Tuesday, October 7, 2025 – MARRIED FOR MONEY DOES NOT PAY

By admin

Ephemeral New York

Unhappily married to a UK royal,
this
Gilded Age Dollar Princess
became the great-grandmother of Princess Diana

Tuesday,  October 7,  2025

Issue # 1548

Mansions, equipages, Parisian ball gowns, box seats at the Academy of Music—top-tier Gilded Age families had access to the finest material luxuries, thanks to their deep pockets and social influence in post-Civil War New York.

Yet one luxury some Gilded Age elites desired was much harder to come by: a family connection to royalty.

America had no aristocracy, of course. But Europe did. And many lesser dukes, earls, counts, and barons in England and across the continent were finding it difficult to maintain their expensive lifestyles and ancient estates while watching their funds dwindle in poor economic conditions.

So emerged the “dollar princesses.” These marriage-age daughters of posh American families were typically pressured into tying the knot not for love but status.

Their family would arrange a dowry of sorts for the intended husband who needed the cash infusion. In turn, his new wife would gain an aristocratic title—and her social-climbing relations became linked to nobility.

One of the earliest dollar princesses was Jennie Jerome (below left), the 19-year-old daughter of “King of Wall Street” Leonard Jerome. Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874. (She gave birth to their son Winston seven months later.)

Perhaps the best known dollar princess was Consuelo Vanderbilt (below right), who was strong-armed by her mother, Alva, into giving up the American suitor she loved and accepting a proposal in 1894 from Charles Spencer-Churchill, aka the 9th Duke of Marlborough—a man she met on a visit to England when she was 17.

“We reached a stage where arguments were futile, and I left her then in the cold dawn of morning feeling as if all my youth had been drained away,” Consuelo recalled in a final confrontation with her manipulative mother at their Newport mansion in her 1953 autobiography, The Glitter and the Gold.

Both Jennie and Consuelo’s marriages were marred by infidelities and the transactional nature of the relationships. Consuelo cried the morning of her wedding, noting that she was 20 minutes late to the ceremony at St. Thomas Church because she had so many tears to wipe away under her veil.

The stories of these two high-profile dollar princesses have been retold over the years, with Consuelo currently serving as the inspiration for Gladys Russell in HBO’s The Gilded Age show.

But there’s a lesser-known dollar princess from New York City who also married an aristocrat from the UK. It was an unhappy union as well. But the marriage produced a descendent first known as Lady Diana Spencer and then Princess Diana, the modern world’s most famous princess.

The dollar princess’s name was Frances Ellen Work (top image and at left). Born in the fashionable Madison Square neighborhood in 1857, Fanny was the daughter of a Midwesterner who earned his fortune as Cornelius Vanderbilt’s personal stockbroker, according to American Aristocracy.

Fanny grew up at 13 East 26th Street, on the northern end of Madison Square Park. Bright and fluent in French, she summered in Newport and made the rounds of social events in New York City.

“She was also headstrong, so when the handsome James Burke Roche—the son of an Irish Lord with empty pockets but ladles of charm—proposed, she ignored her father’s angry remonstrations and married him anyway,” notes American Aristocracy.

Fanny’s father may not have been pleased by the nuptials; he reportedly cut his daughter’s allowance to $7,000 per year. (Not a bad sum in the 1880s.) Yet he did pay off her husband-to-be’s $50,000 in gambling debts.

But she had the support of her grandmother, according to a writeup in History Collection, who wanted her “exceptionally beautiful” granddaughter to “run in the most prestigious social circles of them all: British nobility.”

The marriage took place at Christ Church in September 1880. Two daughters and twin sons were born to the couple, and Fanny’s father once again paid off his son-in-law’s gambling debts, which now amounted to $100,000. By 1886, Fanny Burke Roche had enough. She fled to New York and filed for divorce, claiming desertion.

The divorce was messy, thanks to custody disputes and the fact that American divorces were not valid in England at the time. Fanny married again in 1905 at the Empire Hotel, this time to her Hungarian-born driving instructor. That marriage also ended in divorce a few years later.

When her father died in 1911, Fanny inherited a portion of his $14 million fortune. For the rest of her life, she entertained at her apartment at 1020 Fifth Avenue (below ad from the 1920s) and in her Newport mansion. She also visited various European destinations.

“Mrs. Burke Roche, during her later years, divided her time between this country and Europe, visiting her son, Lord Fermoy, who in addition to the title, inherited an estate of 20,000 acres at Rockbarton, County Limerick, Ireland, and a seat in the British Parliament,” reported the New York Times in Fanny’s 1947 obituary, which stated that she died in her apartment at the age of 90.

Here’s where the Princess Diana connection comes in. The son she visited in Ireland, Lord Fermoy, aka Edmund Maurice Burke Roche (above right), had a daughter named Frances Ruth Roche.

This daughter grew up to marry John Spencer, and the two became parents to four children—including Princess Diana in 1961.

Diana was born into the British aristocracy, and she hailed from a long line of UK nobles. But her connection to Gotham’s Gilded Age through a beautiful and independent-minded great-grandmother (who is also great-great-grandmother to William and Harry, and great-great-great grandmother to their children) adds a historical New York angle to her compelling life story.

[Top photo: American Aristocracy; second photo: American Aristocracy; third photo: Wikipedia; fourth photo: Wikipedia; fifth photo: American Aristocracy; sixth image: Wikipedia; seventh image: American Aristocracy (Frances Ellen Work) and Getty Images via Oprah Daily (Princess Diana)]

Save the Date
Wednesday, October 15th
1 p.m. at the Tram Lawn
for the Revealing of the
“Roosevelt Island
1969-2025 Maps and Images”

Credits

Ephemeral New York

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.

Copyright © 2025 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com