By Christmas Day the Marlboroughs had arrived in Rome. Consuelo remembered the rooms of the hotel as high and bare, and felt acutely homesick. Concerned by her persistent listlessness, Sunny chose this moment to insure her life. A ‘pompous Roman doctor’ examined her and promptly informed them that she had less than six months to live. This alarming news led Sunny to summon a specialist from London posthaste. The specialist’s diagnosis was that she was physically well but had ‘outgrown her strength’. A modern doctor might well have diagnosed homesickness or even reactive depression and queried whether extended travelling was simply making matters worse. The news that the Duke of Marlborough had been so quick off the mark to insure his new wife’s life and thus protect Blenheim against the loss of her part of the marriage settlement reached Town Topics by 2 January 1896. It took a dim view of the matter: ‘After the hardships and perils incident to the successful hunt for “bigger game” in America, the Duke of Marlborough, like a worthy descendant of the thrifty founder of his house, has no fancy in being done out of his “bag” by a random shot from the “gray” horseman,’ it commented sourly.39
Consuelo was ordered to rest while Sunny ransacked the antique shops of Rome, remarking that her appearance only served to drive up prices. This was probably an indirect compliment, but if so Consuelo failed to notice and simply felt excluded from the great project of setting Blenheim to rights for future Marlboroughs. Indeed, enforced rest proved most difficult of all: ‘In the solitude of those long hours I began to realise what life away from my family in a strange country would mean. At the age of eighteen I was beginning to chafe at the impersonal role I had played in my own life – first, as a pawn in my mother’s game and now, as my husband expressed it, “a link in a chain”. To one not sufficiently impressed with the importance of ensuring the survival of a particular family, the fact that our happiness as individuals was as nothing in this unbroken chain of succeeding generations was a corroding thought; for although I greatly desired children, I had not reached the stage of total abnegation regarding my personal happiness. Nevertheless, to produce the next link in the chain, was, I knew, my most immediate duty and I worried at my ill-health.’40
Two weeks later, spies for Town Topics had better news to report. In spite of hundreds of visiting cards left for them, the Marlboroughs preferred to visit monuments like ‘bourgeois tourists’ and received no-one. The Duke was even reported as saying gallantly: ‘I am here only for my wife, and I only take interest in her.’ This was just as well, thought Colonel Mann in his weekly column, for ‘during their stay in Monte Carlo, I understand that everyone remarked upon the woe-begone aspect of the two turtle doves.’41
In view of concerns about Consuelo’s health and ability to conceive, it was perhaps rather tactless for Sunny to leave his new bride in the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum while he went with a guide to look at risqué paintings and ‘statues erected to the worship of Priapus, the god and giver of life’. Indeed, it clearly caused another row since she later recommended honeymooners to avoid these sites which, she said, could only provoke discord. It was perhaps equally maladroit, when sailing on the Nile, for Sunny to summon nautch girls on board to dance. ‘Not yet hardened to such exhibitions, I retired below and was not altogether sorry to hear that one of them had fallen into the river, from which she was fished none the worse for her immersion.’42
In Egypt, Sunny explicitly aped the Prince of Wales (who had returned from a visit to Egypt in 1869 with a ten-year-old Egyptian page called Ali Achmet) by acquiring an Egyptian pageboy for his duchess and taking him back to Blenheim as a human souvenir. It was not a wise decision. Consuelo soon found the unhappy pageboy’s attentions trying, and he developed a violent streak. Gerald Horne, a hallboy at Blenheim in 1896, remembered that though he did not speak a word of the language on arrival, the Egyptian page could swear like a trooper in English within six months. ‘Mike’, as he was nicknamed, appealed to Sunny’s sense of ceremonial display, and he often stood beturbaned and dressed in a yellow or scarlet Egyptian costume behind the Duchess’s chair at dinner. ‘He looked very picturesque, I’ll say that much, but he was a dangerous customer all the same,’ remarked Horne.43 (‘Mike’ eventually returned to Egypt).
It was with feelings of considerable relief that Consuelo found herself back on the familiar terrain of the Hôtel Bristol on the Place Vendôme in Paris in February 1896. She had tasks of her own in Paris, for William K. had told her to buy whatever she needed to complete her trousseau, well away from the searchlights of New York’s press. At this point, Consuelo suddenly realised how inexperienced she was. Until now, everything she owned had been selected by her mother. Her new husband promptly stepped in to take Alva’s place, a move that was far from welcome since Consuelo felt he was primarily motivated by display, particularly when it came to her clothes. ‘Marlborough took it upon himself to display the same hectoring rights [my mother] had previously exercised in the selection of my gowns. Unfortunately, his taste appeared to be dictated by a desire for magnificence rather than by any wish to enhance my looks. I remember particularly one evening dress of sea-blue satin with a long train, whose whole length was trimmed with white ostrich feathers. Another creation was rich pink velvet with sables. Jean Worth himself directed the fittings of these beautiful dresses, which he and my husband considered suitable, but which I would willingly have exchanged for the tulle and organdie that girls of my age were wearing.’44
Sunny’s own shopping in Paris astounded his new bride who was surprised by the ‘excess of household and personal linens, clothes, furs and hats’ he ordered. He was also anxious to buy jewellery for Consuelo, for the lack of family heirlooms was a source of embarrassment. Marie Carola, Lady Galway noted in her late-nineteenth-century autobiography that it was the custom for a bridegroom to offer a corbeille to his fiancée, and that: ‘In the case of the great and the rich, there were family heirlooms to which modern additions were made, and much pride and kudos was involved,’45 but after the depredations of his ancestors the Duke had little to offer that was suitably grand. The purchase of jewellery for Consuelo in Paris only illustrated how poorly this young couple understood each other, even after weeks of travelling together. Once again, Consuelo felt that Marlborough’s purchases were motivated first and foremost by a desire to convey the splendour of the family, a cause for which she felt little sympathy. The Duke, meanwhile, simply could not understand why she should object to wearing beautiful jewels and enhance the standing of the family into which she had married.
Both Sunny’s desire to buy jewellery for his new duchess and Consuelo’s resistance to it becomes clearer in the context of nineteenth-century ostentation. Historians of jewellery have noted a marked increase in sales of gold jewellery in England as well as America from the 1850s onwards, a trend that extended far beyond the aristocracy. Peter Hinks points out that even Charles Dickens’s character, Mr Merdle, ‘wanted something to hang jewels upon’ and therefore ‘got himself a wife.’46 Nancy Armstrong has noted that this tendency became noticeable from the end of the eighteenth century when men stopped wearing jewels themselves. In the hierarchy of display, pearls and diamonds sat at the top until the successful development of spherical cultured pearls in the first decade of the twentieth century sharply damaged the value of real pearls.47 Before that, pearls were often more valuable than diamonds and in 1908 George Kunz could still write: ‘If one is a wearer of jewels, pearls are an absolute necessity; indeed, they are as essential and indispensable for the wealthy as are houses, horses and automobiles.’48 Pearls were swung in huge loops round necks in a visible display of wealth. Mrs Astor even developed an odd habit of draping pearls down her back. On marriage, Alva gave Consuelo the magnificent string of pearls bought for her by William K., said to have belonged first to Catherine the Great and later to Empress Eugenie. These almost certainly came into Alva’s possession after 1887, when a famous auction of most of the French crown jewels was conducted by Tiffany and Co. on behalf of
the government of the Third Republic. The value of the jewels owned by American society women was frequently recorded and compared by the press. Comment in England on the jewels worn by Princess Alexandra and her court was only marginally less explicit.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Duke was keen to ensure that the new Duchess of Marlborough had beautiful jewellery. Consuelo’s resistance to wearing new jewels was unexpected, however, and pointed towards an emerging distaste for submission. Some commentators have suggested that there was a connection between male gifts of jewellery and acceptance of servitude by the female partner, and point out that as middle- and upper-class wives became increasingly divorced from economic production, their jewellery became more fetter-like.49 The most fashionable piece of jewellery in Edwardian England was the pearl dog-collar, the most fetter-like style of them all, which usually consisted of a dozen or so strands of small, ungraduated pearls or diamond open work. Portraits and photographs of society ladies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show its near universal appeal. The fashion was led by Princess Alexandra, though Consuelo’s nineteen-row pearl dog-collar, designed for her celebrated swan-like neck, became the most famous. But she hated wearing it, complaining that the diamond clasps rasped her neck and that wearing a heavy tiara gave her a violent headache. This may have sounded extraordinarily spoilt to the Duke to whom she doubtless complained, but if one accepts a subliminal association with submission, Consuelo’s dislike of her famous dog-collar is much more understandable. It was, as Marian Fowler has said, ‘a fit symbol for a young wife to be brought instantly to heel’.50
In spite of tensions with her husband, Consuelo would later write that she dreaded their honeymoon coming to an end as they prepared to travel to London. ‘I realised that he would from now on be surrounded by friends and distractions that were foreign to me and that the precarious hold I had during our months alone secured in his life and affections might easily become endangered,’51 she wrote. One clue that he did indeed hold her in some kind of affection comes in a letter to the Duke from the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava in Paris: it seems that Sunny had approached him to write a tribute to Consuelo for her birthday, knowing that the Marquess was already the author of some verses entitled ‘Transatlantic Letters’. ‘My dear Duke,’ replied the Marquess:
I would esteem it an honour and a privilege to pay any little tribute at the feet of the Duchess, but I am afraid it is quite impossible for me to do so on the present occasion. In the first place, I have not the practical faculty, though in early life I strung together a few very bad rhymes, and whatever is written about the Duchess ought to be a little gem; and in the next place, my daughter Flora made the same request to me for her picture. For a long time I refused, simply from the sense of my inability to write anything suitable. At last, on being further pressed, I sent her a couple of foolish verses which I had written years and years ago to please my sister-in-law who had instigated a book of ‘definitions’. The subject of the verses was ‘letters’. They have nothing whatever to do with Flora and are really worthless, but they were the only thing I could think of. To put some kind of meaning to them I added ‘Transatlantic Letters’. A second equally mediocre effort in the same book by the same person would never do. I have written this long rigmarole in order to make you understand how vexed I am at not being able to take advantage of what would otherwise have been a most pleasant opportunity of evincing my genuine feelings of admiration for your wife. Believe me,
Yours very sincerely,
Dufferin and Ava.52
Shortly after her nineteenth birthday on 2 March 1896, Consuelo braced herself for introduction to a new life in England, suitably ‘bejewelled and bedecked’. ‘London looked immense as the train slowly wound through endless dimly-lit suburbs. They seemed drab to me, but the streets were clean and the little houses had gardens. There was a general air of homeliness. In those days there was little discontent – England was prosperous and only the intelligentsia ventured to discuss socialism.’53
To all appearances this was true. Keir Hardie’s presence on the Campania and his lectures on the British class structure did not, as yet, pose any threat to the patrician elite. This was an era when, as Churchill would later write, the old world still existed in a ‘glittering and it seemed stable framework’.54 Aristocratic government reached its apogee between 1895 and 1905. The Conservative government that came to power in 1895 was dominated by England’s great landowning families. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was a marquess. So was the Secretary for War. The Lord President of the Council and the Secretary for India were both dukes. The government also included one viscount, and at least three barons. Other than Joseph Chamberlain, even the commoners were more aristocratic than they first appeared: Arthur Balfour came from a Scots landowning family and was Lord Salisbury’s nephew (a coincidence behind the expression ‘Bob’s your uncle’). In 1896, however, when Consuelo arrived in England, some of the glitter of British aristocratic dominance could already be imputed, in A. L. Rowse’s ringing phrase ‘to the phosphorescence of decay’.55
In the view of David Cannadine, the rot had already set in by the 1880s. It was not simply that the style of the patrician elite was being challenged by the opulence of plutocrats. Across Europe, the agricultural base of the economy was being adversely affected by the rise of industrial society and an influx of cheap foodstuffs from the Americas and the Antipodes. Agricultural depression meant lower agricultural rents. ‘The result was that the rural sector was simultaneously depressed and marginalized, and the consequences for the essentially agrarian elite of European landowners were inevitably severe.’ In Britain there was a more specific problem. The Third Reform Act, passed between 1884 and 1885, had altered the balance away from dominance by the landed classes, from ‘notables to numbers’.56 As a result of this extension of the franchise there had already been several challenges to the great landlords across Britain: a tithe war in Wales, a crofter rebellion in Scotland, a demand for Home Rule in Ireland. The patrician society to which Consuelo was about to be introduced may superficially have seemed all-powerful – rich, prestigious, and with political power vested in the House of Lords – but it was already on the defensive. The consequence was arrogance, insularity, a preoccupation with minute issues of status and precedence, and a complex – and not always amiable – reaction to a young American plutocrat bride with a very large fortune.
Consuelo would experience all of this and more as she came to know her new in-laws, some of whom now lined up to greet her on the platform at Victoria station in London. The reception committee included some familiar faces: Sunny’s sisters, Lilian and Norah, whom she had met at Blenheim the previous summer; Ivor Guest, the Duke’s best man; and cousin Winston whom she had probably met briefly before leaving New York the previous November. There were new faces too: her mother-in-law, Lady Blandford; Lady Sarah Wilson, an aunt whom Consuelo mistrusted on sight; and Lady Randolph Churchill, born Jennie Jerome, the first American bride to marry into the Spencer-Churchill family. ‘I felt the scrutiny of many eyes and hoped that my hat was becoming and that my furs were fine enough to win their approval. They all talked at once in soft voices and strange accents which I knew I should have to imitate, and I felt thankful that I had no nasal twang.’57
There was a great deal to absorb that first evening in London. Lady Blandford, Consuelo’s mother-in-law, ‘had the narrow aristocratic face of the well-bred, with a thin slightly arched nose and small blue eyes that were kind and appraising’. Consuelo immediately realised that ‘Goosey’ was far from dim however. ‘Her outlook was limited, for she had received an English girl’s proverbially poor education, but she possessed shrewd powers of intuition and observation, and that she liked me I immediately realised.’58 At dinner that evening, however, Consuelo was taken aback by some of her mother-in-law’s more startling remarks ‘revealing that she thought we all lived on plantations with negro slaves and that there were Red Indians ready to s
calp us just round the corner’.59 This was not an uncommon experience: Lady Randolph Churchill wrote in her memoirs that the young American woman ‘was looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature, with habits and manners something between a Red Indian and a Gaiety Girl’.60 Such treatment was also satirised by Edith Wharton: ‘I am constantly expecting them to ask Mrs St George how she heats her wigwam in winter,’ remarks Sir Helmsley Thwarte in The Buccaneers.61
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 21
