The Drawing-Room Diplomat

This essay exploring the world of Consuelo Vanderbilt, who would become a drawing-room diplomat, is included in my most recent book Lives Illuminated. The ten other essays in it have similar themes that delve into the lives of a variety of historical figures.

Taking in the interiors of Marble House—the Newport, Rhode Island, mansion that William Kissam Vanderbilt funded as a fortieth-birthday present for his wife Alva—was like eating a box of bonbons for breakfast. Even without the ostentatious furnishings, the Rococo and Gothic decorative shell, which was built between 1888 and 1892, would have been cloying. The gilded gaudiness of the main living spaces continued as I made my way to the second floor until I reached a surprisingly somber room where the finery abruptly came to an end and was replaced with dark-wood furniture carved with chunky medieval motifs. Only the fabrics and wallcoverings held any hint of elegance, the bed and the walls sheathed in red satin heavily embroidered with gold. Just after the thought popped into my mind that it must have been the bedroom of one of their sons, I found that my assumption was wrong. On a table was a photo of a young woman in a luxuriant gown trimmed in ermine, a coronet atop her mass of dark curls. The placard placed near it proclaimed the depressing room was the domain of the Vanderbilt’s oldest child and their only daughter Consuelo. The expression that clouded her face was the saddest I’d ever seen mar the features of such a beauty. 

I couldn’t wait to return home and find out more about this creature whose name I’d never heard before. My search led me to an array of sources, one of whom was Michael C. Kathrens. In his book on Newport villas, he declared the English Tudor-style room with its dark wainscoting and heavy canopied four-poster bed was hardly appropriate for a teenage girl. He believed it represented the mother’s ambitions because Alva had surrounded Consuelo with furnishings suitable for the English peeress she was determined her daughter would become. Ironically, the pale blue bedroom that the Vanderbilts’ two sons shared was more feminine than the mausoleum in which Alva had entombed Consuelo. Furthering the shrine-like quality of the girl’s room over a century after she left it was a vanity on which a gold-framed mirror and a set of hairbrushes were perfectly arranged, bristles up, next to a lace-covered pin cushion that matched the dressing table’s flouncing skirt. In her memoir The Glitter and the Gold: The American Duchess—in Her Own Words, Consuelo’s description of her gloomy prison was frank. 

“Upstairs my own room was austere,” she explained. “It was paneled in a dark Renaissance boiserie. There were six windows, but at best one could only glimpse the sky through their high and narrow casements. An unadorned stone mantel opposite my bed greeted my waking eyes.” She remembered the small desk by the window on which ornate candlesticks and a miniature clock were still sitting when I visited, along with pens and several small journals. They were just as she described them—in such perfect order she wouldn’t have dared touch them. “My mother had chosen every piece of furniture and had placed every ornament according to her taste, and had forbidden the intrusion of my personal possessions,” she remembered. Consuelo was so disregarded, she felt like her mother saw her as nothing more than an unfinished piece of art, “a work-in-progress that might eventually become as revered as St. Ursula depicted by Carpaccio.” 

Remembering the extent of Alva’s control, she added, “I reflected that it was her wish to produce me as a finished specimen framed in a perfect setting, and that my person was dedicated to whatever final disposal she had in mind.” As I plumbed her story, I flinched at the cruelty she was forced to endure, the final disposal Alva had in mind was to see her daughter take the title of duchess. The determined woman’s campaign would have put a military man to shame. Though Consuelo did not realize it at the time, her mother had already chosen her prey—the 9^th Duke of Marlborough. When Alva heard the Brit, whose name was Charles Spencer-Churchill, was looking for a wealthy wife, she enlisted a powerful ally to bring her daughter to the attention of the duke. 

Alva’s accomplice was Lady Paget, whom Consuelo remembers meeting. “Once greetings had been exchanged, I realized with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes,” she wrote. Paget did agree to support Alva’s efforts but the statement she made in front of Consuelo was biting. “‘If I am to bring her out,’ she told my mother, ‘she must be able to compete at least as far as clothes are concerned with far better-looking girls,’” Consuelo remembered. “It was useless to demur that I was only seventeen. Tulle gave way to satin, the baby décolletage to a more generous display of neck and arms, naïveté to sophistication.” Consuelo met the duke during a dinner party at Paget’s home. “My hostess had placed the Duke on her right and put me next to him—a rather unnecessary public avowal of her intentions,” she explained. “He seemed to me very young, although six years my senior, and I thought him good-looking and intelligent.”

After several more face-to-face gatherings, including one at the duke’s ancestral home of Blenheim Palace, Alva’s dreams were realized. Visiting the Marble House in September of 1895, Sunny, as his friends called the duke, proposed to Consuelo. The eighteen-year-old debutant braved her fate, even while she was grieving over a young man whom Alva forbid her to ever see again. Because Consuelo had agreed to marry him behind Alva’s back, her mother threatened to shoot the interloper if Consuelo ever laid eyes on him again! I laughed when I read this because I had so admired the painting on the ceiling of Alva’s bedroom at Marble House. It depicted Athena, the goddess of war, a deity who must have been her exclusive muse! 

Consuelo’s memory of the moment she became engaged had dark undertones. “It was in the comparative quiet of an evening at home that Marlborough proposed to me in the Gothic Room, whose atmosphere was so propitious to sacrifice,” she explained. “There was no need for sentiment. I was content with his pious hope that he would make me a good husband and ran up to my mother with word of our engagement.” The wedding date was set for November 6^th and the money began flowing from U.S. banks into Great Britain at once. The New York World published this list of her physical attributes and the financial details once the news broke that Consuelo was engaged: “Chin: pointed, indicating vivacity…Eyebrows: delicately arched…Length of hand: six inches…Waist measure: Twenty inches…Marriage settlement: $10,000,000.” The paper wasn’t aware that W.K., as Consuelo’s father was known, had given her and her new husband £500,000 to buy a house on Curzon Street in London and that her father had, as Dana Cooper noted in her book Informal Ambassadors, “conferred on his new son-in-law some $2.5 million in fifty-thousand shares of railroad stock, with a guaranteed annual payment of four percent.” 

The tally of the monies Sunny received was approximately $15 million USD, which would be more than $532 million in US currency in 2023. Consuelo was disturbed by the negotiations and by her mother’s continued control, though she wouldn’t have dared to complain, even when Alva didn’t allow her daughter to choose her own bridesmaids because she wanted the group to achieve a balanced aesthetic in weight and height. This meant there were several girls Consuelo barely knew walking down the aisle before her. “The arrival of my wedding dress brought the realization that my mother had ordered it while we were still in Paris, so sure had she been of the success of her plans,” Consuelo said. “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 bride dressed for her wedding like an automaton, then was finally allowed out of the dark and dreary bedroom to walk toward her sacrificial moment. “I felt numb as I went down to meet my father and the bridesmaids who were waiting for me,” she remembered. “My mother had decreed that my father should accompany me to the church to give me away. After that he was to disappear.” He was persona non grata because Alva had divorced him. “My mother had forbidden me to receive any gifts from my Vanderbilt relatives and I felt hurt and pained when I was made to return them without excuse or thanks,” Consuelo said. “My grandmother was the only Vanderbilt whom I was allowed to visit and the only one invited to my wedding, but she naturally refused to come to a ceremony from which her entire family was to be excluded.” Consuelo described very little about the wedding, only saying, “The usual hymns glorifying perfect love were sung, and while I glanced at my husband shyly I saw that his eyes were fixed in space.”

She titled the chapter about her union “A Marriage of Convenience,” describing in it her husband’s arrogant behavior after they boarded a train bound for Idle Hour, her father’s estate in Oakdale, Long Island, where they would start their honeymoon. “Marlborough whiles away the journey reading congratulatory telegrams, handing them on to me with the proper gestures of deference or indifference the senders evoked,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, there was no silver platter on which to present Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s missive, but it was read with due respect, and a sense of her intimidating presence crept even into that distant railway car.” It was then she realized the aristocracy in the foreign country that would now be hers was governed by silent rituals she knew nothing about. “To me, seated beside the man who would now rule my life, absorbed as he was in contemplation of the future at a moment when the present should mean so much, the outlook was somber,” she so aptly decreed. 

Blenheim Palace was undergoing such a massive renovation with Consuelo’s family’s money that the couple traveled around the world for months on a protracted honeymoon. She described the places they went—a veritable grand tour—and noted how her husband spent his time with art dealers and went on a spree of “ransacking the antique shops” of Rome. She wrote, “I was not allowed to accompany him because he claimed that my appearance in furs and furbelows caused prices to rocket.” Consuelo used words like ‘formidable’ to describe the family she had married into, particularly her mother-in-law. “I can remember still my surprise when one member after another of that well-bred company remarked to me that I was the first American she had condescended to receive!” she explained. “Could they imagine they were paying me a compliment?” Consuelo called the snobbishness “an enthroned fetish which spreads its tentacles into every stratum of British national life.” 

She set the scene once they finally arrived in London: “I gazed anxiously at the station platform where a small group of people were waiting to welcome us. I felt the scrutiny of many eyes and hoped my hat was becoming and that my furs were fine enough to win their approval. The sight of these strangers, Marlborough’s family, brought the loneliness of my position sharply into focus.” You’ve likely guessed by now that she had exchanged one bondage for another, her newest chains including not only her new husband and his overbearing family but the social strictures demanded of Britain’s upper classes. 

The day after her arrival, her husband’s mother—the Dowager Duchess Albertha Spencer-Churchill—consented to the audience Consuelo had been told she should value so highly. “After an embarrassing inspection of my person, she expressed great interest in our plans,” she remembered. “Then fixing her cold grey eyes upon me she said, ‘Your first duty is to have a child and it must be a son, because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke. Are you in a family way?’ Feeling utterly crushed by my negligence in not having insured Winston’s eclipse and depressed by the responsibilities she had heaped upon me, I was glad to take my leave.” 

The upstart the dowager duchess referenced was Winston Churchill, Marlborough’s first cousin. Winston was the son of another American-born, British-wed woman named Jennie Jerome, who became Lady Randolph Churchill when she married Winston’s father. Because Marlborough had no brothers, if he died without an heir, Winston would be handed the title of duke because Winston’s late father was the youngest son of the 7^th Duke of Marlborough. “Both sides of the family were evidently equally concerned with the immediate necessity of an heir to the dukedom, and were infecting me with their anxiety,” Consuelo wrote. Once she had endured this intimidating inspection and had, for the moment, passed muster, the couple traveled to Woodstock where Blenheim is located. She was surprised when she was heartily celebrated by the townspeople, the staff of the palace, and local tenant farmers. “As I stood on the steps listening to the various speeches, I realized that my life would be very strenuous if I was to live up to all that was expected of me,” Consuelo explained. “My arms were full of bouquets, the fur coat felt heavier and heavier, the big hat was being blown about by the winds, and I suddenly felt distraught, with a wild desire to be alone.” 

But the solitude she craved would not be granted as long as she was at Blenheim. As she began to grow accustomed to the way of life there, she realized the staff lived under deplorable conditions—no running water in the tower where the housemaids slept, for instance. She wanted to help them by having plumbing installed but was told it was how the housemaids had lived for nearly two centuries so she would do nothing of the sort. She also lamented how unlivable the palace was, noting it was planned to impress rather than to please. “Blenheim was perhaps not designed as a home,” she explained. “We slept in small rooms with high ceilings; we dined in dark rooms with high ceilings; we dressed in closets without ventilation; we sat in long galleries or painted saloons. Had they been finely proportioned or beautifully decorated I would not so greatly have minded sacrificing comfort to elegance.” Early on, her happiest times were daily inspections with the estate agent, who was an accomplished horseman. “We used to gallop across the countryside to our outlying farms, where I met Marlborough’s tenants,” she said. “They were fine men, good farmers, and loyal friends, and some had lived on the estate for over fifty years.” 

A theme that would color many years of her life surfaced as she began to realize she truly cared about the disadvantaged. “It was the custom at Blenheim to place a basket of tins on the side table in the dining-room and here the butler left the remains of our luncheon,” she wrote. “It was my duty to cram this food into the tins, which we then carried down to the poorest in the various villages where Marlborough owned property. With a complete lack of fastidiousness, it had been the habit to mix meat and vegetables and sweets in a horrible jumble in the same tin.” In spite of the fact that she was considered impertinent for not conforming to precedent, she sorted the food into separate containers and was pleased at how delighted the recipients were. She described their first months at Blenheim as busy but uneventful, noting that Marlborough spent a good deal of time away in London and that he summoned her to town when her first London season as a duchess began. She described glittering balls and concerts, and a trip to Buckingham Palace for a ‘Drawing Room’—an afternoon in-person with the Prince and Princess of Wales in an intimate state room. 

The younger royals were standing in for Queen Victoria because she no longer attended such ceremonies. Consuelo described the fervor when the princess, the future Queen Alexandra when the prince was coronated as Edward VII, entered. “I can still feel the little thrill of excitement the roll of drums and the National Anthem gave me as the royal procession entered the ballroom,” she remembered. The event foreshadowed an invitation to meet Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, which included some seriously ironic moments. “Having heard so much about the queen’s terrifying personality, it was with some trepidation that I awaited her appearance before dinner,” Consuelo explained. “When eventually she came in, a little figure in somber black, I discovered to my dismay that I almost had to kneel to touch her outstretched hand with my lips. My balance was precariously held as I curtsied low to receive her kiss upon my forehead, and a diamond crescent in my hair caused me anxiety lest I scratch out a royal eye.” 

After dinner, each person had a moment with the queen. “I found it embarrassing to stand in front of her while everyone listened to her kind inquiries about my reactions to my adopted country, which I answered as best I could,” Consuelo remembered. “I was, moreover, haunted by the fear that I might not notice the little nod with which it was her habit to end an audience, having heard of an unfortunate person who, not knowing the protocol, had remained glued to the spot until ignominiously removed by a lord-in-waiting.” The social calendar continued with a hunting trip to Sandringham at the invitation of the Prince and Princess of Wales followed by the royal couple’s five-day visit to Blenheim during which numerous activities were planned. Happy to have made it through the grueling week of the Wales’ visit with only the final dinner remaining, Consuelo marveled that she had pulled everything off. “As I went on a last round of inspection before dinner I thought the state rooms, which we had redecorated in Louis XIV boiseries of white and gold, were a splendid setting for such a festive scene, and the long suite of reception rooms filled with orchids and malmaisons looked to me truly palatial,” she explained. “Later, as the royal procession wound its way through the throng of guests, the prince stopping here and there for a word of greeting, I realized that the Crown stood for a tradition that England would not easily give up.” 

Soon after their week of hosting, the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee took place on June 22, 1897, ending with a fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House, which lasted into the early hours of the morning. “The sun was rising as I walked through Green Park to Spencer House, where we then lived,” a heavily-pregnant Consuelo wrote. “On the grass lay the dregs of humanity. Human beings too dispirited or sunk to find work or favor, they sprawled in sodden stupor, pitiful representatives of the submerged tenth. In my billowing period dress, I must have seemed to them a vision of wealth and youth, and I thought soberly that they must hate me.” It is interesting to see these words flow into her narrative given how helping the dregs, as she called them, would eventually fuel her greatest life purposes. But one particular duty had to be fulfilled before she could immerse herself in philanthropy—that of having a son. She achieved this on September 18, 1897, and the Prince of Wales offered to be godfather to Albert Edward William John Marlborough, who would be called Blandford because this was his title. Consuelo shared how much happiness her baby brought her, saying he “lightened the gloom that overhung our palatial home.”

In her book Consuelo & Alva Vanderbilt, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart wrote, “The weeks and months after the birth of Blandford in 1897 were the high-water mark of the Marlborough marriage. Sunny had now assured both the future of the Marlborough dynasty and put in hand a new Golden Age for Blenheim. He had brought home a beautiful duchess who had charmed society and was idolized by the people of Woodstock and the Blenheim estate.” The bleak winter that followed found Consuelo pregnant with her second child, Ivor, who was born the following autumn. Just after the birth, her mother-in-law haughtily declared, “You are a little brick! American women seem to have boys more easily than we do!” Consuelo’s success at birthing an heir and a spare—a phrase she coined—freed her from having to worry about struggling through any other pregnancies, which was convenient considering the cracks in her marriage were growing into chasms.

There were a number of reasons she and her husband were not getting along: They disagreed greatly over how the Blenheim estates should be run, particularly where the human rights of its people were concerned; they were on opposite sides during many conversations about politics; and their views on philanthropy couldn’t have been farther apart. Whereas she felt buoyed by the audience’s response during a speech she gave to a group of blind men in Birmingham, England, her talk aimed at encouraging them to improve their lives by gaining a technical education; Marlborough always had to brace himself for any exposure to the “lower orders,” as he called the downtrodden. Stuart said that Consuelo’s tentative step into public life was one of several strategies by which she distracted herself from the unhappiness of her marriage. 

Marlborough was not only engaged in his own activities to create emotional distance between them, he expanded the physical divide by signing on to serve in the Boer War, leaving for South Africa on January 20, 1900. During the five months he was away, the only visitor of note to sign the guest book at Blenheim was the French painter Paul César Helleu, whose daughter claimed he and Consuelo likely had an affair sometime after his arrival on May 11, 1900, which she said lasted into 1901. Stuart believed her, offering as evidence Helleu’s pastels, dry-point etchings, and drawings of Consuelo that he produced at Blenheim and in Paris. The author said, “Some of these are delightfully tender and intimate, particularly a drawing of Consuelo dozing on a sofa at Blenheim, a dog asleep on her lap.”

The biographer also noted that when Consuelo went to Paris in June of 1900, the backdrops in the drawings that were completed in the French capital match photographs of Helleu’s studio. Consuelo brushed aside her relationship with Helleu in her memoir, though this hasn’t kept biographers from speculating there was likely physical intimacy between them. Stuart noted, “He offered her companionship when she needed it as well as limitless admiration of Consuelo’s blossoming beauty.” The duchess’s confidence was also growing, thanks in no small part to Winston, who was by then rushing headlong into his brilliant political career. “Whether it was his American blood or his boyish enthusiasm and spontaneity, qualities sadly lacking in my husband, I delighted in his companionship,” she remembered. “His conversation was invariably stimulating, and his views on life were not drawn and quartered, as were Marlborough’s, by a sense of self-importance.” She credited their discussions about politics for the sense of civic responsibility she was developing. “I began to look beyond the traditional but superficial public duties expected of me,” she explained. “Opening bazaars and giving away prizes with a few appropriate words could be successfully done by a moron—indeed, I realized that my dress and appearance were more important than any words I could utter. So perhaps it was not surprising that I became inspired to turn to more serious efforts.” 

As she slowly moved toward these earnest endeavors, the superficiality of their public life was wearing on her. “Looking back on the last years of the Victorian era, I see a pageant of festive scenes. But pomp and ceremony were becoming tedious to one who, as my husband complained, had not a trace of snobbishness,” Consuelo explained. “The realities of life seemed far removed from the palatial splendor in which we moved and it was becoming excessively boring to walk on an endlessly spread red carpet.” She described a dressing down from the Prince of Wales when she attended a soiree with a diamond crescent in hair rather than a tiara. “Such an incident illustrates the over-importance attached to the fastidious observance of ritual,” she declared. The public appearances demanded by her rank were some of the most important historical events as England transitioned from Victoria’s reign to the Edwardian Era. When Consuelo and Sunny were entering St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle for the queen’s state funeral in February of 1901, she said her husband paid her a rare compliment. “If I die, I see you will not remain a widow long,” he told her. 

This might have bode well for the couple had things not grown so dicey by this point in time. Not only did Marlborough believe his wife had had the affair with Helleu, he blamed her that he was passed over when the position of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was given to someone else because she had let it be known she preferred to remain in England. As the rifts between them piled on, he began to strengthen a relationship with another woman who would have a great deal to do with the undoing of their marriage. In her memoir, Consuelo remembered meeting her competition just after she gave birth to Blandford. “During my convalescence Marlborough had met a young woman named Gladys Deacon, who had come to London on a visit from Paris, where she lived with her mother and sisters,” Consuelo wrote. “Gladys Deacon was a beautiful girl endowed with a brilliant intellect. Possessed of exceptional powers of conversation, she could enlarge on any subject in an interesting and amusing manner. I was soon subjugated by the charm of her companionship and we began a friendship which only ended years later.” 

I found no proof that Marlborough began a romantic relationship with Deacon soon after that initial meeting in 1897, but Hugo Vickers wrote in his biography The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon—Duchess of Marlborough, that Sunny left Blenheim soon after Deacon arrived because he was so bowled over by her he doubted his self-control, which would eventually crater. The duke wrote the first of many letters to Deacon as soon as he arrived in Harrogate where he went to enjoy spa treatments. His intentions are cloaked but fairly obvious when he quotes this sentiment by François de La Rochefoucauld: “Absence diminishes mediocre passions and enflames the big ones, as the wind extinguishes candles but lights fires.” He then told Deacon he cherished “the fond illusion that the candle has not been blown out” and “lingered on the possibility of its burning.” Vickers noted there’s proof that Deacon and Sunny were physically intimate by August of 1901 when Deacon had become a regular visitor at Blenheim. Vickers said Sunny was absolutely smitten with her. “Her arrival relieved the tedium of the Marlborough’s doomed marriage,” Vickers explained, “which the duke described as a ‘false and sordid story.’” 

Stuart elaborated on Sunny’s enchantment with Deacon: “By 10 August 1901, the unhappy duke of Marlborough was helpless in the face of her beauty, intelligence, intensity, and capricious charm.” Consuelo was equally enamored with Deacon, a closeness that solidified during a trip the two women took to Germany. “Consuelo had never experienced this kind of friendship, and by the time their short holiday ended, and Gladys returned home to Paris, she was almost as entranced by Gladys as her husband had been earlier,” Stuart wrote, noting that they exchanged locks of hair and were referring to each other with silly endearments by then. Once Deacon was back in Paris, a shadowy triangle was unfolding—both Consuelo and her husband were writing Deacon effusive letters. Vickers said when Deacon returned to Blenheim, Consuelo adored talking to her about art and literature late into the night. He went so far as to say that Deacon inspired love in both the husband and the wife, a feat he said she had achieved with other couples. Consuelo was unaware that when Deacon heard about her engagement to Sunny, she had lamented the marriage because Deacon had fancied herself in the role of the Duchess of Marlborough. She would eventually achieve this but it would be nearly a decade before Consuelo was released from the burden of hiding her discontent over her husband’s unfaithfulness and the endless string of grand events she was forced to endure. 

One of the most magnificent was the coronation in which the Prince of Wales was crowned Edward VII on August 9, 1902. Alexandra had asked Consuelo to be one of the four duchesses who were her canopy bearers during the ceremony, and this is the moment when I was able to connect the dots to the photo I had seen of Consuelo in her bedroom: It was taken at some point during the ceremony to commemorate her participation. No wonder her face was a mask of despair! Not only was her husband having an affair, hers with the French painter had ended over the fact she resented Helleu for indiscriminately selling etchings of her without her permission. She was also exhausted from having to pretend everything was fine each time she appeared with her husband in public, the coronation included. Consuelo was twenty-five years old at the time and had been married for almost seven years. In the photo, she was dressed to the nines in red velvet robes trimmed in miniver, and dripping with pearls and diamonds, the wealth of the incredibly attractive woman such a contrast to the hopelessness marking her face. The image depicted a perfect arm charm to accompany a duke whose political career was taking off—not only had he just been made a Knight of the Garter, he was the newly-appointed Under-Secretary for the Colonies. 

He and Consuelo took grand trips to India and Russia as their marriage faltered, and the lauded names of the people who floated into and out of Blenheim was a who’s who of Edwardian England. As Marlborough’s star rose, he hired John Singer Sargent to paint their family portrait at Blenheim in 1905. Consuelo was very fond of the artist and her expression in the painting is not as beleaguered as it is in the black-and-white photograph. Though she still seemed somber, she also appeared to be somewhat bemused. As I studied her demeanor in the painting, I grew convinced it had been choreographed to reflect her station in life at the time. Within a year after she struck that pose, things would be drastically different. She titled the next chapter in her memoir “Deed of Separation,” which opened with her comment that the eleven years she and Sunny had been married had not brought them closer together so they would be living apart from then on. “The nervous tension that tends to grow between people of different temperaments condemned to live together had reached its highest pitch,” she explained. 

Not wanting to have to navigate the stigma that divorce would have brought them, they decided she would move out of Blenheim in 1906 and make her home Sunderland House in London, which had been built with the money her father had given her husband. The home was no palace but it was substantial—it had a ballroom with décor modeled after the La Galerie des Glaces at Versailles that was so long, two orchestras—one at each end—were required to fill the room with music during parties. Consuelo felt fully supported in living apart from her husband, even by many of Marlborough’s family members. “My mother-in-law and many of my English family and friends gathered round me,” she wrote, “and I was deeply touched by the innumerable letters I received, even from people unknown to me, expressing hopes for my future happiness.” She surprised me when she revealed she had made amends with her mother, who came to stay with her at Sunderland House, saying that Alva’s sympathy was precious to her. 

It is at this point in her life when she proved she would not be typecast as a ‘poor little rich girl.’ She dove into philanthropy like a woman obsessed, learning from other more experienced females how to create successful campaigns and manage committees . Like the other American-born aristocrats, she had an ace up her sleeve—she had a massive and influential list of contacts who were eager to help her raise large sums of money for her charities on both sides of the Atlantic. This gave her a leg-up as a drawing-room diplomat. She was particularly interested in working to help the poor, whom Dana Cooper said “absolutely adored her compassionate methods of soft power.” Winston’s mother became a close friend as they plunged into philanthropic activities as members of a group called the American Amazons, which Lady Churchill had founded. 

“Consuelo began to hone her ability to negotiate her British and American identities,” Cooper explained. “Over the next several years, she discovered that she could manipulate her national identity depending on the circumstance.” Championing the poor began to shift toward a focus on women and children. Eventually, she became involved in the suffragette’s movement, influenced by Alva who was advancing the cause in America. Cooper said that while some may dismiss Consuelo’s efforts as little more than “emotional therapy for an unhappy aristocrat” or an attempt to reinstate her social position after a much-discussed marital breakdown, her involvement in charitable works went far beyond writing a check or lending her name to an institution. “Consuelo’s philanthropic works were not an attempt to reestablish her membership in London society,” the author added; “she genuinely cared about changing the lives of women, children, and the poor.” 

The list of Consuelo’s accomplishments as a drawing-room diplomat is long and she proved to be forward-thinking in her philosophy. “In a statement that eerily foreshadowed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s demand a century later to see ‘women’s rights as human rights once and for all,’” Cooper explained, “Consuelo announced, ‘This is the age of feminism…[but] not so much feminism as humanism.’” Consuelo and the other American Amazons spearheaded relief efforts when World War I broke out. After the conflict ended, Consuelo ran for and gained a seat on the London County Council in March 1919, the first woman to be elected to serve. During the portions of her book recounting the years after her separation, she revealed little about any contact with Marlborough, concentrating instead on how much she enjoyed championing her own interests. But her husband was not finished diminishing her life. He roars forth in the memoir again when he pressures her to allow him to end their marriage so he could make an honest woman out of Deacon, who had been his mistress for years. “In 1920, the duke and duchess began a series of legal battles that revealed Britain’s depth of social ostracism for divorcees,” Cooper explained. “Their official divorce forever placed Consuelo and Sunny outside social circles in England and ended Consuelo’s political career.” 

As Consuelo put it, “The long vista of lonely years behind me prodded the courage I needed to face the publicity of an English divorce court. But when I consulted my lawyer, he informed me that a legal separation freed a husband from the obligations contracted by marriage and that to secure a divorce I should first have to live under the same roof with Marlborough again.” She described the humiliating process that lay before her: the husband was required to leave his wife and inform her in writing that he refused to return to her; she then had to appear in court and ask the judge for an injunction granting her “a restitution of conjugal rights”; on the judge’s pronouncement, the husband would be ordered to comply; on his refusal to do so, the woman could bring action for divorce, provided she had the evidence required to secure it. “These were the steps I took to obtain my divorce in the year 1920,” she explained, “having first, in order to comply with existing regulations, spent some days at Crowhurst with Marlborough.” This home in Surrey, which she owned, was chosen as a sort of middle-ground for their supposed reunion. The treatment she endured because of such chauvinistic laws was a last straw and she decided she had had enough of Great Britain’s formalities.

With the divorce behind her and grieving the loss of her father, who died the same year, she made the decision to leave England for France. “I spent a few weeks in London to pack my belongings, to arrange the sale of Sunderland House, to transfer a house I had leased in Portman Square to my married son, to give up Crowhurst, and to wind up the many activities that had become dear to me,” she remembered. “Leaving my work was a wrench and saying farewell to my fellow workers saddened me.” She settled in a lovely house her father had given her in Paris where she was joined by her mother and her aunt Jenny Tiffany. Consuelo, who tweaked her role of drawing-room diplomat to be activist, was finally able to move toward a happiness she couldn’t have dreamed of as an English duchess. She began a relationship with a Frenchman who had noticed her during her teen years when she made her debut in Paris. “Curiously enough, my second husband, Jacques Balsan, who was present [in Paris], told his mother the following day, ‘I met at the ball last night the girl I would like to marry,’” Consuelo explained. “It was twenty-seven years later that his wish came true.” They married on July 4, 1921, in a civil ceremony in a chapel in London at nine in the morning. 

“This unusual hour had been chosen to avoid the glare of publicity which had been focused on the marriage of Marlborough and Gladys Deacon earlier that spring in Paris,” she remembered. “In shedding the luster of the coronet, it was my hope to avoid publicity. If not quite successful in that respect, in every other, life with Jacques Balsan has brought me the profound happiness that companionship with one who is equally loved and honored means.” Unfortunately, she was not fully free of Marlborough’s manipulations: Five years after Consuelo married Jacques, the duke demanded she agree to an annulment. “The shadow of my first marriage was once again to fall across my life when some years later Marlborough, having joined the Roman Catholic Church and wishing to regularize in that Church his civil marriage to Gladys Deacon, asked me to take steps to have our marriage annulled,” she explained. This meant that Alva would have to admit she had forced her daughter to marry the duke. 

“It pained me to approach my mother for her consent, but on learning that the proceedings were entirely private we agreed to take the necessary steps,” Consuelo explained. “The evidence once collected, I appeared with other witnesses before an English tribunal of Catholic priests versed in canonical law. My former governess, Miss Harper, gave valuable testimony, since she had personally witnessed the coercion to which I had been subjected.” Before the annulment was fully granted, Marlborough caused a splash of publicity by going to Rome to have an audience with the Pope, the move exposing Alva’s complicity. “News of the annulment then got about and promptly unloosed a blast of Protestant wrath aimed at the Rota for annulling an Episcopal marriage,” Consuelo explained. “Alas, gone were our privacy and peace of mind as once again the press exposed my story. My mother, with her usual courage, remained undaunted, but I suffered to see her in so unfavorable a light, knowing that she had hoped to ensure my happiness with the marriage she had forced upon me.” In the end, the annulment, which was finalized in 1926, benefitted Consuelo. The Balsans, who were devout Catholics, had never fully recognized her marriage to their son. “After the annulment was granted, I was married to Jacques in a Catholic ceremony and joined the family circle,” she explained. 

Consuelo said that during these happy years of her life, she was often asked if she ever regretted giving up the title of duchess. She said she never had because she was much better suited to a life of philanthropic and political endeavors that helped struggling people better their lives than she was to vapid ceremonial roles. With her personal life in the best place it had ever been, the tone of her memoir turns chatty and cheerful. In the chapters devoted to the initial years of their marriage, she shared how she and Jacques loved renovating houses and how they transformed a number of residences from Paris to the Riviera. The memoir is filled with details of their decorating, their lavish entertaining, and the important visitors they hosted in Paris and in the south of France. These included diplomats, politicians, and personalities as diverse as Charlie Chaplin and Edith Wharton. “Luncheons centered round a literary or political personality became our specialty,” she remembered. “Our cosmopolitan parties were gay and the house with its objects of art provoked interesting discussions, for nearly everyone in France ‘collects’ or has a hobby.” 

The Balsans’ names were also included on some of the most coveted guest lists. She recounted one glittering evening at the home of the Duchesse de Doudeauville on the rue de Varenne, a mansion that is now the Italian Embassy in Paris. It had been spared from looting during the revolution and was filled with exquisite furnishings unlike many hôtels particulier that had been burned or emptied of their contents. Doudeauville had requested that everyone come in period dress popular during the reign of Louise XV. “I copied mine from a Nattier portrait—a white taffeta dress with a pink sash slung across one shoulder and in my powdered hair a tuft of roses,” she remembered. “When I entered the ballroom a spontaneous burst of applause greeted my appearance, a compliment which for me enhanced an already enchanted evening.” The list of high-ranking members of French society the couple counted as their intimates was impressive, but her desire to do good that had risen to the forefront in her past was niggling at her. “Throughout all these years, I was blissfully happy in my life with Jacques and with our wide circle of friends,” she explained; “but I missed the work I was accustomed to in England. I was therefore glad when in 1926 a group of social workers asked me to help them to build and equip a hospital for the professional classes.” She quickly joined them in their fundraising efforts and was pleased when other organizations began reaching out to her after she made such a positive impact. As her desire to serve spread, she was about to be grounded in a community where she would do an immense amount of good. 

After having spent the warmer months in the Riviera for years, Consuelo and Jacques decided they wanted a summer home that was in the country but closer to town so they could draw their Parisian clique to them more often. They found Saint Georges-Motel, a little château on the border of Normandy near the forest of Dreux, where they would spend summers until they left France. She described the parties on the lawn to which they beckoned the villagers and the champagne brunches that drew their friends from town. Her next philanthropic effort organically took shape as she and Jacques grew more familiar with the local inhabitants. “During the summer holidays we opened a recreation school for the village children, for I was dismayed to find how little French children played,” Consuelo wrote. “There was a stream where they swam and a playground for games, and the girls were taught how to sew, while the boys engaged in carpentry. At the end of the holidays, the children put on an entertainment in our honor, and a grand finale with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ sung in English.” 

The combined efforts she directed during her years in France playing the role of drawing-room diplomat earned her the coveted Légion d’Honneur in 1931. As Consuelo moved through details like these, Alva entered the picture a number of times, her presence the most pronounced as Consuelo and Jacques settled in Normandy. “Our happy life at Saint Georges-Motel had inspired my mother to acquire a château near-by,” Consuelo explained. “Not far from Fontainebleau, it was built of stone and was of the Renaissance period. Once settled, she proceeded to let her fancy roam, creating improvements so steadily that in spite of failing health, her last years were happily employed.” Consuelo remembered an afternoon when she and Jacques were walking through Alva’s gardens with her, the determination in her mother’s character ever-present. Alva pointed to the river and said it was not wide enough. “When next we came, an army of workmen would have enlarged it,” Consuelo explained. “A great forecourt separated the village from the house. It was sanded instead of paved. ‘This is all wrong, it should be paved,’ my mother commented severely; the year of her death, old paving stones brought from Versailles covered the court.” It was 1933, and Consuelo described Alva’s funeral at St. Thomas Church in New York City as “triumphantly symbolic with suffrage societies flying their banners as they came up the aisle wave upon wave.” 

She said a hymn that Alva had composed was sung and, “It was only fitting that such a tribute should be paid to the courage she had shown in braving popular prejudice by securing better conditions for women the world over.” Just as Consuelo let bygones be bygones with her mother, she would loyally return to Blenheim, the scene of so much heartbreak and loneliness, for family milestones once her son had become duke. “How rewarding are my memories of Blenheim in my son’s time when his life, with Mary and his children, was all that I wished mine could have been,” she wrote. Given the poignancy of this statement, my rancor toward Alva grew, and I struggled more than ever with how to forgive the heavy-handed woman, holding out even after her daughter had done so. It was thanks to Stuart, who did not see Alva’s machinations as completely negative, that I was finally able to admit I could cut Alva a little slack. “It had been one of the ironies of her story that, after she left the Duke, the position of Duchess of Marlborough helped Consuelo to evolve an independent life, which in turn brought self-respect, confidence, autonomy and freedom, and quasi-professional roles far beyond anything that Alva had envisaged when she first arranged the marriage,” Stuart explained. 

Given Consuelo had Alva’s blood running through her veins, it makes sense that she would have turned out to be a resilient woman in spite of the fact that it was highly unlikely she could have ever had a successful marriage with a money-grabbing duke. Blenheim certainly benefitted from her sacrifice, a grandness that I saw mirrored in Marble House when I walked up that commanding staircase. I had no idea when I stepped into her bedroom that I would find within those monumental interiors the story of such a nurturing individual who would dedicate herself to the downtrodden so much so that she would be renowned as an “informal ambassador” and a “drawing-room diplomat” in the highest of societies in Europe. Though these terms may sound demeaning today, at the turn of the century they were powerful positions for the few American-born, British-wed women who cracked the gilt ceiling to hold. What I respect so much about them is that they didn’t do so for the sake of dominance, but for the benefit of humanity. 

By the time Consuelo and Jacques fled Europe for America in order to escape the Germans who were about to invade France at the beginning of World War II, she had made remarkable contributions to the charities she assisted. Forced once again to leave behind efforts she had so diligently built, Consuelo and Jacques boarded a plane in Lisbon after a harrowing trip from Normandy to Portugal. They did so just as Hitler’s troops would have made their leaving impossible. She described her relief once they were airborne: “As we moved through the waters and rose to our flight, I looked at the sky above and the slowly fading coast beneath and felt I had embarked on a celestial passage to a promised land.” It is with this sentence that she ended her story, and I was disappointed that she decided not to share anything about her life after she returned stateside because I would have loved to know whether she returned to Marble House; whether she walked up that sweeping staircase and entered the bedroom where she had been so unhappy. I would like to think she would have smiled at the framed photograph of herself, which Alva must have placed on the dresser at some point to represent all that she had achieved for her daughter. 

I believe Consuelo would have been pleased because she could by then declare she was “a finished specimen framed in a perfect setting” because she was no longer imprisoned in that room or in the marriage she was enduring when the snapshot was taken. It would have been such a victory for her to close the door for the last time knowing she had achieved her own success in spite of the fact that her reality had been so denied when she was growing up that she wouldn’t have dared touch any of the elegant accoutrements in that room. Once her marriage to the duke fell apart, Consuelo could easily have lived a superficial life as an extremely wealthy woman. The fact that she chose to concentrate a tremendous amount of energy over the years doing good for those less fortunate, she charted a path from self-denial to soft power and managed to find some happiness along the way. What more can any woman of any era ask for?

The Drawing-Room Diplomat © Saxon Henry, all rights reserved. The journalist’s and author’s books include Lives Illuminated, The Modern Salonnière, Anywhere But Here, Stranded on the Road to Promise, Four Florida Moderns, and Collaborations: A Houston Penthouse. Saxon is also a content strategist. The CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license can be found here.