Conclusion

Abstract

On 29 July 1981, Diana Spencer, the barely 20-year-old youngest daughter of Earl Spencer, walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to marry Charles, Prince of Wales. Witnessing the beginning of this ill-fated fairy tale were Diana’s two elder sisters, Sarah¹ and Jane.² These daughters of the upper echelons of the aristocracy serve as a fitting illustration of the marriage patterns of late twentieth-century aristocratic women. According to the statistics gathered for this study, only 25.89 per cent of the marriages of elite British women were endogamous in the twentieth century. The Earl’s eldest daughter Sarah entered into an exogamous union, just as 66.19 per cent of the marriages of her twentieth-century contemporaries were, marrying Neil McCorquodale, a Lincolnshire landowner³ in 1980. Jane, the Earl’s second daughter, married Robert Fellowes, then Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, in 1978. This union was also exogamous. Both Sarah and Jane, while marrying outside of titled ranks, married men of significant social standing; a pattern that is typical for twentieth-century women of their social rank.⁴ The Spencer daughters’ marriages to a large landowner, a court official, and a member of the royal family⁵ fit well with the fundamental argument of this project, that the marriages of aristocratic women were an important means by which noble families solidified and expressed their sense of rank identity.