by gail maccoll
THE MRS. ASTOR
Ward McAllister may have done the actual work of drawing up lists, scrutinizing the merits of débutantes and leading cotillions, but he was just an eager worker bee carrying out the commands of his queen, Mrs. Astor. Born Caroline Schermerhorn, of an old shipping family, Mrs. Astor was uniquely suited to the task of running New York. Her husband was the wealthy William Backhouse Astor, Jr. (she made him drop his middle name because it was vulgar), whose money was some fifty years older than Bouncer money and thus acceptable. In addition, she had the pride and strength of purpose to keep society pure of newcomers. Tall, dark-haired and commanding, she breezed through the city’s social rituals with the confidence of a woman who had rarely, in her forty years, been crossed.
The crucial question in New York was whether or not Mrs. Astor ‘knew” you. Had she spoken to you at a tea party? Had she paid a call? (It was always up to a social superior to make the first visit.) Most important, had she invited you to her annual ball? If not, you’d best leave town or sit at home in the dark lest anyone know of your shame. Even among those who did gain entrée to the sacred precinct, favorites were singled out still further. The queen of society had a throne, a red velvet divan set upon a dais, from which she watched the dancing; the truly chosen were fetched to sit with her for a few breathless moments, and everyone knew them as the elect.
The lady who kept New York safe for the Knickerbocracy; her husband, who bankrolled her mission; and his yacht, where he escaped from it.
* * *
“There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York society. If you go outside that number, you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.”
WARD MCALLISTER
* * *
Ward McAllister, the brains behind Mrs. Astor’s brawn.
The brilliance of the plan lay in McAllister’s selection of the Patriarchs. They were carefully chosen to form a new social élite, representing not only the “Nobs” (the old oligarchy) but the “Swells” (the high-living possessors of new money). This coalition would, McAllister thought, create an unchallenged and unchallengeable hierarchy. He expected that once they were assimilated into the chosen people, the Swells would hasten to align themselves against their former fellows and step on the hands of the climbers just below them on the ladder.
McAllister’s calculations left out, however, a distinctive feature of American society: there is always new money. Even the apparent codification of New York society in the Partriarchs’ Balls couldn’t solve the problem of the nouveaux riches forever. They kept coming to Manhattan, richer and richer, and more and more insistent on social recognition. So, to strengthen their defenses, the anointed demanded the “correct” ways of doing things, from leaving calling cards to marrying off a daughter. They made lists: guest lists, visiting lists, members’ lists. And New York society, by the mid-1870s, was more self-consciously exclusive and compulsively regimented than ever.
RULE BRITANNIA
New money and new faces, the same forces that were convulsing Old New York, were finding a far different reception in London. Society here was not threatened by newcomers; instead, it welcomed the glamour and opulence the newcomers could bring. This reception had much to do with the fact that London society’s commander in chief was not a persnickety matron but a party-loving playboy who happened to be next in line for the British throne.
* * *
Though christened Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales would be known throughout his life by the jaunty nickname “Bertie”
* * *
WRETCHED HIGHBORN BEINGS
The party-loving playboy was, of course, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. In 1861, a year after the Prince’s tour of North America, his father had died, leaving his mother the Queen quite inconsolable. Victoria had depended on her husband not only as head of the family (they had nine children) but as her chief, most reliable adviser on affairs of state. In fact, her entire existence had centered on her straight-backed, right-thinking consort. “My life as a happy one is ended!” she mourned. “The world is gone for me!”
London’s Piccadilly boasted both architectural and social variety that put New York to shame.
Left: English society was defined as those who were eligible for presentation at court. Her Majesty received her splendidly dressed subjects at several Levées and Drawing Rooms during the season.
Right: The very picture of a deferential Victorian wife: Queen Victoria, looking up to her husband, Prince Albert.
The lord Chamberlain’s office issued the invitations.
For her eldest son, however, life was just beginning. In the spring of 1863, Bertie married a pretty eighteen-year-old Danish princess named Alexandra. For taking this step into responsible adulthood, he was rewarded with Marlborough House, his own London residence. Soon afterward he bought Sandringham, a country estate in Norfolk. Now the twenty-two-year-old Prince could entertain whom he pleased, as he pleased. So he chose to entertain people like Louisa, Duchess of Manchester, who, Victoria warned Alexandra, “is not a fit companion for you.” And the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, she being, according to Victoria, “a foolish, injudicious little woman” whose husband did “not live as a Duke ought.”
Princess Alexandra of Denmark, aged eighteen, a few months before her marriage to the Prince of Wales. She was as sweet-natured as she was beautiful, but matrimony even with this paragon couldn’t tame Bertie’s high spirits.
Bertie and Alix had fallen in with the “fashionable set.” And the fashionable set, so long denied royal favor, was delighted to have them. While Albert was alive, sobriety, simplicity, domesticity and respect for the hard-working lower orders had been the hallmarks of royal style. Queen Victoria and Albert could never really be bothered with events of the social season such as Ascot or Derby Day. Their view of fashionable society was not far different from that of the Knickerbocker crowd in New York, who tended to consider “aristocratic” a synonym for “decadent.” In fact, the royal pair had nothing but disdain for the free-living nobility—“the wretched, ignorant, highborn beings,” as Victoria described them, “who live only to kill time.”
Marlborough House, the Prince of Wales’ London residence, which gave its name to his fashionable set of friends.
BERTIE TAKES OFF
Though grief-stricken, Queen Victoria continued to keep a firm grip on the reins of power. And, despite her own ministers’ advice that she give her son something serious to occupy his mind, she denied him any responsible occupation—even something as innocuous as the presidency of the Society of Arts. The Prince of Wales, a restless, energetic, enthusiastic young man who liked nothing so much as a diary crammed full of engagements, was thus left with little else to do in life but have fun.
The Prince of Wales in 1871, a year after the Mordaunt scandal. He is costumed as Lord of the Isles.
In pursuit of this goal he quite naturally began to emulate those masters of purposeful leisure, the English aristocracy. He took up horse racing, hunting, shooting. He played cards for money until early in the morning; he gambled at casinos when he went abroad. He attended balls and teas. He went to Ascot, not just on opening day, but every day, driving onto the course with his friends in a glittering carriage procession. He also went to music halls, and after the theater he went to Rules or the Café Royal or Kettner’s, restaurants that provided not only meals but private rooms with settees for postprandial sex.
Moreover, as all England eventually came to know, the Prince did not confine his extramarital lust to showgirls in the upstairs rooms of restaurants. The first big scandal of his career broke in 1870 when Sir Charles Mordaunt sued his young wife for divorce. (Harriet Mordaunt’s solicitor countersued, claiming she was not of sound mind.) A packet of letters from the Prince to Harriet was entered as evidence, and he was subpoenaed to give testimony. So, for the first time in English history, a Prince of Wales entered the witness box at a public trial. Bertie
acquitted himself well—he managed to sound convincing as he denied that he had committed no “improper familiarity or criminal act”—but the damage was done. The Prince was clearly not the paragon of domestic virtue his parents had raised him to be.
The print edition of this book includes an image called At Home on Berkeley Square.
Please download a PDF of this image here: workman.com/ebookdownloads
OUTSIDE IN
There was irony in this, for Bertie’s entire upbringing had been meticulously designed by his father to produce an exemplar of the modern monarchy. Albert was farsighted enough to realize that monarchs at the end of the nineteenth century would not be allowed to get away with the kind of behavior that had distinguished the Regency years. The threat of revolution was not to be taken lightly; republican sentiments were being voiced loudly and regularly. The licentious behavior of monarchs and their noble friends in other European countries had already cost them their heads. Albert wanted to make sure that the Prince kept his.
The young Prince of Wales clad, mid-nineteenth-century style, in a dress.
To this end, young Bertie had been allowed as little contact with the English aristocracy as his father could politely manage. The “corrupting influence of British patrician frivolity” must not spread to the boy. So the Prince was presented with carefully chosen companions, vetted and approved by Albert. He spent his youth surrounded by older men and tutors, who were supposed to report back regularly to his father. He was always being watched, expected to be reading and studying, rarely allowed to play. He was not allowed to attend Eton, and while he followed some courses at Oxford, he was forbidden to have any part in undergraduate life there.
Domestic bliss: England’s Royal Family in 1843. The Prince is learning to recognize the letter “W,” no doubt for “Wales.”
Although Albert’s plan was bound to backfire, Bertie’s childhood seclusion had at least one beneficial result. Having been raised outside the traditional English system, he was without some of the traditional English prejudices. He himself wasn’t altogether English (his father was German, he had three German grandparents, and there was a distinct Germanic flavor in his pronunciation of certain English words), so why should he mind if some of his friends weren’t classic English aristocrats? If a wealthy, amusing man like Alfred Rothschild was willing to host the Prince and his entourage, the Prince was willing to give him social entrée. “All manner of strange, wild millionaires were wandering round London then,” recalled Christopher Sykes, “and the Prince, perhaps recognizing natural Devil-mates, yearned to make these men his friends.” In other words, the Prince of Wales willingly counted among his companions the very sort of recently rich, big-spending industrialists who were giving Old New York an upset stomach.
His Royal Highness would popularize many fashions in his lifetime, but perhaps none as persistent as the sailor suit he wore as a small boy.
THE ROCK OF ENGLAND
The Prince’s taste for expensive entertainment, his enthusiasm for the social round, and his willingness to call in from the social wilderness those previously without hope (as long as they were amusing and could pay their way) converged with London’s growing position is the center of a far-flung empire. By the 1870s, social climbers not merely from the rest of England but from all over the world had begun to arrive in London. But London’s society matrons, unlike their New York counterparts, were not coming unglued at the prospect. Revolutions they worried about; social climbers they could deal with, without needing recourse to McAllister’s lists and Patriarchs’ Balls. They already had an ancient and noble system for keeping people sorted out, for deciding who, ultimately, was socially acceptable. They had the British peerage.
THEIR NOBLE LORDSHIPS
Without an up-to-date Peerage, listing all titled Britons and their families, the task of sorting out the nobility was next to impossible. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that the upper ranks of the English aristocracy often had several titles, of which they would use only the highest. The ranks, in descending order, are as follows.
DUKE: A great catch; only twenty-seven in existence at any time. The duke’s wife is a duchess, and both are referred to formally as “Your Grace.” Their eldest son uses one of the duke’s subsidiary titles, and his eldest son uses a different subsidiary title. (The Duke of Manchester’s son, for example, is called Viscount Mandeville, and the Viscount’s son is called Lord Kimbolton.) Other children use the honorary title “Lord” or “Lady” in front of their Christian names.
MARQUESS: A great leap down into the body of the peerage, who are always referred to informally and addressed as “Lord So-and-So.” The marquess’s wife, a marchioness, is “Lady So-and-So,” and the children’s titles are the same as those of a duke’s children.
EARL: The bread-and-butter of the peerage, numbering in the hundreds. The earl’s wife is a countess, and their eldest son uses a subsidiary title. Other sons are merely “Honourable”; daughters are “Lady” before Christian name.
VISCOUNT: Often a newer title, awarded for success in politics. The viscount’s wife is a viscountess. The eldest son uses a subsidiary title, if any; other children are “Honourables.”
BARON: Always referred to and addressed as “Lord”; “Baron” is rarely used. His wife is a baroness; all children are “Honourables.” There are no subsidiary titles, since no lower rank exists.
MERE SIRS: The baronet and the knight. The former is hereditary; the latter, a lifetime honorific. In each case, men are addressed as “Sir” (as in “Sir William Gordon-Cumming,” known as “Sir William,” never “Sir Gordon-Cumming”) while the wives are “Lady” (“Lady Gordon-Cumming”). Their children have no titles.
And, unlike the nobility of the fallen European monarchies, the British peerage was still in fighting trim. For one thing, it hadn’t lost control of Parliament; the peers themselves sat in the House of Lords, while their sons and untitled friends sat in the House of Commons. For another, thanks to the policy of primogeniture, the titles and estates of the British peers had remained more or less intact. Primogeniture meant that the eldest son in a noble family got everything—the land, the houses, the paintings, the jewels, the titles. This way, the title proliferation that afflicted the French and Italian aristocracies was not a problem in England. In France there might be several comtes de Castellane running around at any one time; in England there were only twenty-seven dukes, and a duke had to die before his son could take his place. Linked with primogeniture was the policy of entail, a means of tying up estates in trust so that they were not broken up into ever smaller plots of land but passed whole from one generation to the next. Ruthless, but wise. This system, though hard on the daughters and younger sons who lost by it, gave the English titles and consequently the entire English aristocracy a certain irrevocable cachet.
The badge of the Prince of Wales consists of three ostrich plumes, a coronet, and the motto Ich dien, which means “I serve.” It was not particularly appropriate for Bertie.
Because England’s social structure was so explicit and because it was agreed on by everyone, non-aristocrats included, society could be more relaxed. Status had already been determined by title and family history, and little short of outright scandal could alter it. While New York, in its effort to be exclusive, was becoming ever duller, London was on its way to becoming the most brilliant social capital of the era. And, fortunately for American heiresses, this capital’s social leader was the Prince of Wales—a man who had already proved that he had an open mind as far as outsiders were concerned and a more than keen eye for the ladies.
THE LONDON SEASON
The great houses in Mayfair and Belgravia, shuttered and somber most of the year, have suddenly turned gay. There are striped awnings and flower boxes at all the windows. The royal standard flies over Buckingham Palace; the Widow Queen is in town. It must be the season—Hyde Park is packed. Spectators have gathered to watch the parade of elegant riders in Rotten Row, the long
strip of reddish brown earth beside the green of the park. Suddenly, chairs are pushed back, voices are lowered—the Prince of Wales and his wife have been spotted at the Marble Arch entrance.
It’s just after Easter, and England’s aristocrats have come up to London to attend Parliament. The city churns with political gossip. There are great parliamentary debates to listen to, speeches to be read in the morning papers. Issues of import are settled, careers made or broken. And while the Empire is ruled, the great hostesses hold their political receptions. Piccadilly is clogged with carriages, their doors emblazoned with coats of arms, as noble guests arrive at one of the great houses. A strip of carpet leads up to the front door beneath an awning, lined on either side by a phalanx of footmen, policemen and spectators. Inside, the grand staircase sags beneath the weight of guests making their way to the top. There they are greeted by the host and hostess, she in the biggest, heaviest, shiniest tiara the family arsenal can provide. In the upstairs reception rooms, a band plays from behind a screen of potted azaleas. Downstairs, the rooms are crammed with little tables and a buffet supper for 600.
