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How To Marry An English Lord: The Uniting of British Lords and American Heiresses

© Joseph Sramek

Winston Churchill was, among other things, an accomplished historian and writer, writing several books during his lifetime. Four of these: his four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1953. When one reads these books, the person realizes that Churchill placed special stock on the "Special Relationship" between the United States and Great Britain. While it has been debated in academic circles whether there ever was a special relationship[1] in Churchill's mind, there was no question. It was represented by his own family tree. His mother was an American debutante, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist; his father, the younger son of a Duke. Their marriage started a trend that was both old and new. It was old in that it represented the constant story of old money chasing new; new in that it was being done transcontinentally. The trend lasted a whole generation and a half, spanning the entirety of the Late Victorian and Edwardian periods in England, and the Gilded Age in America, a time period from roughly 1870 until 1914.

While the match between Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome was a trendsetter, the trend was not all that popular right away. There was still much hesitation on the part of English lords of the need, or desirability, of marrying outside of tight European nobility/royalty. This hesitation would soon change, however, after the British Great Depression of the 1880s and 1890s [2] hit the country squireage particularly hard. This was coupled with increasing democratization of the British political process, which, in turn, led to several assaults on the British aristocracy's traditional economic and political supremacy. As the British lords found themselves without much of an economic inheritance, and with their traditional methods of securing fortune rapidly closing or being hindered, they could not but help to look with envy across "the pond" at the carefree, prospering, Americans.

The Americans were by 1880 in the midst of the longest economic boom of its history. The country was undergoing rapid industrialization, which in the course of 50 years transformed the United States from being a relatively backwards nation split between a somewhat industrialized North and a feudal South which still viewed slavery as an economic system into an industrialized power, which, by 1914, had the largest GDP in the entire world, both in aggregate and per capita.[3] Many of the individuals who participated in this transformation acquired quick and unprecedented fortunes and, within time, developed a mindset that they were America's version of European royalty. They started to build castles and palaces in America, acquire exquisite European, Asian, Roman, Greek and Egyptian art, and copy the lifestyle of European royalty and nobility as much as possible.

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