Consuelo Vanderbilt Cried at Her Own Wedding. Nobody Stopped It – HT
On the morning of her wedding, Consuelo Vanderbilt spent 3 hours alone in her room. A footman had been posted at the door of her apartment, and not even her governness was permitted to enter. The door stayed closed, and the man stayed at it, and inside the room, Consuela was alone.
She had been alone since early morning. The wedding was scheduled for noon. She had hours, and she used them the way the morning required. She got dressed. She put on the white silk stockings. She put on the shoes. She fastened the lingerie with its real lace. She did each of these things without help, without company, without anyone to speak to.
In her memoir, written more than half a century later, she described it this way. Like an automaton, she dawned the lovely lingerie with its real lace and the white silk stockings and the shoes. She felt cold, she wrote. She felt numb. She went through the movements of dressing the way someone goes through movements when the movements are the only thing left to do.
She had been crying since before dawn. By the time the morning was gone and the hour of the wedding arrived, her face was swollen enough that the ceremony could not begin on schedule. The guests waited. The pews at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue held some of the most prominent people in New York.
And they waited and the reason given was that the bride was not yet ready. The wedding was delayed 20 minutes. When Consuel finally came down the aisle, she was wearing a veil. The veil covered her face. The newspapers, which had been informed that something was visible beneath it, reported that she appeared to have been crying. The newspapers were not wrong.
She was 18 years old. In 4 hours, she would be the Duchess of Marbor, wife of Charles Spencer Churchill, 9inth Duke of Marbor, one of the oldest titles in the British periage. She would leave New York for England, for Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, for a life that had been arranged around her without her participation in any of the decisions that shaped it.
Downstairs, her mother was waiting. Alva Vanderbilt had positioned herself in the rooms below, while her daughter dressed alone above. She was not in the apartment. She did not need to be. The footman at the door was sufficient. Alva had been in that house all morning, moving through the preparations, receiving guests, managing the sequence of events that she had spent the better part of a year constructing, and she was downstairs when her daughter descended to meet her father and the bridesmaids who were waiting at the
bottom of the stairs. Outside St. Thomas Church, 300 police officers had been deployed to manage the crowd. Thousands of people had gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch the carriage arrive, to see whatever could be seen from the street on a day like this. The crowd was not accidental. It had been built.
For weeks before the wedding, Alva had been feeding the press a sequence of details, each one released at the right interval, and each one picked up and printed. The gown of cream satin with its 5-ft train trimmed in lace. The wreath of orange blossoms at the bride’s head. The orchids in her bouquet sent from the Duke’s estate at Blenheim.
The diamond garders Consuelo would wear beneath the dress. The gold fastenings on the lingerie. Alva had supplied each of these details to specific journalists at specific moments in the weeks before the ceremony, and the accumulation of them had built the expectation that filled Fifth Avenue and required 300 officers to contain.
The wedding had been on the front pages before it happened. The coverage described a spectacle. What the coverage did not describe was the footmen. That detail had not been released. It had not appeared in any of the society columns that had been running the story for months. The man at the door of the bride’s apartment on the morning of her wedding was not part of the story Alva was telling.
If you want to understand how something like this was allowed to happen in plain sight, with witnesses, with press coverage, and with hundreds of people standing outside on Fifth Avenue, that is the kind of story this channel follows. Not just the scandal, the system around it. The question the footman raises is not a small one. He was not there by accident.
Someone had placed him at that door on that morning at the entrance to the room of a young woman who was about to be married. The governness who had known Consuel her entire life was not permitted past him. The question is who gave that order and why on the day of the wedding itself it was still considered necessary.
The woman who placed that footman at the door had been preparing for this morning since before Canuelo understood what was being prepared. Alva Erskin Smith had married William Kissum Vanderbilt in 1875 and she had spent the two decades since then building a position in New York society that required continuous maintenance.
Consuela was the only daughter of that marriage born on March 2nd, 1877. named after her mother’s closest friend, a half-Cuban socialite whose own marriage to a British Vic count had caused a minor scandal the year before. The name was not accidental. Neither was anything else about the way Consuelo was raised.
From early childhood, Alva managed her daughter’s body the way a property manager manages a building, with attention to structure, to presentation, to what the exterior communicated to people who had not yet been inside. Consuela was required to wear a steel rod that ran the length of her spine fastened at the waist and over the shoulders to correct her posture. She wore it for years.
When she was old enough to have opinions about her clothing, Alva told her she was not old enough to have opinions about her clothing. When she objected to a particular outfit her mother had selected, Alva’s response was direct. I do the thinking, she said. You do as you are told. For minor infractions, the record does not specify which ones qualified. Alva used a writing crop.
The rod, the crop, the phrase, these were not moments of anger. They were methods. Alva was not a woman who lost control. She was a woman who exercised it. And what she exercised it on in those years was her daughter. The physical came first before the social machinery had anything to work with. Consuela was educated entirely at home.
governnesses, tutors, multiple languages, French, German, enough Italian to be useful. Her English governness encouraged her towards something beyond the standard curriculum, and Consuela was capable of it. She worked toward what she later described as a kumlad result. And she had hopes supported by her governness of going to Oxford after her graduation an honors degree in modern languages.
The kind of intellectual ambition that was unusual for a young woman of her position and that Alva showed no interest in cultivating all of it. Canuel wrote later came to not when at the age of 18 she became engaged to be married. The Oxford plans were not discussed. They were not argued over.
They were simply not part of what was happening next. And what was happening next had been decided by someone else. Alva’s own marriage had been decided the same way or close to it. She described her marriage to William K. Vanderbilt as her attempt to keep her family from financial ruin and she did not pretend otherwise. William’s grandfather was Cornelius Vanderbilt who had built the railroad fortune.
When William’s father died in 1886, William inherited $65 million. Alva had been in the family for 11 years by then, and she understood exactly what she had married into, and she intended to use it. The mechanism for building on that position required a specific kind of social access, and Alva had spent a decade engineering it.
In 1883, she hosted a costume ball at the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue, a building she had commissioned specifically to demonstrate that the Vanderbilts had arrived at the level of the oldest New York families. She invited more than a thousand guests. She did not invite the daughter of Caroline Aster, who was at that time the undisputed gatekeeper of New York society.
Caroline Aster’s daughter wanted to attend badly enough that Caroline Aster came to call on Alva in person to request an invitation. The call was Alva’s objective. Once Aster had made it, Alva sent the invitation. The moment was reported in the press. Aster was observed at the ball in animated conversation with Alva. One account recorded her as saying that the time had come for the Vanderbilts.
It was Alva who had arranged for the time to come and Alva who had arranged for Aster to say so. That was 1883. In March of 1895, Alva divorced William Kissum Vanderbilt. The divorce was a public event and its consequences for Alva’s social position were immediate and specific. A divorced woman in New York society in 1895 did not retain the standing she had held as a married one.
The friends who had attended her balls and accepted her invitations began to reconsider. Hostesses who had sat at her table reassessed whether Alva Vanderbilt, now a divorced woman, was someone they could continue to be publicly associated with. The position she had secured by outmaneuvering Caroline Aster, by building on Fifth Avenue, by managing every introduction and exclusion for two decades, was at risk.
She was 42 years old, and she needed something to replace what the divorce had cost. Canuel’s wedding was 8 months away. The footman at the door of the bride’s apartment on the morning of that wedding was not there because Alva was cruel. He was there because Alva could not afford for anything to go wrong. The introduction between Consuelo and the Duke of Marlboro had been arranged through a woman named Mary Stevens known as Minnie who had married a British knight and reinvented herself as Lady Padet.
She was Americanborn, perpetually short of money, and she had found a way to make herself useful to both sides of a particular kind of transaction. American families with money and no titles, British families with titles and no money. She introduced them. She was compensated for doing so. The introduction of Consuelo Vanderbilt to Charles Spencer Churchill was one of the services Lady Padet provided.
By the time the Duke appeared as a formal prospect, at least five other men had already proposed to Canuelo or to Alva on her behalf. Consuel was permitted to consider exactly one of them, Prince Francis Joseph of Battenburg, a distant relation of Queen Victoria. She met him in 1894 and developed an immediate aversion. She refused. Alva moved on.
The Duke remained. Her mother had spent 20 years building toward this morning. The question is what she was willing to do to make sure it arrived. That summer on a bicycle ride along Riverside Drive, Winthrop Rutherford proposed to Consuelo Vanderbilt. He was 33 years old, 15 years older than she was, descended from Peter Stacent on his mother’s side, a graduate of Colombia, a member of the 400.
Edith Wharton would later say he was the prototype for the male characters in her first novels. He and Consuelo had found time together despite Alva’s vigilance. And on that ride, drawing back from the rest of the group, he asked her to marry him. She accepted. She was leaving for Europe with her mother the following day. He told her he would follow.
He told her they would elope when they returned to America. She believed him and she left. Alva found out. The response was immediate and systematic. She intercepted Consuel’s mail. She banned Rutherford from the house. She took Canuel to Europe as planned and when Rutherford followed, which he did, crossing the Atlantic to reach her, Alva had already arranged things so that he could not get close. He came as far as Paris.
He called at the place where they were staying. He was not admitted. Canuel did not know he had come until much later. She spent 5 months in Europe waiting for a letter or a visit that her mother had already made impossible. Not knowing the letters were being stopped, not knowing he had been there.
While this was happening, Alva worked on the facts available to her. She told Consuelo there was madness in the Rutherford family. She told her he could not have children. Neither claim has been confirmed by any independent source. Rutherford went on to have six children with his eventual wife. The madness claim left no verifiable trace.
Alva may have believed these things or she may have said them because they were useful. The record does not settle which the Duke proposed to Canuelo at Marble House in Newport in a room Canuelo later described as gloomy. The Gothic room which Alva had designed with high ceilings and heavy stone detail, a room that did not invite lingering.
Alva had been waiting for the proposal longer than she had expected. The Duke had come to Newport at her invitation, and he had taken his time before making his intentions clear, which had frustrated her considerably. When he finally proposed, the Duke was deliberate and without warmth. Canuelo did not describe the moment as one she had chosen.
She described it as one that had arrived. What followed was a staged medical emergency. Alva took to her bed. The illness was serious, her household indicated, and the cause of the deterioration was Consuelo’s refusal to cooperate. Consuel was in effect being told that her stubbornness was killing her mother.
Alva appeared to be at the edge of something irreversible. Consuel, who had been trained since childhood to understand that her mother’s well-being was connected to her own compliance, found the situation, as it was designed to be found, impossible to hold against. She did not go to Rutherford herself.
That is the detail the record preserves and it is worth holding. Canuel sent someone else, a go-between, a person dispatched to carry a message she could not bring herself to deliver in person. That person went to Rutherford and told him that the engagement was over, that Canuelo had ended it, that she would not be marrying him.
Rutherford received this information from a third party. >> >> He received it secondhand from someone who had not been there when the engagement was made in a room he had not been permitted to enter. Delivering a decision he had not been part of. Whatever he said in response, the record does not preserve it.
He did not force the issue. He did not go to Consuel directly. He accepted the message that had been sent through someone else and he left. Alva recovered. There was no gradual improvement, no extended convolescence, no period of fragile health following the crisis. Once Consuelo agreed to proceed with the Duke, Alva’s condition resolved.
She was well. The illness had done what it needed to do and it ended. This is Consuelo’s account written 58 years after the fact and it is the only account from inside those weeks that exists. What it describes is a woman who had watched Canuelo defer to her concern her entire life and who used that difference one final time.
Which brings the story back to the morning of November 6th. The footman at the door of Canuelo’s apartment was not a formality. He was not a mistake or an excess of household protocol. He was there because Alva, having spent months dismantling every alternative Consuel had, was not willing to assume that the dismantling had been complete.
She had intercepted the letters. She had blocked Rutherford in Paris. She had staged an illness and watched her daughter break her own engagement through a messenger rather than face the man herself. And still on the morning of the wedding, she posted a man at the door. If you think Rutherford should have fought harder to reach her, or if you think Canuel never had a real choice from the moment Alva decided, say so in the comments.
The morning she had spent alone in her room was November 6th, 1895. St. Thomas Episcopal Church stood on 5th Avenue at 53rd Street. And by the time the ceremony was scheduled to begin, 300 police officers had been deployed along the block to manage the crowd that had gathered outside. The crowd was large enough that the officers were necessary.
People had come from across the city to stand on the pavement and watch whatever could be watched from the street. The Duke of Marlboro arrived late. The reason, as it was reported at the time, was that negotiations over the financial terms of the marriage had continued past the point when they should have been finished.
The settlement had been agreed in principle, but the Duke had sought additional concessions in the final days before the ceremony and had been added again that morning, seeking to extract further guarantees from the Vanderbilt side before he considered the matter settled. He arrived at the church after the guests were seated.
The bride also arrived late. Canuelo came to the church 20 minutes after the ceremony was scheduled to begin. The veil she wore was long enough to cover her face completely. The newspapers reported that she appeared beneath it to have been crying, but the newspapers had not been inside her apartment that morning. They had been informed, by whom the record does not specify, that something was visible beneath the veil.
That difference matters. The press did not see everything. They were told where to look. By the time she reached the altar, the marriage had already been priced. William Kissum Vanderbilt transferred $2.5 million in railroad stock to the Duke as the central element of the settlement. He also agreed to pay Canuelo $100,000 a year for the duration of their joint lifetimes with another $2.
5 million to be paid to her trustees after his death. These were not rumors from society pages. They were legal agreements signed before the wedding. The ceremony proceeded. The guests had waited 20 minutes for the bride, and when she arrived and the service began, it continued without interruption. The record contains no account of any guest rising to speak, no account of the officiating clergy pausing the proceedings, no account of any family member on either side intervening between the start of the service and the exchange of
vows. The room that morning contained by the description of one contemporary account the cream of New York society minus most of the Vanderbilts themselves who had not been invited or had declined to attend. These were people with enough social authority to stop almost anything if they had decided together that it should be stopped.
They did not. The service moved from opening prayer to final vow in the ordinary sequence of such events. When it was finished, Consuel Vanderbilt was the Duchess of Marlboro. The headline in one New York paper read, “She is now a Duchess.” The reception was held at the Vanderbilt family home on the Upper East Side.
In 1895, Canuelo Vanderbilt was one of nine American women who married into the British aristocracy. The pattern was familiar. American industrial wealth on one side, British titles, and old estates on the other. The sums change depending on the rank of the title and the needs of the family, but the structure was the same.
It was common enough that the New York Times had taken to publishing periodic tallies of the money involved in these marriages, listing the figures almost the way one might list market prices. The Vanderbilt Marlboroough settlement was among the largest. It was not the only one. The ceremony on November 6th produced a duchess.
It also produced a marriage that both parties understood from the first day to be something very different from the romance described in public. The question was when that truth would finally be stated in an official record. On the night of the wedding, Consuel told her husband the truth. She said, “I am sure that we shall both do our best to make the other happy, but there is something you must believe.
Our marriage was my mother’s idea, not mine.” She insisted on it even though there was another man who wanted me. She made me turn him away. The Duke of Marbor was reading the congratulatory telegrams that had arrived that day. He looked up briefly. He said, “Really? I take it he was an American. I don’t see much point in discussing it any further.
” He returned to the telegrams. That exchange took place on the same day as the ceremony on Fifth Avenue. the 300 police officers, the thousands of people on the pavement, the 20-minute delay, and the veil. Within the same 24 hours, the marriage had said what it was. In public, it looked like triumph.
In private, it sounded like a transaction. During those first weeks, the Duke told Consuel why he had married her. He said he felt obliged to save Blenhan. That was the word he used, obliged. He had inherited the dupdom in 1892 along with the palace and its debts and the restoration costs had exceeded what the estate could generate on its own.
He also told her at some point in that early period that he despised anything that was not British. Canuelo was American. She had grown up in New York. She had been educated in French and German. She had planned before her mother redirected her life to study at Oxford. None of this was what the Duke considered suitable preparation for the role she was now required to fill.
Blenham Palace was enormous and cold. There was no central heating. The rooms that were not in regular use were not heated at all. Canuelo’s room looked out over a pond in which she later learned a former butler had drowned himself. She wrote in her memoir that as one gloomy day succeeded another, she began to feel a deep sympathy for him.
That sentence appears in the memoir without elaboration. She placed it and moved on. The Duke’s mother had her own requirements. She interrogated Consuelo regularly about whether she was, as the phrase of the time had it, in the family way. The heir was the primary obligation, and until the air existed, the interrogations continued.
When Consuelo, still new to the house and its protocols, asked a butler to light the fire in the drawing room, he looked at her with what she remembered as a horrified expression and sent for the footmen whose job that was. She had not yet learned which tasks belonged to which member of a staff that numbered in the scores.
She learned within a few years she had mastered the running of a household that hosted dinners for royalty and shooting parties that lasted days. She visited the poor tenants on the estate and provided assistance where she could. She took an interest in the welfare of mothers and children which became a sustained philanthropic commitment.
Society found her gracious. At the coronation of King Edward IIIth in 1902, Canuela was chosen as one of four duchesses to carry the canopy over Queen Alexandra. The role was assigned by the crown and her selection showed how completely she had learned the world she had been placed into. She was 25 years old.
She had been in England 7 years and by then she had become almost perfect at a life she had never chosen. In 1905, the painter John Singer Sergeant came to Blenn to paint the family portrait. The result showed the Duke Consuelo and their two sons in the formal arrangement appropriate to their station. Consuel was described in the press of that period as the most beautiful duchess in England.
Her husband’s cousin Winston Churchill was a frequent visitor at Blenheim in those years and Canuelo later wrote that she found his company a relief. She described him as the life and soul of the circle that gathered around him. Spontaneous and enthusiastic, qualities she noted were sadly lacking in her husband. Churchill was one of the few people in her immediate world who acknowledged openly that the situation was what it was.
Between the wedding in 1895 and the formal separation in 1906, William Kissum Vanderbilt transferred approximately $20 million in gifts and inheritances into the marriage. There was the annual allowance. There was Sunderland House, the London townhouse built at the Duke’s request at a cost of roughly $2.5 million.
There were trust funds, liberty bonds, and additional provisions in Williams will. The money kept arriving year after year. It documented the original transaction more clearly than the ceremony ever had. A few years into the marriage, Consuel saw Winthrop Rutherford again. The record does not give an exact date for when they reconnected, but at some point in the early years of the 1900s, she spent 2 weeks with him in Paris.
She told her husband afterward. She told him she was in love with Rutherford. She told him she wanted to leave. The Duke’s response was not to end the conversation, but to discuss the logistics of it. Reluctantly by her account, he gave her permission to go to London in 1900 and meet Rutherford there.
She was going to ask whether he would take her away from her husband, her sons, her title, benim, and the life that had been arranged around her. It was not a simple request. She would have been leaving two young sons in a household where she had no independent legal standing, no financial resources outside the marriage settlement, and no claim on the title or estate. She went to London.
She met with Rutherford. He told her no. The record does not explain why. It does not record what he said exactly or how the conversation ended. What the record shows is simpler and harder. She came to London with a question and left without an answer she could use. She went back.
The Duke left for South Africa in the second half of 1900. His cousin Winston Churchill was there serving in the Boore War. The Duke was away for 6 months and returned in July. When he came back, Consuelo told him she had begun an affair with his cousin, Reginald Fellows. She also appears to have had a relationship with the French artist Paul Caesar Hel, who had painted her several times.
Hel’s daughter, speaking later, believed the affair had begun around 1900 and continued into 1901. By this point, the Duke had also been involved for some years with Glattis Marie Deacon, an American woman of little money but extraordinary beauty and intelligence. She had first come to Blenham as a guest.
In one sense or another, she stayed near the Duke’s life for the next two decades. In 1906, Canuelo planned to alope with Charles Vain Tempest Stewart by Count Castle, who was later the seventh Marquis of Londereerry. The plan did not proceed, but it precipitated the formal separation that both parties had been moving toward for years.
The separation was made official. They continued to be married. Canuelo left Blenhan. She took a small manor house called Crowhurst on the edge of the Marlboro estate, a 15th century tutor building close enough to London to be accessible and far enough from Blenheim to feel like something else. She used it for weekend gatherings and the guests who came were different from the guests at Blenheim.
Later she moved to Sunderland House in London, the townhouse her father had built for her and the Duke. The guests there included Herbert George Wells and George Bernard Shaw. She also became involved in the British women’s suffrage movement, aligning herself with the non-militant wing. She attended sessions in the strangers gallery at the Palace of Westminster, followed the legislative debates, and contributed to the public campaign without joining the more confrontational actions that had begun to define the movement’s
more visible faction. In her memoir, she described the 11 years between the wedding and the separation. This way, we had been married 11 years, and life together had not brought us closer. Time had but accentuated our differences. The nervous tension that tends to grow between people of different temperament condemned to live together had reached its highest pitch.
What the record does not explain is what Winthrop Rutherford said when Consuelo came to London. The Duke had granted her permission. She had arrived and then Rutherford had declined in a conversation the record does not enter for reasons the record does not supply. He had proposed to her on a bicycle path in the summer of 1895.
He had followed her to Europe. He had been turned away at the door of the place where she was staying in Paris. He had waited. And then in 1900, when she came to him with her husband’s permission and a question about what came next, he said, “No, the record closes there. It does not reopen.
” The Duke returned from South Africa in July of 1900. Canuelo told him she had been involved with his cousin, Reginald Fellows. He returned to a marriage that had continued in his absence in ways he had not authorized and he received this information from his wife who delivered it directly. The divorce was finalized on April 20th, 1921 in a French court.
Consuel married Jacqu Balsan on July 4th of the same year. A French aviator and industrialist, a man she had first met at her coming out ball in Paris in the 1890s when she was 17 and he was 26. and neither of them was in a position to do anything about it. By the time she married him, she was 44 years old.
She had been separated from the Duke for 15 years. The marriage to Balsson was, by her account, and by the accounts of people who knew them, a happy one. The anulment proceedings that followed the divorce were initiated by the Duke, not by Consuelo. His motivation was specific. He had converted to Catholicism, and he wished to marry Glattis deacon in a Catholic ceremony.
The Catholic Church did not recognize the civil divorce. A divorce ends a marriage. An anulment says something different. It says the marriage was never valid in the first place. For the Duke to remarry within the church, the Vatican would have to declare that his marriage to Consuelo had lacked free consent from the beginning.
The Sacred Roman Roa, the Vatican’s appellet court, was the body with authority to make that ruling. The ground the Duke needed was coercion. The Duke married Glattis Deacon in Paris in June of 1921. The marriage did not go well. Glattis had at some point in the preceding years injected her face with paraffin wax in an attempt to alter the shape of her nose, and the paraffin had migrated, changing her face in ways she had not intended.
She and the Duke grew aranged. She kept a pistol at her place at the dinner table. When he wanted her to leave Blenham, and she did not leave, he cut off the electricity. She left eventually. They never divorced. His second marriage became unhappy in its own way. But by then that was no longer Consuel’s story.
In 1926, when the Vatican proceedings produced their documentation, Winthrop Rutherford was named in the record as the man Consuel had been forced to give up. The proceedings identified him by name, described the engagement, described Alva’s intervention. Reporters sought a comment from him. He was 64 years old. He had been married twice and had six children.
He was asked about Consuelo Vanderbilt and the statement he gave was this. Some 30 years ago, I knew Miss Vanderbilt. I was one of her greatest admirers. He did not elaborate. He did not correct the Vatican’s characterization of events. He did not dispute that the engagement had existed or that it had been ended against her will.
He offered what he chose to offer and nothing further. What the record cannot settle is what he understood in 1900 when Consuelo came to London and why that understanding produced the answer it did. That question has no source. It belongs to a conversation that was not recorded in a room that no one else entered between two people of whom only one left an account of the years that followed.
The Vatican proceedings were still formally underway. Someone was going to have to say on the record and in a document that would be made public that what had happened in 1895 had been coercion. 30 years later, the truth finally needed a witness. The question was who would say it and under what terms? The answer came from two directions at once.
In 1926, documents relating to the financial negotiations between William Kissum Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlboro before the 1895 wedding were found in the New York surrogates court. The documents included a letter from December of 1919 setting out the full terms of what William had transferred to the marriage.
The railroad stock, the annual allowance, the trust funds, the Sunderland house costs. The transaction that had been contracted before the wedding was now in the court record, independent of anything Consuel or Alva had said about it. The Vatican proceedings were moving in parallel. The Sacred Roman Roa had been hearing the case, and Alva Vanderbilt, by then Alva Belmont, appeared before the tribunals’s investigators and gave her testimony.
She was no longer simply the mother who had arranged the marriage. She was the widow of Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the founder of the National Woman’s Party and one of the more prominent voices in the American Suffrage Movement. She was 73 years old. What she told the investigators was this. I forced my daughter to marry the Duke.
I have always had absolute power over my daughter. Those are the words as they appear in the accounts of the proceedings and in the tribunals’s documentation. She did not qualify them. She did not frame them as the actions of a mother who had believed she was doing what was best.
She stated them as facts about her own conduct using language that described control as a condition rather than a series of decisions. 30 years earlier she had told Consuelo, I do the thinking, you do as you are told. The phrasing had changed. The claim it made had not. On August 19th, 1926, the Sacred Roman Roa issued its pronouncement under Pope Pius X 11th.
The ruling stated that the nullity of the marriage between the Duke of Marbor and Consuel Vanderbilt was ascertained. In plain terms, the marriage was declared invalid from the beginning. The morning the decision was published, Alva Belmont boarded a ship and sailed for Europe. She had given her testimony. The ruling had come and she left.
Consuel and Jacques Balsson reached at their chateau in France declined to discuss it. A statement was issued indicating they desired no further publicity on the matter. Reporters were turned away. By the time the anulment was granted, Consuel had been married to Jacqu Balsan for 5 years.
The life she had built with him in France bore no structural resemblance to the life she had lived at Blenhim. The civil divorce had been finalized in April of 1921. She had remarried in July of the same year. The Vatican ruling came 4 years after that. By 1926, the person whose position the enulment most directly affected was the Duke.
He needed the church’s recognition of nullity for his own religious and marital purposes. Canuelo’s ascent to the proceedings was required, and she gave it. The record does not show that she opposed it. The record also does not show that she initiated it, sought it, or had particular use for it. The official record now said what the room at St.
Thomas Church had contained in 1895, a coerced marriage. It said it in a Vatican document under a papal seal with the names of the auditors who had heard the case and the specific language of the ruling. The truth had arrived on the Duke’s schedule through Alva’s testimony for the Duke’s purpose. The stories that run through the decades before this one, the marriages arranged for reasons that had nothing to do with the people inside them, the institutions that processed those arrangements, and the families that produced them are the
stories this channel follows. Because behind the title, there is usually a system. She and Balsson did not comment further. The years after the ruling were spent between France, Florida, and eventually the United States after the war. Churchill came often to the chateau at St. George Motel. He painted there landscapes and interiors, and his visit in 1939 produced what was said to be the last canvas he completed before the war began.
In the summer of 1940, with the German advance moving through France, Consuelo and Balsson were informed that they were at risk of being taken as hostages. They left. They crossed into Spain and from there made their way to the United States. Consuel was 63 years old. She did not return to live in France after the war.
In 1953, she published her memoir. It was called The Glitter and the Gold and it covered her childhood, the marriage to the Duke, the years at Blenhum, and her later life. Reviewers at the time and historians since have noted that it is selectively candid. She did not discuss her affairs during the marriage.
She did not address the question raised by the Duke’s second wife about the parentage of her younger son, Ivore. She wrote about her mother with restraint, but not with a simple forgiveness. In 1956, Ivor Spencer Churchill died of a brain tumor. He was 57 years old. Jacqu Balsan died less than 2 months later.
Canuelo had been married to him for 35 years. The two deaths came within the same year, within weeks of each other, and the memoir that had just been published 3 years earlier was the last sustained account she would give of what her life had been. In 1932, Canuelo built a house in Manalap in Florida, just south of Palm Beach. It was designed by the architect Maurice Fio and covered 26,000 square ft.
She named it Casa Alva. Alva Belmont had died in January of 1933 while the house was under construction and Consuelo finished it and gave it her mother’s name. In the years after the anulment, she and Alva had arrived at something easier than what had existed before. The memoir suggests a later closeness, but it does not erase what came before it.
Churchill stopped at Casa Alva in early 1946 on his way to Fulton, Missouri, where he would deliver the address that became known as the Iron Curtain speech. Canuelo Vanderbilt Balsson died on December 6th, 1964 in Southampton, Long Island. She was 87 years old. Her will directed that she be buried at St. Martin’s Church in Bladen, Oxfordshire.
Blandin is the village adjacent to the Blenham estate. The grave she had requested was next to her younger son, Ivore. Winston Churchill was buried in the same churchyard 4 weeks later in January of 1965. She had left Blenhan in 1906. She had not lived in England in decades. Blenham Palace is less than 2 miles from that churchyard.