In the winter of 1898, as Lady Alice Montagu made her society debut in New York, the newspapers called her the most admired of the belles of the past London season. She was described as exquisitely pretty, with shimmering golden-brown hair and a general joy for life. But even as she moved through the glittering rooms of high society, her health was failing. She was suffering from consumption, the disease that had already taken her twin sister three years earlier, and she had come to America with her mother knowing that her time was short.
Jacqueline Mary Alva Montagu and Alice Elena Louisa Montagu were born on the 27th of November 1879, the second and third children of George Montagu, Viscount Mandeville, and his wife Consuelo, the daughter of a wealthy Cuban-American businessman. The twins were born into one of the most senior aristocratic families in Victorian Britain. Their father was the son of the 7th Duke of Manchester and would eventually succeed as the 8th Duke in 1890, when the girls were just ten years old. Their mother came from a very different world.
Her father, Don Antonio Modesto Yznaga, descended from generations of rich Cubans who had run sugar plantations on the island, but the family had shifted its business and political interests to the United States as the Spanish Empire in the Americas collapsed in the first half of the 19th century. Consuelo was one of the earliest examples of what came to be called a dollar princess—a daughter of wealthy American businessmen married off to the sons of leading British noble families. The arrangement was a transaction. The American family secured ties to British nobility and raised their social status, while the British aristocrat received a large injection of cash at a time when many dukes, earls, and lords were struggling under debts accumulated from years of living beyond their means.
Jacqueline and Alice, known to their family as May and Nell, were born out of this marriage of convenience, and the financial and emotional realities of that arrangement would shape their short lives. Their early years were chaotic even by the standards of Victorian aristocracy. The family divided its time between London and Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire, the Montagu family seat, a castle whose history stretched back to the 16th century when Catherine of Aragon spent her final years there. But when the twins were just four years old, their grandfather, the 7th Duke of Manchester, exiled his son and his family to Ireland.
The reason was their father’s reckless lifestyle. In London, his drinking, gambling, and other activities had quickly squandered the vast majority of the six million dollars that Consuelo had brought to the marriage—a sum equivalent to over 170 million dollars today. The family took up residence at Tandragee Castle in County Armagh, where the girls would have grown increasingly aware of the strained relationship between their parents and the hostility of a country where families like the Montagus were seen as alien overlords who had supplanted the Roman Catholic Irish population. The twins’ situation changed again in 1890 when their grandfather died.
The family returned fully to England, and their parents assumed the positions of Duke and Duchess of Manchester at Kimbolton. But their relationship with their parents was distant. The Duke and Duchess spent growing amounts of time split between Kimbolton and London, with their mother engaged in many charitable activities, while May and Nell were increasingly minded by nurses, tutors, and other household staff. It was during this period that it became clear that Nell was ill.
The disease was called consumption at the time, but it is known today as tuberculosis. In the late 19th century, it was called the white death, and it had become one of the most lethal diseases in the Western world. A respiratory illness, it primarily attacked the lungs, and as the respiratory system broke down, the body wasted away—hence the name consumption, as though the body were being consumed slowly. By the time Nell’s illness became evident, nearly a quarter of all premature deaths in countries like Britain were caused by tuberculosis.
The infectious disease spreads through the air when people with active tuberculosis in their lungs cough, spit, speak, or sneeze. It is generally believed that May was also suffering from the disease, possibly caught from her sister, though she was never officially diagnosed. The twins celebrated their fifteenth birthday in November 1894. By then, according to a near contemporary, Shane Leslie, they were the two most beautiful and delicate girls imaginable.
They would never celebrate another birthday together. On the 15th of March 1895, May died. She had never been officially confirmed as having consumption, so the cause of her death remains unconfirmed, though it is assumed to have been tuberculosis. Some accounts give the reason as malaria, which is not impossible—the family was on holiday in Italy at the time, and in an age before air travel, it was not uncommon for people from northern Europe to fall ill with malaria when visiting the Mediterranean.
But tuberculosis remains the more likely cause. May’s death caused a rift between her mother and one of her oldest friends, Alva Smith Vanderbilt. At the time of May’s death, Alva’s husband, William Vanderbilt, had been in the Mediterranean with the Montagus and arranged for May’s body to be brought back to England on his yacht. When Alva learned of this, she suspected that her husband and her best friend were having an affair.
The incident added to Consuelo’s tragedy. Although it was clear by then that Nell was suffering from tuberculosis, she continued to live a relatively normal life after May’s death and funeral. In the winter of 1898, she made her society debut in both London and the United States, just before her nineteenth birthday. Following her appearances at events in New York that November, the newspapers referred to her as the most admired of the belles of the past London season.
But her entry into high society was brief. After her time in New York, she and her mother headed for St. Moritz in Switzerland, a town famous for its healing spring waters for centuries. They arrived there by the end of 1898, and Nell would spend much of the remainder of her life in that region.
Reports of the time juxtaposed her unfortunate ill health with her great beauty. But her health was deteriorating sharply. Over the spring and summer months, her mother employed numerous physicians to attend to her. All recommended rest and a dry climate, and warned against returning to the damper conditions of England.
Things did not improve. By the start of 1900, it was clear that she was dying. In the months before her death, family and friends went to visit her at the alpine retreats where she had been living to pay their last respects. Nell died on the 10th of January 1900, aged just twenty.
Her passing was widely reported, with the New York Times in America and The Times in London carrying the story the day after. As far away as New Zealand, her life and death were soon being reported on. A passage from the Otago Daily Times gives an indication of the depth of sorrow at her passing, particularly as it came so soon after the death of her twin sister. The newspaper noted that many who had never seen Lady Alice Montagu in life felt a check of regret and sadness on hearing the unexpected news of her somewhat sudden death at Davos Platz, for people had grown so familiar with her beautiful face through seeing her photograph in illustrated journals that she always seemed a sort of personal friend.
The paper called her one of the loveliest girls London had seen for many a long day, noting both her charm and her sweetness of expression and amiability of nature. The cause of death was consumption, the same scourge that had carried off her twin sister. Nell’s funeral was held at St. James’s Palace on the 15th of January.
The service was attended by some of the leading nobles of late Victorian Britain, including members of the royal household and staff. Afterwards, her remains were taken to Kimbolton Castle, where she was laid to rest next to her twin sister. In the aftermath of Nell’s death, their mother decided to create a timeless memorial to their two short lives. She employed Louis Comfort Tiffany to create it.
Although the Tiffany Company is better known today for its jewelry, its founder was actually more celebrated for his work in stained glass. At St. Andrew’s Church, located on the grounds of Kimbolton Castle, the Duchess had him install a stained glass window showing the two girls, based on an image of them shortly before May’s death when they were in their early teens. The ethereal image still adorns one of the main windows of St.
Andrew’s Church, a testament to the two girls who died so young. Had the girls been born just fifteen or twenty years later, they might not have died. Already in the 1890s, new methods of pasteurizing milk and other substances through which the tuberculosis bacterium was regularly transmitted were emerging. The first successful immunization against the disease was achieved in 1906, just six years after Nell’s death.
By the 1920s, vaccines were generally available, though the real turning point against the disease did not come until after the Second World War. Today, roughly twenty-five percent of the world’s population continues to carry a trace of the bacterium, but it is almost entirely dormant and does not negatively impact those who carry it. For May and Nell Montagu, the timing of their birth was fatal. Born into wealth and position, blessed with beauty and youth, they were taken by a disease that medical science was only beginning to understand.
Their lives were brief, but the memorial their mother commissioned preserved their images for more than a century, two delicate figures in stained glass, remembered together as they had lived.