The first American heiresses took Britain by storm in 1816, two generations before the great late Victorian beauties. Marianne, Louisa, Emily and Bess Caton were descended from the first settlers in Maryland, and brought up in Baltimore by their grandfather Charles Carroll, one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. These Catholic Southern belleswere expected to marry a Plantation . But they were independent, fascinated by politics, clever with money, romantic in mood. Arriving in Britain, Marianne, Louisa and Bess were swept into the set of the Duke of Wellington, who loved Marianne until his death. In London the three sisters forged their own destinies in the face of intense prejudice, against both Americans and Catholics. (Meanwhile, Marianne s sister-in-law Betseyhad married Napoleon s younger brother Joseph, to the Emperor s fury, and found herself abandoned in Paris.) While Emily stayed at home, marrying a Scots-Canadian entrepreneur and running the Baltimore households, the widowed Marianne shocked the world by marrying the Wellington s wayward elder brother, the Duke of Wellesley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and appearing as a Catholic Yankee among the Prote