The third season of The Gilded Age is not a love story. It is, however, a story about marriage: the first episode is centered around Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga), the teen daughter of Bertha and George, who is head over heels for Billy Carlton (Matt Walker), a well-to-do young man in New York society. He and Gladys want to marry. However, her mother (Carrie Coon) refuses to approach the match. “It’s not happening,” she says in the last minutes of the episode. Why? She wants Gladys to marry the Duke of Buckingham—a British aristocrat who would elevate the family’s standing from the top of New York society to the top of European society.
As is often the case in his shows, Julien Fellowes was inspired by a real-life historical event for this particular plot-line: the “marriage of convenience” between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough.
Consuelo Vanderbilt, the daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Vanderbilt, was just 19 when she was forced to marry Charles Spencer Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough. Forced is not an exaggeration: her memoir, The Glitter and the Gold, details the lengths her overbearing mother went to ensure the union. Consuelo hoped to marry for love: specifically, Winthrop Rutherford, a handsome American who was a member of Ward McAllister’s “The Four Hundred”—or, the notable New York families that were considered to make up the cream of New York society at the time. Yet, during a trip to Europe, it became clear to Consuelo that Alva intended for her to find an aristocratic suitor within the continent’s gentry. While the children of her New York peers often married well, none of them had married into titles.
At first, the options were lackluster. “That summer, I received two or three other proposals from uninteresting Englishmen, which I found slightly disillusioning. They were so evidently dictated by a desire for my dowry, a reflection that was included to dispel whatever thoughts of romance might come my way,” she wrote. But then they arrived for a weekend at Blenheim Palace, the family seat of the Marlboroughs. There, Mrs. Vanderbilt found the socially advantageous bachelor she was looking for.
And Marlborough found a fiancé with something he desperately needed—money, which would ensure the upkeep of Blenheim. So much so that he broke things off with an English lady he’d long been infatuated with. “It was that afternoon that he must have made up his mind to marry me and to give up the girl he loved, as he told me so tragically soon after our marriage,” Consuelo wrote. “For to live at Blenheim in the pomp and circumstance he considered essential needed money.”
Money he got. After their divorce in 1907, the press got wind of the exact terms of the Vanderbilt and Marlborough’s agreement. The Duke was to receive $100,000 yearly—around $3.2 million today. He also got $2.5 million in railroad stock, which adjusted for inflation, is around $81 million. Consuelo, meanwhile, also received a sizable allowance.
Consuelo tried to go against her mother’s wishes. She confronted her at their home in Newport, where Alva forbade her to have any visitors in case they snuck in messages from Rutherford.
“I considered I had a right to choose my own husband. These words, the bravest I have ever uttered, brought down a frightful storm of protest. I suffered every searing reproach, heard every possible invective hurled at the man I love,” she wrote.
Heartbroken and backed against a corner, Consuelo agreed to the engagement. She became the most eminent example of what is now known as a “dollar princess”: or, wealthy American heiresses who married aristocratic English men. They got social clout and titles. In return, men received a sizeable dowry, often used to run their estates. According to the Library of Congress, by the late 1800s, American heiresses had married more than a third of the members in the House of Lords.
In 1895, Consuelo and the Duke married in New York City at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. Her mother had Consuelo under intense watch in the moments before the wedding, in case she tried to run away. “I spent the morning of my wedding day in tears and alone; no one came near me. A footman had been posted at the door of my apartment and not even my governess was admitted.” The wedding was delayed for 20 minutes as Consuelo had been crying so much that her eyes swelled up.
She moved across the Atlantic to be with the Duke. There, she found English society to be overtly restrictive and outdated; she writes about the ingrained snobbery the English had against Americans like herself, who they considered to be “nouveau riche.” She found the weather depressing, and discovered she and her husband were ill-matched. “How I learned to dread and hate these dinners, how ominous and wearisome they loomed at the end of a long day,” she wrote about her nightly dinners with the Duke.
By 1906, they separated. Separated, not divorced—at the divorce needed to be “for cause”—or due to a legitimate legal reason. There was none, other than the couple’s mutual unhappiness. “Desiring to be free, we contemplated divorce. But in England the divorce laws then existing required a man to prove unfaithfulness in his wife; a wife, however, had to prove physical cruelty as well,” she wrote. So they just decided to live separate lives.
In 1920, the couple was finally able to divorce, due to an update in marital law that allowed wives to file due to “desertion.” Although that was complicated in and of itself: first, Consuelo had to prove that her husband had slept with another woman. Then, she had to provide a judge with a written proof of her husband rejecting her attempts at reconciling. She called this process “humiliating,” but went through with it nonetheless.
In 1921—almost immediately after her divorce—she married French industrialist Jacques Balsan. They remained in a happy union until his death in 1956, Consuelo a dollar princess no more.
