Heiresses and graces

WHAT a good thing that the Earl of Grantham married an American heiress – otherwise Downton Abbey would have gone bust and there would never have been a TV series.

Fortunately, the Earl married his American and her millions, which delayed the problems at least until all the fuss over who Lady Mary would marry.

Although it made a good story line, there was little fictional about the Granthams’ marriage situation. In the last years of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, more than a hundred – often impoverished – members of Britain’s aristocracy married American heiresses.

Sometimes it was the only way they could afford a new roof on the ancestral home. Not to mention allowances for younger sons and the payment of gambling debts.

At the end of the 1800s, many members of the British aristocracy were in a bad way. Huge houses, massive estate, big ideas but no cash.

For centuries they had made marriage alliances among themselves, amalgamating land and money. The huge resulting estates had provided enough income for the great families to live in style.

But in the late 19th Century, agriculture went into a decline. Income from estates plummeted as the country began importing food from all over the world. Expenses went up.

Land was no longer a good investment and the estates and the huge houses, households and lifestyles they supported were looking decidedly rocky.

During the agricultural depression the income from the Duke of Manchester’s estates dropped from £95,000 a year to a loss of £2,000.

Although younger sons might go into the Army or the church, peers themselves never worked. But they and their estate desperately needed money from somewhere.

Enter the American girls.

The US was the home of the self-made man.

Engineers, railroads bosses, miners and stockbrokers had seized the opportunities in opening up a young country. They started with little but made vast fortunes and used quite a bit of it to set their daughters up in style.

Ironically, old New York was even more snobbish than London and new money – even by the trainload – found it tricky to be accepted.

Not in England.

The English took the American girls straight to their hearts… and their overdrafts.

It helped that King Edward VII when a young Prince of Wales had visited New York and been intrigued and delighted by American women.

Unlike tongue-tied English girls in their drab tweeds and with their quiet demeanours, American girls were bright, vivacious, charming and dressed to impress – it was nothing for them to spend today’s equivalent of half a million dollars on their clothes for the season, mainly by Worth of Paris.

With little formal occupation while he waited for his mother Queen Victoria to die, the prince of Wales was bored. A pretty women, sparkling eyes and intelligent conversation was a godsend.

Unlike their English counterparts, these American girls had been well educated by the best tutors. They’d often travelled widely in Europe and were equally knowledgeable about great art and French fashions. They’d been encouraged in conversation from an early age and could talk happily and confidently.

Sometimes too confidently. Consuelo Yznaga thought nothing of picking up a banjo and singing minstrel songs in a Mayfair drawing room. Which took some getting used to.

Above all, the Americans had money. The ultimate passport into society.

So Consuelo Yznaga married Viscount Mandeville, heir to the Duke of Manchester. Their wedding was one of the most elaborate ever seen in New York with 1,200 guests creating a traffic jam along Broadway.

Meanwhile, the Jerome sisters, from New York via Paris, attended a ball on board HMS Ariadne at Cowes, in honour of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Czarevich and Czarevna of Russia. The 19-year-old Jennie Jerome was introduced to Lord Randolph Churchill, brilliant second son of the Duke of Marlborough. Three days later he proposed and Jennie accepted.

Both sets of parents were horrified – the Marlboroughs because the Jerome’s father “seems to be a sporting and a vulgar kind of man”, and the Jeromes because Lord Randolph was only a second son and wouldn’t get the dukedom.

But eventually the parents were reconciled, helped, no doubt by the £50,000 that Mr Jerome settled on the couple. Within eight months of the wedding, Jennie gave birth to baby Winston and the rest, as they say...

Twenty years later when Consuelo Vanderbilt married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, she brought in total around $15m dollars to the family fortune.

The American girls came to England. Impoverished peers went to New York and San Francisco in search of brides. Frances Wok, daughter of a New York stockbroker, married James Burke-Roche younger son of an Irish baron and became the great grandparents of Diana, Princess of Wales.

For many American brides, Britain came as a horrible shock. A grand title and parties with the Prince of Wales were all very well, but marrying a duke also meant living in huge houses, no heating, no plumbing and months in the country with nothing to do except produce an heir and a spare as quickly as possible.

That done – and their money used to make the house more comfortable – the wives, often still in their teens when they married, could enjoy a social life and discreet affairs. They were often also great hostesses and brought new life and energy to the British nobility.

Nancy Astor – originally a Langhorne from Virginia – became the first woman ever to sit in Parliament.

FOR many years they were part of a world of parties and balls, fabulous riches, jewellery and entertainments, invariably revolving around the Prince of Wales and continuing when he became King Edward VII.

But he died in 1910 and was succeeded by the much quieter George V, ultra-respectable, a family man and not much given to carousing.

But by then the American heiress had done their job, rescued scores of stately homes, saved family finances, enlivened British society and became very much part of it, their origins often forgotten.

They inspired writer Julian Fellowes when he invented Downton Abbey and the American Lady Cora, whose money saved the family fortunes and her larger-than-life mother, played by Shirley Maclaine.

The stories of those heiresses – complete with jewels, fashion, sex, scandals and scheming mothers – is told in a fascinating book by Gail MacColl and Carol McD Wallace – a sparkling trip through 40 years of marriagemaking that changed the English aristocracy for ever.

• To Marry an English Lord, tales of wealth and marriage, sex and snobbery by GailMacColl and Carol McD Wallace (Workman Publishing £10.99)
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• The new series of Downton Abbey is on Sundays ITV at 9pm.