith Jones, brought up in the heart of well-bred American society, was so ignorant of, and so dreading, ‘the whole dark mystery’ that just before getting married she summoned up the courage to question her mother, who had always refused to allow any mention of it.
‘[I] begged her, with heart beating to suffocation, to tell me “what being married was like”. Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded. “I never heard such a ridiculous question!” she said impatiently, & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me.
‘But in the extremity of my need I persisted. “I’m afraid, Mamma – I want to know what will happen to me!”
‘The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust. She was silent for a dreadful moment; then she said with an effort: “You’ve seen enough pictures & statues in your life. Haven’t you noticed that men are – made differently from women?”
‘“Yes,” I faltered blankly.
‘“Well, then?”
‘I was silent, from sheer inability to follow, & she brought out more sharply: “Then for heaven’s sake don’t ask me any more silly questions. You can’t be as stupid as you pretend!”’ And that was all.
It was not difficult to be ignorant in those days when no one, ever, talked openly about sex to the young. ‘Girls know absolutely nothing until they are married,’ wrote the seventeen-year-old Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton to her confidant the Rev. Elwin Whitwell. ‘They are taught that everything is wrong, and then plunged suddenly right into the middle of it.’
Even Leonie Leslie, brought up with the other Jerome sisters in the more free-and-easy atmosphere of France, shirked the issue. She had taught her four sons to walk on a drawing-room sofa above which hung a Poussin, The Marriage of Thetis and Peleus,7 in which, as she remembered, ‘debauched cherubs are lowering a red canopy over the amorous couple while sunburned satyrs carry off white-thighed Bacchantes with obvious intent’. When the children asked ‘But what are they doing?’ Leonie could only reply: ‘Having a lovely picnic.’
* * *
Another factor in the popularity of the American girls who came to England was that they were ready and able to talk to anyone on equal terms. ‘There would be great difficulty in finding an American woman who would be prepared to take a back seat,’ said John Morgan Richards, the American entrepreneur who lived in England most of his life. Such girls also had more to talk about, as most were more cosmopolitan. Some had travelled around Europe in their fathers’ yachts, usually accompanied by friends of their parents, so that they had lived in a sort of floating house party, with visits to places of interest en route – all good conversational material.
Most were better educated than English girls, taken by their mothers to Europe to learn languages and study art and music. When Consuelo Vanderbilt was sent to spend time with the youngest Lansdowne daughter, while her parents were staying with the Viceroy and Vicereine of India, Lord and Lady Lansdowne, at Government House, she was surprised to find ‘how scanty was her knowledge. Little time or trouble was spent on the education of English girls. It was still customary for them to have a good homespun governess. They read Miss Young’s History of Greece. But Virgil, Gibbon, Hallam and Green were unknown to them. I pitied the limited outlook. Later on I was to find that English girls suffered many handicaps.’
What Consuelo did not then realise, of course, was that English education was of a different sort – though often scanty in the schoolroom, it was a good training for the kind of life they hoped and expected they would lead: marriage to a ‘suitable’ young man, with a future life spent largely in the country, with perhaps seasons in London. That is, very much like that of their parents.
Although confined largely to the schoolroom, the daughter of an English landowning aristocrat (and most aristocrats were landowning) absorbed much of the expected behaviour of the wife of such a man from her mother. With her mother she would take food to cottages, visit the sick, attend fêtes, and as she grew older gradually join gatherings of her parents’ friends or meet them during some of the long country-house visits exchanged between cousins, friends and connections.
In these parties, she would hear constant political conversations – most of the landowners were in government – analysis of questions of the day, discussions about the party leaders and their MPs as well as more general chat about sport or the estate’s affairs. When Jennie Jerome, newly married to Lord Randolph Churchill, arrived at Blenheim she quickly discovered that in the morning an hour or more had to be devoted to the reading of newspapers, ‘a necessity if one wanted to show an intelligent interest in the questions of the day, for at dinner conversation invariably turned on politics’.
Chauncey Depew, a witty lawyer working for Cornelius Vanderbilt and later a senator, said that in American society conversation was not ‘thoughtful, profound, or argumentative; it is but the contact of the moment, a dinner, a reception, or a call, and we separate’. But as the English often visited for up to four months at the same house, met the same people and lived intimately together, ‘conversation becomes discussion of serious and weighty considerations’.
At a London dinner party, though – and it was usually in London or at least in an urban setting that an American girl met a future English husband – it was the American who glittered, with her looks, her polish, her sparkle, her original remarks, while her knowledge of Europe and its languages made her in demand if ambassadors were to be entertained.
There was no doubt that American girls swept all before them: between 1870 and 1914, 102 American women married into the peerage. As one verse of the day put it:
… For there were the strangers, delightful and wild.
With twang well developed and dollars well piled.
And the mothers of Mayfair are loud in their wail,
As their schemes matrimonial hopelessly fail,
Each match of the season, duke, marquess, or Lord,
Is caught in the coils of the alien horde.
How did they meet the men they married? Thanks to the matriarchal character of the society from which they had sprung, American women who had already made good marriages often introduced their countrywomen – provided these measured up to their exacting standards – to London life. As Vanity Fair pointed out (on 6 July 1905): ‘The American hostesses who really play a part in London society are not very numerous … But they entertain with an originality, an entrain and above all with a splendid disregard for money, which our sadly handicapped aristocracy cannot afford to imitate.’
Lady Paget, born Minnie Stevens, daughter of Mrs Paran Stevens, for instance, was a close friend of the Prince of Wales. ‘Once greetings had been exchanged I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes,’ wrote Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose mother Alva was a friend of Minnie’s mother. ‘I felt like a gawky, graceless child under her scrutiny.’ At the next dinner party at her house, Consuelo was seated next to the Duke of Marlborough, ‘a rather unnecessary public avowal of her intentions,’ thought Consuelo.
Sometimes money changed hands. Many well-born Englishwomen were much worse off after the agricultural depression and the drop in income to the great estates. When in 1894 Elizabeth Banks, an enterprising young American journalist, pretended to be an American heiress looking for a chaperone (‘A Young American Lady of means wishes to meet with a chaperon of Highest Social Position who will introduce her into the Best English Society’, ran her advertisement), she received eighty-seven responses, almost all from genuinely well-connected women, some of them impoverished peeresses, all promising to launch her and some to present her at court. Their prices ranged from £500 to £10,000.
She went to call on one, ‘who had intimated her willingness to chaperone me for £2,000’. Elizabeth arrived, dressed elegantly, at a smart address and found, not the cold-blooded bargainer she had expected but ‘a more aristocratic, refined and interesting woman I had never met. She candidly explained that she was in great need of money, and was obliged to either increase her income or diminish her expenses.’
Elizabeth, still in her persona of wealthy heiress with no social connections, also got several proposals of marriage, some veiled, some explicit. ‘You would possibly desire to marry an Englishman of high social position, who could place you in a certain circle where you would lead others,’ wrote one man. ‘I am a country gentleman, have a fine place, house and estate, have been an officer in a distinguished regiment, and know many people of position and rank.’ He informed her that he would treat her ‘with all honour and respect’ – including silence on the matter – but added, ‘it would be an absolute necessity that you should be a lady of considerable fortune’.
She agreed to see him and when they met thought he was ‘a fine-looking aristocratic man of middle age’, and ‘a thorough English gentleman’. She discovered that he was a widower and, to her surprise, found when she investigated him that he was exactly what he said – from a titled family and with a large place in the country but whose fortunes were ‘decaying’, as so many were. Another, who thought he ‘might be able to suggest a way by which she could even more than gratify her ambition for a place in English society’, turned out to be a young man she had already met (who was also exactly what he claimed to be). In this case the embarrassment of meeting him in her guise as a coronet-hunter would have been too much and she simply threw his letter into the fire.
Some women advertised openly. ‘A lady of title wishes to borrow £1,000 for six months. Would act as chaperon to young lady.’ Everyone, found Elizabeth, was prepared to overlook her own lack of background and ancestry in return for cash. ‘Had I carried my experiment further and been introduced and presented at court, I should only have been one of numerous Americans who have walked on a golden pavement to the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace.’
Elizabeth Banks also discovered a man prepared to concoct pedigrees, crests and coats of arms for affluent visiting Americans who wanted ‘ancestry’ to go with their new wealth. He warned them, however, only to use one of his creations in America, ‘where people will not put it to a close scrutiny’.
* * *
One of those who made full use of the introductory process was Adèle Beach Grant. Her determination to marry a peer and thus enter the highest society clearly shows through the ins and outs of her romantic history; what is unusual is that once she had succeeded she refused adamantly when asked to perform a similar service, despite a huge financial inducement.
The beautiful Adèle was born in New York, the daughter of David Beach Grant of the Grant Locomotive Works and, as one society paper put it: ‘she belongs to the English set in New York, rides to hounds, is a notable lawn tennis player, and a famous horse-woman in a town said to boast the most fearless and reckless of women riders in the world. The Grants have entertained a great many Englishmen of distinction, the last one being Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Pinafore and Mikado fame.’
Sir Arthur, indeed, was so assiduous in his escorting of Adèle that it was said at one time that they were engaged. Her looks were exactly those that fitted the Edwardian ideal of beauty: she had a mass of black hair, a creamy complexion, vivid colouring and lustrous eyes; so lovely was she that she was later the model for Hubert von Herkomer’s portrait Lady in White. When she made her début in New York society during the season of 1883–4, at the first Patriarchs’ Ball, held in Delmonico’s, she was the acknowledged belle of that season.
What was not so generally known was that her father was a notorious drunkard. During her coming-out ball he had been returned, drunk and dishevelled, by the police, to be smuggled up the back stairs, given a sedative and locked in his bedroom. Enough, Adèle must have decided, was enough. She managed to transport her family – mother, younger sister and brother – to Paris, where she spent a year at the Sorbonne.
The next season, staying in Pau,8 she met the twenty-five-year-old Lord Garmoyle, son of the 1st Earl Cairns, a former Lord Chancellor and distinguished Conservative politician, but the romance did not start until a few months later when Lord Garmoyle arrived in New York and saw her at a ball given by Mrs Bradley Martin.
Cairns was in New York to escape the furore caused by the result of a breach-of-promise action. When he was twenty-three he had met a lovely young actress who performed under the name of May Fortescue, whom he had first seen on stage in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. May had joined the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1881, when she was nineteen, and quickly became both admired for her beauty and a protégée of W. S. Gilbert.
Garmoyle fell in love with her, and proposed marriage (in August 1883) and she left the theatre. It was a time when marrying out of one’s class was mal vu, and when an aura of immorality still clung about the stage; nevertheless, his family accepted her. His friends, however, were a different matter and this meant so much to him that he broke off the engagement in January 1884, and went travelling in Asia. When he returned she sued him for breach of promise – W. S. Gilbert paid for her lawyers – won the case and £10,000; and went straight back into the theatre, starting her own theatre company.
In New York, with the case behind him, and by now Earl Cairns (his father had died that April), he began to pursue Adèle, following her to Europe. ‘He has no indication of the possession of any intelligence beyond that required for the customary languid intercourse of fashionable society,’ wrote the Daily Alta of California scornfully in June 1886. ‘In dress, manners and expression of feature he is nothing more than the typical English youth of fashion.’ Nevertheless, the idea of being a countess clearly overwhelmed any scruples Adèle might have had, and in the summer of 1886 she accepted his proposal. Nor was he taking any chances: for the ‘Battle of Flowers’ at the Nice carnival, he went as far as Genoa to buy camellias, filling the carriage of his new fiancée fuller of flowers than any other in the procession.
The invitations to the wedding were sent out to all the bride and groom’s friends in London and New York, a splendid trousseau was ordered in Paris, wedding presents poured in – including expensive jewellery from Lord Cairns – and a house taken in Grosvenor Square for the wedding breakfast.
Then, suddenly, the marriage was called off. The reason, everyone agreed, was financial; some said it was because of the prospective bridegroom’s extortionate demands for a settlement, others that he was so hopelessly enmeshed in such deep financial complications that Adèle’s relatives did not think it worthwhile to extricate him for the sake of gaining her his coronet and title. Although she had to send back the presents and cancel the house, the trousseau, at least, was not wasted: during the following London season she appeared in the gowns ordered for it.
She was steadily moving upwards in English society, by now being helped by Consuelo Mandeville. Lady Mandeville, unhappily married to the Duke of Manchester’s heir, who was flagrantly unfaithful and gambled much of her money away, had decided to make a life for herself in England. The first step was to become a close friend of the Prince of Wales, which she managed quickly and successfully. The second was to accept large fees to groom and school American girls anxious to enter English society – provided they measured up. Adèle’s wealth and exceptional beauty ensured that she did.
In 1891, Consuelo Mandeville had succeeded in having Adèle and her mother, now living in Cumberland Place, presented at one of Queen Victoria’s Drawing Rooms by a Mrs Lincoln, and by the following year Adèle had been introduced to the widowed Earl of Essex, then thirty-four. He was a strikingly attractive, well-dressed man, who turned up the ends of his moustache every morning with a tiny pair of curling tongs while his valet waited for him to select a buttonhole from a tray holding a rose, carnation and violets. But he was also, as his daughter Iris recalled, ‘first and foremost, an angry man’, often breaking anything that happened to annoy him – clouting his caddy over the head if he moved by the tee or breaking his putter over his knee if he missed a shot on the green.
His family seat, Cassiobury Park, an Elizabethan house in Watford, Hertfordshire, was one of the showplaces in eastern England, with a wonderful collection of porcelain and pictures, some by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was not, otherwise, considered a rich man, and Adèle’s fortune as the heiress of her wealthy uncle Suydam Grant helped offset some of his financial problems.
Their wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1893 was the social sensation of the year, with Adèle’s old admirer Sir Arthur Sullivan accompanying his own anthem ‘Sing O Heavens’ during the signing of the register. The town of Watford was illuminated and decorated with triumphal arches. An escort of the Herts Yeomanry Cavalry, of which Lord Essex was Captain, met them at the station, and after they entered their carriage the horses were unharnessed and the equipage was drawn by tenantry the two miles to the gates of Cassiobury.
* * *
As Lady Essex, Adèle quickly made her mark in society, her beauty smoothing her path and forming a pleasing contrast to the coarseness of her husband, whose ribald conversation once made Balfour leave the room – although it did not stop his visits to Cassiobury. When Edith Wharton, a great friend, went down to Cassiobury one Sunday at the end of the season she found there Balfour, Lady Anne Dickson-Poynder (later Lady Islington), John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Lady Elcho and Lady Desborough – Ettie Desborough thought Adèle ‘top’ for elegance of any woman she had ever known.
Along with the Duchess of Sutherland, the Countess of Westmorland, the Countess of Lytton and the Countess of Warwick, Adèle was one of the so-called ‘Lovely Five’, and she was a favourite of the Prince of Wales, a friendship that continued when he became king. In 1905 there she was, in a house party arranged for the King, Queen and Princess Victoria at Chatsworth, that included the King of the Belgians, Arthur Balfour, the Marquis de Soveral, the Earl and Countess of Mar and Kellie, Lord and Lady Elcho, Evan Charteris, Consuelo Duchess of Manchester, Lord Montagu, Mr R. Cavendish MP, Lady Moyra Cavendish and the Earl and Countess de Grey, who wrote of it to her brother Mungo.
‘We had a very pleasant weekend at Chatsworth last week. The old King of the Belgians … made propositions to all the ladies, and even non-plussed Ettie who is pretty clever at warding off awkward requests! But he had no success with anyone. Hugo walked into his bedroom by mistake one evening, & said he was only made aware of what he had done by hearing a bitter groan of disappointment from the bed.’
Her own experience did not, however, encourage Adèle to help others up the social ladder. When her husband’s aunt by marriage, Lady Meux, the immensely rich widow of the brewer Sir Henry Meux (Lord Essex’s uncle), asked her for such help she refused to give it. As Valerie Reece, Lady Meux had been a bar girl – and possibly worse – before becoming a burlesque star. Sir Henry, heir to something like £3 million, doted on her and when he died she inherited everything he possessed, from two estates and wonderful jewellery to 15,000 acres of land.
Valerie Meux was a controversial figure, given to driving herself around London in a phaeton drawn by a pair of zebras. Never accepted by her husband’s family or by the social world in which they moved, she must have felt that now, bejewelled, independent and enormously rich, was her chance; and all she needed was the entrée. She begged Adèle to introduce her to polite society, saying that she would make Lord Essex her heir if she did so. But Adèle’s disapproval of the flamboyant widow was such that even this bribe failed to move her.
* * *
Chauncey Depew neatly summed up the reasons why Englishmen selected American wives: ‘I should say that the American girl has the advantage of her English sister in that she possesses all that the other lacks. This is due to the different methods in which the two girls are brought up …
‘The American girl comes along, prettier than her English sister, full of dash, snap and go, sprightly, dazzling, and audacious, and she is a revelation to the Englishman. She gives him more pleasure in one hour, at a dinner or a ball, than he thought the universe could produce in a whole lifetime. Speedily he comes to the conclusion that he must marry her or die. As a rule he belongs to an old and historic family, is well educated, travelled, and polished, but poor. He knows nothing of business, and to support his estate requires an increased income. The American girl whom he gets acquainted with has that income, so in marrying her he goes to heaven and gets – the earth.’