For centuries Britain’s 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.