The wedding of Duke of Windsor, Prince Edward and Mrs. Wallis Warfield was celebrated at the Cande Castle, France on June 3, 1937, near Tour. After the ceremony, the duke and "her grace" agreed with the posing on the castle terrace. Left to right: Mr. Hermann Rogers witness of Mrs. Warfield, duchess, Duke of Windsor, and Major Metcalf, first former king of England’s witness. (AP Photo)

Created: 6/3/1967

Upward Nobility

American-Made Royalty

05.18.18

The marriage of England’s Prince Harry to American actress Meghan Markle is making headlines around the world. U.S. women marrying into aristocracy has a surprisingly long history. This week, Ed, Brian, and Joanne look at the outsized political impact these marriages often have around the globe.

aristocracy; marriage; monarchy

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

That Woman

As the tabloid coverage of Meghan Markle reaches a fever pitch, we look back at the furor surrounding another American woman who married into the Windsor family.

Music:

Pigalle by Jahzzar

Golden Hour by Podington Bear

Gnossienne 1 by Podington Bear

Pop Brasilia by Podington Bear

Box Canyon by Podington Bear

Wallis Simpson; marriage; scandal

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation’s.

JOANNE: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: An English prince has his heart set on it American actress. On May 19th, 2018, Prince Harry of Wales is set to marry California native, Meghan Markle. When the couple’s relationship became public, the press coverage was so intense and so negative that the royal family issued an official statement warning the press off.

MALE SPEAKER: The Royals rarely talk about their love lives, but Prince Harry just confirmed that he is dating American actress, Meghan Markle.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah, he broke the news in order to slam the press. He is royally upset about the way his girlfriend is being treated, calling it–

FEMALE SPEAKER: Abuse and harassment, racial undertones, outright sexism and racism of social media trolls. Megan’s father is white, her mother is African-American.

MALE SPEAKER: The private life has to be private.

JOANNE: But this is not the first transatlantic royal relationship and Meghan Markle is not the first American woman to become a tabloid sensation after getting involved with a British Royal.

ANNE SEBBA: The world’s press reported on it and took photographs.

JOANNE: This is historian, Anne Sebba.

ANNE SEBBA: And there was one photograph in particular with her hand resting lovingly on the King’s arm.

JOANNE: That photograph was taken in 1936. The woman resting a proprietorial arm on her beloved was about to become the most hated woman in England. She would set off a constitutional crisis that shook the British monarchy to its foundations. She was an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson.

ANNE SEBBA: She was brash and open and had affairs. And that was very different from the sort of sheltered English rose type of woman.

BRIAN: In 1928, Wallis Simpson had arrived in London with her second husband, Ernest, an Anglo American shipping executive.

ANNE SEBBA: She wanted real money, real stability. She did not want the sort of insecurity that she had seen her mother suffer from.

BRIAN: The Simpsons attended and hosted parties for members of the British elite and Wallace stood out. She was smart, she was assertive and she knew how to hold a man’s attention.

ANNE SEBBA: And one of her early guests is the Prince of Wales, but she can’t really afford to entertain the Prince of Wales and his circle in the way that she would like to. And that’s really where the trouble starts, because Edward is totally smitten, and he loves going to visit Wallace to discuss affairs of state, or to have a cocktail, or rather a KT as it became known. Wallace was a dab hand at mixing a KT. And it’s a slippery slope, because the Prince of Wales starts giving her jewelry and furs and even sets up a trust fund for her in Canada, because he does not want to lose her merely because she’s worried she hasn’t got enough money. He can certainly do with that little problem.

JOANNE: Wallis Simpson soon became the Prince’s mistress. She wasn’t the first married woman to take the eye of the future King.

ANNE SEBBA: And normally, it’s just an affair and when it runs its course, they’ll be dumped. So Wallis was historically correct in thinking that soon enough, the affair would dwindle and Wallis would, like all royal mistresses, be handed back to her husband. And she was just waiting for that to happen, which shows I suppose that at the beginning, she totally failed to understand what a desperately needy and really troubled man Edward was.

JOANNE: In fact, Edward had long chafed at the restrictions of his royal role.

ANNE SEBBA: And he says, he would rather die than have the sort of throne and courtiers that his father has created, the stuffy old world establishment. He says, I love America, I love all things American. And it’s not just trouser turn ups and jazz and the telephone, it’s American democracy. He actually says, he feels the days of monarchy are over and his father’s a tyrant.

BRIAN: King George the 5th died in January of 1936. Edward was officially King Edward the 8th. His feelings towards Wallis hadn’t changed. In fact, it would soon become clear that he intended to marry her. And that created a whole new problem, because the King of England is also the head of the Church of England and Wallis Simpson was a divorced woman.

ANNE SEBBA: It wasn’t so much illegal as, you couldn’t marry in church if you’d already been divorced and Wallis had two living husbands. So it was simply not possible for her to be queen.

BRIAN: But Edward refused to give her up. Discreet inquiries were made about how his subjects might feel about a queen with two living husbands. And it turns out, they did not approve. British dominion’s like South Africa, Canada and Australia threatened to leave the empire if Wallis were made queen. The love affair became a full blown constitutional crisis And to Edward, there was only one possible resolution.

KING EDWARD: But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman that I love. And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone.

JOANNE: On December 11th, 1936, less than a year after becoming King, Edward became the only English monarch to voluntarily abdicate his throne. The idea of a King just walking away to be with a woman, especially that woman, was unthinkable. And across the pond, Americans were just eating it up.

ANNE SEBBA: Everybody thought this was a great love story, the greatest romance of the 20th century. And so if an American woman had provided everything that a handsome, charming young prince wanted when he could have had any English rose, any aristocratic woman in the world, and she chose a twice married American woman. Wow, she must be very, very special. So of course there was American pride in all of that.

JOANNE: But back in England, Wallis Simpson was a pariah.

ANNE SEBBA: Nobody knew nothing about Wallis, so there really was a belief that she must have witch like powers, she must be a gold digger, an adventurous, a whore, a Nazi– they threw every single insult they could find at her.

JOANNE: Sebba says that it was Edward’s obsession with her that ultimately led to the couple’s downfall.

ANNE SEBBA: When you look at the story, it’s Edward who wanted her, Edward who was doing the chasing, but people didn’t know that at the time, because he didn’t give interviews and all people thought was, he’s handsome and charming and he’s been lured away by this woman. I’m not saying she’s perfect and wonderful, she did her fair share of manipulating, but she got caught by her own machinations.

JOANNE: Wallis divorced her husband and married Edward in a small ceremony in France in front of a few friends. No Royals attended. The couple could be together forever. And from that point onward, their relationship seemed to deteriorate. Wallis would continue to write to her second husband even after they divorced and her letters seem filled with regret. She refers to Edward as Peter Pan, a man child who will never grow up. His devotion to her was claustrophobic and she grew increasingly bitter. Sebba says, few who knew the couple described what they shared as love.

BRIAN: Despite the national trauma brought on by Edward’s abdication, Sebba says that in the long run, it may have been for the best for both the Royal Family and the United Kingdom.

ANNE SEBBA: How lucky, because if Edwards had broken up the empire, he would have done, it’s impossible to imagine Britain prosecuting a war without the help of Canadian soldiers, Indian soldiers, Australian, the lot. So all of that was critical. And I do believe we got the better brother and the more supportive wife.

BRIAN: The abdication of Edward VIII removed a weak and pro-German King from the throne at the fairy moment Britain was on the verge of war with Nazi Germany. The playwright Noel Coward quipped, a statue should be erected to Mrs. Simpson in every town in England for the blessing she has bestowed upon the country.

JOANNE: Even today, royal marriages can have big political consequences. And as for Harry and Meghan Markle, Anne Sebba says, while their courtship may have echoes of earlier royal relationships, there is at least one big difference. Unlike his great, great uncle, Harry will never be King of England.

ANNE SEBBA: Harry is sixth in line to the throne. He can really do what he likes, but I think he will realize that actually, he has a job to do and the survival of the Royal Family really depends on how well that job is done. And I think with Megan, he will do it absolutely brilliantly.

BRIAN: So today on the show, with a royal wedding dominating headlines around the world, we’re looking at the surprisingly long history of American women who marry into royal and aristocratic families and the often outsized political impact that those marriages have. We’ll hear about American women who traded family fortunes for aristocratic status in the Gilded Age, plus, we’ll look at how women have shaped her own political dynasties here in the US, even if they couldn’t always play a formal role in politics.

Bonaparty Girl

Ed sits down with historian Charlene Boyer Lewis to discuss Elizabeth Patterson, whose marriage into Napoleon’s family caused major political storms on two continents.

Music:

Notre Dame by Jahzzar
Slotcar by Podington Bear

Elizabeth Patterson; Napoleon; marriage

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JOANNE: Now Wallis Simpson was far from the first American woman to find a royal match. She wasn’t even the first woman from Baltimore to marry into a European power. That would be Elizabeth Patterson, a wealthy young Maryland socialite whose marriage into France’s imperial family became a major social and political scandal.

BRIAN: In 1803, as Napoleon was consolidating power in France, he sent his youngest brother, Jerome, on a mission to the French Caribbean. On his way back, the young Bonaparte stopped in Baltimore where the best families of the city vied to entertain him.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: And he meets Elizabeth at a ball.

BRIAN: This is historian Charlene Boyer Lewis.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: They dance a dance together and literally get entangled, it’s either her hair in his watch chain or his watch chain in her button– the stories differ– and it really was mutual attraction.

BRIAN: It wasn’t long before the two were legally entangled as well. After a whirlwind courtship, they married on Christmas Eve.

ED: Napoleon was furious when he found out his brother had gotten hitched to an untitled American. When the newlyweds arrived in Europe in 1805, the Emperor personally annulled their marriage. He promptly married Jerome off to a German princess and banished a pregnant Elizabeth from the French Empire. Despite her very public humiliation at the hands of France’s Imperial Family, Patterson Bonaparte had no intention of relinquishing her new aristocratic ties. She returned to the US with her infant son, a new wardrobe and a plan to work her way into Napoleon’s good graces.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: So even though she returns to Baltimore a rejected woman, she knows she has something incredibly valuable, because this is the time period when Napoleon cannot have any children, there’s only one nephew and he’s kind of sickly. And so Elizabeth calculates, as long as I have a male Bonaparte, they’re going to still want me. So she does not at all act like a rejected woman who had this scandalous past, instead, she decks herself out in all of the European clothing she bought while she was in Lisbon, which includes jeweled tiaras and diamond and ruby perfume cases. And she goes to every single party that she gets invited to. So she flaunts her status, flaunts her connection to the Emperor and Americans love it.

ED: And everybody knows the full deal.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Everybody knows the full story. It was written up in all the newspapers. I found a copy of a Russellville, Kentucky newspaper who had written up the whole story. So everybody in the United States, even in the most remote corners knew this whole story.

ED: Now doesn’t this sort of make her less charming and interesting in the American scene, which is basically a huge marriage market?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: It is a huge marriage market, but no, she’s incredibly alluring because of that Bonaparte cachet. Because Napoleon had divorced her, she is considered available. And so she’s courted by many men, she gets five or six marriage proposals, she rejects every single one of them. She seriously however, considers one from a Secretary to the British legation, Sir Oakley, and that’s what galvanizes Napoleon to start a correspondence between the two of them, because Napoleon doesn’t want his potential heir, her son, to have a stepfather who’s British.

So she writes Napoleon, takes advantage of that and says, well, if you offer me an annuity, which would be like a pension, and you pay for my son’s schooling and you give me a title, then I won’t accept any marriage proposals. And Napoleon agrees. And he gives her $12,000 a year. He’s going to pay for her son’s education. And he says, I’m thinking about making you the Duchess of Oldenburg.

ED: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah, she was very savvy.

ED: She has some nerve, doesn’t she.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She sure does.

ED: Get eye to eye with Napoleon. Well, actually, she’s probably above eye to eye with Napoleon.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, Napoleon had created himself. I mean, so in that way, he’s kind of like the classic American story. He was from and an absolutely poor, impoverished, nobody knew them family from Corsica, so not even France, right? And he makes his family imperial, he makes his family royal. But Americans saw Napoleon as just this upstart, nobody Corsican– so who is he to reject a young woman of one of the finest families in America. And so Americans rankle at Napoleon when Napoleon rejects her.

ED: So she goes head to head with Napoleon and he actually says, sure, I’ll give you all these things, and $12,000 then–

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s a lot of money.

ED: And so I’m sure that Americans go, hey, good for you girl.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, it’s not exactly, hey, good for you girl. But they are captivated by her because they don’t know what her future will be. But rumors start to swirl around about this $12,000 annuity, about this potential title. And so it was one thing to have kind of this captivating woman who’s a cosmopolitan, linked to Bonaparte in their midst, it was another thing to think about having somebody with a title– she being a duchess and her son being a prince– living in their midst. And that kind of changes the way Americans start to think about her.

So once the rumors go around that Napoleon’s really connecting with Elizabeth and his potential heir, the concern is that Elizabeth’s son, who is only four years old at the time, will potentially become, as one congressman called him, the emperor of the West. Other congressman– Timothy Pickering, a Federalist of Massachusetts, believes that what Napoleon is going to do is set up a court, a palace right there in the United States, perhaps in Baltimore and Elizabeth and her princely son will live in it. And so Pickering writes, this palace is going to make the president’s mansion look like nothing. And then he says, our eyes will be introduced to gorgeous scenes of royalty and soon, Americans will become seduced and corrupted by these charms and will choose a king over a president, a monarchy over a republic, so we have to do something.

ED: Yeah, that’s very strange language. Watch out, we’re going to like this too much.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. That’s right.

ED: It’s going to be too beautiful. We’re not going to be able to control ourselves.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: And they’re still not sure this republic is going to work, because people can be seduced by gorgeous scenes of royalty.

ED: Yeah, we’re still in the first 20 years of the country, right? So what do they propose to do about this.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: So they propose– several members of Congress– the title of nobility amendment, that no citizen of the United States can receive a title or an annuity from an emperor or a King or a prince. And so you would have to give up your US citizenship and you could never hold office. So here, they’re clearly thinking about her son, right?

ED: Yeah. What’s his name, by the way?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Of course, it’s Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.

ED: Yeah, that’s subtle.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. His nickname is Bo. And so his nickname is Bo. And so they the plan is that they will have this amendment that will neutralize the threat of Elizabeth and her son, Bo. And it sweeps through the Senate, it sweeps through the House and it’s sent out to the states for ratification and everyone thinks it’s going to become the 13th Amendment. But then it falls two states short and it never becomes the 13th Amendment.

ED: So this is a lot for a young woman still in her 20s, not to mention a young boy, who’s 4, to go through all of this. So what’s he think about all this as he sort of comes aware of what’s going on in the world, he says, give me my kingdom?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: No, her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte much to his mother’s dismay, loves the United States, loves being a small-r republican and doesn’t want really anything to do with the whole aristocracy nobility stuff. He’s sent over to visit his father when he’s 14, 15 years old and he hates every moment of it. He just thinks it’s a vapid kind of too luxurious lifestyle and he wants nothing to do with that.

So he tells his mother this and he says, no, I’m going back to the United States, I’m going to take the Pledge of American Citizenship, I don’t want to be an aristocrat. And she is so infuriated with him and she thinks the work of her life has just come to not, because he’s decided to be a patriotic American instead of an aristocrat.

ED: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah.

ED: So when you add it all up Charlene, what lessons do we draw from this story?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think there are several lessons here. One, that Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude about royalty, about aristocracy from the very beginning. Yes, they threw off a monarchy, yes, they thought republican simplicity was the way to go, but aristocratic luxury was still seductive to them, it still had a place. Another lesson I think we learn is, Americans have loved celebrities from the beginning of this country too.

So even in an era without mass media, without mass culture, the celebrity who has that cache– and much of it is being an aristocrat, right, or the trappings of aristocracy, the trappings of royalty and nobility. Americans like that. And she’s kind of a lightning rod for all of that.

ED: Well, bless her heart, but I’m glad she failed. It sounds like it’s a good trial for early America to look this in the face and decide, you know, I think we like our own way better. But I do believe that celebrities today are the Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s of 1803. I mean, has everything, all the trappings of aristocracy without the threat of Napoleon taking over the country.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think celebrities today wish they were as good as Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. She had it all. She totally had it all.

JOANNE: Charlene Boyer Lewis is a historian at Kalamazoo college and author of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, an American aristocrat in the early republic. Earlier in the show, we heard from Anne Sebba, author of That Woman, The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor.

Top Dollar

Brian and writer Angela Serratore unpack the Gilded Age phenomenon
of ‘dollar princesses’ – young women who traded American wealth for old-world
aristocratic status.

Music:

All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear

marriage; wealth

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: So far, we’ve heard about two women who pursued an imperial connection to the dismay of the families they married into. But titled families didn’t always turn up their noses at the thought of an American match, particularly if the woman came to the match with many.

BRIAN: At the end of the 19th century, dozens of American heiresses married into the British aristocracy. Known as dollar princesses, these women were from families that had recently struck it rich. Their fathers had made their money in railroads, department stores, or the stock market, rather than inheriting their wealth. Frozen out of New York’s high society marriage market, they traded American cash for old world status and respectability. I sat down with writer Angela Serratore to explore how this international marriage market began.

ANGELA SERRATORE: If you married somebody with a title, that kind of trumps everything else. And then suddenly, you have access to this New York society that has perhaps been a little bit hostile and you also have the pleasure of being able to skip it entirely, because it’s now beneath you.

BRIAN: OK, so since it takes two to tango, and certainly, to get married, what did the British families get out of this deal?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Well, to go back to your question about money talking, for them, money definitely did talk, in large part because if you are an Earl or a Duke or a Lord and you’ve got a large country estate, you’ve got to run that estate. But to have any other kind of employment is unthinkable, it’s just not something the upper classes and the nobility do. And these houses are expensive to take care of, the grounds are expensive to take care of. So if you marry a dollar princess, you’ve got a beautiful young wife, you’ve got an influx of cash immediately to fix up your house, pay any of your family’s debts and you’ve also got a guarantee of a yearly allowance for the rest of your life, which means, this sort of question of, how are we going to keep up financially, you never have to worry about it again.

BRIAN: And how did the finances work and how large were they? I mean, can you give me any examples?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Well, it certainly varies depending on the situation and how much money any given father has. But so the first big dollar princess is Jennie Jerome. And in 1874, she meets Lord Randolph Churchill and this is a real love match. They meet on a ship. Three days after they meet, they’re engaged. Both sets of families are a little bit hesitant. But the families come together and they negotiate and Jennie’s father gives Lord Randolph $50,000. So I don’t know exactly what that comes out to in–

BRIAN: That’s a lot of money.

ANGELA SERRATORE: –it’s a lot of money in 1874, though not as much as some people get. But that’s sort of the average. And then you would get maybe $10,000 a year as an allowance.

BRIAN: Is there more than just money entailed for these British families, do they benefit in other ways from these marriages?

ANGELA SERRATORE: I think they do. I think a lot of these American girls are bringing a kind of American spirit to Britain and I think, particularly when it comes to the political careers of some of these men and also the next generation, one thing that we haven’t mentioned is that the son that Jennie Jerome has with her husband, Lord Randolph Churchill is Winston Churchill.

BRIAN: Right.

ANGELA SERRATORE: Winston Churchill, when he was starting his political career through the end of his mother’s life, very rarely made a decision without consulting his mother. And that’s just not something England has really seen before.

BRIAN: So if you were to tell us about one, I don’t know, most representative dollar princess, who would that be?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Well, there’s only one answer to that and that is, Consuelo Vanderbilt who in 1895 marries the 9th Duke of Marlborough at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York.

BRIAN: I recognize the last name, Vanderbilt, but what was it about Consuelo that made her such a featured dollar princess?

ANGELA SERRATORE: It’s really the work of her mother, Alva. Consuelo’s mother is what the tabloids today might refer to as a momager. From the day Consuelo was born, it is Alva’s job to make her the sort of brightest, prettiest, best, most successful girl that society has ever seen. And when she comes onto the marriage market, every eligible suitor is interested.

And the Duke of Marlborough, who in the press, goes by his nickname, which is Sunny, is on paper, the most eligible of these bachelors. He is the heir to the estate of Blenheim, which today is still one of the most magnificent country estates in all of Great Britain. But he’s sort of a ne’er do well and Consuelo is very sheltered. At the time of her wedding, one of the newspapers says that she has all the naive frankness of a child. She’s very shy. She’s very close to her mother.

BRIAN: How old was she when she was married?

ANGELA SERRATORE: She was 18. And in the months leading up to her marriage, it’s in the papers every day. There’s a story about her bridesmaids. There’s a story about her jewelry. There’s a story– and I found this one really affecting– a couple of weeks before the wedding, about the lingerie that she’s going to wear on her wedding day. And this is sort of a shy 18-year-old girl and I can’t even imagine what she must have felt like having everybody in America read about her underwear.

BRIAN: And when you say, everybody in America, so it wasn’t just the upper classes that were reading about themselves here, I gather this was popular with the hoi polloi?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Oh yeah, these girls are celebrities. The day of Consuelo’s wedding, thousands of people show up outside the church. And the police are in sort of a tricky position, because they’ve got to keep the peace amongst the crowd, but the crowd is almost exclusively teenage girls and young women in their 20s. They’re trying to figure out how to manage the sort of very real wedding hysteria.

BRIAN: So dare I ask, what comes of their marriage?

ANGELA SERRATORE: It’s rumored that on the carriage away from the church after they’re married, Sunny starts to give Consuelo the lay of the land, what her life is going to be like in England. And one of the things that he mentions is that he’s got a mistress, he’s very in love with his mistress and he has no plans to give her up. And several papers and Consuelo’s autobiography itself reports seeing very real tears on her face before, during, and after the wedding. And none of these tears look particularly happy.

BRIAN: You know, I just have to ask, why would any parent do this to their daughter?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Consuelo’s marriage is certainly the most famous of these, but it’s also the moment at which people really do start to reconsider this whole enterprise? Parents are noticing that their daughters are not happy. American fathers with money too are getting fed up with sending their dollars overseas. Consuelo’s husband was gifted at the time of their marriage– stock in the Vanderbilt company worth $2.5 million in 1875. Her father, William Vanderbilt, agrees to give Consuelo and Sunny each a yearly allowance of $100,000.

And a lot of fathers in particular start to say to their wives, why don’t we just keep the money at home, where instead of frittering it away on some guy’s house, it’ll actually have the chance to multiply?

BRIAN: And what about the cache of laundering this money, if you will, into social status? This is a period in American history where Americans are beginning to feel a little more confidence. There’s a kind of America first emerge when it comes to social status.

ANGELA SERRATORE: Absolutely. And by the time we get to the late 1890s, anybody who is really eligible has been snapped up already. And a lot of the husbands that come at this point are really sort of aggressively painted as mercenary. Really, the point at which people say, we’ve got to stop doing this is in 1903, a Pittsburgh heiress named Alice Thaw, whose father was a railroad magnate, married the Earl of Yarmouth. And their wedding ceremony was delayed several hours, because on the morning of their wedding, the groom was arrested for failing to pay his gambling debts. And Alice’s father had to collect the groom from jail and renegotiate his compensation package.

BRIAN: Well, when you take a look at the Royal marriage today, do you see any parallels with 120 years ago.

ANGELA SERRATORE: I really do. I should also say that not all of these marriages are as disastrous as Consuelo’s and Sunny’s. Mary Leiter, whose father owns a chain of department stores in Chicago, marries in the 1890s– Lord George Curzon. And George Curzon eventually goes on to become the viceroy of India. And virtually everybody who has a political connection to him says that this is almost entirely because of the skill and charm of his wife. They’re a real romantic team and a real political team.

And I think Harry and Meghan seem very much like a love match, they seem crazy about each other. I hope they’ll be very happy. But I think it’s also important to remember that particularly now when you agree to join the Royal Family, you’re really signing a business contract. Meghan will have given up her work and taken up the job of becoming a royal. And she and Harry gave an interview on television the day after they announced their engagement and Megan did most of the talking.

BRIAN: So no dollar princess here. But clearly she’s bringing a lot to the table.

ANGELA SERRATORE: Yeah, Meghan is bringing I think a sort of future and continued relevancy to the royal family. Every year, newspapers in England run a poll– should we even have the monarchy anymore? Is it in 2018 perhaps distasteful to have a monarchy at all? And Meghan is new and different and vibrant, and I think that gives them continued relevancy.

ED: Angela Serratore is a writer based in New York. You can find her article on dollar princess– How American Rich Kids Bought Their Way Into The British Elite– on smithsonian.com. So thinking about the women we’ve heard about on the show today, it seems like something that all their marriages have in common is that they’re covered in the tabloids and such, but they have a real political impact as well. So the dollar princesses in particular got me thinking about how marrying well also had a political impact for families here in the US. A wife like Jennie Jerome or Mary Leiter could bring money to the table that her husband could use to run a political campaign and she could also bring political connections and her own political savvy, even if women couldn’t participate in politics directly. So Brian, Joanne, do you think these kinds of political marriages have happened in American history?

Marriage is What Brings Us Together Today

Some wives of prominent men brought money, political and social skills to the union. Ed, Brian, and Joanne discuss how women have helped launch their husbands’ careers in the United States.

first ladies; marriage

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: Well, I mean, I think if what we’re talking about is, in one way or another, I don’t know if I want to call it a fair trade, but certainly a trade of sorts, in which two people come to a relationship and each brings something. If you go further back in time to the founding period, for example, there are women I think who bring a lot to marriages of influential husbands that I’m sure they came with their money attached, but more than that, they brought social skills, they brought the ability to actually be, in a sense, more effective politicians than their husbands. And I’m thinking particularly of Dolly Madison, and Louisa Katherine Adams, who is John Quincy Adam’s wife.

BRIAN: So you’re saying those guys were political stiffs and they needed a little help.

JOANNE: Yeah, pretty. Pretty much. They were not the most sort of vivaciously, wonderfully social human beings, and their wives were. And their wives sort of mastered that domain– and in the case of Dolly Madison– really kind of created a sense of place and purpose for the capitol and for the presidency.

BRIAN: And were people are aware of that, or did they like just attribute all those good things to the guy?

JOANNE: I think in the case of Dolly Madison, they were very aware. I mean, because some people called her, Queen Dolly, because she very clearly was– yeah, yeah. In the case of Louisa Katherine Adams, I don’t know if it was quite as blatantly obvious–

BRIAN: Which would make it all the more effective in a way.

JOANNE: Exactly, well exactly. And I think in a sense, they were more of a pair. I think that they were a politicking pair in a different kind of a way.

ED: You what’s really striking to me is, that sounds like a great precedent that turned out not to be one, because after them, I have a hard time thinking of any woman in the White House who exerted really much of a positive influence.

BRIAN: When we think of first ladies we think of first ladies who are kind of held up in scorn in a way.

ED: Yeah, or the woman who wished so badly to be of great help to her husband was Mary Todd Lincoln. And he married her in part, because he thought that she would be helpful politically. Not only does she come from a prominent family and not only does she have social skills that he lacked, but she was also ambitious in a way that he wasn’t always ambitious. But unfortunately, those things didn’t really work out in the cauldron of Civil War Washington. Well, people were not really impressed with her finery and with her insistence that, during wartime that she needed to have all those dresses. And this is kind of scandalous that she had to have dozens of pairs of gloves. That was a major scandal that people were just appalled that she was so pretentious in a time when so many people were suffering. And so she end up being a great political liability to Lincoln for exactly the opposite reason that he had hoped.

JOANNE: That sounds like it’s a wartime problem as opposed to a Mary Todd Lincoln–

ED: We’ll never know Joanne, that’s the only time that they served. But it very well could have been. It could have been that in a time of gaiety and prosperity, that that would have been just what this stiff Abraham Lincoln guy needed. So that reminds us, a lot of this is context. Unfortunately, apparently there’s decade after decade of context in which that doesn’t work called the Gilded Age.

At the very same time that these dollar princesses that Brian was talking about are flourishing, you don’t have women who are prominent in the White House, except for the somewhat icky instance of Frances Cleveland who marries in the White House when she’s 21 who had been the ward of Grover Cleveland, her new husband, throughout her life. And even though he’s 48 and she’s 21, she does have some of the skills you’re talking about Joanne that Dolly Madison had, she’s vivacious, she sort of makes the White House a place to be. But other than that, the 19th century is kind of a smoking crater when it comes to influential women in the White House.

BRIAN: Yeah, and I would say that, when you get to Lady Bird Johnson, she was the key to financing Lyndon Johnson’s early political career. She had come in to some wealth, certainly a lot more wealth than Lyndon Johnson. And her financing and her advice and partnership in Lyndon Johnson’s early political career before they had kids was really crucial to the success of both of them, perhaps that kind of pair initially.

JOANNE: So I mean, essentially, it feels to me that what we’ve been saying here is what we’re talking about a number of different things that women are bringing to these marriages and sometimes, it’s social skills and sometimes, it’s money and sometimes, it’s a political agenda, sometimes, there’s a partnership, sometimes, it really is men looking for a woman to give them whatever it is that they need for their political purposes. But I kind of feel like I want to put in a word for amorphousness and ambiguity, because the fact of the matter is, we’re talking about exchanges, but in at least some of these cases, there’s also sincere emotion involved too, right?

So we’re talking about something that’s practical, but that’s also tied up with emotion and, hopefully, in some cases, love. And that’s part of this too, that’s part of the mix.

BRIAN: We’re not allowed to discuss that on this show.

JOANNE: Oh, but I’m a woman, so I can say, love.

ED: Bingo. Well, I think that’s one of the things that made the Obama’s so effective is that their mutual devotion was so obvious, but so was her chops and so was his respect for her chops– proudly independent people who were also devoted to each other.

BRIAN: Professionals.

ED: Yeah, exactly. And it be that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are sort of in the Obama mold, that they’re both coming into it with their own distinct personalities, their own distinct trajectories and credibility, but are devoted to a common purpose. The difference is, you don’t actually become royal in America, but you do become forever the former president and the former first lady.

That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Ernest, Emily [? Gaddick ?] and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from [? Angeli ?] [? Bishosh, ?] Sequoia Carrillo, Courtney [? Sponia, ?] Aaron [? Tealing, ?] Korean Thomas and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [? Catsa, ?] Podington Bear and [? Jazaar. ?]

Thanks as always to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

JOANNE: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windom for Virginia Humanities.