What often came as a rude shock to the American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy was just how much of their lives they were expected to spend in the country, rather than in the exciting milieu in which they had first met their husbands.
For it was land that had supported the aristocracy for centuries, from which they drew their wealth and their great houses, on which they led their sporting lives – sporting lives that ruled the social calendar – and land on which lay the village or small market town that marked the nucleus of their greater or lesser fiefdom. In 1873 almost a quarter of England belonged to the great landowners.
Primogeniture had kept these large estates in one piece, aided by the process known as ‘strict settlement’ that prevented heirs from selling any part of the family estate to pay off debts. Thus the great country house was not so much the property and home of an individual and his family as the seat of a clan that he, as head of the whole family, held in trust for his descendants. It followed – another shock for American girls – that the wife was absolutely subservient to her husband. ‘After the Almighty, let your husband reign in your heart,’ was the advice given by her father to Lady Cecil Talbot when she married Lord Lothian. ‘You have no duty but to obey him. Watch his looks and fulfil all his wishes, conform yourself to his habits and inclinations.’
Unfortunately, these seldom took him in the direction of creature comforts for his new bride. To an American girl, accustomed to a nice warm house and plenty of hot water when she felt like a bath, the icy corridors and inadequate plumbing of the English country house often came as a hideous shock. Mildred Sherman, from Ohio, who became Lady Camoys, gave up going to dinner at country houses because she couldn’t withstand the temperatures in an evening dress (shawls and wraps were never worn at night).
Mary Leiter, on marrying Lord Curzon, was staggered to find that she was expected to bathe in a tin hip bath which was filled with hot water brought up by a housemaid from the boiler in the kitchen. Her sister Marguerite (‘Daisy’), who married the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, felt the same. She, however, a less yielding character than Mary, insisted on building her own bathroom amid the ancient splendour of Charlton Park, the house built for her husband’s ancestor, the 1st Earl, in 1607, even bringing her own bath, a lavish affair with eight taps, from Chicago.
It was all so different from home. Before the Civil War, Americans had been as dirty as Europeans, but by the 1880s, middle-class city dwellers had begun getting water pumped into their houses. The first American bathrooms were largely found in hotel basements (plumbing then seldom extended to the first floor), catering for those who had journeyed across the vast distances of America and so were weary and travel-stained. Soon private houses followed, and by the time the great mansions of the Gilded Age were being built, bathrooms had become a necessity to everyone who could afford them.
This was far from the case in England. Although the most famous writer of the age, Charles Dickens, had an up-to-the-minute bathroom installed in 1851, in which he took a cold shower every morning (‘I do sincerely believe that it does me unspeakable service’), he was one of the very few with such an advanced approach. Most people were happy with a daily sponge bath, while in great houses a combination of apathy, disinclination and snobbishness fought successfully against modern plumbing: because the middle classes and nouveaux riches welcomed such things as gas, water closets and piped-in water, the upper classes tended to regard them as – well, middle-class and therefore to be avoided.
Then, too, for some time baths had a flavour of ill-repute. The famous courtesans and actresses – mistresses, in other words, of rich men – were known to spend long hours soaking themselves in their luxurious baths and then anointing their bodies with exotic preparations. And what for? was the unspoken question. When it became known that Cora Pearl and La Païva, celebrated belle époque courtesans in Paris, had respectively a magnificent bronze bath and a bathroom walled in onyx with a silver tub, both furnished with mysterious and delicious oils and unguents with which to prepare their bodies for further sensual delights, there could be only one answer.
So for many years the whole idea of a female removing all her clothes to enjoy bathing in warm, possibly scented (quelle horreur!) water had a frisson of forbidden erotic pleasure – many convent-educated girls were ordered to bathe in a shift to avoid the corrupting influence of nakedness. In country houses, however, the lack of bathrooms was due much more to a lethargic contentment with the status quo: there were plenty of servants to cart hot water up to bedrooms, so why bother to install expensive plumbing?
To come from New World steam heat and hot baths to the English equivalent was to experience an unpleasant surprise, although for many American girls the sense of isolation and culture shock was even worse. If a husband did not, or would not, entertain, they might find themselves stuck for weeks or months on end in a large house with few comforts and little to do except gaze at the rain. Life for them felt wretched, and most of them, with their huge dowries handed over to their husbands, could do little about it, a situation that must have accounted for a good many of the unhappier marriages.
A fortunate few, however, still had charge of their own money and thus, to a degree, of their lives. One of these was Anna Murphy, whose solution to boredom and unhappiness was constant travelling. ‘What sort of a life do I have to lead to induce me to return any sooner than I can help?’ she wrote to her baronet husband on one of her trips abroad.
Anna was one of the four daughters of Daniel Murphy and his wife Anna Geoghan. Daniel had emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine, or Great Starvation (1845–52). Arriving in New York, he had begun work on the transcontinental railway that offered employment to so many Irish labourers, working his way across America until he reached the village (as it then was) of San Francisco, where he opened a hardware store. Then, in 1848, came the Gold Rush, and with Murphy’s the only hardware store in town it was the place all the would-be miners went for equipment. Between January 1848 and December 1849, the population of San Francisco increased from 1,000 to 25,000 and Daniel Murphy’s business expanded exponentially. Within a few years he had made a fortune. But the Murphys, with their humble beginnings and ‘nouveau’ money, could not get into society. Mrs Murphy took a route by now beginning to be time-honoured: she took her daughters to Europe in search of husbands, preferably titled.
Charles Wolseley, the 9th baronet, born in 1846, had inherited his title when he was only eight. As a minor, he had been made a Ward in Chancery, and as such his mother was not permitted to go on living at Wolseley Hall, so she took her children abroad, where living was more economical. At eleven, he was brought back to England for formal education, living with his mother at the estate’s dower house, Park House.
He did not take to education. His response when she insisted that he go to Oxford University was that he would do so, but he would not study, would not take his degree and would leave when he was twenty-one. He did all three, and the parting words of the Dean of his college to him were: ‘I hope to hear anything good of you but I never expect to.’
When Charles attained his majority he had hoped to live at Wolseley Hall, but it needed so much refurbishing and repairing after neglect by its various tenants that when he had completed these he could no longer afford to live there. So he took himself off for long trips abroad, not even returning for his mother’s funeral in 1873. When he did return, he lived at Park House (the dower house), where his mother had lived, and spent the next five years working hard at enjoying himself. He shot, he hunted, he raced in point-to-points, and became one of the country’s first polo players.
When he lost money betting on races, he let Park House and went abroad again. On his return, he again found that the tenants of Wolseley Hall had let the place go and major repairs were needed. This time, the bill was £4,000 plus another £800 to build new stables. He turned to the solution found by others in his predicament – a pretty American heiress.
Charles had met the Murphys in San Francisco on one of his trips abroad, and now proposed to the prettiest daughter, Anna, with the agreement that her father would settle over $1 million on him. Unfortunately for Charles, after the wedding (in 1883) but before the money had been transferred, Mr Murphy died, and Anna’s siblings, feeling that too much of the estate was going to the Wolseleys, contested the will and had the Wolseley portion reduced. Even worse for Charles, it was settled on Anna rather than him.
At first Sir Charles and the new Lady Wolseley were happy, and two little boys were born. But then the familiar drawbacks of life in the English countryside became too much for someone like Anna, accustomed to the lively social scene of the European capitals. Financially independent and with the self-confidence that was her American birthright, she took matters into her own hands – and spent as little time in her new home as possible, largely through extended and highly expensive trips abroad.
By 1899 she was in India, enjoying herself taking photographs, moving around the country, asking her husband to send out some of her clothes and refusing to come home because she ‘hadn’t seen enough of India yet and didn’t have time to pack before the ship sailed’.
Relations between them had begun to deteriorate, so much so that she refused to return for her sons’ six-week school holidays, though she continued to sign her letters with the phrase ‘The Sweet Wife Wolseley’. But this did not stop her writing that April: ‘I cannot see why you wish to make it so great an affair my being away for the holidays instead of suggesting that you will try and fill my place towards the boys for this once … with only the past life to face on my return – for I can picture no other – little wonder that I tarry in doing so.’
When she did return, she complained of her husband’s indifference, saying that he was too cold, detached, inattentive and unsympathetic (‘I don’t believe you have once made a kind personal reference to me since I left in one of your letters, as to whether I was well, enjoying myself, or anything about me’), though she hoped the American flag was still flying at Wolseley Hall on the Fourth of July.
As for the wealth that had been supposed to rescue the Wolseley fortunes, this was still firmly in Anna’s grasp. Although she sent her husband an allowance to keep up the estate for their elder son Edric, Charles found this inadequate and sold off a few pictures to supplement his income, upon which Anna promptly cut the allowance by half. By now their marriage had become a misery, with Anna’s letters bristling with hostility; any hotel room on earth, she assured him, was better than a night under the same roof as him. To survive, Charles sold more and more until, finally, almost everything had gone and, broken and wretched, he was forced to leave the Hall.
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In nineteenth-century Britain, politics and land were inextricably mingled: almost three-quarters of the Commons represented landed interests, and so did nearly all the House of Lords, an aristocracy so small that it was almost tribal, with its own nicknames, jokes and expressions. In those old Whig families where the gulf between the two parties still remained, even certain words were differently pronounced. Little Whig children were taught to say ‘cawfee’ instead of coffee, ‘yaller’ instead of yellow, ‘cowcumber’ for cucumber, ‘napern’ for apron and ‘Orspital’ and ‘orficer’ for hospital and officer. To call a chimneypiece a mantelpiece, wrote Mabell Gore, the daughter of Viscount Sudley, ‘proclaimed a Tory of the deepest dye’.
It was also strictly hierarchical, with everyone knowing exactly where everyone stood. When Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895 he told her that there were just 200 families whose names and titles she must remember. Precedence was all-important, not just for seating but for the procession in to dinner: one of the four earls she was entertaining at her first big weekend house party reproved her on the second night because she had wrongly given one of the other three precedence over him.
The converse of this was that because gradations of rank were both accepted and well known, there was little jostling for position – competition took other forms – as everyone knew that no matter how hard she tried, a marchioness could never outrank a duchess. At the top, of course, was Queen Victoria, but, honour though it was to serve her, it could not have been called fun. Gloom, cold and formality were the salient characteristics of the court. There was little colour, with the Queen in the mourning she always wore after the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, the conversation frequently of funerals and epitaphs, in which Victoria was keenly interested and, for the last twenty years of her reign, dinner parties conducted in almost total silence. Balmoral, always freezing-cold – the Queen detested fires – was even more hideous for those unlucky enough to be invited. ‘We just exist from meal to meal and do our best to kill time,’ wrote one of her ladies-in-waiting, Marie Adeane, in 1890. It was not surprising that smart society revolved round the pleasure-loving, genial Prince of Wales.
* * *
Another surprise for American brides was the discovery that politics was generally part of daily life – discussed over the dinner table, written about in letters. (‘I cannot help thinking you are quite in the wrong when you say so decidedly “Drop the Education Bill”,’ wrote one wife to her husband before going on to say, ‘in less than a week, my darling, we shall be together once more…’) Spending afternoons in the Strangers’ Gallery to listen to important debates or those in which a brother or husband was involved was a recognised entertainment, while the great hostesses were also political enablers.
‘Cyril Flower asked us to dine with him at the House of Commons, which we did in the evening,’ wrote Mary Theresa Leiter when she and her daughter Mary visited London. ‘The guests were Lord and Lady Rayleigh (she is sister of Arthur Balfour), Mr George Wyndham, Mr G. Curzon, St John Brodrick and Lady Hilda his wife, H. H. Asquith, Princesse de Wagram, Mary and I. The dinner was a brilliant one and all were MPs except of course Lord Rayleigh. After dinner we went to Mr Brodrick’s Committee Room, where we took our coffee, when all the members were summoned for a Division.’
This intermingling of social life and politics in a way then unknown in America was not merely because the simple geographical reason of lesser distance allowed peers and other landowners to come up to London for parliamentary terms, staying in their own or rented town houses; more that in England ‘the ruling class’ was the ruling class; and it was a matter of hereditary custom that they should be so. As late as 1865 a mere sixty families supplied one third of the House of Lords and one third of the House of Commons, thus one third of the ruling body of an empire that comprised a quarter of the world’s population.
In America, by contrast, a large proportion of the ‘movers and shakers’ were busy opening up the prairies, building railways and establishing mining, stockbroking and real estate businesses anywhere from California to Connecticut – in other words, focusing on the expansion of the country’s wealth and economy – while politics per se took place in Washington.
Politics was in fact the ruling social passion of many of the upper-class English. Statesmen met each other at the houses of the leading hostesses, often arriving at a private consensus that would later be ratified in Parliament – and probably to be watched from the gallery that afternoon by the same women at whose houses they had so recently dined.
Once the season was over, they were to be found at carefully arranged country-house parties, where instead of confidential discussions over cigars there were strolls in the shrubbery well away from listening ears; or meetings in a quiet library. Nor did the gossip-writers in England concern themselves with private house parties, so that it was possible for political opponents or ambassadors from arguing countries to have friendly discussions in an atmosphere of privacy and luxury.
Autumn was the best time for these country-house weekends – known then as Saturdays to Mondays (because as in law a ‘gentleman’ was ‘a man who has no occupation’, the word ‘weekend’ implied that weekdays were spent earning a living). There was still late-summer sun, the hunting and shooting seasons had not yet started, debutantes, now ‘out’, could be asked to leaven the mix, Parliament did not go back until after Christmas – and after the exhaustions of the season, rest in the country was welcome. Besides, there would be plenty of gossip over what had gone on during the balls and dances and close proximities of those three months of gruelling late nights – who had been seen with whom, who had said what to whom, who had got engaged and who hadn’t.
Such weekends were, of course, ostensibly nothing to do with politics but all about enjoyment of the company of interesting or like-minded people. Often they were all from the same small set, but as the century drew on, as well as the usual aristocratic contingent there might be a diplomat, one or two well-known beauties, a painter, a writer and a musician, who would entertain the company after dinner.
The hidden agenda, though, was frequently the facilitating or furthering of romances and love affairs. With restaurants largely out of bounds to respectable women – and hotels even more so – there would have been few chances to meet in London but, during a country weekend, riding or walks together or a disappearance for a pre-dinner stroll in the shrubbery were easily manageable.
Assignations were discreetly arranged; any touching in public was taboo, but a man might show his interest in a woman by writing a note that his valet would give to her maid to put on her breakfast tray, perhaps suggesting a walk together before lunch or, if it was a shooting party, that she should stand with him at his ‘peg’. Labels with the occupant’s name on them slotted into brass holders on bedroom doors not only stopped anyone getting lost in a large, strange house but allowed illicit visits during the night (‘children of the mist’ was one name for a child sired by someone not the husband).
‘For a winter visit you arrived about five o’clock,’ wrote the novelist Elinor Glyn of staying with the Prince’s favourite, Lady Warwick. ‘The entrance hall where you left your furs had trophy heads round it, as had every other hall in this kind of house at that time, because all proper Englishmen (who could afford it) went big-game shooting all over the world, and brought back the heads of every sort of strange animal to adorn their stately houses.’
You would then be taken into the saloon, where your hostess and any other lady guests were to be found. ‘They would be wearing tea gowns, of velvet or satin brocade, trimmed with sable,’ recalled Elinor. ‘They usually had V-necks and elbow-length sleeves. They would be enjoying a substantial tea – muffins, crumpets, cakes, scones with honey or jam and Devonshire cream instead of, as formerly, only slices of thin bread and butter.’
Tea would be removed by footmen. In a grand house, these might be chosen for their matching heights – Lady Warwick’s were all six foot – and good looks. The hostess would then take the ladies to their bedrooms, ‘made luxurious with sofas heaped with soft down cushions, stands loaded with the newest books near them, white bear hearthrugs, shaded lamps, silk or tapestry hangings, writing tables with pens, paper and stamps’. Behind a screen, tipped against the wall, was a huge, painted tin tub, to be filled with hot water brought up by housemaids every morning. A fire would already have been lit.
Most people arrived by train, often with several changes en route and always accompanied by a mountain of luggage – hatboxes, trunks containing numerous changes of clothing swathed in tissue paper, guns, shooting sticks, field glasses or fishing rods if for a sporting weekend, as well as personal miscellanea. ‘My mother had been born in the era when you took sketching materials, and a great many heavy London Library books, as well as clothes,’ wrote Lady Tweedsmuir. ‘She usually also had an embroidery frame and, as she was often studying a language, primers were added to everything else.’ Once the luggage wagon had arrived – guests went by the faster brougham – trunks would be unpacked by the lady’s maid and valet brought by the couple, and clothes hung up on hooks (coat-hangers had not yet been invented).
For breakfast women wore simple morning frocks, changing into slightly more elaborate dresses for luncheon or, if they were going out for a shooting lunch, tweed coats and skirts, followed, in the late afternoon, by a tea gown – the men might change into velvet smoking suits – and, finally, into full fig for dinner. Some houses provided men with buttonholes and ladies with sprays of gardenias or orchids; most had freezing passages along which women in their décolletée evening dresses had to scurry.
On the first night, guests went in to dinner according to rank, with each man ‘taking in’ (i.e. offering his arm to) a woman. After dinner the new game of bridge1 might be played, after which every guest would take a silver candlestick from a tray in the hall and carry it up to his or her room where maid or valet would help them to undress.
As no one could be seen in the same outfit twice, this meant ten or more for a weekend, each with its appropriate accessories – gloves, belts, scarves, wraps, fans and underwear – corsets, shifts and flounced, frilled, lace-trimmed petticoats and jewellery (diamonds to be worn only at night). If royalty were there, this meant tiaras. No one wore make-up.
Life in these houses ran to a series of unwritten rules. The large staff of servants needed for this meant a complex interdependence between family and staff. In a great house, the number of servants was a correlation between how many were required to do its work and how many the owner could afford, the latter in order to display his proper standing. A ratio of three or four servants to each member of the family was quite normal. At Eaton Hall, the Duke of Westminster had fifty indoor servants and forty gardeners, while Edwin Lee,2 second footman to the Honourable Frederick George Wynn, at Glynliven Park, Caernarvonshire, recalled: ‘Mr Wynn was a bachelor of some sixty years, living alone, entertaining rarely yet keeping a full establishment [of fifty-one servants) … All these people to look after one gentleman.’
Major-domos would remove yesterday’s blotting paper from bedroom blotters before curious housemaids had a chance to hold it up to the mirror and perhaps read a love note, a valet would shave his master, iron his shoelaces and could double as a loader in a shooting party, log boys watched an hourglass to know when to run and refill log baskets in the family’s rooms, lamp boys kept wicks trimmed and lamps filled, and there might be a night soil man or a spider boy, who had a bunch of feathers tied to a long stick for knocking high-up spiders’ webs to the ground.
Followers were generally forbidden and fraternising with someone from the opposite sex within the house meant instant dismissal. ‘In Paris we had a housemaid who was a most charming and delightful girl, and she had a child by one of the footmen in the house,’ wrote Lady Emily Lytton in October 1892 to her confidant the Rev. Whitwell Elwin. ‘Of course the poor girl was sent away, and she went to a wretched lodging in London, where her child was born, and she died, which was the best thing that could happen to her, poor thing.’
It took an American girl, as Lady Grantley, to ignore this brutal policy. ‘She created what I believe was a world’s precedent for the time, in forgiving and reinstating a kitchen maid who had got into trouble,’ wrote her son, the 6th Lord Grantley.
The house itself was divided up in a way that roughly reflected the different lifestyles of its master and mistress – library, dining room, smoking room and billiards room were largely masculine areas, women ruled the drawing room, music room and boudoir, that small private sitting room, decorated in a style that was soft, luxurious and inviting, in which the lady of the house could talk freely to her intimate women friends. This separation also meant that a listless or unhappy marriage could be kept going or made bearable. Lord and Lady Howard, for instance, separated but continued to occupy the same house.
Divorce was virtually unthinkable: the husband was entitled to keep not only the children – whom, if the wife had committed adultery, she could be prevented from seeing because of her moral turpitude – but also all the money and property she had brought to the marriage, so that a divorced woman was both ostracised and penniless.3
While the owner of the great house met his agent, saw to the management of the estate or went out shooting, his womenfolk were kept busy. His wife ran the house, conferring with housekeeper and cook over bedrooms and menus for weekend house parties and, with her daughters, took food, medicine and clothing to the poor or sick of the parish. Sometimes she conducted Bible readings as well as organising garden parties for charity and Christmas parties for tenants, servants and families. In some houses there were annual servants’ balls, which were extremely popular.
In England women, especially those in the upper classes, were second-class citizens. Sylvia Brett, Lord Esher’s daughter, knew from early childhood that ‘women were only brought into the world to become the slaves of men. Every morning it was our duty to lace up our brothers’ boots.’ And, as the anonymous author of Good Form (1888), wrote, ‘they are brought up to feel that their first duty in life is to get out of the way of their brothers as soon as they possibly can, and marriage is the only possible means within their reach’.
In other words, unlike the mansions of Fifth Avenue or the ‘cottages’ of Newport, English stately homes were not thought of as impressive backdrops for beautifully gowned women determined to impress with their wealth and social status, but run as the man who owned them thought fit.
The only person of whom the head of the house was sometimes afraid was his mother. It was the era when the rule of the dowager was supreme. ‘Widowed mothers exacted obedience from sons and daughters, no matter what their age,’ wrote Mabell Gore, who became the Countess of Airlie. As for the daughters, their whole upbringing was directed towards finding a husband (of their own class, almost needless to say). Marriage was the only alternative to remaining at home under parental authority, and later being forced out, on the father’s death, to dependence on others or a meagre allowance. To this end, accomplishments rather than education were necessary: they learnt French, music, dancing, sketching, deportment, needlework (useful in the long winter evenings) and, perhaps most important of all, how a great house was run. As their social intercourse was limited to those houses considered suitable within reach of the carriage horses, this often meant a fairly isolated childhood and adolescence, largely confined to the house and its gardens. In the year or two before coming out, they might appear at luncheon but were not expected to say anything more than yes or no. It was something no American girl would have stood for.