Husband Hunters: American Heiresses in the British Aristocracy

At the end of the nineteenth century, a strange invasion of Britain was taking place. The citadel of power, privilege, and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long, was being breached.

The incomers were a group of young women who, fifty years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world. The Dollar Princesses had arrived.

Why they came, and how they managed it, is in many ways the backstory of Downton Abbey. Just as the heiress Cora Levinson’s marriage to the Earl of Grantham saved Downton Abbey, so the union of the Duke of Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt, with her $2 million dowry (worth around $50 million today) saved Blenheim Palace. And all over England, there were other Coras…

Today, no one would raise an eyebrow if a peer married an American girl. Then—for the peer—it was a completely different matter. British ‘Society’ was a closed circle of around 1,500-2,000 families, most linked to each other through marriage or cousinage—near or distant. ‘You were either in it or outside it,’ said the critic and novelist George Slythe Street.

For centuries, the patriarchs of these families, almost invariably peers, owned most of Britain and, through the system of primogeniture—everything going to the eldest son—the great estates remained largely intact.

The weaponry of these socially ambitious American women was the flood of gold pouring in from husbands busy all day and, often, all night.

But from around 1873, England, and especially its countryside, suffered what became known as the Great Depression, thanks to poor harvests, with growing industrialization causing many agricultural workers to leave the land and a flood of cheap wheat from booming America, as railways opened up the American prairies. Landowners’ incomes dropped like stones.

On the other side of the Atlantic, different factors were at work. Here, ‘Society’ was even more exclusive, a group of powerful ‘Knickerbocker’ families, descendants of the original Dutch and English settlers, ruled over by Mrs. William Astor, so powerful a matriarch that she was always known as the Mrs. Astor.

Then, after the ending of the Civil War, came the great fortunes, made through speculation, mining, railways, shipping, banking, and with them, conspicuous consumption to an extent that it almost became a metier.

The wives of these men, who had the same enterprising, 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 that stockade into that inner circle where the absolute élite had their being.

---

The weaponry of these socially ambitious American women was the flood of gold pouring in from husbands busy all day and, often, all night. They trawled Europe for marble mantelpieces, statuary, tapestries, paintings, and wardrobes-full of dresses by the most famous couturier of the age, the Paris-based Worth.

But none of this persuaded the Knickerbockers to let down the drawbridge. If Caroline Astor did not wish to know you, she did not know you.

The newly rich, however, were not defeated. Europe was more welcoming and how much better it sounded to say: ‘I’m taking my daughters to be educated in France’ than ‘Mrs. Astor hasn’t invited me to her ball.’

And for an indigent peer, a beautiful girl with a large dowry that would instantly become his on marriage, was a tempting prospect indeed.

When the Franco-Prussian War (of 1870) put a stop to France as a destination, the logical next step was Britain. And to Britain came the three Jerome sisters, daughters of the flamboyant financier Leonard Jerome, and their mother. They took a house at Cowes, on the lsle of Wight, for the Regatta; within three days of meeting the youngest Jerome sister, the dazzling Jennie, Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger brother of the Duke of Marlborough, had proposed to her.

Soon beautiful young American women, with quantities of dollars as dowries, were becoming welcome imports.

Englishmen found these girls irresistible. They knew how to talk to boys—they had grown up going on picnic parties or skating with them—and were fresh, spontaneous and enterprising. They were fun.

They also had unbeatable wardrobes, a point far more important than it sounds—everyone knew that the Prince of Wales did not like to see a woman in his circle wear the same dress twice. Most of their clothes came from Worth, an instantly recognisable sign that a girl’s father was very rich indeed (few Englishmen could afford to dress their wives, let alone their daughters, in Worth).

And for an indigent peer, a beautiful girl with a large dowry that would instantly become his on marriage, was a tempting prospect indeed.

From the American mama’s point of view these matches were the key to Mrs. Astor’s drawing room…for even Mrs. Astor would not refuse entrée to the mother of a marchioness.

Anne de Courcy is the author of thirteen widely acclaimed works of social history and biography, including MARGOT AT WAR, THE FISHING FLEET, THE VICEROY'S DAUGHTERS and DEBS AT WAR. She lives in London and Gloucestershire.