For centuries Britains country houses had been the exclusive preserve of their traditional landed gentry of lords and ladies, their tenancy legitimised by time-honoured ancestry and the accident of birth. But from the late nineteenth century an entirely different kind of proprietor began to take up residence. American money lots of it came across the Atlantic, in the form of wealthy, eligible heiresses to fortunes like the Vanderbilts, and fabulously wealthy industrialists and self-made men like William Waldorf Astor and newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst.
