Читать книгу The Real Life Downton Abbey - Jacky Hyams - Страница 33

One very successful early merger of American money and aristocratic class is the wedding of stunningly beautiful New York heiress Jennie Jerome to Lord Randolph Churchill, 2nd son of the Duke of Marlborough, in 1873. Their first-born son becomes British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.

Jennie’s two sisters, Clara and Leonie, also marry into the English aristocracy, Leonie to one of the sons of Ireland’s biggest landowning families; Clara marries an English aristocrat for love. Her husband, Morton Frewen, a financially incompetent son of English landed gentry has a nickname: ‘mortal ruin’.

Throughout her twenty-year marriage to Lord Randolph, Jennie Churchill is reputed to have many lovers, young and old – among them King Edward VII – yet she becomes well respected and greatly admired as an unofficial ‘ambassador’ for American society in the influential, high-born circles of the time. Following Lord Randolph’s death in 1895, she remarries – twice. She dies in 1921, following a fall down a flight of stairs – in a new pair of high-heeled shoes.