About the Book

Lily Price Hamersley became, with her 1888 marriage to the eighth Duke of Marlborough, the highest-ranking American peeress in England and the first American duchess in fifty years.

The duke was one of three distinguished, but, alas, short-lived husbands of this beauty from Troy, New York. Her first husband, Louis Hamersley, was a patrician New Yorker who left her an affluent widow at the age of twenty-eight. Her second was the brilliant but “wicked,” divorced, and socially outcast Duke of Marlborough—brother-in-law to Jennie Churchill, uncle to Winston Churchill, and father to the husband of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Lily’s third choice in husbands was an ebullient Anglo-Irish lord, William de la Poer Beresford, a horseracing enthusiast whose popularity has been likened to that of modern film stars. In the course of a surprising life, Lily knew triumph and heartbreak while proving herself a woman of self-confidence, optimism, and remarkable resilience.

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The daughter of a naval careerist elevated to the rank of commodore after the Civil War, Lily passed her childhood in Troy and in the elegant Washington, D.C., home of her great aunt, whose husband, Ogle Tayloe, was one of the city’s most respected personalities in the mid-nineteenth century. Her 1879 marriage to Louis Hamersley took her to New York, where her husband’s family background as well as her friendships with society leaders such as Henry Clews and his wife, Lucy, propelled her to the top of the city’s social pyramid. A painful contest over Hamersley’s will after his sudden 1883 death clouded her social position, a position she escaped by marrying the Duke of Marlborough, who, like many of his noble contemporaries, was sorely in need on supplementary income. Lily’s marriage took her to Blenheim, where she became the chatelaine of what is today recognized as the grandest home in Britain. Despite predictions about an unhappy marriage, Lily thrived as the Duchess of Marlborough. She was devastated by her husband’s unexpected death in 1892, but before long had arranged a new life for herself, one that included a close friendship with her nephew Winston.

In little more than two years, Lily married again, finally achieving the social prominence denied her as the Duchess of Marlborough. She reinvented herself as a “well known racing woman,” one whose husband placed second behind Edward, Prince of Wales, in overall English race winnings in 1900, the year in which he died.

Lily went on after Beresford’s death with, if not the same ebullience as in earlier years, the same good spirits, She died in 1909 and was eulogized in a London newspaper as “an American lady who had won for herself a secure place in the affections of the British people.”

Reviews

“There is a unique flavor to Lily’s experience that had little equal in her era. Her three marriages, her confident ease in moving into impossibly complicated and exalted social realms, and her decades of dealing with legal complexities related to wills, estates, and trusts make her story read like a newly discovered Edith Wharton novel. The history of the fairytale years when Lily became the Duchess of Marlborough and a dear friend of Winston Churchill is immensely readable and fascinating.”

- Eric Homberger, emeritus professor of American Studies, University of East Anglia, and author of Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age

“This entrancing portrait of a conventional American girl who made three extraordinary marriages draws on society papers and women’s magazines as well as archives, court records and private papers to create a lively and vivid picture of social elites on both sides of the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century.”

- Sally Mitchell, author of Daily Life in Victorian England and The New Girl: Girls' Culture in England, 1880-1915

“Fascinating! The 8th Duke of Marlborough has been generally dismissed in the past as being an unimportant figure in the Churchill family's illustrious history, but . . . this book goes a long way in re-establishing his reputation, and reveals the importance of his marriage to Lily in the renewal of Blenheim Palace.”

- Jeri Bapasola, archival researcher at Blenheim Palace and author of several books on palace life and collections

“In this well-told biography . . . Svenson introduces us to a warm and savvy woman, who, seeking a place for herself in American and eventually British high society, weighed her limited options, took control of her destiny, and linked her fortune and future to a succession of three very different husbands.”

- Kathryn Allamong Jacob, author of Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C, after the Civil War