During the Gilded Age, Alice Cornelia Thaw commanded a fortune that made her one of America's wealthiest unmarried women at twenty-three years old, but she discovered that some negotiations happen with five thousand spectators watching and a bride trapped in silk and desperation.
-------------------
The Gilded Age Divorce That Built America: Alva Erskine Vanderbilt vs. William K. Vanderbilt -- • The Gilded Age Divorce That Built America:...
-------------------
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
1:04 Chapter One: The Bankrupt Earl's American Hunt
4:53 Chapter Two: Million Dollar Ransom at the Altar
8:36 Chapter Three: Mademoiselle Roze's Peculiar Marriage
12:16 Chapter Four: The Countess Who Escaped
———————————
In spring 1903, when American railroad fortunes still bore the soot of their origins and British titles carried the weight of crumbling estates, a perfect storm of greed converged on a single altar.
Her father William Thaw Senior had conquered railroads and coal fields with ruthless efficiency, leaving his children drowning in more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes while Pittsburgh society watched their every move.
Into this gilded Pittsburgh paradise slithered George Francis Alexander Seymour, Earl of Yarmouth, carrying a title that traced back centuries and debts that traced back to last Tuesday's creditor meetings.
The Earl had already declared bankruptcy in 1899, a spectacular feat for someone whose father commanded one of Britain's great estates at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire.
His annual allowance of two hundred pounds barely covered his champagne tastes, let alone the three thousand pounds he owed to increasingly impatient creditors across two continents.
Between hunting American heiresses, he'd toured vaudeville stages under the preposterous stage name "Eric Hope," passing himself off as a matinee idol to paying audiences who had no idea of his aristocratic background.
In Australia, he'd performed as "Mademoiselle Roze," twirling through Loie Fuller's patented Serpentine Dance in two hundred yards of silk to Brisbane audiences who declared it the most remarkable theatrical entertainment ever seen.
Alice met him at her brother Josiah's townhouse on Lafayette Square in January 1903, where he'd arrived as Harry's guest during his systematic hunt for American money and marriageable heiresses.
The engagement announcement in February 1903 sent Pittsburgh society into delighted convulsions over their coal princess becoming a countess, with newspapers breathlessly covering every detail of the transatlantic romance.
Mary Sibbet Thaw orchestrated wedding preparations with military precision for April 27 at Calvary Episcopal Church, complete with Alice's hundred-thousand-dollar trousseau worth three point three million in today's money.
On the wedding day, Calvary Church overflowed with five thousand gaping spectators as police struggled to clear paths through the crushing mob of curiosity-seekers climbing telephone poles for better views.
Then came the footman with a message that would transform a fairy-tale wedding into an extortion plot—the Earl refused to enter the church unless Mary Thaw immediately transferred one million dollars in Pittsburgh Plate Glass stock and copper mining certificates directly to his name.
The ultimatum exploded in the vestry like one of Andrew Carnegie's blast furnaces, leaving Alice frozen in her wedding finery while her mother confronted aristocratic blackmail disguised as matrimonial negotiation.
Outside, the restless mob sensed catastrophe, climbing higher on telephone poles and pressing closer to church doors as minutes ticked by without a processional march beginning.
Mrs. Thaw finally, furiously, signed papers transferring what financial historians calculate as the largest same-day wealth movement by any private American woman before 1914, worth thirty-five point five million today.
Only then did the Earl deign to enter the church and claim his purchased bride, transforming the holy sacrament of marriage into a hostage negotiation with five thousand witnesses.
At Ragley Hall, servants whispered that the bridal suite sheets remained pristine—virgin linen for a virgin countess whose husband had other interests entirely, including his extensive collection of theatrical costumes.
Within months, reports of the Earl's "ill-treatment" reached Pittsburgh, though newspapers demurred from specifying his exact offenses to his unconsummated wife trapped in an English castle.
In August 1908, British courts granted Alice's annulment, declaring the marriage void and returning every penny of her extorted securities, which had grown to one point four million dollars.
Alice immediately resumed her maiden name, settled in Lenox, Massachusetts, and transformed herself into a pioneering horticulturist while the Earl died broke in a Torquay hotel in 1940.
Информация по комментариям в разработке