History'There is one thing you can tell Mr Townsend when you see him again," says rich Dr Sloper to his daughter in Henry James's Washington Square.
"That if you marry without my consent, I don't leave you a farthing of money." Catherine Sloper represents the archetypal heiress: innocent, susceptible, a prey to the first smooth-talking fortune hunter who crosses her path. She also conforms to Anthony Malcomson's definition, being in his terms "a bride who brought with her assets which far outweighed any return that her husband's family was obliged to make". In other words, on marriage her income would be superior to that of the groom.
Popular history has long held that in the 18th and 19th centuries, heiresses were particularly vulnerable to attention from impoverished Irish peers; The Abduction Club, a rather poor film dealing with precisely this theme, was released only five years ago. Malcomson does include some instances of attempted abduction, but demonstrates they were infrequent and usually unsuccessful. In 1772, for example, an effort was made to abduct Miss Charlotte Newcomen from the house of friends in Longford. The man responsible, a recent graduate from Trinity College Dublin called Thomas Johnston, ended up without a bride but with a mortal wound, acknowledging as he died "that he deserved his fate and had no one to blame but himself".
In any case, it's probable that Newcomen's fortune, estimated to produce an annual return of £4,000-£5,000, was better-protected from unwelcome attention than the lady herself. A variety of legal devices stood guard over even the most independent-minded young woman's financial assets, which were often already assigned to go not to her husband, should she marry, but to her heirs, either direct or indirect. Men who sought a wife in the hope that she could lift them out of penury or rescue their indebted estates were as liable to disappointment as poor Thomas Johnston. If a woman were wealthy in her own right, that wealth most frequently went to younger children rather than the heir, who could already expect to inherit his father's property; as a result, it was possible for a second son to be richer than his older brother.
Malcomson's investigations show that of 129 Irish peers alive in 1810, just 17 were married to heiresses. The laws of entailment and the manner in which an estate passed from one member of a family to another as men (who were always first in line) died either unmarried or without children, meant quite a number of women who at the time of their marriage would not have been categorised as heiresses subsequently became so, sometimes even posthumously. In 1898, land in counties Louth and Armagh was inherited by the fourth Viscount de Vesci thanks to an ancestor, Margaret Fortescue, who had died 142 years earlier. However, improving rates of mortality among men during the period covered meant the likelihood of a woman belatedly becoming an heiress steadily declined.
AND THE MODERN phenomenon of poor women marrying rich men was not unknown even then. The beautiful Gunning sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who in the early 1750s became Countess of Coventry and Duchess of Hamilton respectively, are the best-known instance of this, but there were others.
In 1795, the first Earl Annesley, a childless widower aged 55, was en route to dine with his brother when he stopped to speak to Sophia Connor, the wife of a gardener; two years later, he bigamously married her.
Nevertheless, occasionally a genuine heiress did come onto the marriage market, the most famous being Lady Harriet Gardiner, daughter and only surviving legitimate child of the Earl of Blessington. At the age of 15 and at her father's insistence, she was wed to the penniless French dandy Count Alfred d'Orsay. But Lady Harriet proved to be no meek Catherine Sloper; she would later become the mistress of the Duc d'Orléans and subsequently marry a younger man as her second husband. In the meantime, within two years of Lord Blessington's death she had separated from d'Orsay and was in court fighting for possession of the Gardiner estates that covered much of north Dublin. Malcomson understandably devotes several pages to this case in his highly entertaining study of heiresses and Irish marriage during a particularly prosperous era in Ireland. But he examines the history of many other families across the country before concluding that affection played a greater role than affluence in determining a man's choice of wife. Even in the 18th century it was understood the key to a happy marriage was not money but love.
Robert O'Byrne is an author and journalist. He is currently writing a history of Dublin's Gaiety Theatre and a biography of the late Desmond Leslie
The Pursuit of the Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1740-1840 By APW Malcomson Ulster Historical Foundation, 307pp. £24.99