20 Historical Figures Who Married Their Way Into A Fortune

On January 6, 1759, George Washington, the future U.S. president, married Martha Dandridge Custis, a rich widow. Virginia’s dower law allowed widows lifetime use of one-third of a late husband’s estate, and Washington assumed management of the entire 17,500-acre Custis estate. However, he only had profit rights to Martha’s roughly 5,800-acre dower portion, with the balance held in trust for her children. He never had legal title to the property.

Prince Rainier III of Monaco risked losing Monaco to French annexation if he died without an heir, so he wed Hollywood actress Grace Kelly in 1956 to preserve his monarchy. Her father, Philadelphia millionaire Jack Kelly, paid a $2 million dowry, half of which was covered by Grace’s own movie salary. MGM broadcast the ceremony in return for releasing her from her MGM contract; the studio never paid the dowry.

In January 1772, Thomas Jefferson wed a widow, Martha Wayles Skelton. Her father, the lawyer and slave trader John Wayles, died in May 1773, leaving her 11,000 acres of land, 135 slaves (including Sally Hemings, Martha’s half-sister), and an estimated £4,000 debt owed to British merchants. That was one very complicated inheritance!

The illegitimate Alexander Hamilton was born in the West Indies and came to America as an orphan. In December 1780, he married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of Major General Philip Schuyler, a wealthy landed patroon (a major landholder) from New York. It made him elite by marriage, bringing him political connections and legal clients. He never owned any of Schuyler’s land, though, and he died in debt.

Prior to achieving stardom, the actor Clark Gable was known for his bad teeth. He married Maria “Ria” Langham, a wealthy Texas socialite who was 17 years his senior, in June 1931. She financed his teeth straightening, tailored clothes, proper etiquette lessons, and theater performances such as “The Last Mile” that attracted the interest of MGM studios. It was practically a full Hollywood makeover before Hollywood came calling. When he began earning money from his own pictures, he paid her $286,000 to grant him a divorce in 1939 so that he could remarry.

In 1814, the poet Lord Byron was already in debt to the tune of over £20,000. In January 1815, he married Anne Isabella “Annabella” Milbanke, the niece and heir of Viscount Wentworth. She inherited Wentworth’s massive Leicestershire estates on his death later that year. They separated after less than a year, and the separation deed provided that Byron should receive over £3,000 a year during his life from the Noel estates, named for Wentworth’s family. Byron adopted the name Noel-Byron in 1822 as a condition of the inheritance.

In November 1895, the 9th Duke of Marlborough was in desperate need of funds to rescue Blenheim Palace, his ancestral home, from ruin. He married 18-year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose father, railroad magnate William K. Vanderbilt, gave him $2.5 million worth of railroad stock that yielded $100,000 a year, plus $100,000 in annual allowances for each spouse. She is reported to have cried on her wedding day, having been forced into the marriage by her mother, Alva Vanderbilt.

The third son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, Lord Randolph Churchill, had the family’s name, but very little cash. In April 1874, he married an American heiress, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of stock market speculator Leonard Jerome. Her £50,000 dowry would yield £2,000 a year, funding his political career. Unusually for the time, Jerome’s marriage contract specified that £1,000 of this should be paid directly to Jennie as her own personal allowance. Seven months later, their son Winston Churchill was born.

Prince Albert came from the small, cash-poor house of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld with little personal wealth of his own. He wed his first cousin, Queen Victoria, in 1840. Prime Minister Lord Melbourne proposed an annual annuity of £50,000, but Tory opposition in Parliament reduced it to £30,000 before the final vote as a result of a wave of anti-German sentiment. Albert did not become Prince Consort until 1857, 17 years after his marriage.

Mark Antony was a Roman general in debt around 47 BC. To solve the issue, he married Fulvia, a rich widow of two populist politicians, Publius Clodius Pulcher and Scribonius Curio. Fulvia gave Antony her lands, capital, and the power of the street gangs that Clodius controlled. Money, property, and street gangs made for quite the marriage package. This paved his way to power. Fulvia was also the first Roman woman to appear on coins produced by Antony. After becoming involved in the failed Perusine War against Octavian, she fled Italy and died in exile in 40 BC.

Eleanor, the former Queen of France, married 19-year-old Henry Plantagenet (the future Henry II of England) in May 1152, only eight weeks after the annulment of her previous marriage to King Louis VII of France. Through this marriage she passed to Henry, jure uxoris (in right of his wife), all the revenues of the duchy of Aquitaine (then including Poitou and Gascony), which represented roughly a third of the area of modern France. This created the beginnings of the Angevin Empire, although Aquitaine remained in law the property of Eleanor herself. Henry had effectively doubled his lands.

King Charles II succeeded to an empty treasury following the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. He married Catherine of Braganza in May 1662; her dowry was two million crowns (worth approximately £300,000 to £500,000), free trade throughout the Portuguese Empire, Tangier, and Bombay. Some people married into money. Charles married into money and two cities. As the finances of Lisbon had been disrupted by war, a portion of the dowry was provided in goods such as sugar, silk, and timber rather than money.

Bess of Hardwick was a member of the gentry (the landowning upper class below the nobility) who married four times to build her wealth. Her marriage to Sir William Cavendish in 1547 quadrupled her lands and funded the Chatsworth estate. When Bess married George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the wealthiest men in England, in 1567, it really cemented her holdings. She used her rights as a dowager widow to control coal mining, ironworks, and glassmaking businesses until she died in 1608 as one of the richest women in English history, second only to Elizabeth I.

Count Boni de Castellane was old nobility with no money to back it up. In March 1895, he wed Anna Gould, daughter of railroad magnate Jay Gould, bringing a $15 million dowry. Over the next 11 years, he burned through $10 million on everything from a marble copy of the Grand Trianon at Versailles to a fancy yacht to parties. She left him in 1906 over his infidelity, stopped funding him, and had him thrown out.

In 450 AD, Marcian was a low-ranking, retired Roman soldier. Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II had died without an heir, and his sister, Empress Pulcheria, needed a male co-ruler. So she married Marcian on the condition that he respect her vow of perpetual virginity, and named him emperor. Then she gave him all the money in the imperial treasury. From retired soldier to emperor with a treasury is quite the career change. He turned out to be a good ruler. At his death in 457 AD, there was money left over.

After leaving school at age eight, Timothy Dexter became a leather tanner. In May of 1770, he married 32-year-old Elizabeth Frothingham, a widow from Newburyport, Massachusetts, who was much wealthier than he. Dexter used her money to buy up Continental paper money during the Revolution when its value plummeted, and later sold it once its value returned after Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, assumed control of the nation’s finances. He also invested in a number of strange exports to the West Indies, like bed warmers and stray cats, that turned out to be wildly profitable in the end. Yes, even the stray cats made him money.

A younger son without land or title, William Marshal earned his income by fighting in tournaments. As a reward for his services, in August 1189, King Richard I married him to the 17-year-old heiress Isabel de Clare. Through her, Marshal, now 43, gained Irish lordships and English manors and became one of the richest barons in the kingdom, though he was not actually created earl of Pembroke until King John’s coronation in 1199.

Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg was short on money when he married “Mary the Rich” in August 1477. With a nickname like that, the financial upside wasn’t exactly hidden! Mary of Burgundy was the sole heir of Duke Charles the Bold, and she brought with her Flanders, Brabant, and the rich Burgundian Netherlands. The marriage pumped much-needed tax revenue into Habsburg coffers. But when Mary was killed in a hunting accident in 1482, Maximilian spent the next 15 years fighting the French crown to keep his inheritance.

In May 1359, Prince John of Gaunt wed 12-year-old heiress Blanche of Lancaster. In 1361, when her father died, followed by her sister’s death in 1362, Blanche inherited all the Lancastrian estate, estimated at more than £12,000 a year. And thanks to “curtesy of England,” a legal rule that gave a husband life-tenancy of his wife’s land if they had a surviving child, Gaunt continued to have access to the fortune after Blanche’s death in 1368.

Because he was the younger son among several, Richard Neville had only a small inheritance. He wed Anne de Beauchamp in April 1436, and when her brother and infant niece died by 1449, she became sole heir of both the Beauchamp and Despenser estates, as Neville defeated her half-sisters’ attempts to share their inheritance. By claiming the earldom “jure uxoris,” or in right of his wife, Neville became the wealthiest man in England outside the royal family, and he used the vast income to finance his private armies, which eventually led to his nickname, Warwick the Kingmaker.

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