The Husband Hunters Read online

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  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Section One

  Viscount and Viscountess Mandeville (Bridgeman)

  Consuelo Vanderbilt (Bridgeman)

  Fifth Avenue, New York City (Bridgeman)

  Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s New York mansion (Library of Congress)

  William K. Vanderbilt (Library of Congress)

  Oliver Belmont (Getty)

  Alva Vanderbilt (Library of Congress)

  Alva Belmont (Bridgeman)

  The Marble House, Newport (Alamy)

  The Breakers, Newport (Alamy)

  Tennis game at Casino, Newport (Bridgeman)

  Newport bather (Alamy)

  William K. Vanderbilt II, Harold Vanderbilt and Harry Lehr (Bridgeman)

  Newport harbour (Bridgeman)

  A yacht race, Newport (Bridgeman)

  Mrs Jerome and her three daughters (Bridgeman)

  Jennie Jerome (Mary Evans)

  Randolph Churchill (Getty)

  Jennie Churchill with her two sons (Getty)

  May Goelet and the Duke of Roxburghe (Mary Evans)

  May Goelet’s trunks and dress baskets (Mary Evans)

  Section Two

  Cartoon of Ward McAllister (Getty)

  Grace Wilson (Library of Congress)

  Adèle Beach Grant (Bridgeman)

  Mrs Bradley-Martin (Bridgeman)

  Cornelia, Countess of Craven (Alamy)

  The Bradley-Martins (Rick Hutto)

  No. 4 Chesterfield Gardens (Rick Hutto)

  Anna Gould and Count ‘Boni’ de Castellane (Bridgeman)

  Empress Eugénie (Alamy)

  The Angouleme rubies (Private collection)

  Maud Burke (Library of Congress)

  Mrs Stuyvesant Fish (Getty)

  Broad Street and Wall Street, New York City (Bridgeman)

  Tennie Claflin (Library of Congress)

  Virginia Bonynge (Library of Congress)

  Minnie Paget (Library of Congress)

  Coaching in Central Park (Bridgeman)

  Knightsbridge, London (Alamy)

  Worth dress (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  Worth dress (Bridgeman)

  Empress Eugénie (Bridgeman)

  INTRODUCTION

  For me, one of Edith Wharton’s most intriguing novels is The Buccaneers – the story of four American girls, not in the ‘right set’ in New York, who come to England and marry into the peerage. ‘The St George girls were beautiful, and their parents rich, yet fashionable New York had rejected them,’ says Wharton in her book. ‘It was bitter to be left out of all the most exclusive entertainments, to have not a single invitation to Newport, to be unbidden to the Opera on the fashionable nights,’ thought the elder girl, Virginia St George; and still more did this ostracism rankle with her mother, desperate to see her daughters make good matches.

  So when the suggestion was made of a London season, with the aid of one or two good contacts, it was eagerly taken up by Mrs St George. It was not long before her daughters’ looks, beautiful clothes, confident American naturalness and sense of fun had landed them their titled catches.

  Wharton, herself born into this ‘right set’, based her novels on what she saw around her, from personalities to places, from clothes to customs, so that they are virtually a biography of the times. In the period between 1870 and 1914 – Wharton was twenty in 1880 – 454 American girls married titled Europeans. One hundred were to British aristocrats – sixty to eldest sons, forty to younger sons, six to dukes, with 1895 the peak year for such marriages. By any standards, this was a staggering number.

  It was a real invasion, and recognised as such. So well known was it that when Sir William Gordon-Cumming spotted Leonie Jerome, the youngest of the Jerome sisters, walking in Hyde Park on her first visit to London in 1882, he went up to her and said: ‘Over here husband-hunting?’ The year before, the Punch Almanack had featured a group of ‘New York Millionairesses’ about to start for Europe, shown studying ‘not Murray and Baedeker – oh dear no! – but Burke and Debrett’, making notes of all unmarried peers and bemoaning that photographs are not published as well as ages and titles. There was even a magazine to help them do this: Titled Americans was a New York quarterly, with a list of eligible single noblemen at the back.

  For me, the interesting thing was not so much that they made these marriages, as why. Why should so many of these young women troop across the Atlantic when there were plenty of good-looking and much wealthier young men in America (where males still outnumbered females)? The obvious answer, that it was a case of cash for coronets, is from many points of view too simplistic. And what were the social and economic factors behind these marriages that made such a lasting impact on British society?

  There was, on the face of it, no reason why American girls, spoilt and cosseted in their own country, should wish to spend the rest of their lives far from their families and the friends they had grown up with, plunging into marriages that surrounded them with strangers, reduced them immediately to the property of a man whose right to control their lives and money was unquestioned, and whose country was the embodiment of much that their background had taught them to disapprove of.

  After all, it was only just over a hundred years since the fiercely fought War of Independence that had created the United States and given birth to its Constitution. America had supposedly freed itself from the idea of hereditary aristocrats; the Republican credo of its citizens’ equality was trumpeted forth at every opportunity – often contrasted with the effeteness and decadence of these scions of the Old World – and yet here were its daughters turning eagerly towards them. It was the meeting of a whole set of diametrically opposed ethics.

  The first surprise to me was that ‘the husband-hunters’, as they quickly became known, were often the mothers rather than the daughters. Some girls, it is true, had a firm idea that they wanted to marry an English aristocrat, and led the way towards their potential target, but more often than not it was the mothers who took this decision.

  Some brought their daughters over to Europe in their early teens, sometimes because it was less embarrassing to say: ‘I’m educating my daughter in France,’ than ‘Mrs Astor hasn’t asked me to her ball,’ sometimes to put a gloss on them so that these girls would shine more brightly in the marriage market when they returned to New York, and sometimes to establish a foothold so that if New York turned its back on their daughter when she made her début, she could be taken back to Europe and then, with the right connections and enough money, filtered into English society where, it was hoped, she would make a brilliant match.

  Modern women might find it difficult to understand just how much of a role the mother of a marriageable girl played in finding her daughter a spouse. Although love was desirable, it did not play nearly such a large part in the mating game as it does today – far more important were other factors such as family background, mon
ey, probity and general ‘suitability’. Thus many of these marriages were just as much a creation of the American mother as of the American daughter. For often, as I show in this book, it was the American mother who was the true husband-hunter, who took the initiative in seeking a match for her daughter in the Old World, rather than an adventurous daughter suggesting a trip to Europe – and who realised that a peeress daughter would be the key that allowed her mamma to unlock the gates of society back home. Even Mrs Astor would not refuse admittance to the mother-in-law of an earl. Punch, always a mirror of its times, has an 1890s cartoon of an American mother holding her daughter on a leash so that she has no option but to marry the insignificant little peer beside her as both stand in front of the altar.

  Another aspect that emerged equally strongly from my research was the clash between the matriarchal society of the US and the patriarchal society of England, often resulting in a rude shock for the American bride, who had grown up seeing her mother do more or less what she wanted, paid for by an unquestioning husband, and who expected to do the same. For American upper-class society was run by women, for women; whereas in England it was fitted around the demands and expectations of male lives. Women may have fulfilled a vital role, but it was a secondary one – secondary to the demands of husband, estate, Parliament and sport.

  The alien horde, as such girls were sometimes dubbed, was eagerly welcomed by some, in the main those who hoped to profit by it, while others felt that much of English life was being polluted. ‘Seadown – marry Seadown?’ says the baronet Sir Helmsley Thwarte in horror when his son Guy tells him that Lord Seadown is interested in the eldest St George girl. ‘There won’t be a family in England without that poison in their veins.’

  Looking at it from the other side: why should a peer marry one of these girls who came from a culture so different from the one in which he had been brought up? Again, money was the obvious answer; again, it was not quite as simple as that. Today, no one would raise an eyebrow if a peer married an American girl. Then – for the peer – it was a completely different matter. ‘Society’ was a closed circle of around 1,500–2,000 families, most linked through marriage or cousinage. ‘You were either in it or outside it,’ said the critic and novelist George Slythe Street. And to stay in it, you married within it.

  For centuries, the patriarchs of these families, almost invariably peers, owned most of Britain and, because of the system of primogeniture – their heirs were always the eldest son or the eldest son of the nearest male relative – the great estates remained largely intact. Not only that; through the rents raised from them or the produce of the farms on them, their owners were assured of an income that was sizeable to vast. All they had to do was pick a suitable bride from a similar family; although she might inherit comparatively little, she had the necessary breeding and training in the ways of a large house and the rest would be supplied by her bridegroom’s large income.

  Producing these incomes were the agricultural poor, who worked the land and for whom life was constant hard labour. Even children helped, lifting potatoes, scaring crows, milking cows or leading horses. ‘When I was ten I left school to work on a farm for £3 a year,’ wrote Tom Mullins in 1873. ‘Before bridges were built we often had difficulty getting our horses and wagons across flooded streams. Often my clothes were quite wet when I took them off at night and still wet when I put them on again next morning. On Sundays I walked ten miles to have dinner with my parents, and then walked ten miles back to start milking.’

  Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was an irreversible change in the settled order of things. From around 1873 England, and especially its countryside, suffered what became known as the Long Depression, accounted for by several interlocking factors. It began with a series of appalling harvests for seven or eight years from 1873 to the end of the decade, accompanied by a drift from the land to towns and cities,1 partly because of increasing industrialisation, partly because of the dwindling number of agricultural jobs. Local trade, which had relied on the custom of these workers, migrated from the small market towns to the larger county towns, putting many small traders like bakers or haberdashers out of business, while those that were left, now in a more commanding position, began to bargain, so that landlords were forced to reduce the rents they charged tenant farmers.

  Contemporaneous with the poor harvests and loss of labour on the land came a dramatic fall in the price of grain. Vast fields of wheat now waved on the prairies of America, with different types grown to extend harvest time. Early settlers from Minnesota, Ontario and Wisconsin brought spring wheat; in the Central Great Plains the original bread-grain crop, soft winter wheat, was grown, to be harvested in summer; with Turkey red wheat, brought to central Kansas in the early 1870s by German Mennonite immigrants from southern Russia, in the autumn. When refrigeration came (in about 1870), farmers who had relied on livestock were also hit, as this meant that meat could be shipped from the great meat-producing countries like North and South America, and Australia. During those twenty years of change, the price of English wheat and barley fell by half – and landowners’ incomes dropped like stones.

  ‘That summer [1879] was followed by a severe winter,’ wrote Mary Elizabeth Lucy, châtelaine of Charlecote in Warwickshire, of one of the decade’s dreadful harvests. ‘The Avon rose to such a height covering the marble vases on the lower steps of the terrace that Spencer lost all his meadow hay to the value of £700. The previous year too all the hay in the Place Meadow was carried away by a flood and for the last three years the harvest had been so bad that farmers were unable to pay their rent and many had thrown up their farms: Spencer had five in Hampton Lucy parish on his hands. Many of his tenants were asking for a reduction of rent, which he was obliged to grant for fear of having more farms on his hands.

  ‘The times for agriculture are too sad! Spencer’s income was reduced by more than half.’

  So parlous had the state of agriculture become that in 1885 Joseph Chamberlain, then President of the Board of Trade, said that ‘almost universally throughout England and Scotland agriculture has become a ruinous occupation’.

  As for the aristocrats to whom this land belonged, many simply watched helplessly as their estates became burdened with debt and their houses began to crumble around them: the idea of earning a living was not something they could comprehend. They were not educated to work, they had no family business to go into (to be ‘in trade’ was to be outside society) – in short, they could not change their ways.

  ‘Behind him was the English squirearchy, generations of it stretching back, his justification for the only sort of life he knew how to live,’ wrote Mary Elizabeth Lucy of her son. ‘When unpaid bills mounted he sold [his father’s] collection of paintings piecemeal. The houses in London, taken in order to give the girls a chance to find husbands, the hunters, the shooting parties, the grouse moors in Scotland – all these were looked on as necessities; old masters were expendable.’ For some of these men, an American wife, with her dowry of dollars, was a lifeline.

  * * *

  On the other side of the Atlantic strikingly different factors were at work, hinging largely on the idea of élitism. Where British society had its natural pecking order, its pinnacle being the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), no such system operated in the US; there was therefore a constant struggle not only over acceptance but also pre-eminence. It was a class system based on exclusion, but none the less rigorous for that.

  For generations New York society had been run by the ‘Knickerbockers’ – descendants of the original Dutch and English founders. Although rich, they lived quietly, managing their affairs and largely seeing only each other. No outsider was let in. Then came the great fortunes, made through speculation, mining, railways, shipping and banking, and, with them, the spending of this wealth to such an extent that it almost became a métier (something that in many ways resonates today). The Gilded Age was born.

  The wives of these men, who had the same e
nterprising, energetic, winner-takes-all spirit as their husbands, battled for supremacy in salon and ballroom, their ambition not simply to outdo each other but to climb over the stockade into that inner circle where the absolute élite had their being. Wharton’s Mrs St George was possessed by an ‘almost religious zeal … to fight for entry into the circle of Knickerbocker families whom she revered as “aristocracy” superior to any in the Old World’. For such women, money was of no avail: they had to find another way in.

  Often, their daughters – married to a peer willingly, cajoled or forced to do so – were their ultimate weapon. For once a daughter had become Lady XX, the respect for a title among New York’s inner circle ensured that she would now be welcomed by them … and with her came her mother, who had now achieved her objective: she was ‘in society’.

  As Edith Wharton put it near the end of The Buccaneers, ‘Mrs Elmsworth, Mrs St George and Mrs Closson had long since taken for granted their acceptance … by the best New York society as mothers of daughters who had married severally, a duke, an earl who would become a marquis, a courtesy lord who was the earl’s brother, a prominent young British statesman widely regarded as a future Prime Minister…’

  * * *

  What I aim to do here is to examine the reasons behind this social phenomenon; and its lasting impact on British life.

  Of the ‘real’ ‘buccaneers’, several rose to the topmost peaks of British society while others, through their marriages, enabled their families to enter the much more exclusive circle of American society – then almost impenetrable to those whom its leader, Mrs Astor, chose not to know. Much has been written about a few of them, such as Consuelo Vanderbilt, who became the unhappy Duchess of Marlborough, bringing with her an enormous dowry that would today be worth around $100 million. But there were many others who, though lesser known, achieved their titled goal – and, sometimes, even love.

  So let me introduce the girls whose stories I shall be tracing here, their mothers and the major figures in their backgrounds. The one who could be called the pioneer of these Gilded Age brides was the stunningly gorgeous Jennie Jerome, daughter of ‘the King of Wall Street’, financier Leonard Jerome. She married Lord Randolph Churchill and became the mother of Winston Churchill.