Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester (1853?–1909) and Emilie Yznaga (1859?–1944)

Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester

Consuelo Yznaga’s parents were Antonio Yznaga del Valle, originally from Cuba, and Ellen Little Clement of Natchez, Mississippi.¹¹ Antonio Yznaga owned a plantation at Ravenswood Place, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where he lived with his family and 145 slaves.¹² Most likely he had also already established a residence in New York before the end of the American Civil War.¹³ The Yznagas’ eldest child and only son, Fernando, was born in about 1850. Maria Consuelo, more often called Consuelo, was born in about 1853. The middle sister, Natica, was born in about 1856,¹⁴ and Emilie probably in 1859 in New York.¹⁵ In 1876 Consuelo married Viscount Mandeville, the son of the 7th Duke of Manchester.¹⁶

Consuelo had not reached adulthood when she and her sisters were taken to Paris by their mother. They stayed there several years until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when they returned to Louisiana. In the meantime, Consuelo had befriended the Empress Eugénie, as well as Jennie Jerome (later Lady Randolph Churchill) and Alva Smith (later Mrs William Vanderbilt).¹⁷ As a young woman in New York, where she went in 1875,¹⁸ Consuelo was apparently one of a group of six ‘fragrant specimens of American girlhood’ who were nicknamed ‘The Bouncers’ and without whom, according to the New York Times, ‘No dance was complete … No country house frolic was a “go” …’.¹⁹ Following her marriage in New York to Lord Mandeville in 1876, which initially horrified Mandeville’s father, the 7th Duke of Manchester, who is said to have called her ‘a little American savage’,²⁰ she went with him to England and, in the words of the Duke of Portland, ‘took Society by storm by her beauty, wit and vivacity, and it was soon at her very pretty feet’.²¹ Thereafter she resided mainly in England and Ireland, where her new family had residences at Kimbolton Castle, St Neots; Portman Square in London; and Tandragee Castle, County Armagh. In 1877 Consuelo gave birth to a son who would become the 9th Duke of Manchester and to twin daughters two years later. Mandeville went bankrupt in 1889,²² a year before he became the 8th Duke on the death of his father. By then the couple were living apart. According to one account Mandeville ‘formed a scandalous public liaison with Bessie Bellwood, a coarse, hoarse-voiced, male impersonator of the music halls’.²³ If Consuelo was able to console herself with Joseph Chamberlain, a member of Gladstone’s cabinet, whom she is said to have taken as a lover,²⁴ and then with the novelist, Robert Hichens,²⁵ the deaths of her daughters at the ages of 16 and 21 were doubtless bitter blows. Materially and socially, however, Consuelo led a charmed existence. In 1880 she and Emilie helped at a charity event led by the Princess of Wales at Kensington House.²⁶ In 1884 she was in New York staying at the Vanderbilts’ and helping plan the huge costume ball given in honour of her and Lord Mandeville.²⁷ In 1897 she was one of the guests at the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire’s costume ball at Devonshire House, Piccadilly (since demolished), where she is described as dressing as Anne of Austria in a gown of white, silver and gold satin and wearing a diamond crown and a single pearl on her forehead.²⁸ Consuelo’s life revolved around both the London social scene and the out-of-town activities of its participants: racing at Ascot,²⁹ yachting at Cowes,³⁰ renting Old Mar Castle in Scotland for shooting,³¹ hiring White Lodge, Richmond Park, for entertaining ‘in the most lavish manner’,³² interspersed with trips to Biarritz, St Moritz³³ and New York.³⁴ Consuelo’s social prominence was such that she would make posthumous appearances in Proust’s La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, as Mme de Guermantes’s London shopping companion. Among the visitors at Mar were her sister Emilie and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.

It was following her return to London from New York in 1884 that Consuelo became a friend of Edward, the Prince of Wales.³⁵ They were to remain close friends for the rest of her life.³⁶ An account of that friendship is contained in the New York Times in 1908, after Edward had become king:

Advancing years, a grandmother several times over, portly, and with few traces of the beauty and elegance for which she was formerly celebrated, she still retains her merry wit and her musical gifts which are always at the service of the King to dispel his boredom. Moreover, there are few persons who possess so intimate an acquaintance with his likes and dislikes, his prejudices and his tastes, and by catering to these the Duchess always manages to render herself agreeable in the extreme to his majesty.³⁷

If there were some parallels between this friendship and that of Mme de Pompadour with Louis XV, it was not the music of Rameau which entertained Edward VII. According to the New York Times, when things were getting dull at Tandragee Castle during a royal visit, Consuelo and Natica delighted their majesties when they ‘got their banjos and began playing and singing the old time darky songs’.³⁸