Free America's Secret Aristocracy by Stephen; Birmingham Page B

words “Your consent gives content” inside the circle. He had also given her a necklace with a pendant upon which his profile was embossed. Working together, Lady Stirling and Nannie Brown pieced together a wedding gown out of whatever scraps of old silk they could lay their hands upon. The day ofthe wedding arrived, the bride was dressed, and the guests had assembled on the Van Hornes’ sweeping lawn. Military musicians, recruited by General Stirling, were poised to play the Wedding March. At that point a messenger arrived on horseback with a brief note from the bridegroom. He had changed his mind.
    Nannie Brown did not die of a broken heart but lived on in dignified spinsterhood for many years. James Monroe married a stately lady named Elizabeth Kortright who was of a “good,” if not distinguished, family, though she had more money than Nannie Brown. But New York society would never forgive Monroe for his caddish act.
    Thirty years later, when Monroe had become the fifth president of the United States, he encountered Mrs. Alexander Hamilton at a reception in Washington and approached her, holding out his hand. “I believe you know me, Mrs. Hamilton,” he said. “I’m President James Monroe.”
    Mrs. Hamilton refused his hand and turned her back on him. “I do not wish to know a James Monroe,” she said. “I do not wish to know a president of the United States who jilted my friend Nannie Brown.”
    James Monroe might have fought and been wounded in a gentleman’s war, but he would never be a gentleman.
    And this might be a corollary rule of the American aristocracy: One seldom gets an invitation to join its ranks more than once.

6
    Coronation in New York
    When the American Livingstons became rich, they began the usual title search into their Scots past and came up with the fact that the powerful earls of Callendar and Linlithgow were also Livingstons. This was sufficient for the American line to claim these earls and countesses as cousins. The cousinship, however, is so remote as to be almost undetectable. Nonetheless, through this connection the Livingstons are able to claim not just one but two family mottos. The first is Si je puis —“if I can.” The second is Spero meliora —“I hope for better things,” and indeed, after marrying John Jay, Sarah Livingston had found better things than she could ever have wished or hoped for growing up on a farm in New Jersey.
    In Madrid, where the American Revolutionary cause was very popular, the Jays were the toasts of society, and Sarah Jay had danced with the widowed Carlos III, who had even—or so she would later claim—attempted a “flirtation” with her. John Jay’s mission with the Spanish government met with mixed success. He failed to get official recognition of the United States from Spain, but he succeeded in getting a grant for about $150,000. And Spain’s reaction to Great Britain’s protests over this Spanish aid to America had been an attack on the British stronghold of Gibraltar.
    The Jays’ next diplomatic posting was to London and Paris, where Jay was to aid Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson at a conference to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain. In London, John Jay took time off to commission a portrait of himself by Gilbert Stuart, whom he would later introduce to George Washington. It was the firstof a collection of portraits that Jay would assemble and that would include portraits of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, James Madison, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and Egbert Benson, a New York State official and longtime friend of Jay’s. It was as though John Jay had decided to gather, in his collection, a pantheon of American national heroes, among whom his own likeness now seemed to him to belong.
    On his treaty mission, Jay had been under specific instructions to come to no agreement that did not also satisfy the French