Prince Harry’s love story is but a drop in the pond
TRANSATLANTIC ROMANCES HAVE LONG FACED INTENSE SCRUTINY
The story is a familiar one. Prince Harry finds a girlfriend. He tries unsuccessfully to hide said girlfriend from public view, and so begins a cat-andmouse game that ends with his frustration boiling over and the woman in question running for the hills.
Such has been the swell of interest in his latest romance, with 35- year- old American actress and divorcee Meghan Markle, a Toronto resident he has been seeing since June, that in November, Harry, 32, felt compelled to issue a furious statement about her alleged harassment.
But while t he Prince could be forgiven for feeling unfairly scrutinized, he is in good company. In fact, the young royal and his American girlfriend are just the latest in a long line of aristocratic transatlantic liaisons to have caught the imagination of the British public.
The obvious attachment that springs to mind is the one whose shadow loomed large over the Royal family for generations; King Edward VIII’s incendiary romance with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
But their relationship came towards the end of the biggest American invasion of the British aristocracy that the country had ever seen. By that point, women — many from wealthy U. S. families — had been crossing the pond in search of eligible gentlemen to marry for more than 50 years.
Deemed nouveau riche by New York society and shunned from the drawing rooms of influential society matrons, they saw a British title as the best means of acquiring respectability. The trickle of heiresses quickly became a flood, giving rise to a phenomenon that changed the shape of the upper classes and cemented the true “special relationship.”
“The American girl comes along, prettier than her English sister, full of dash and snap and go; sprightly, dazzling and audacious,” wrote U. S. Senator Chauncey M. Depew in the introduction to Titled Americans, a guide to single English nobles published in 1890.
The popular book gave a list of eligible bachelors, their title, age and income, so that an American heiress on the hunt for a lord or a duke would have all the information she needed to pursue her target. Her homebred r i vals didn’ t stand a chance. Not only were the American young ladies who arrived in England rich, with fathers who were willing to pay a handsome dowry to secure the perfect match, they were lively, well- educated, fashionably dressed and, above all, fun — qualities that were sometimes lacking among English debutantes.
The grande dames of the upper classes may have grumbled about the manners of American invaders and sneered at their lack of social pedigree, but privately they feared for their daughters, who were destined for spinsterhood if they could not make a suitable marriage by the age of 30.
Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874, was one of the first of these American buccaneers (immortalized by Edith Wharton in her novel The Buccaneers). She bemoaned the attitudes of an English society that deemed her exotic and unrefined, while ignoring her many talents.
But she also understood that while the daughters of the aristocracy remained in the nursery, poorly educated and closeted from the outside world until they were flung into society on their debut, the daughters of ambitious American industrialists with new money to burn were well- travelled, educated to the highest standards and accomplished.
They included such women as Cuban- American Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was just 18 when she mar- ried the 9th Duke of Marlborough in a lavish wedding in New York. She had passed the entrance paper for Oxford with flying colours the summer before, despite never intending to take up her place.
Or Maud Burke, who would come to be known as Emerald Cunard after her marriage to Sir Bache Cunard, heir to the shipping line.
The sparkling San Franciscan belle was dubbed the Duchess of Covent Garden by Evelyn Waugh after she fiercely championed the opera, an experience she had first been exposed to at just 12 years old at the Metropolitan in New York.
Of course, these “dollar princesses” didn’t just have the vitality to charm future husbands — they had money to save the family seat, and lots of it.
The upper classes were under intense financial pressure amid a shift in power from a rural economy to the burgeoning cities, whose rapid growth was being driven by the Industrial Revolution. Cheaper imports of grains and meat, ironically from America, meant they were no longer able to live comfortably off income from their vast estates.
There was also a political power shift that was slowly eroding the influence of the upper class through the Third Reform Act in 1884, which doubled the electorate and gave rise to a new political movement allied to the middle and working classes.
An heiress’s cash could support her husband’s political ambitions — as in the case of Mary Leiter, whose father’ s money helped George Curzon rise to the top of the political establishment, making his wife, as Vicerine, the highest ranked lady in the empire, second only to Queen Victoria.
Mary married George in 1895, a bumper year for topnotch transatlantic unions — there would be nine in total — before the press and public in America tired of the stories of miserable marriages, rakish husbands and millions of dollars leaving the country to shore up British coffers. By the First World War, the fashion was largely over.
Still, in the boom times, the biggest advocate of the transatlantic marriage was another s o- called party prince, Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Bertie, later King Edward VII, who was beguiled by their ability to liven up a staid society. He championed Americans as much for their ability to have a good time as their dollars, embracing the first clutch of buccaneers in the 1 870s, i ncluding Jennie Churchill and her compatriot Consuleo, later the Duchess of Manchester.
Despite this royal seal of approval, heiresses still encountered snobbery and prejudice in their new home and needed a steely resolve to rise above it. Harper’s Bazaar wrote in 1905 that any newcomer “had to be trebly armed in indifference to the inspired scandal and abuse that will instantly centre on her” and should expect “a good many seasons of relentless opposition.”
It was advice that served the determined buccaneers well.
Over a century l ater, Prince Harry and his American consort will undoubtedly face more scrutiny yet. They might be wise to take note.