Abb Fab: Abbotsford’s Very Own ‘Dollar Princess’? - Marie-Louise Maxwell Scott

Well, not quite. The term ‘dollar princess’ describes (mostly young) American women from wealthy (often self-made) backgrounds marrying into the impoverished British aristocracy during the ‘Gilded Age’, the late 19th and early 20th centuries—dollars for Titles.  

In the way articles and guidebooks of Abbotsford, often describe Marie-Louise St Paul de Sincay Logan, the second wife of Major-General Walter Maxwell-Scott, as an ‘American heiress’, this sounds like a polite stand-in for ‘dollar princess’. But as usual, this is only half of the story. When Marie-Louise arrived at Abbotsford in 1928, she was no dewy-eyed teenager in awe of the British aristocracy. Instead, she was a 40-year-old Countess, a widow with an 18-year-old daughter, who already had a whole life history behind her.  

Born in 1888 in Youngstown, Ohio, she came from an illustrious military family. Her grandfather was the famous Civil War hero, General ‘Black Jack’ Logan. Her own father, Major John A. Logan, fell in the Philippine-American War. His death prompted her mother, Edith, a formidable character who actively managed the business empire her father had left her, to move to New York into a fashionable mansion near Fifth Avenue. Here she took her place in American high society, and from here her eldest daughter, Marie-Louise, married the Belgian Count Henri Calley St Paul de Sincay in 1910 in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Marie-Louise left the US and began a new life in Europe.

A daughter, Eliane, was born in the same year. The Sincay family had amassed a fortune with zinc mining in the Belgian Congo, and the family seat was a chateau at Angleur on the outskirts of Liege. Marie-Louise’s new life as part of the Belgian aristocracy was only short lived. In the August of 1914, she and her daughter had to flee the approaching Germans as Liege suddenly found itself on the front line of the First World War. Marie-Louise spent the war driving ambulances and nursing the war-wounded. Her first-hand accounts from the front line in Europe supported fund-raising efforts for war orphans back home in New York where her mother mobilised her society contacts.

After the war, she, her mother and Eliane made their home in Paris and lived a glamourous cosmopolitan life, complete with a villa near Cannes.

By then she was estranged from her husband who turned out to be a drinker and gambler. He went to the Cote d’ Azure to live with Muriel Miles, a Ziegfeld Folly dancer. In 1922, he made the headlines when he shot Muriel in a jealous rage (she survived) and eventually took his own life in 1924.

This must have been mortifying for Marie-Louise.

1924, incidentally, was the same year the Major-General lost his first wife so suddenly. With no surviving records from this time in Marie-Louise’s hand, we again have to rely on the Major-General’s diary for details of his second courtship and marriage. 

“1928: May – Went to Cannes (to Miss Amy Paget at Garitboudy). Engaged to be married. Promoted to Major General (on half pay). Went to Rome.”  

He always was a man of few words. By the end of June, they were married. After a three-month honeymoon in Capranola, Italy, they returned to live permanently at Abbotsford. Over the summer months, Marie-Louises’s money had been used to upgrade the heating system and install new bathrooms. She breathed new life into Abbotsford in many ways, re-decorating and re-arranging.

We have boxes of correspondence with fashionable suppliers and receipts in our archives. She bought paintings and china on her many travels to Italy and France

She also famously ordered the wood paneling in Scott’s dining room to be bleached because she found the dark wood too gloomy. We do have to remember that this was the 1920s, when the picture gallery at Paxton House resembled a lounge bar at Raffles Hotel. Abbotsford got off lightly. 

A strikingly elegant figure with a very distinct sense of her place in society, Marie-Louise certainly brought a sense of glamour to Abbotsford with frequent stays in Paris, Italy and the United States. But she was by no means superficial. She was a devout Catholic and passionately interested in global politics. In the 1930s, she took up the cause of Royalist Spain, which she perceived to be under imminent threat from atheist communism.

She worked tirelessly, raising funds for Spanish war orphans and awareness of the threat of communism, not only for Spain but Europe as a whole. Like many others, she initially saw fascism as a possible counterpoint and corresponded with many like-minded individuals across the globe on this subject. Fluent in French and Italian, she had friends, often in many countries, often expatriate aristocrats.

She was a voracious reader and even contemplated becoming a writer. By the mid-1930s, the money flowing from the US had run dry, the villa in the South of France sold. We know little about her post war years; her correspondence sits largely unread in our archives. After the Major General’s death in 1954, Marie-Louise mostly lived in Italy and died in Rome in 1969 at the age of 80. We even have the receipt of the private hospital where she spent her last days. It is signed by her stepdaughter Patricia, who, after the death of her father, had become the next chatelaine of Abbotsford. Just like her grandmother Mary Monica and her great grandmother Charlotte Lockhart before her.

Want to learn more about Marie Louise? Check out 'More from Marie Louise - Luxury, Shopping and Life at Abbotsford'!

Next month, we will look at Patricia Maxwell-Scott.

Click here to read last month's Abb Fab post, where we dive into the mysterious ‘Lady of the Isles’-Mairi Maxwell-Scott