One of the most spectacular entries into New York society was that of the Wilsons. They were exactly the sort of people that the Knickerbockers wanted to keep out, with their new money, no particular pretensions to family background, and the added drawback that Richard Wilson was the subject of unpleasant rumour. But as so often, success in husband-hunting allowed them to leapfrog their way into the heart of New York society, so much so that a favourite joke of the time was: ‘Why did the Diamond Match Company fail?’ ‘Because Mrs Richard T. Wilson beat them at making matches.’
The father of the ‘marrying Wilsons’ was Richard Thornton Wilson, born in Habersham County, Georgia, in about 1829. The son of a poor Scottish tanner and shoemaker, the twenty-year-old Richard left home after the death of his father with forty dollars in gold and a mule. He first found work as a clerk in a store, then became a travelling salesman. One evening, exhausted by life on the road, he fell asleep on the doorstep of a store belonging to a man called Ebenezer Johnston, the owner of a 700-acre estate and a number of slaves. Ebenezer took him on and was soon impressed by his ability and hard work, and in 1852 Richard married Ebenezer’s eldest daughter Melissa. Their children, May, Orme, Belle, Richard and Grace, were born respectively in 1855, 1860, 1864, 1866 and 1871.
Richard, at six foot six, was a handsome giant of a man with plenty of Southern charm who was said to be the model for Rhett Butler, the glamorous Southern black sheep of a hero in Gone with the Wind. Hard work, enterprise, an unswerving determination to succeed and perfect manners took him up the ladder until, during the Civil War, he was appointed Commissary General of the Confederate Army by Jefferson Davis, where his fortune was said to have begun by selling cotton blankets to the Confederate Army while charging them for wool.
At the time England’s sympathies lay with the South, thanks largely to the lucrative cotton trade they shared, so to England Richard moved in 1864, accompanied by his family, chiefly as an agent to dispose of the South’s cotton crop – though some said to sell Confederate supplies to foreign governments. When the Civil War ended he brought his family back to America, this time to the Union, along with a fortune of $500,000. Always with an eye to the main chance, he began buying up derelict railways in the devastated South to refurbish or sell later at a large profit, amassing another fortune in doing so.
The Wilsons settled in a brownstone house at 812 Fifth Avenue, between what is now 63rd and 64th Street – then very much the unfashionable part of Fifth Avenue, with much of the land north of 59th Street still a rocky, hilly area dotted with wooden farmhouses and squatter settlements. Later they moved into the much grander house of the disgraced Tammany Hall supremo, Boss Tweed,1 on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, a much smarter neighbourhood.
Here, despite all Melissa’s efforts, the family remained outside the charmed circle of society until the eldest Wilson daughter, May, struck gold, in the form of Ogden Goelet. Ogden, although a scion of one of the oldest New York families, lacked confidence: he was serious-minded, shortish, not very rich, and shy. When he was sent to recuperate from a long illness in a small New England town, Mrs Wilson seized her opportunity. Cannily, she rented a nearby house and got her daughters to read to him during his long hours of enforced idleness.
To this young man with little faith in his attraction to women, May’s warmth and generous open-heartedness must have had an irresistible appeal. Natural flirtatiousness – Southern belles were accustomed to have admirers competing with each other for their favours – only added to the allure, and May was clearly not afraid to step up this attitude until it would almost seem that she was making most of the running.
‘I never liked you so well, or wished more to be with you, than last night,’ she wrote, ‘and yet you left me – heedless of my entreaties, left me with a man too prone to say sweet nothings, which some think mean so much, or so little.
‘I am convinced you have no jealousy – I shall really be awfully disappointed if I do not see you tomorrow, and prefer of course seeing you in the evening. Forget the other girl and I will do the same with the other man.’
He did, and they married in 1877; to make their union even sweeter, Richard settled $75,000 on the young couple. Then, unexpectedly, Ogden’s rich but parsimonious uncle died, leaving his nephew $25 million. Soon afterwards, Ogden’s father died – and also left Ogden $25 million. Ogden and May, already socially secure, were now among the richest in their set.
Five years later May’s brother Orme achieved an even more stunning coup, marrying into the most exclusive of all the New York families. His bride was Caroline (Carrie) Schermerhorn Astor, the youngest daughter of William Backhouse Astor and his wife, the Mrs Astor. Carrie, a slender – she had an enviable twenty-two-inch waist – sweet-natured girl with a wistful, heart-shaped face that many thought plain, could be said to have been born into the purple; and certainly her mother, though dominating, treated her like a little princess. Carrie and Orme had known each other since both had attended the same New York children’s dancing class and Carrie had fallen in love with him when she was sixteen, to the horror of her mother, who regarded the Wilson family as outside those ‘one knew’ socially, an attitude enhanced by her awareness of Richard Wilson’s shady past. She made it clear to Carrie that such a match was out of the question.
Carrie, like so many girls completely subservient to their mothers, did not openly revolt. But her misery was such that she became pale, depressed and ill. Although uncalculated, this was the best thing she could have done. Mrs Astor, although socially implacable, was a kind-hearted mother who adored her daughter. She became worried and unhappy at seeing Carrie so wretched, and one day – or so she told her friends – seeing the young couple emerge from church hand in hand, thought they seemed so much in love that ‘I felt I could not stand in the way of their happiness any longer’. She did, however, make them wait for two or three years, considered nothing unusual at a time when long engagements were the fashion; partly, perhaps, to ensure that the feelings of her daughter, still so young, had not changed.
It was not until 1884, when Orme was twenty-four and Carrie twenty-three, that they were finally married in the Astor mansion, even its chandeliers hung with pink roses and not a society ‘name’ missing from the thousand-odd guests seated in the house’s art gallery. The Astors had insisted on Richard Wilson putting up $500,000 as a settlement, at that moment a severe strain on the family’s finances, but as the strength of the Wilson clan was that they all worked towards the common good, this hefty price was considered well worth it in terms of the step up it gave them. Carrie’s father gave her what was described as a ‘full set of diamond jewels’ and threw in ‘a handsome residence on Fifth-avenue’. Richard Wilson completely furnished the new house, then added ‘a full table service of silver knives, forks, and spoons’.
Now, the Wilsons were connected through marriage to two of the most important, respected, socially impeccable and richest families in New York. It was the start of the legend of the ‘marrying Wilsons’.
* * *
As she grew up, the youngest Wilson, Grace, slim and honey-blonde with fine, aristocratic features, became a favourite of Mrs Astor. Thirteen at the time of her brother’s wedding, she was developing into a beauty, and, what was probably more important to this doyenne of society, her demeanour was one of distinction and refinement – in fact, a worthy addition to the Astor family circle. When a debutante she was even, honour of honours, asked by Mrs Astor to lead a cotillion at her exclusive annual ball. This approval would stand Grace in good stead in years to come.
Grace was always close to her sister May and May’s husband Ogden, most of whose fortune came from real estate. The Goelets lived at 608 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 49th Street, where their two children, Mary (May) and Robert (Bobby), were born in 1878 and 1881 respectively. May, who like Grace had spent many summers in Europe, collected paintings; Ogden joined the Fine Arts Society and was one of the founder members who bought shares in the Metropolitan Opera House.
The only small cloud on the horizon was Ogden’s health: his physique was frail and he suffered from chronic asthma. Like many of his peers, he was a keen yachtsman – also, his asthma was less troublesome at sea – and owned a superb and beautiful schooner, The Norseman, built for him and launched in 1881.
Gradually both Goelets became disenchanted with the society into which they had the unquestioned right of entrée. The competitive splashing around of money in an attempt to upgrade status or popularity had become insufferable to them, and they set off to cruise round Europe in The Norseman with their children, now seven and five, governess and tutor. They were joined the following year by the second Wilson daughter, May’s sister Belle, on the lookout for a husband of the right sort. She would soon find one.
When the party arrived at Cowes for the regatta that August, the spectacular beauty of The Norseman at once caught the eye of the yacht-loving Prince of Wales. He invited himself on board for a closer look and stayed to tea, returning twice that week, once for a luncheon party in his honour and again for tea.
With the Prince of Wales’s open interest in The Norseman and its passengers, it was not long before the Goelets had a circle of acquaintances – and Belle had found her man. On the yacht of the 14th Earl of Pembroke, she met his diplomat younger brother Michael (Mungo) Herbert and the two fell in love. The wedding in 1888 of Mungo and Belle saw the start of a successful and happy marriage – and another triumph for the Wilson family, this time one that took them into the heart of the British aristocracy. His family welcomed her warmly, his sister Lady de Grey writing to Belle that: ‘Now 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.’
As did all in their exclusive social set, the Goelets were accustomed to spend summer weeks in Newport, where Ogden Goelet commissioned Ochre Court, second only to The Breakers in size and built at a cost of $4.5 million in 1892. Like the next two largest houses, Belcourt Castle and Marble House, it was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. In this château-like building of grey granite with its sheet-copper roof, gilded magnificence and ballroom that would hold 1,000, crowded near other grand mansions, the family spent eight summer weeks, looked after by twenty-seven house servants, eight coachmen and grooms and twelve gardeners. But May soon tired of the running of such a large establishment, and Ogden was becoming increasingly unwell, needing a nurse’s care and living mainly on hothouse grapes.
So the Goelets turned again to the sea, leasing a large steam yacht, The White Ladye, from Lily Langtry (the former favourite of the Prince of Wales who had, by 1881, become an actress) and set off in her for the winter season of 1895–6. Also on board was the dazzling Grace, at twenty-five the youngest of the ‘marrying Wilsons’ sisters. It was a happy family party, only shadowed by Ogden’s steadily declining health.
Grace Wilson was beautiful, distinguished-looking and extremely well educated: she spoke flawless French and good German, she knew all the great operas and she was used to the sophisticated, cosmopolitan life of European capitals as she had spent most summers abroad since the age of eleven. She had been engaged to Cecil Baring, the son of Lord Revelstoke, who had lost most of his fortune in the crash of 1893. Some said that Lord Revelstoke demanded such a high dowry that Richard Wilson had refused.
By 1895 she had a new admirer, the shy, twenty-two-year-old ‘Neily’ Vanderbilt (Cornelius Vanderbilt III), the eldest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Neily was just under six foot tall and extremely good-looking, with square-cut features, thick, curly brown hair and dark blue eyes. He was shy and hardworking, but had recurrent bouts of rheumatism. In 1892, his older brother Bill had died of typhoid at the age of twenty, while the two were sharing a room together at Yale. In 1893 Neily had been sent on a world cruise in a chartered yacht – packed with fresh produce from the family farms in Rhode Island – to gain some European polish.
He returned much fitter, aged twenty-one, in time for his sister Gertrude’s coming-out ball in Newport in the summer of 1895. It was a lavish affair: the favours – gold cigarette cases and fans – distributed to all the guests cost $10,000. For the ball the twenty-four-year-old Grace, surrounded by admirers, looked her best in a deeply décolletée white chiffon dress embroidered with pearls; round her waist was a chain of diamonds from which hung a small ivory fan. Neily was dazzled, and it showed; to anyone watching, it was obvious that he was hopelessly in love with Grace – and overnight the Vanderbilts began to disapprove of her.
She was older than their son, too sophisticated, and she had perhaps been too open in her search for a wealthy husband who could raise her socially: one American onlooker, Jay Burden (later to marry Neily’s sister Gertrude), had written of Grace ‘raking the Solent for dukes’ when the Goelet yacht was at Cowes. One of her potential targets, or so the Vanderbilts believed, had been Neily’s older brother Bill, to whom it was said she had been secretly engaged, and there was also the broken Baring engagement. In short, the Vanderbilt clan looked on Grace as an adventuress, out for what she could get and determined above all to make a rich marriage.
Sometime in the autumn of 1895, Neily’s mother Alice paid a social call on Mrs Wilson, during which she enquired casually if the family were remaining in New York for the winter or, as many did, going abroad. When she heard that they were staying, Neily was quickly despatched on a European holiday. When the Wilsons learnt about this, they were so angered that Grace, too, was sent to Europe where, inevitably, the couple met.
‘There is nothing the girl would not do,’ wrote Gertrude in her diary, claiming that Grace was at least twenty-seven and had ‘unbounded experience. Been engaged several times. Tried hard to marry a rich man. Ran after Jack Astor to such an extent that all New York talked about it. Is so diplomatic that even the men are deadly afraid of her. There is nothing she would stop at.’
To her brother she wrote a frantic plea: ‘Please, please don’t announce your engagement now. You may think because I do not say much that I don’t really care for you. You may think too that I am as narrow as the others and that I don’t understand your point of view. That is not so. I care so much for you that if I were not absolutely sure that you would not be happy I would take your side against the family. I am not narrow and I know how hard your position is and how desperate you feel, but you are not going to do yourself any good by announcing it, and you certainly are going to do Miss Wilson harm. A man may say he does not care what the world says but for a girl it is different – a slight is a hard thing to stand and you will find it is so when it places someone you care for in an awkward position.
‘When you are sure of their feelings it is not such a hard thing to wait. You are positive you won’t change, you are positive she won’t change, why can’t you wait? You will say your position is a hard one. Yes but not as hard as it will be if you announce this engagement. What could be my object in saying all this if I did not care for you. The family have not asked me to speak to you.
‘It’s four years ago tonight you came to New York and found Willie dying. He died and you instead of taking his place … what are you about to do?’
Grace’s sister Belle wrote from Constantinople to her: ‘I am still waiting, every nerve on edge, for further developments … I feel, with your love for Neily and his undoubted and much-tried affection for you, things must some day be right. But the misery you have been through!’
Battle ranks had been drawn up. The Vanderbilts used every weapon in their arsenal to part the two; Neily’s father Cornelius II threatened to disinherit him, while the scandal of this feud within the world’s wealthiest family swirled outwards through friends and acquaintances to anyone who had heard of them – even the Prince of Wales, who knew Grace, asked to be kept informed of developments. When, in June 1896, Richard Wilson announced that the couple were to be married that month, Cornelius II responded with: ‘The engagement of Cornelius Vanderbilt Jnr to Miss Wilson is against his father’s expressed wishes.’
So sharply divided was New York society on the question that only a third of those invited to the wedding accepted, the rest fearing the displeasure of the powerful Vanderbilt family. The matter was solved when, the day before the proposed wedding, a statement was issued by Neily’s father that his son was confined to bed suffering from rheumatism and the wedding was cancelled.
It provoked the comment from one woman of their circle to another: ‘I wager you that as soon as that boy is well enough he’ll be whisked off to Newport and there’ll be no match this summer at least.’ To which her friend replied: ‘My dear, you do not know the Wilsons.’
The last speaker was right. When Neily, who had been ill, learnt what his father had said, there was a violent confrontation – Neily did not intend to abandon Grace. Shortly after this, Cornelius II collapsed with a stroke so severe that he was confined to a wheelchair unable to speak, a catastrophe blamed on Neily by his family. ‘He knows it is his behaviour that gave Papa his stroke,’ wrote Gertrude in her diary. After this she, like almost all his family, cut him off completely.
Neily stuck to his word. He and Grace were married in a small and simple ceremony at her parents’ house in August 1896. Wisely, after it they left to spend some months abroad. Once there, his ill-health surfaced again.
Without Vanderbilt backing, the newlyweds had to economise – a relative term, as Grace’s father gave her a trust fund of half a million dollars that brought in an income of $25,000 a year (a sum she was used to spending on clothes alone). Neily, who had written to his father asking if he could see him in the hope of healing the breach, was flatly turned down. Neither Grace nor Neily could understand the reason for his family’s disapproval of Grace: if Neily’s mother had had any question in her mind concerning Grace, why had she invited this beautiful and well-behaved debutante time and again to her balls and dinners when she had three (then) unmarried sons in the house? But when Cornelius Vanderbilt II had his stroke, it was immediately put down by the Vanderbilt family to Neily’s obduracy in marrying Grace.
The rift in the Vanderbilt family seemed impossible to overcome. When Cornelius Vanderbilt II died in 1899, in a will dated the day originally planned for Neily and Grace’s marriage, he left the major part of his fortune – $42 million – to his second son, Alfred, while Neily, his erstwhile heir, was left a mere $500,000 and the income from $1 million in trust funds. Alfred settled $6 million on Neily (largely in order to avoid any potential litigation over the will), but the rupture remained: when they met, the brothers did not speak but only nodded at each other. Even Grace’s first child did not bring them closer, Neily’s mother Alice referring to it as ‘that Wilson baby’. None of the Vanderbilts attended the baby boy’s christening.
* * *
Meanwhile, at the end of 1896 Ogden Goelet took delivery of yet another beautiful new yacht, The Mayflower, designed in Glasgow by the man who had built the Prince of Wales’s racing yacht, Britannia. The following year the Goelets rented Wimborne House in Arlington Street for their daughter May’s first London season. Petite and dark, with an excellent figure, she had grown into a charming and accomplished young woman who could read and write in several languages and whose dusting of European sophistication did not hide her youthful high spirits and the warmth of her nature – her family relationships had all been close and loving. She viewed the coming season, during which the family friendship formed with the Prince of Wales would stand her in good stead, with excitement.
‘On Sunday the Prince dined with us,’ she wrote on 1 June 1897, ‘and I’m happy to say it all went off most successfully – you have no idea of what a struggle it was though – Everyone we could think of to ask was going out of town, either to Waddesdon or some other Rothschild’s … After dinner we had Melba to sing and the Prince was simply delighted. I have rarely seen him in such good spirits. He let everyone go at a quarter to one and he stayed till 1:15. He told Mamma it had all been most beautifully done and I don’t think he could have been bored otherwise he would never have stayed so late.’
The family’s entry into the inner circle of British society was made even clearer by the invitation to the most exclusive event of 1897, the Duchess of Devonshire’s Jubilee Ball on 2 July – an invitation to which confirmed that you were absolutely among the chosen. It was fancy-dress or, as the Duchess decreed, ‘allegorical or historical costume before 1815’, with five ‘courts’ that individuals could join. May went as Scheherazade, the Arabian Nights storyteller, in a Worth gown of golden gauze embroidered with precious stones and a flower-bedecked headdress topped with a large white ostrich plume.
Devonshire House, which stood between Stratton Street and Berkeley Street, facing on to Piccadilly, with views over Green Park, had a large courtyard in front so that carriages could arrive and depart quickly, avoiding congestion. Across the stone floor of the pillared entrance hall glass doors led to the inner hall, from which a curving marble staircase with a crystal handrail led up to the first floor. Here yellow and white silk brocade covered the walls, the gilded furniture was upholstered in dark blue, the light from the myriad candles in the brilliant crystal chandeliers gleamed off heavy polished mahogany doors, huge mirrors and superb paintings. For the party, the large garden was lit by 12,000 lamps and supper was in a marquee carpeted in crimson, with blue and gold walls hung with tapestries and mirrors.
The United States was well represented: nine other heiresses who had married into the nobility were there, from the Countess of Essex as Berenice Queen of Palestine, with a wonderful art nouveau crown shaped like a peacock’s tail, to Mrs Arthur Paget (née Minnie Stevens) as Cleopatra in white and gold, so ablaze with diamonds, rubies and emeralds that when she entered people gasped in astonishment. Jewels were everywhere – many of the 700 guests had their own jewels reset to match their costumes. The Duke of Marlborough’s Louis XV suit of pale gold velvet was thickly embroidered in silver, pearls and diamonds, all sewn on by hand, while his wife the slender Consuelo disguised her seven-month pregnancy in an eighteenth-century pale green satin gown garlanded with roses. Jennie Churchill, as the Empress Theodora, wore embroidered mauve satin by Worth.
Also there was the young Duke of Roxburghe, dressed as a Yeoman of the Guard, in a scarlet and gold tunic above scarlet breeches and stockings, with a white ruff emphasising his good-looking face. This 8th Duke, six foot four, the handsome eldest son of seven children, was called Kelso (the Earl of Kelso was one of the Roxburghe subsidiary titles) by his family and Bumble by his friends. With an estate of 60,418 acres bringing in over £50,000 a year, he was also rich.
But the man with whom May’s name became linked was another duke, Kim, as the son of Consuelo Yznaga the half-American 9th Duke of Manchester, who had followed May round the ballroom wherever possible. Then aged twenty – he had succeeded at fifteen – he had already established a reputation as a notorious spendthrift. In fact, he was following in some well-defined family footsteps: the previous two dukes had frittered away much of the family fortune and he was on the lookout for a wealthy bride. May, pretty, charming, hugely rich and petite – he himself was on the short side – seemed an ideal target. Consuelo, now forty-four and the widowed Duchess of Manchester, agreed and, whether or not the rumour was put about by them, it was soon believed in London that May was engaged to the profligate Duke.
To Ogden who, in common with his class and kind, had always avoided publicity, this bruiting-about of his daughter’s name in connection with a man of whom he thoroughly disapproved was intolerable. A denial by Kim, on which Ogden had insisted, did something to calm the outraged American headlines (‘England’s poorest Duke after our richest heiress!’), but Ogden, as always, felt safer at sea. The Goelets left Wimborne House and anchored at Cowes in the Mayflower for the August regatta.
They were only able to enjoy it for a few days. Ogden had been growing steadily worse and when, finally, his liver ceased to function he died, on 27 August, on his beloved yacht, his family clustered round him. ‘It was a tragic ending of one of the most sensational social successes ever made by an American in England,’ recorded one newspaper. ‘The Prince of Wales had been his guest at Cowes for the third time, and his American host had already made plans for other important social entertainments. Some of Mr Goelet’s friends think his daughter’s determination to marry the young Duke of Manchester may possibly have hastened the father’s end. He felt very strongly about it, but as was cabled at the time of the suit of the young English nobleman he was supposed to be favoured by Mrs Goelet.’ Unsurprisingly, perhaps – May Goelet was, after all, one of the ‘marrying Wilsons’.
Ogden’s body was transported back across the Atlantic in his yacht for the funeral service in Newport in September. He had left $10 million dollars to his wife and – where an English girl with a brother might have expected much the smaller sum – May and Bobby were treated equally. Each received $20 million, the only difference being that May’s was to be held in trust for her, gathering interest, until she reached twenty-five, when the whole sum would be hers absolutely.
When the Goelets returned to Europe May was a golden target for every man who felt a rich wife was one of life’s essentials. ‘How I should hate to be May Goelet,’ commented Daisy, Princess of Pless, ‘all those odious little Frenchmen and dozens of others crowding round her millions. An English duke does not crowd around – he merely accepts a millionairess.’
May, however, was a girl with plenty of emotional common sense. She had been brought up in a close and warm family environment and she had the example of a loving marriage before her in the shape of the two women to whom she was closest, her mother and her favourite aunt Belle. She wanted the same for herself and she was prepared to wait until she got it. Flattering though it might be to receive all these proposals, she was well aware that part of her attraction was her potential dowry.
‘I must give an account of my proposals,’ she wrote to her aunt Grace. ‘Well, first Lord Shaftesbury popped almost as soon as he returned to London. He came one afternoon. Mamma happened to leave the room for a few minutes and off he went – like a pistol. I told him it was quite ridiculous as he had only known me three weeks and he couldn’t possibly know his own mind.’ She added shrewdly that she knew nothing of him or his past.
The same letter brings a mention of the Duke of Roxburghe. ‘[He is] the man everyone says I am engaged to,’ wrote May. They met at a dinner party – ‘he never goes to balls’ – and the following night at another, given by May’s countrywoman Lady Curzon. ‘Such a nice dinner,’ though she added: ‘Lord Castlereagh took me in (the Londonderry boy) and we talked together afterwards so I didn’t have a chance of saying a word to the Duke.’
To a girl with her head as well screwed on as May, the twenty-four-year-old Charley Londonderry’s looks and charm were no threat:2 he was already married. Of the Duke, who had been commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards and served throughout the South African (Boer) War of 1899–1901, all she was able to observe was that he seemed shy and well read, with charming manners. But there was not then any striking of sparks nor, on the part of the Duke, the pursuit that May was used to.
Although May’s immense wealth meant that she would always be a matrimonial target, her friends had begun to feel that it was time she got married. She was twenty-five – that dread age which to the Victorians was the cusp between fresh young girlhood and old maid-dom – and most of those in her circle had been married for several years. Even the King told her that it was time to settle down and, indeed, tried to arrange a match for her with Captain George Holford, owner of Dorchester House on Park Lane and two estates in the country. For May, who had a keen sense of her priorities, this was not enough. ‘Unfortunately, the dear man has no title, though a very good position [he was the brother-in-law of Lord Grey] – and I am sure he would make a very good husband.’ To someone else, was the unspoken corollary.
For May knew exactly what she wanted. With her money and looks, only a duke would do. And within a year, during which she and Roxburghe gradually got to know one another better, she had got one. The Duke of Roxburghe was handsome, brave, a conscientious landlord and rich enough himself not to have pursued May for her money – though it was undoubtedly welcome. When, in July 1903, Mrs Goelet returned to New York, May, significantly, was left behind – but with her aunt Grace to chaperone her as they stayed at Claridge’s. Soon the Duke of Roxburghe arrived there too, and their families were told of their engagement. It was announced by the Dowager Duchess in Scotland and Mrs Goelet in Ochre House simultaneously, on 1 September. They were married in New York, the Duchess having first presented May with the family emeralds.
May brought with her to Floors Castle not only her magnificent $20 million dowry but some wonderful French furniture and a set of superb tapestries. Like May, they fitted perfectly into Floors. From the start, she enjoyed the panoply, and the grand treatment: when she and her husband returned from their honeymoon to his family seat on the Scottish Borders, they were greeted at Floors Castle by 100 torch-bearers and a band of pipers. She redecorated the castle in deluxe American style and settled down to a happy life growing carnations and doing good works among the villagers. The only problem was her failure to produce an heir. After ten childless years, the Duke and Duchess went to visit a specialist in Vienna, promising him £1,000 if he could help them conceive, and double that if the child was a boy. The doctor apparently did nothing more to earn his fee than advise the Duchess to give up sugar, but the Marquess of Bowmont was born a year later, in 1913. His birth was marked by a chain of bonfires along the Borders of Scotland, lit by jubilant tenants, relieved that the Goelet money would stay in the Roxburghe family.
* * *
Several years after his father had died in 1899, Neily managed to persuade his mother Alice to allow them to visit her with their son Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, and the breach was officially healed. But Grace had neither forgotten nor forgiven the behaviour of her husband’s parents, and when she finally greeted her mother-in-law, even her son realised that ‘her smile was as the flash of sun on a glacier’. Alice Vanderbilt and her husband were, after all, the only people who had ever tried to halt the advance of the ‘marrying Wilsons’.