The Viscountess Who Never Became a Countess
The Californian heiress who married an English earldom, buried her past under a coronet she never quite wore, and reinvented herself twice over.
On the afternoon of the 10th of March, 1894, crowds gathered outside the Church of All Saints in Kensington to catch a glimpse of a bride. The weather, the papers noted approvingly, was perfect. Inside, the church was full of the sort of names that made an Edwardian hostess’s pulse quicken: Princess Christian, Queen Victoria’s own daughter, and her daughter Princess Victoria beside her; the Countess of Arran, the Countess of Cairns, the Earl and Countess of Cadogan, the Earl and Countess of Craven. The wedding gifts were, in the language of the day, numerous, costly and magnificent—a diamond bracelet from one Indian prince, a pearl brooch from another, and from the bride’s father a diamond tiara, a diamond bracelet, a silver tea and coffee service, and a cheque for a sum too large to print.
The bride was Virginia Bonynge, a Californian. And not one of those glittering guests, I suspect, knew the truth about the man whose blood she carried.
I’ve been wanting to write about Virginia for a while, and there was really only one person to call. Rick Hutto has spent a lifetime tracing the American women who sailed east and married into the British and European aristocracy—the dollar princesses, the gilded heiresses, the girls whose fortunes shored up a hundred crumbling estates. His new book—Gilded Finale: The Bradley Martin Ball and the End of the Gilded Age—is out in January and available to pre-order now, and he has a memory for this world that I have come to rely on completely. So I asked him to walk me through Virginia. What follows is our conversation, tidied only lightly, because Rick tells a story the way the best historians do—sideways, generously, and always with one more thread to pull.
A Girl From the Wrong Coast
When we picture the gilded heiress, we picture a particular geography. The eastern seaboard. Newport, New York, the Hudson Valley. Names we already half-know— Vanderbilt, Jerome, Leiter. Virginia came from none of that.
“We think of the eastern seaboard, preferably northeast,” Rick told me, “with these great families whose names we all recognise. There were a few out west. And we just sort of tend to leave those out of our stories.”
Virginia was born in 1866, which places her right at the front of the wave—earlier than Consuelo Vanderbilt, a near-contemporary of the very first crossings. But where a Vanderbilt daughter had marble and lineage behind her, Virginia had something else entirely: a fortune with no pedigree, and a childhood with a shadow over it.
Her stepfather was Charles William Bonynge, an Irish-born speculator who made a great deal of money in the California mining booms and gave Virginia both his surname and his wealth. Her birth father was a man named William Daniel, and it is here that the story darkens. By some accounts he was hanged. By the account Rick gave me, drawn from his own research, it was stranger and sadder than that.
“Her father thought he’d committed murder,” Rick said. “He tried, and he thought he was successful. He went into prison. And then even the man he’d shot said, after a few years, let him out. So the guy comes out—and basically kills himself.”
Whatever the precise truth, the shape of it is unmistakable: a father lost to violence, prison and self-destruction, and a little girl of three left on the right side of a divorce, carried off by a mother who married money and never looked back. The great unanswered question, Rick says—the one that hangs over everything that followed— is how much Virginia herself ever knew.
“At one point she said she didn’t know any of that,” he told me. “But who knows if she did or not.”
