To Marry an English Lord

by gail maccoll

  But America’s Founding Fathers had thought primogeniture a barbaric system, so they made certain that citizens of the new country would be free from such customs. In America a man could dispose of his fortune however he liked, splitting it equally among all his children or leaving a larger portion to an elder son (some families did cling to this tradition) while still providing for the others—even the girls.

  A MOST SUPERIOR PERSON

  By 1890 the advantages of the transatlantic match were plain to the dimmest of English gentlemen, and the Honourable George Curzon was anything but dim. He was the eldest son of the fourth Baron Scarsdale, and had been brought up with his nine siblings at Kedleston, the Scarsdale seat in Derbyshire. An eighteenth-century predecessor, Sir Nathaniel Curzon, had greatly expanded and improved Kedleston, hiring Robert Adam to design staterooms in the new neo-Classical taste. (Samuel Johnson thought the house “would do excellently well as a town hall.”) Sir Nathaniel, a Tory, was making a bid for political supremacy over the Whig Cavendishes, the local magnificos. Though Kedleston soon rivaled Chatsworth (the Cavendish seat) in size, the Curzon fortune wasn’t up to supporting such a large house. Property in London had to be sold, and by the 1880s the Curzon family was drastically, if grandly, overhoused. The estate, about 10,000 acres, brought in £18,000 a year, of which the house ate up a great deal. The Baron could afford to pay George an allowance of only about £1,000 a year.

  Left: The Hon. George Curzon, one of the most brilliant men of his generation. His ambitions matched his intelligence.

  Right: Curzon vacationing in Scotland. His bad back exempted him from the pressure to play games at Eton, so, unlike many students, he actually studied.

  The print edition of this book includes an image called Estate Drains.

  Please download a PDF of this image here: workman.com/ebookdownloads

  Left: After his stunning career at Eton, where he won the most prizes in the history of the school, Curzon (center) went on to win the Arnold and Lothian prizes at Oxford.

  Right: Ironically, Kedleston was used as the model for Government House in Calcutta, the home of India’s British viceroy.

  For a young bachelor, that sufficed, and George supplemented his allowance with £400-500 a year from journalism. His position as M.P. paid nothing. But Curzon was no less ambitious than his forebear who had expanded Kedleston. He had inordinate talents (he swept the academic prizes at Eton and Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of All Souls at the age of twenty-four) and knew it. In 1888 he went abroad. But Curzon was no adventurous dilettante, knocking around the world with a pair of Purdey shotguns looking for sport. His itinerary took him to Samarkand, where he watched and listened and made notes on the politics of the area, and upon returning to England he published Russia in Central Asia.

  Curzon went abroad again in 1889, this time traveling on horseback through the remotest areas of Persia and sending articles back to The Times to pay for his trip. Because his health was poor (he suffered from chronic back pain, frequently resorting to an iron brace), the primitive travel methods were grueling, but Curzon would always push himself beyond human endurance. His goal was a lofty one: he wanted nothing less than to be viceroy of India, and his voyages of discovery (for he penetrated areas where white men had never gone) were intended to make him England’s expert on Eastern politics.

  AMBITIOUS LOVE

  He could not, however, become viceroy on a mere £1,500 a year. His father was young and healthy, so there was no hope of inheriting soon. It occurred to him to marry money, and to this end he strenuously courted Lady Grosvenor, the wealthy widow of the Duke of Westminster’s heir. She turned him down in 1887, but by 1890 his heart (and self-esteem) were whole again when he returned from Persia to the flurry of the London season. His charm, intelligence, looks and breeding guaranteed a place in the most fashionable circles; his achievements made him much sought after. On July 17, at the peak of the season, he went to the Duchess of Westminster’s ball at Grosvenor House and watched Mary Leiter dance with the Prince of Wales.

  Lord Terence Temple-Blackwood, second son of the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Like Curzon and other younger sons, he had to make his own way in the world; he chose the Foreign Office, rising as high as Second Secretary at the British embassy in New York before his older brother was killed in the Boer War. He married New Yorker Flora Davis in 1893.

  Curzon later wrote that he “never loved Mary Leiter more than at the moment when he first saw her walk into that great assembly.” Perhaps, yet within days he had written to a friend in Washington to ask about the Leiters’ background and had heard back that she was very rich but lacked social standing. There is no record that they danced together that night, but George and Mary met again at a house party. A short time later, before returning to America, Mary sent George a pearl from her necklace, made into a gold tie pin. This was a forward gesture, even for an American. He wasn’t to know it yet, but Mary found him “the most wonderful, the most charming, the most handsome, the most clever of all the men I have met. I almost died when he touched my hand.”

  RATING A MATE

  The task of the Self-Made girl was to differentiate among all the attractive, well-bred Englishmen who sought her favor. This was where her social sponsor (or the unusually astute mama) came in, weighing the family history, youthful peccadilloes and financial circumstances of society’s bachelors.

  THE PEER would make a girl a peeress. This meant wearing ermine and velvet at coronations and having a place of honor at dinner, a crest on one’s writing paper and a coronet on one’s sheets. It also probably meant inheriting an ancestral home full of creaky ancestral machinery: shooting parties for which the guest list hadn’t changed in three generations; family jewels that could not be reset no matter how ugly they were; family religion, family politics, family traditions. Marrying a peer turned the heiress into an institution, incessantly compared to the last woman who’d held the job and, because she was American, frequently found wanting. It would be her dollars that made her acceptable, if she spent them on restoring the glory of the family name. And if she conformed, with time she might even be loved. May Goelet, Duchess of Roxburghe, is still spoken of at Floors Castle, the family seat, with fond respect.

  THE MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT offered stature of a different sort. No indolent aristocrat (though frequently aristocratic), the M.P. needed the American energy to achieve his ambitions. He might need American money, too: campaigning was expensive, and M.P.s were paid a pittance. His wife could give receptions in the mansion her father’s dollars bought; she could charm key members of both parties. A remarkable number of Cabinet-level statesmen chose American wives: Joseph Chamberlain, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Randolph Churchill, George Curzon, Viscount Harcourt.

  A “Spy” cartoon of lord Randolph Churchill, published at the height of his political career.

  THE COURTIER was in effect a servant of the Royal Family. (Queen Victoria had once proven to a skeptic that she could not travel with fewer than 100 courtiers and servants, while her son needed a similar retinue.) Principal characteristics were discretion and a generations-old loyalty to the Crown; courtiers were naturally drawn from the oldest aristocratic families. A courtier would travel with H.R.H. (duties rotated week by week), so a courtier’s wife could expect to spend weeks alone. The advantages were probable royal presence at the wedding and royal godparents to the children. And a woman whose husband had served long and well might ultimately be made a member of the Order of British Empire, which gave her a medal to wear with her evening dresses.

  THE YOUNGER SON was always the sideshow, never the main event. If he was the second son and his older brother died without children, he would get the title. If he was the fifth son, he’d have to make his own way; since he had no position to keep up, however, he didn’t need as rich a wife. But it was a hard life—especially if one had an American sister-in-law whose superior firepower had brought down a superior quarry. To stay in England, sentenced to sitting b
elow the salt and sleeping in the eighth-best bedroom, just because your husband had been born fourth in the family, would be a constant irritant to the American heiress’s pride.

  Lord Kitchener, the Empire’s man on the spot in South Africa, was an example of how far the ambitious military man could go.

  THE MILITARY MAN appeared at balls in full-dress uniform, all red twill and gold braid and (for a cavalryman) black boots to above the knees. Ah, men in uniform! In peacetime the soldier’s life was pleasant enough: guard duty at Windsor, perhaps, or at the Curragh in Ireland, with plenty of time for hunting and polo. It was less glorious when the regiment was in South Africa or the Sudan, under fire. But if all went well the military husband might, like the naval hero David Beatty (married to Marshall Field’s daughter Ethel), be made a peer for his exploits.

  THE BLACK SHEEP looked as charming as the other men, perhaps even more so, but was actually a disgrace to the family name. He might have enormous debts. He might have made an effort to go on the stage. Or there might simply be rumors of unspecified indiscretions on faraway shores. An English mama appreciated the gravity of these flaws, but Americans, overly optimistic or simply uninformed, frequently sailed straight into them.

  Curzon (seated, center) en route to Afghanistan. He sent home many articles for the Times, but his fiancé went for months without a letter.

  * * *

  My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

  I am a most superior person.

  My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,

  I dine at Blenheim once a week.

  Doggerel popular in the late ’80s

  * * *

  For his part, George had made known his opinion of Americans: he found them “the least attractive species of the human genus.” Though Mary wrote to him faithfully from America, his responses were few and measured. For one thing, he could not be seen marrying for money in such an obvious fashion; Sibell Grosvenor was one thing, Mary Leiter something else entirely. He was afraid of what his father would say. And besides, he had his agenda. In 1891 Lord Salisbury asked him to accept a Cabinet position as undersecretary of state for India. His scheme of becoming England’s foremost expert on Eastern politics would require more traveling.

  “I WILL HAVE HIM . . . ”

  Meanwhile, Mary wrote to a friend: “I will have him, because I believe he needs me. I have no shame.” She was back in London—chaperoned as ever by her mother—for the 1891 season. She was presented at court, helped Jennie Churchill arrange a tableau for the Marchioness of Londonderry’s ball, stayed at Hatfield with the Salisburys and at Wilton with the Pembrokes. George saw her almost daily but somehow managed to keep their relationship on a completely ambiguous footing. Though Mary would have been his at a word, by the end of July, when the season was over, he still hadn’t let her know whether his interest was romantic or merely friendly.

  George’s intentions may have seemed clearer once Mary went back to America, for in the next eighteen months he wrote to her barely half a dozen times. And when he went around the world in 1892, actually passing through Washington, he made no effort to see her. The Leiters went abroad themselves at the end of 1892, to Italy and Egypt; again, though George was in Cairo just a day before the Leiters, on the last leg of his trip, they did not meet.

  Traveling through the Far East, Curzon (right) still hadn’t made up his mind about Mary.

  Then, on March 3, 1893, after dining with the Leiters in Paris, George asked Mary to marry him. “I had entered the hotel without the slightest anticipation that this would be the issue,” he later wrote. “She told me her story. How she had waited for nearly three years since the time when we first met, rejecting countless suitors and always waiting for me.” This account was somewhat disingenuous on George’s part. While he may not have known that Mary was waiting for him, he was well aware that she was an heiress. And that fact, though unrecorded in his reminiscences, must have weighed heavily in his decision. He certainly doesn’t record that he fell in love with Mary when faced with her patient devotion. He merely took advantage of it. Maty Leiter solved several of his problems: he hadn’t much time for courting, and he had almost no money; she was hopelessly in love with him, and she had pots of money. So George proposed. And then, perhaps regretting his precipitous move, insisted the engagement be kept secret. He went off on another trip, this time to Afghanistan, while Maty went back to politely fending off suitors and watching her mother wonder why she wasn’t engaged yet.

  DARLING DAISY

  Occasionally, England produced an heiress of her own. Frances Evelyn Maynard, the Essex heiress known as Daisy, married Lord Brooke, heir of the 4th Earl of Warwick, in “the most splendid wedding of a dozen seasons.” Beautiful and intelligent, with an unrestrained enthusiasm for living, she soon became one of the great hostesses of her day. Weekend guests were brought by private train to Easton Lodge, the family estate, where Daisy’s unique extravagance was evident at every turn. Elephants, hyenas, giraffes and pet marmosets joined the deer and pheasant in the park, and guests could expect to have their meals enlivened by the vision of a goat eating from the plate of their magnificently gowned and jeweled hostess. There were fresh flowers every morning on each guest’s dressing table, a spray of gardenias for each female guest in the evening.

  Women in the Marlborough House Set must have love affairs, so Daisy dallied with such Set stalwarts as Lord Charles Beresford, Lord Randolph Churchill and, inevitably, the Prince of Wales himself, on whom she practiced her German. But she also had great feeling for those less fortunate. She spent years and much of her fortune on working-girl education projects such as Lady Warwick’s Agricultural Scheme for Women. And in 1895 she joined the most radical branch of the Socialist party in England; having spent an evening at her London townhouse singing the Internationale with “fellow travellers,” she would attend next day’s State Opening of Parliament—in emeralds to match her eyes.

  Daisy Warwick in the 1880s: she was not a typical aristocrat, but for all her passion and energy, she was completely of her time.

  Inevitably, Daisy’s fortune collapsed. She tried to sell her love letters from the Prince, but succeeded only in precipitating a blackmail scandal. She went on a lecture tour of the States to talk about society’s ills, but all her listeners wanted to hear was the latest gossip from London. She showed visitors through Easton Lodge, in almost every room of which were photographs of the late king. And she wrote her memoirs several times over, as full of contradiction in ink as she was in life, forty years of socialism having done nothing to dim her pride: “When I came out,” she declared in Life’s Ebb and Flow, “social prestige meant something.”

  During George’s long silences, Mary was reduced to sending him reminders of how many other men would be happy to marry her.

  COMME IL FAUT

  Any man who reverses (changes the direction in which he’s spinning his partner during a waltz) is a cad.

  THE SABINE WOMEN

  Nearly two years after proposing to Mary, George came around to telling his father and speaking to hers. He could wait no longer; in order to realize his ambitions, he needed to be married and he needed to be rich. Any mis givings he had had about marrying an American were overcome by Mary’s charms; the financial arrangements were all that he had hoped for. Mary might have been disappointed when Mr. Leiter came up with only £6,000 annually, but by English standards that was exceedingly generous. Leiter compounded George’s pleasure by agreeing to buy the young couple a London house, 1 Carlton House Terrace, in the row so popular with American heiresses and their English husbands. Finally, he settled a large sum (rumored at both $1 million and, more modestly, $700,000) on Mary and set aside an additional amount for any children she and George might have.

  Leonie Jerome and her fiancé, John Leslie. His parents disapproved of the Jerome family almost as strongly as the Churchills had, but it was a happy match.

  * * *

  “Why couldn’t she have married a normal Americ
an and lived in my Country!”

  LEONARD JEROME on the marriage of Leonie, his third daughter to wed an Englishman

  * * *

  The engagement, announced simultaneously in London and Washington on March 4, 1895, just six weeks before the wedding, prompted an immediate response on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, there was shock that the proud George Curzon was stooping to marry an American—however lovely—of no background. In America, there was dismay that still another of the native belles was being lost to England.

  Though the participants couldn’t know it, George and Mary’s wedding marked the beginning of a new era in the transatlantic marriage. More money, grander titles, greater publicity were the rule from then on. In fact, social historian Dixon Wecter dubbed 1895 the annus mimbilis, or “year of miracles,” for the Anglo-American match and claimed that it was the beginning of “the great invasion of titled bankrupts in search of American heiresses, than which nothing more sweeping had been known since the rape of the Sabine women.”

  THE SELF-MADE GIRL’S WEDDING

  “For richer, for poorer. ..”

  If the waning modesty of the mid-nineteenth century influenced the weddings of the Buccaneers, it was the vulgarity of new money that colored the wedding of the Self-Made Girl. A new desire for pomp and circumstance resulted in certain fixtures of American heiress weddings: the wedding march from Lohengrin, the white satin gown from Worth, the crowds, the newspaper coverage. In New York, Grace Church was the fashionable spot, and Rev. (later Bishop) Henry Potter the fashionable pastor, who officiated at Clara Jerome’s wedding in 1881.