Richard Jay Hutto

Muriel White was a scion of several “first families” of the U.S. Born into great wealth at the height of the Gilded Age, her mother was so famously beautiful that Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about it. Muriel’s father, who signed the Versailles Peace Treaty on behalf of the U.S., was among the most brilliant and respected diplomats of his day and their daughter was reared at the courts of Europe among the social elite of the era.Muriel, who spoke six languages fluently, ultimately married a Prussian count whose family held extensive estates and a hereditary seat in the Prussian House of Lords. She gave birth to three children, but the gathering clouds of World War II strained her relationship with her husband. He seemed to care only about protecting his family’s extensive estates, while Muriel plainly saw what Germany’s future was becoming. As she mentored her husband’s cousin, the future Queen Geraldine of Albania, through courtship, marriage, and the birth of the crown prince, Muriel witnessed firsthand the Italian Fascist invasion of Albania in 1939 and the royal family’s narrow escape from capture.When war descended on Europe and her marriage failed, Muriel sent her children to safety abroad. Cut off from her funds in the United States, she and her husband divorced; he allowed her to remain in their palace only as an unpaid housekeeper, even though her fortune had restored the estate. Her U.S. passport was confiscated and she was virtually a prisoner. Nevertheless, she resisted the Nazis (in several verified incidents) and secured funding to save a Jewish family before she was forced to make the ultimate sacrifice rather than reveal the location of her sons to the Nazis.

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England--for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly did not commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before Maybrick was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison--in her opinion a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name, enlisting the president of the United States and successive ambassadors, including Robert Todd Lincoln. Decades later, a gruesome diary was discovered that made Maybrick's husband a prime Jack the Ripper suspect.

New York City native Mary Esther Lee (1837-1914) first married in 1864 the Prince von Noer, brother of the Queen of Denmark, and was created a princess in her own right after his death. An active philanthropist to Protestant causes, she then married Count Alfred von Waldersee whose close ties to the Prussian court made her an intimate friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a mentor and valued friend to his young wife. Although she preferred to remain in the background, Mary's influence caused intense jealousy by those at court who resented her friendship with the kaiser and kaiserin. This biography chronicles the remarkable life of an American woman whose wealth and influence enabled her to rise to power in the Prussian royal court.