THE HUSBAND HUNTERS
A new book reveals the extraordinary lengths American heiresses went to snap up impoverished British blue bloods in a cash-for-class deal that saved the aristocracy
ELIZABETH BANKS was curious. A young American journalist who lived and worked in 19th- century London, she had an eye for a scandal and specialised in undercover stories, having ‘worked’ as a flower girl, a chambermaid and a laundress to expose them.
Now, she’d heard on the grapevine that there was a thriving transatlantic trade in brides. Rich American girls were buying their way in to the top ranks of British society and as good as selling themselves to impoverished aristocrats. She determined to learn the truth.
In 1894, she put an advertisement in a London magazine, posing as an heiress: ‘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.’
To her astonishment, she received 87 responses from well- connected women promising to launch her and even get her presented at Court. Their fees ranged from £ 500 to £ 10,000 ( equivalent to £250,000 today).
Eager for their pay off, upper-crust English grandes dames were offering their services as go-betweens in a transfer market — not unlike the agents who today ‘sell’ footballers from around the world to high-spending soccer clubs, taking a huge cut along the way.
Men wrote, too, with proposals of marriage. One inquired if she wanted ‘ to marry an Englishman of high social position, who could place you in a certain circle. I am a country gentleman, have a fine house and estate, have been an officer in a distinguished regiment, and know many people of position and rank’.
Banks agreed to meet him, and he turned out to be ‘a fine-looking aristocratic man’ of middle age. When she investigated further, she discovered he was a widower and exactly what he said — from a titled family with a large place in the country, but whose fortunes were ‘decaying’.
He informed her that he would treat her ‘with all honour and respect’, but added: ‘It would be an absolute necessity that you should be a lady of considerable fortune.’
Like everyone else she encountered in this burgeoning cash-for-coronets business, he was prepared to overlook her lack of background and ancestry in return for dollars.
‘Had I carried my experiment further,’ Banks wrote in The Weekly Sun, a London newspaper specialising in human interest stories and gossip, ‘I would have been one of numerous Americans who walked on a golden pavement to the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace.’
The crucial factor in this trade — as detailed by historian Anne de Courcy in her new book, The Husband Hunters — was, of course, the fabulous fortunes that were being made from virtually nothing in the fast- growing economy of the United States.
To the rich of America, everything seemed buyable, including family history. Tiffany’s had a special department designing coats- ofarms. A would- be customer recalled how you went in and said: ‘I want armorial bearings in the name of Smith. Show me a large selection, please.’
A massive book was produced, with illustrations, and the assistant asked: ‘ Which Smiths would you prefer — the Herefordshire Smiths or the Yorkshire Smiths?’
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in such snobbery and desperation for a touch of class lay that fruitful trade in brides. Rich Americans craved aristocratic credentials. Impecunious British aristocrats, their incomes from the land slashed by falling food prices, their castles falling around their ears, were desperate for injections of capital.
The result was a marriage market in which wealthy girls from the U.S. came hunting for titled toffs to wed, bed and breed from. dukes were top of the shopping list, but a belted earl would do. The longer the pedigree, the better.
For impoverished would- be husbands, meanwhile, the newcomers’ polished looks and glamour were secondary to the number of noughts in the dowry and their freedom to plunder it at will. Thus did the fictional Cora Levinson from Cincinnati snap up the Earl of Grantham in TV’s downton Abbey and save him and his estate from ruin.
Bevies of real-life Coras did the same between 1870 and 1914, with at least a hundred marriages into the British aristocracy and many more into ancient French, Italian and Spanish families. It became such a fashion that a mocking verse of the time spoke of these: ‘Strangers, delightful and wild, ‘With twang well developed and
dollars well piled. ‘Each match of the season, duke,
marquess or lord ‘Is caught in the coils of the
alien horde.’
deal-making could be a tough business, however. A marriage was arranged between beautiful U.S. heiress Adele Beach Grant and the hard-up Earl Cairns.
Invitations to the wedding had already been sent out when, at the last minute, it was all called off. The gossip was that his financial demands were so extortionate her family decided he wasn’t worth it.
Adele went instead for the widowed Earl of Essex, also in need of a dollar or two to balance the books.
She got her part of the bargain. When he took her to his stately home as his new bride, his tenants showed their appreciation by unhitching the horses of their carriage and hauling it themselves for the last two miles. She was soon taking tea with countesses and duchesses and partying with kings and queens.
No wonder that a song from a popular musical had the refrain: ‘The almighty dollar will buy,
you bet, ‘A superior class of coronet.’
In the face of such seemingly boundless riches from the U.S., British aristocrats became quite explicit in their demands.
An advertisement in a national newspaper in 1901 stated that ‘an English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying a very wealthy lady. Her age and looks are immaterial’.
He sought a downpayment of ‘£25,000 sterling, paid in cash to her future husband’. She also needed ‘sufficient wealth besides to keep up the rank of peeress’.
There was no shortage of takers, even when English journalist William Stead described such bargains as no more than ‘gilded prostitution’ and another writer thundered about ‘heirs to a great name and title selling their birthrights for a mess of American dollar-pottage’.
But most of these heirs were grateful for the shower of gold that came their way.
It is estimated that between 1875 and 1905, Americans marrying into the nobility brought with them close to a billion dollars in dowry payments — money that went straight into the pockets of the men they married and saved many a stately home from ruin.
But such social climbing often came at another price, too — in personal comfort and hygiene.
Those draughty castles and country houses could be hell to a rich gal from the New World accustomed to a nice warm house and plenty of hot water.
Mildred Sherman, from Ohio, who became Lady Camoys, gave up going to formal dinners because she couldn’t stand the icy temperatures in her evening dress.
CHICAGO-
BORN 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.
Maud Burke, from San Francisco, stared listlessly out of the window in Leicestershire at the mud, rain, snow and frost of the British winter while her husband, Sir Bache Cunard, went fox-hunting.
Nor did the newcomers always find it easy to fit in when they came face to face with deeply ingrained English snobbery and were treated as upstarts who did not know how to behave.
Mary Leiter found British servants downright rude and hostile because of her background. ‘They are malignant and stupid fiends,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘I should like to hang a few and burn the rest at the stake.’
Maud Burke continually dismayed her rank- obsessed husband by giving orders direct to the footmen instead of through the butler.
New relations could be just as bad. On her marriage into the Grosvenor family, a nervous Sophia Wells Williams overdressed on her first morning at the family home, Moor Park, and was told off by her snooty new sister-in-law for ‘looking silk-gownified’.
Such attitudes could have put the parvenus from across the pond firmly in their place. Except that, in social terms, they had a vital and unexpected ally: the Prince of Wales, later to be Queen Victoria’s successor as Edward VII.
Bertie, as he was known, delighted in anyone amusing who challenged the rigidity of the Victorian court. American wives fitted the bill, and he welcomed them with ample arms open wide.
It helped that they had money to throw around on the things he liked — good food, comfortable surroundings, house parties in congenial company and pretty women, exquisitely gowned, who could amuse him with gossip about the love affairs of themselves or their friends.
He was the most longed-for guest in the country, but the cost of entertaining him was prohibitive. The house had first to be
redecorated, with one room converted into a private post office and sometimes a private train laid on. He arrived with a large retinue, tucked into huge meals and the best champagne and expected to picnic off the finest gold plate when out shooting.
One of the earliest of the Prince’s American friends (and later a part-time mistress who liked to entertain him at home in a loose kimono, known as her ‘geisha dress’) was promiscuous Jennie Churchill, daughter of Wall Street financier Leonard Jerome, married to Lord Randolph Churchill and mother of Winston.
Society, writes de Courcy, was quick to notice the Jennie effect — ‘the charm American women held for the Prince and their less hidebound attitude’.
The trade of cash-for-class turned full circle, though, with Consuela Yznaga. Originally from a New York family which made a fortune in Cuban sugar, she wed the Duke of Manchester’s heir.
A gambler and lecher, he squandered her fortune, and she ended up perpetually short of money. As a favourite of the Prince, she then made a new career by introducing American heiresses to English high society — at a price.
In return for settling outstanding bills, she would groom her protegees, present them at court and, finally, invite them to a select dinner party, at which the Prince would be present. With royal approval, noble sons would be found to marry them.
Eventually, the procession of heiresses trooping across the Atlantic petered out, not least because many of the marriages turned out unhappily.
After first glamour wore off, life in England, writes de Courcy, ‘with its wretched climate, lack of home comforts, isolation of country life and a husband who spent the wife’s money while going his own way, resulted in disillusionment and misery’.
Some, such as Mary Curzon (née Leiter), never got over the sense of being an ‘alien’. She said: ‘I shall never be an Englishwoman in feeling or character. Oh, the unhappiness I see around me here among American women.’
Mary stuck it out, but others were determined to escape.
Alice Thaw, naive daughter of a Pittsburgh iron millionaire, married the Earl of Yarmouth, unaware he was homosexual.
After three years, the marriage was annulled on grounds of non-consummation, but Alice continued to pay her ex-husband an annual income of $30,000 — the high price she was willing to pay just to be rid of him.
And though the cash- forcoronets trade eventually ceased, American dowry money left a permanent mark on Britain — for which we should be grateful.
The restoration of many grand houses, now open to the public, is thanks to them, concludes de Courcy, citing Blenheim Palace — home of the Dukes of Marlborough and beneficiary of a much-needed Vanderbilt dowry — as the crowning example.
The husband hunters by Anne de Courcy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20). To order a copy, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15.