Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  There were two great ceremonies. One was the state entry into Delhi, a procession three-miles long with heralds and trumpeters, led by Lord and Lady Curzon riding an elephant lent by the Maharajah of Benares and covered in a cloth of gold embroidered with lions rampant and a silver boat-shaped howdah. This was followed by another elephant carrying the King’s brother, the Duke of Connaught and his duchess, and a great procession of Indian chiefs. ‘The mere bringing together of people from the Chinese frontier of Tibet and Siam, Burma, Bootea, Nepal, Gilgit, Chitral-Swat, Beluchistan, Travancore, and Kathiawar, has been the most marvellous object-lesson. Chiefs from the outer fringes of civilisation, who for years had been turbulent, gasped, “Had we known we were fighting this we would have remained at peace,”’94 wrote Mary Curzon to Lady Randolph Churchill in England. The effect of them all in procession struck the correspondent for The Times as ‘a succession of waves of brilliant colour, breaking into foams of gold and silver, and the crest of each wave flashed with diamonds, rubies and emeralds of jewelled robes and turbans, stiff with pearls and glittering with aigrettes’.95

  The focal point of the two weeks was the Coronation Durbar on 1 January 1903. Sixteen thousand people, including the Indian ruling princes, assembled in the amphitheatre to hear the proclamation of King Edward VII as Emperor of India read aloud to a fanfare of trumpets. Thirty-one guns were sounded as Curzon entered and took his place on a throne as the King’s representative, before each of the Indian princes was presented in turn. Around these two great ceremonies there was ceaseless activity – polo matches, fireworks, a huge ball at the Red Fort, and a military review of British and Indian troops. For Consuelo it was punctuated by memorable moments: Curzon at his grandest, leaving no-one in any doubt that it was he, and not the King’s brother, the Duke of Connaught, who represented the King-Emperor in India; Mary Curzon bewitching, the cynosure of all eyes in a dress with a design of peacock feathers embroidered with semi-precious stones; a purdah party to meet the maharanees and princesses which only women could attend but profoundly reinforced Consuelo’s sense of just how forcefully this ‘bevy of imprisoned children’ depended on their husbands;96 an early morning gallop across a great plain as part of a falcon hunt …

  After it was over, Curzon was congratulated by the King, the British press and politicians from both sides of the British political divide. ‘The best show that ever was shown,’97 said Arthur Balfour. ‘The most gorgeous pageant that has ever been devised by the imagination and ingenuity of mortal man to point a moral or adorn a tale,’98 said one newspaper. But not everyone approved of the moral that was pointed or the tale that had been adorned. There were objections to the contrast between the extravagance of the durbar and the poverty of India which, it was alleged, the Viceroy’s guests never saw.

  Consuelo saw plenty on that visit, however, and was as repelled as she had been during the Valiant cruise of 1894, by funeral processions with the dead on litters, by the bloated corpses of babies floating on the Ganges and by the mutilation of lepers. Unlike those guests in the party who saw only a breathtaking display of imperial magnificence, she also noted subversive rumblings – Maharajahs who felt that the Viceroy disdained them; a moment during the Coronation Durbar itself when one of them refused to bow to Curzon (who paled, but chose to ignore it). As far as sections of the Indian press were concerned, the Delhi Durbar was nothing more than a wholly inappropriate display of British imperial pomposity that was deeply humiliating to India. Curzon had gone too far, it was said, and one Indian newspaper even thought that ‘the Durbar marks the beginning of Lord Curzon’s decline, and has made it impossible for him to end his term of office on the same high note with which it began’.99 It was a perceptive remark, which turned out to be true. But the Delhi Durbar did not simply mark the start of a decline in Curzon’s career, it also coincided with further erosion of British aristocratic authority. And if a way of life was coming under pressure, so was the Marlboroughs’ marriage. Exposure to the lifestyle of the Vicereine of India had set the seal on Alva’s determination to marry Consuelo into the British aristocracy during the Valiant cruise of 1894; but by the time the Marlboroughs returned from the Delhi Durbar, the cracks in their own ceremonial facade were beginning to show.

  7

  Difficulties

  WHEN HARPER & BROTHERS accepted The Glitter and the Gold for publication in 1951, Consuelo was asked to write more about the causes of her disagreements with the Duke. She refused. It would be ‘necessary to place him in a light that will be painful to his children and to his cousin Winston Churchill’, she wrote to her editor, Cass Canfield. ‘In order to satisfy the curiosity of magazine readers I am unwilling to depart from a silence I have hitherto observed on a subject which after all is no one’s business than my own.’1 It was a curious protest. By the time the memoir was published in 1952, it was spattered with so many clues that those who were fond of her first husband protested, saying that she should not have blackened the name of a man who had died in 1934 and was thus in no position to defend himself. Piecing together his side of the story of the breakdown of their marriage is more difficult, for it is accessible only through a few letters and the remarks of those close to him. As is often the way, friends sometimes found it difficult not to take sides.

  Later, Town Topics would remark that ‘American mothers, if they must have titles for daughters, should see to it that hearts are not left out of the bargain’.2 The obvious explanation for their later unhappiness is that this couple never loved each other in the first place and that Consuelo never recovered from feeling compelled to marry the Duke. Yet arranged marriages do sometimes end happily, even when the contracting parties have little choice. In this case, however, there was antagonism from the outset. In Consuelo’s memoirs, written many years later during a second much happier marriage, she implied that even by the end of their honeymoon there were already many serious difficulties which were never resolved. By the time she met her new in-laws in London, she was already bristling at the Duke’s arrogant and churlish dislike of all things American; his love of display; his ‘hectoring rights’ over her person which represented little change from life with her mother; and his deference to monarchy, aristocracy and the English class system. On top of a deeply upsetting quarrel, when all illusions of romance on both sides were ruthlessly dispatched, there had been sharply divergent points of view over the importance of presentation to Queen Christina of Spain; insensitive exposure to the vulgarities of belle-époque Monte Carlo; cack-handed timing of life insurance arrangements; serious disagreements over matters of taste; exhaustion and depression; and mutual episodes of deep gloom. Perhaps one of the most ominous signs during those first few weeks was that mealtimes began to assume enormous importance. ‘We seemed to spend hours discussing the merit of a dish or the bouquet of a vintage. The maître d’hôtel had become an important person to whom at meals most of my husband’s conversation was addressed.’3 The Duke, in other words, was finding that after several weeks together, he had little to say to his new bride.

  Settling into life at Blenheim did nothing to improve her sense that they had, au fond, very little in common and had fundamentally incompatible temperaments. Her account of long evening meals when the servants shut the door and left them alone make one feel for both of them:

  He had a way of piling food on his plate; the next move was to push the plate away, together with knives, forks, spoons and glasses – all this in considered gestures which took a long time; then he backed his chair away from the table, crossed one leg over the other and endlessly twirled the ring on his little finger. While accomplishing these gestures he was absorbed in thought and quite oblivious of any reactions I might have. After a quarter of an hour he would suddenly return to earth, or perhaps I should say to food, and begin to eat very slowly, usually complaining that the food was cold! And how could it be otherwise? As a rule neither of us spoke a word. I took to knitting in desperation and the butler read detective stories in the hall.4


  This is only one testimony among many to the Duke’s tendency to self-absorption, which Consuelo found herself unable to puncture. She later described him as ‘a beast’ to Louis Auchincloss, and it is clear from others that he had a domineering streak and a ‘demoniacal temper’ which meant that life with him was altogether too similar to life with Alva. Such was the damage wrought by the Duke’s own childhood that it would have taken very great confidence, insensitivity, or submissiveness to live alongside him happily.

  Consuelo was neither enormously confident nor insensitive, and she quickly became less submissive. At the same time, she had had an isolated and sheltered childhood from which she had been precipitately thrust, and the necessity of constantly surrendering to Alva’s autocratic demands gave her little experience of emotional negotiation, or of articulating her feelings calmly when something was wrong. Instead, her antagonism towards her husband appears to have manifested itself in lethargy or festered until it finally erupted in a bitter and damaging row. Antagonism and antipathy towards his person, his house and his ancestors were much more destructive in the 9th Duke’s case than in those of more robust emotional temperament.

  They probably both hoped that once Consuelo was settled into English life a modus vivendi would emerge and some of these problems would settle down. Instead, more damage was done in the early months in England when Consuelo felt unsupported in finding her way through the mysterious maze of English high society. Sunny was insensitive to her anxieties while she often misunderstood his. Exceedingly fastidious, he had the critical eye of the acutely anxious man which made him more inclined to criticise than praise. His compliments were so rare that Consuelo could remember them years later. Conversely he probably felt her need for encouragement was insatiable, was unwilling to pander to her vanity and felt she should regard becoming chatelaine of Blenheim as a privilege.

  Like other American women who married into the English aristocracy, Consuelo faced the constant unspoken assumption that she would, at any minute, do something vulgar. As Lady Randolph Churchill later wrote: ‘If (the American woman) talked, dressed, and conducted herself as any well-bred woman would, much astonishment was invariably evinced.’5 Consuelo, confronted with the ineffable certainties of the English upper classes, found her new acquaintance in general and her husband in particular unthinkingly arrogant and carelessly anti-American. She was understandably indignant when they tried to patronise her, by the implicit assumption that she was fortunate to have become a Marlborough, and that as a duchess she would work to glorify the family name without question. Even where she could see that change was necessary, she often found that the forces ranged against her made it difficult to implement. There is no sign, moreover, that she was ever allowed to participate in planning the refurbishment of Blenheim, though she was – at least indirectly – expected to finance it. For, as Lady Randolph Churchill also remarked of the American wife: ‘Her dollars were her only recommendation … otherwise what was her raison d’être?’6

  Consuelo later described herself and her husband as ‘people of different temperament condemned to live together’.7 From her in-laws’ point of view, Consuelo may have been more difficult and less victimised than she gives us to understand. She was charming, elegant and wealthy, with a dowry that enabled her husband to carry out many changes to Blenheim of which he had long dreamed; but away from her mother, she was proving ‘touchy’ and ‘oversensitive’, characteristics that Consuelo herself recognised as clouding an otherwise amiable disposition, and which she thought stemmed from her confined and introspective childhood. There was also Churchill irritation at her lethargy in the face of many of the new experiences which now confronted her. Given that she described these, even in her memoirs, as ‘boring’ or ‘tiring’, she must sometimes have appeared spoilt and infuriatingly passive. In the Blenheim Christmas tableaux and theatricals burlesque of 1897, for example, Consuelo was teased by her in-laws for feeling tired all the time.*

  Today, these outbreaks of fatigue and lassitude would be better understood. They may well have had a physical basis. She was faced with a huge and demanding adjustment at the age of eighteen, followed by two pregnancies in quick succession before she was twenty. Many of the new experiences she was supposed to enjoy were imposed without explanation; the risk of failure was impressed on her constantly; she was criticised when she made mistakes and relations who found her lassitude tiresome may well have been jealous of the social success which appeared to cause it. Sunny’s depressive tendency was also misunderstood by his new wife, however, who was more inclined to view his love of Blenheim as the psychological prop of an inadequate man, while his agenda was inaccessible to all but his own charmed circle. It was, at best, a fragile emotional construct and it soon came under new pressures.

  The first of these, ironically, was success. For a few years, the challenge of reversing decline, launching Consuelo into English society and the birth of two sons acted as a distraction from underlying incompatibility. By 1899, however, the ‘heir and the spare’ had not only been produced but were being looked after by nannies, another English system that Consuelo found she could do little to change. She had done her duty while the Duke had done his by ensuring another ‘link in the chain’. This gave both of them more time for introspection and discontent. Consuelo’s success as a duchess gave her confidence, however, and came partly because she learned to assert herself. As the independent-minded Consuelo gained the upper hand, she was more inclined to regard her former submissive self with disfavour and resent high-handed treatment by her mother and husband. But the conflict between the two sides of her nature did not make her any easier to deal with when she was angry. ‘I know from long experience that with a child-like appearance and demeanour she is as dangerous as she can be,’8 wrote her husband in exasperation to Winston Churchill in 1906.

  As Consuelo conquered English society and made friends she found it all less intimidating. By the same token, its pretensions became much more apparent; its insistence on protocol increasingly irritating. After the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, for example, duchesses were required to wear black. When Consuelo wore white gloves with her black outfit to the races in Paris she found herself accused of showing insufficient respect to the memory of the dead Queen by, of all people, the Duchess of Devonshire – the famous ‘double Duchess’ who had a raffish reputation as a leader of the ‘fast set’ and added to her louche aura by wearing a great deal of make-up. On another occasion, she was scolded by the Prince of Wales for wearing a diamond crescent to dinner rather than a tiara like the Princess of Wales, forcing Consuelo to say that she had come direct from a charitable function and that the bank where she kept her tiara had been closed when she arrived in London.

  It was not long before this reaction against stifling protocol became something more profound than irritation at the ‘over-importance attached to the fastidious observance of ritual’. Even her engagement with the poorer tenants on the Blenheim estate opened her eyes to a different side of the English class system. It became increasingly difficult to enjoy life in a resplendent carriage when the linkman who opened the carriage door and bowed as one stepped out onto the carpet looked so drab and impoverished. Constant protection from everyday life was constricting and frustrating. ‘The realities of life seemed far removed from the palatial splendour in which we moved and it was becoming excessively boring to walk on an endlessly spread red carpet,’9 she wrote.

  Although Consuelo supported her husband in his political activities while she lived under his roof, her instincts were always more liberal and she subscribed to the Whiggish view that it was the duty of those with wealth to alleviate suffering caused by poverty. She also remained an unreconstructed plutocrat. ‘The accident of one’s birth had always appeared to me no adequate reason for personal pride; though it is pleasant to realise that cause for shame in one’s forebears is non-existent, still the achievements of others lend one no special glory.’10 She did not regard herself a
s a snob. Her husband regarded her lack of snobbishness as a personality failing.

  On at least one occasion their diverging views caused trouble. During the winter of 1898–9, while she was staying in Melton Mowbray once again, Consuelo heard that there were serious social and economic problems in the countryside round Blenheim, and took a small step to tackle it.

  Reports from our agent at Blenheim told of unemployment and of its accompanying train of hunger and misery. When I announced my desire to provide work for the unemployed it was labelled as sentimental socialism; but unable to reconcile our life of ease with the hardships of those who, although not our employees, were yet our neighbours, I dispatched funds to institute relief work. Unfortunately the men, grateful for the help given to them, sent a letter of thanks to my husband, who to his indignant surprise discovered that the roads on his estate had been mended and his generosity exalted. It was only then that I discovered how greatly he resented such independent action and that had I committed lèse majesté it could not have been more serious.11

  With so little room for manoeuvre, it is hardly surprising that Consuelo found herself faced with the problem of ennui that afflicted other duchesses before and after her. Alva had been convinced that the life of an English duchess would provide a role and a career. In time, however, Consuelo came to find the routine opening of bazaars and the presentation of prizes easy, noting that the mere fact of her appearance was more important than anything she said for ‘the cinema star had not yet eclipsed the duchess and archaic welcomes were still in line … There were school treats for the various villages to arrange. There were cricket matches, which I never learned to appreciate. There were mothers’ meetings, and women’s organisations to address. I even wrote a sermon for a young curate who was shy and pressed for time.’12