Is The Buccaneers Based on a True Story?

Apple TV+’s “The Buccaneers” relies on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel of the identical title. Its massive solid contains Kristine Froseth, Christina Hendricks, Alisha Boe, and Mia Threapleton and traces a bunch of younger, rich American girls as they enterprise throughout the pond in search of high-class husbands within the 1870s, specializing in the conflict between British and American tradition and the lives of the younger girls of that period.

The present’s protagonists and their lives are solely fictional. Nevertheless, their story relies on an actual phenomenon that occurred throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, when many younger American girls, flush with new cash, traveled throughout the ocean with a purpose to discover aristocratic British males to marry. In accordance with Historical past, between the late nineteenth century and the Forties, many American heiresses traveled to Britain, providing their wealth to British aristocrats who possessed standing, class, and titles however who usually have been quick on funds.

Britain’s aristocracy misplaced an excessive amount of cash throughout the Gilded Age, largely as a result of America started producing its personal grain throughout that point, damaging Britain’s earnings from the business. In the meantime, many American males have been rocketing to monetary success in America by varied new companies, although their new-money standing usually left them with out social prominence. An answer, then, was to marry daughters of American wealth to inheritors of British class and standing.

Issues did not all the time go easily for the ladies despatched over to Britain. Many of those girls grew up in luxurious however discovered British tradition and etiquette stifling and old school. Their efforts to modernize British society finally garnered them the nickname “greenback princesses.”

These “greenback princesses” wound up having a transparent affect on historical past in additional methods than one. In 1874, an heiress named Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill, and the pair wound up having a son named Winston Churchill. Then, in 1880, a inventory and railway heiress named Frances Ellen Work married the long run Baron Fermoy. Their marriage led to divorce in 1891, however greater than a century later, Work’s great-granddaughter Princess Diana married a then-prince named Charles.

Since then, the lives of those “greenback princesses” have been incessantly chronicled on the web page and on display. The present “Downton Abbey” largely focuses on a fictional American heiress Cora Girl Grantham and her marriage to a British aristocrat named Lord Grantham. “The Buccaneers,” which premieres on Nov. 8, is the newest sequence to element the adventures of the ladies who made the trek abroad looking for standing and who modified the tradition of the British aristocracy endlessly alongside the best way.