A Ducal Wedding
In September, Charles, 11th Duke of Roxburghe married Miss Annie Green here at Floors Castle. Their marriage begins a new era for both Floors Castle and the Roxburghe family, and we are all delighted for the Duke and Duchess as they begin their lives together.
All the talk of weddings of late brings to mind another wedding of significance to Floors Castle and the Roxburghe family, that of Henry, the 8th Duke and the current Duke’s Great Grandfather, to his American bride, Mary Goelet in New York in the Autumn of 1903.
Mary was the daughter of American Real Estate magnate Ogden Goelet and Mary Wilson, the daughter of a prominent banker. Her mother had always had half an eye on Mary marrying into an aristocratic European family, and had ensured her position as a bridesmaid at the wedding of the Duke of Marlborough (himself Henry Roxburghe’s cousin) to American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895.
American newspaper The Sun wrote of her in September 1903, not long before her wedding that, ‘May Goelet’s life has always been that of a twentieth century fairy princess who in her present incarnation is the daughter of the very rich American. She has all the pleasures that any princess of the bluest blood and the richest properties can enjoy, and she has also freedom which the other princesses may not have, however closely the lives of American girls may be modelled now after the titled women of Europe’.