The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  Next to the chateau were two equally large and imposing, though more conventionally designed, mansions. These were also Vanderbilt residences; one was the home of William H, Alva’s father-in-law, and the other had been built by William H for his daughters. These three buildings occupied a massive site opposite what is now St Patrick’s Cathedral. Alva’s house was completed in 1883. While it was still under construction she organised a magnificent costume ball as a house-warming party, letting it be known that the guest of honour was the woman all New Yorkers wanted to meet, Alva’s good friend, Consuelo, Lady Mandeville. The ball was to be held on a Monday – the normally ‘quiet’ evening on which Mrs Astor customarily held her ‘at home’ – which was considered a very daring move.

  Alva sent out more than a thousand invitations, and the guest list included 399 of New York’s finest families. Only one family was not invited: that of Mrs Astor, for by Mrs Astor’s own dictate she must always make the first move towards any ‘newcomer’. The whole of New York was agog with leaked stories about the magnificence of the forthcoming ball in the fairy-tale white palace that had magically appeared among the brownstone houses on Fifth Avenue. Few declined the opportunity to attend what was certain to be the social event of the decade, let alone the chance to rubberneck inside this amazing building. It might be supposed that the aloof Mrs Astor would ignore such parvenu entertainment, but she had a debutante daughter whose dearest wish was to attend the costume ball at the chateau along with her debutante friends, who were already rehearsing a quadrille for the occasion. It was not long before Mrs Astor sent her footman to 660 Fifth Avenue with a calling card, thus conveying that Alva had been ‘recognised’. Game, set and match to Alva. On the following day an engraved invitation to Alva’s ball was duly dispatched to Mrs Astor.

  More like a ball at a European court, the event was a triumph. No one had ever seen such an ostentatious parade of jewels and wealth in New York. The gowns and costumes, costing small fortunes by the standards of ordinary families, had mostly been commissioned months earlier, amid great rivalry as to whose outfit would be the most beautiful or inventive. Alva and the Vanderbilts were thereby launched into a leading position among New York’s elite families. This was the foundation stone of Alva’s plans for her daughter.

  Another requirement was an appropriate rural setting. The William Ks already owned a huge rambling summer mansion called Idlehour, constructed a few years earlier on the banks of a river on Long Island. It was wooden-framed and built in the style of Queen Anne, and William K and his children liked it. There they could dress in more comfortable clothes, crab and fish, sail and ride; but it was too folksy for Alva. This was not the home of a future European princess.

  So her next great building project was a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. Her husband had very little hand in it other than to pay the bills, but Alva’s brother-in-law, Cornelius, was also building there and they both employed the same architect, Richard Morris Hunt. The seventy-room house Cornelius built was called ‘The Breakers’ (after the small wooden beach house it replaced), and Alva’s house was appropriately named ‘Marble House’. These were perhaps the grandest of the Newport mansions, referred to by their owners as ‘cottages’. Marble House, inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles, cost $11 million in 1887 (over $200 million now), and more than half the cost (over $7 million) went on the 500,000 cubic feet of marble used in the construction.* Alva’s thirty-ninth birthday coincided with the completion of Marble House, and as her birthday gift William K gave her the title deeds.

  As might be supposed, little Consuelo had a very privileged childhood, at least materially. With her parents and brothers she travelled all over the world, along with her own nurse, English governess and tutors. As well as being instructed in English literature by her governess, the various tutors taught her French and German in which she was fluent (she was widely read in the literature of both countries), Latin, mathematics, science, art and history. In addition, the curriculum included the all-important ‘deportment’. Consuelo had ponies, carriages, servants, a sensational bedroom with an en-suite playroom large enough for her few carefully selected friends to ride their bicycles around, and wonderful clothes, but her memoirs do not mention any love or the companionable family background so essential to a happy childhood.

  Alva later claimed to have ‘sacrificed’ the years when her children were growing in order to nurture them herself – that is when she was not building or planning some great project – disregarding entirely the staff who waited on and taught Consuelo and her brothers. Consuelo admitted that her mother probably did love her, but in the same way that she loved her great houses built in French Renaissance style, in which everything had to be perfect. In fact, the decor at Marble House was planned down to the last detail, with items such as pens, cutlery and dressing-table toiletry items so precisely placed on their allotted surfaces that, when she eventually moved in, Consuelo felt unable to use them for fear of disturbing the symmetry. She believed that her mother had ‘created’ her, just as she created her beautiful houses, in an image she had conceived of ‘the perfect lady’ – which to Alva meant a wife suitable for an English duke or a European prince.

  Consuelo was allowed very few playmates so that she had no opportunity to meet anyone unsuitable. She was a sweet, sensitive and submissive child, quite unlike her mother. She never rebelled against the spinal brace that Alva decreed her daughter must wear daily while studying. This was an iron rod, strapped to her body at the waist, shoulders and head, to encourage an upright carriage. In order to read she had to raise her book almost to eye level and it was almost impossible to write when wearing it, but it did – she conceded as an adult – achieve its objective since she was known for her upright carriage. Even when out on informal pleasure outings the growing girl wore clothes of her mother’s choosing: ankle-length skirts, tight corsets and high collars stiffened with whalebone, skin-tight gloves and large beribboned hats skewered to her piled-up hair with long steel pins. Certainly no romping in these outfits. Her mother was a disciplinarian and would never relax her standards: Consuelo and her two brothers were ‘switched’ on their bare legs with a riding whip for even minor infringements. As a child, Alva had been punished in the same way, and she felt it had done her no harm but it had made her behave well. To the more sensitive and introspective Consuelo, though, the terror of these beatings was to haunt her long into adulthood.

  Consuelo’s recollection was that as a teenager she was profoundly unhappy, not least because her parents were continually quarrelling and she was sometimes made the bearer of hurtful messages from Alva to her husband. William K took to spending most of his time on his magnificent yacht the Alva.* His children saw little of him after this. It is hardly surprising that after receiving such a superior education Consuelo assumed she would be allowed to go to university, but although Alva sent for the entrance application to Oxford for her, this was not to be. Alva merely wished to ensure that Consuelo was well enough educated to be accepted, were she to apply.

  When she was sixteen, in 1893, Consuelo and her parents left the USA for an extended world tour in their second yacht the Valiant (the Alva had sunk after being rammed in fog). At all their ports of call they were received as visiting dignitaries, and treated accordingly by ambassadors and state leaders. In Bombay, the Vanderbilts stayed at Government House, where they were welcomed by the Viceroy and Vicereine, Lord and Lady Lansdowne, the uncle and aunt of the twenty-two-year-old Sunny, Duke of Marlborough.

  Years later Alva would confess to Consuelo that it was during that meeting that she was able to focus her ambitions and decide that she would marry her daughter to either the Duke of Marlborough or his cousin, Viscount Curzon’s heir. Consuelo spent the visit in the company of the younger daughters of the Lansdowne family. When they compared the books they were reading Consuelo was shocked at the Lansdowne girls’ lack of education. No Homer, no Virgil, no Gibbon. She did not realise, then, that an academic education w
as considered wasted on upper-class English girls, who needed only to know how to behave well, to have sufficient knowledge in English literature, geography and history to converse well in polite company (in English and French), and enough arithmetic to check the household accounts. They simply accepted that their principal role was to produce healthy heirs and entertain. Consuelo said nothing, of course, but she privately wondered how girls brought up under such restrictions were expected to converse on the same level with men educated in English public schools.

  When the Vanderbilts reached the Mediterranean in the spring of 1894 the Valiant docked at Nice. By then it had become abundantly clear to their many guests on the yacht, as well as to international gossip columnists, that the Vanderbilt marriage was at an end. The atmosphere during the previous weeks between Alva and William K had been frigid.

  What had happened? In subsequent months William K was paired in the press with a number of other women, one a French courtesan. But much later it transpired that she was merely a screen for the really important new relationship in William K’s life, who was none other than the woman Alva always considered her best friend, Consuelo Yznaga, now Duchess of Manchester. Somehow, Alva may have got wind of this fact during the cruise. But she too had her ‘walker’, one Oliver Belmont (whom she would later marry), who was a guest on the Valiant. So perhaps this was the problem? There were certainly widespread rumours about Alva and Belmont. However, they were both discreet, and this relationship was never even raised in the subsequent divorce proceedings – probably William K was too much of a gentleman to have it brought out in court. As a result Alva was the injured party in the sensational divorce case, in which she appeared so innocent of any blame that even Mrs Astor supported her.

  After the party aboard the Valiant broke up, William K. travelled to England to watch the Derby. Oliver Belmont sailed for New York. And Alva took Consuelo to Paris, where they stayed for two months. There, Consuelo attended a number of ‘white balls’ where the young maidens were all dressed in white, radiating innocence and purity, while Alva commissioned a suitable wardrobe for her daughter from leading designers before they left for London.

  Alva received five proposals of marriage for Consuelo while they were in Paris, but only one, from a middle-aged German prince, seemed worth Alva’s consideration. Consuelo was told about the offer, and she wrote later that for a short time her mother’s intentions to marry her to an English duke faltered at the possibility of a royal crown. But Consuelo shuddered at the thought of marriage to this much older man, whom she described as ‘a prejudiced German Princeling’ for whom she felt only aversion and to whom, she realised, she was simply a means to an end: ‘It seems I was about to exchange one bondage for another. Such a marriage could only mean unhappiness…how could I reconcile myself to such a life?’2

  When they reached London Alva launched divorce proceedings. They moved into Brown’s Hotel, which was respectable and comfortable, if a little dull. Consuelo thought longingly of the bright, glamorous suite in the hotel in Paris overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. The first thing Alva did – in a smart carriage and accompanied by a footman – was to visit her old childhood friend Minnie, Lady Paget (the former Minnie Stevens), in Belgravia Square.* The outcome of this meeting was that Consuelo’s debut was placed in the hands of Lady Paget who, though financially strapped, was worth cultivating because she had a direct entrée to the Prince of Wales’s circle. Lady Paget offered to ‘bring Consuelo out’ – almost certainly for a fee. She not only ordered a wardrobe of sophisticated new clothes for the teenager, in satins and with daring décolletages, to replace the demure white tulle debutante gowns bought in Paris, but she insisted that Consuelo receive elocution lessons to improve her French accent and public speaking voice. Consuelo heartily disliked this hard, worldly woman, likening her to the fictional Becky Sharp.

  Within weeks, seventeen-year-old Consuelo was introduced to twenty-three-year-old Sunny Marlborough at one of Lady Paget’s dinner parties. Consuelo felt that she was so pointedly thrown together with the Duke that it must be obvious to everyone what Lady Paget intended, and this made her feel gauche and embarrassed. Her impression of him was that he was intelligent and good-looking enough, though with a large nose and prominent blue eyes, and that he seemed very proud of his beautifully shaped small hands. But she was not overly impressed, perhaps because, at five feet eight inches, Consuelo was some six inches taller than the diminutive Duke; and although he had an undoubted charm when he wished to exert it, he was somewhat morose by nature. He seemed to hide any personality behind a veneer of icy reserve: his eyes were slightly hooded so that one could not read his feelings, and he wore a neatly trimmed moustache which turned down at the corners, accentuating his supercilious expression.

  We do not know what the Duke thought of Consuelo because he never recorded his feelings. What he would have seen was a quiet, thoughtful young woman, tall and slender with a noticeably erect carriage. She had high cheekbones, large doe-shaped eyes and an extraordinarily long and slender neck around which she often wore a simple ribbon. In earlier times she would have been called ‘swan-necked’, but one friend who was extremely fond of her later said that the length of her neck was actually only just short of being a disfigurement.3 She had an inquisitive expression and habitually held her head on one side as she listened. She was naturally intelligent, and had been taught to entertain with her conversation; moreover, she was always exquisitely dressed, thanks to her mother’s training. So she would not have bored him. But Marlborough was almost certainly already captivated by Lady Angela St Clair-Erskine, so perhaps he was not in the mood to be charmed by Consuelo.

  Rumours were already rife, however. On 19 July when the Dowager Duchess Fanny wrote Jennie a letter containing family gossip, such as that she had given Winston permission to attend the Sandown Races on condition that he did not bet – ‘he is thoughtless about money’ – she added: ‘I was amazed at the “news” of Marlborough’s marriage. Mrs Paget has been very busy introducing him to Miss Vanderbilt and telling everybody she meant to make up a marriage between them. But he has only met her once and he does not seem inclined to pursue the acquaintance.’4

  Nevertheless, Alva believed that she had moved her campaign along, and soon after this dinner she and Consuelo sailed for New York. They did not see the Duke again before leaving, and Consuelo thankfully assumed that her mother’s notion of marrying her to the young nobleman had been abandoned, along with any other plan for a ‘foreign alliance’. Now she could look forward to the forthcoming season of balls and parties; and she even allowed herself to hope she might continue a budding relationship that had begun before she left home, with a Newport man of impeccable family.

  Winthrop Rutherfurd was a descendant of the first Governors of New York and Massachusetts, Peter Stuyvesant and John Winthrop. Educated as a lawyer, he was rich in his own right (though not as rich as Consuelo), and a keen sportsman. ‘Wintie’, as he was known to his familiars, was regarded as ‘the handsomest bachelor in society’.5 He was much older than Consuelo, thirty-two to her seventeen, but she was in love with him and there are good grounds for believing that the attachment was genuine on his part, too. Their relationship had been noted in Newport society, and on Valentine’s Day 1895 it was even hinted at in gossip columns. Alva was clearly aware of Rutherfurd’s attentions to her daughter, for she began dropping contemptuous remarks about him into her conversation.

  Rutherfurd’s courtship was a gentle one, necessarily so because Consuelo was so carefully chaperoned; the only time the couple were ever alone was when they danced together under Alva’s watchful eye. We can be sure that this was never more than two dances at each event, and that after each dance Consuelo would have been whirled away from anyone who appeared to be paying her too much attention.

  Consuelo had her eighteenth birthday on 2 March 1895. That morning she received masses of flowers, and among the lavish baskets, bouquets and sprays was a long slim box, lined with gre
en wax paper and containing a single red ‘American Beauty’ rose.* There was no card but Consuelo knew instinctively who had sent it. Later that day, when her invited birthday guests took a cycle ride along Newport’s Riverside Drive, Winthrop and Consuelo managed briefly to outdistance the other guests. During the short time they were alone together they confessed their mutual love and he asked her to marry him. Consuelo breathlessly assented, agreeing to keep their engagement secret from her mother who – they both knew – would put a stop to it. Consuelo and Alva were due to leave for Paris within a matter of days and Winthrop swore he would follow them and try to see her there. Surely Alva would allow a fellow Newport resident to call on them? Somehow, he would find a way to see her and then, when Consuelo returned from Europe, he said, they would find a way to elope. At this point Alva, pedalling furiously and red-faced, caught up with them, and the conversation necessarily ended. But Alva was too late and the damage was done. Consuelo considered herself secretly engaged and had given her heart.

  It could be argued that Alva was looking after her daughter’s best interests by not allowing her to consort with a much older man, who was perhaps after Consuelo’s fortune. But Winthrop Rutherfurd would be independently very rich until the end of his life despite a high-rolling lifestyle, so that at least could not have been her objection. He was supremely eligible and was never a noted womaniser. His age was against him, but this did not bother Consuelo (although her main objection to the German prince had been that he was so much older).

  Before they sailed for France in April, Alva announced that she would be throwing a ball at Marble House in August. She had spent the previous months divorcing William K and keeping her own affair with Oliver Belmont out of the papers. A few months in Europe now would enable her not only to ‘settle’ Consuelo appropriately but also to miss the huge wave of adverse gossip in the New York papers when the divorce was granted. Consuelo was content that somehow she would soon see her secret fiancé. But Alva was no fool; she suspected from her daughter’s unusually happy demeanour that there was trouble brewing.