Absence of Ambassador Prevents Mr. Phillips Coming for Church Ceremony.
NEW YORK, Jan. 12.-Society’s expectations of a brilliant church wedding at which Miss Caroline Astor Drayton, daughter of J. Coleman Drayton and granddaughter of the late Mrs. Astor, should become the bride of William Phillips, have been dissipated as an indirect result of Darius Ogdon Mills in California. Instead of a ceremony at St. Bartholomew’s on Jan. 17, as planned, Miss Drayton will go to London, where the marriage will take place quietly.
The exactions of diplomacy are responsible for the situation as well as for unexpected but disturbing honors for Mr. Phillips, whom the death of Mr. Mills has made acting de affaires of the American embassy at London before he had been two months first secretary.
Mr. Mills was the father-in-law of Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James. Mr. Reid took the first steamship for the United States in order to attend the Mills funeral leaving Mr. Phillips as charge d’affaires.
It isn’t every first secretary that becomes a charge daffier before he has been at the Court of St. James two months, but Mr. Phillips’ pardonable pride was tempered by the thought of that wedding engagement and the bride 3,000 miles away. The perturbed cavalier burned the cables in messages to his fiancee and the net result was an agreement that she should go to London for the marriage.
So all the invitations to the big wedding and the subsequent reception at the Drayton home that were to be of such brilliancy befitting the granddaughter of the late Mrs. Astor are off. Miss Drayton will be married in London probably before Feb. 1. While there she may meet her mother, now Mrs. George Ogilvy Haig, who is living abroad.
Many New Yorkers will regret missing the wedding with Miss Janet Fish, daughter of Hamilton Fish, and Miss Martha Phillips, sister of Mr. Phillips, among the attendants, and with scores of the blue book of New Yorkers at church and residence. However, Miss Drayton, who has gone in for intellectual development rather than fashionable society, expresses no regrets.
The bride-to-be has about half a million dollars in her own right, William Astor having divided her mother’s share of his fortune into equal parts to the children, Miss Caroline Henry Coleman and William Astor Drayton.
Mr. Phillips is 30 years old, of a prominent Boston family, and has had a splendid career in the diplomatic service, having served as third assistant secretary of state, in Washington, as well as under secretary and first secretary at London.
Source: The Quincy Whig, Quincy, Illinois, Friday, January 14, 1910; Pg. 9
