How Americans Infiltrated the British Aristocracy

Picture this: A young American falls in love with a lord. They get engaged within three days. His parents are horrified, but once they realize the financial implications of the match, they relent.

The couple is Jennie Jerome and Randolph Churchill, and their son will become one of the most famous men in the world. 

The era of American Dollar Princesses has begun.

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It’s the late nineteenth century, and the British nobility is down on its luck. With the Industrial Revolution drawing people into the cities and the boom in American agriculture, the landed gentry is almost out of money to keep up their expensive estates and aristocratic lifestyles.

Meanwhile, in America, business is booming. It’s the Gilded Age, featuring fabulously wealthy new money whose riches are established, but whose social position is not. They could afford all the trappings of members of high society, but they would never be accepted among them.

Both parties see an opportunity in each other. Titles for riches, social acceptance for much-needed cash. American women descend on London every social season to find husbands with a great degree of success, nine matches being made in 1895 alone. In return for their titles, they inject what is estimated to be today's equivalent of a billion pounds into the British economy.

If these marriages sound more like a business contract than a legitimate love match, that would be because that is what they were. They were often unhappy, the uncomfortable American woman in the drafty manor home and her husband squandering her fortune to keep up his quality of life. 

One such match was that of Frances Work, who married Baron Fermoy in 1880. The couple was only married for eleven years, but Frances left her mark on Britain. Just over a century after Frances Work traded her money for prestige, her great-granddaughter, Diana Spencer, married Prince Charles and became Diana, Princess of Wales. 

The Americans invaded long before Meghan Markle.