Quickly, she started to change her mind about Britain. “The last thing I thought I would do is marry some laddish, shooting, pub-going nature lover,” she said in an interview at the time. “And the last thing he thought he was going to do was marry some cheeky girl from the Midwest who doesn’t take no for an answer. But now I love England and want to be here and not in America. I see England as my home.”
The tabloids, meanwhile, had a field day reporting on her new “lady of the manor” persona, which suddenly bore more of a resemblance to a Jilly Cooper character than the Madonna we used to know: There were shooting weekends, a quasi-English accent, Barbours, gilets and flat-caps galore. She and her children featured in a 17-page Vogue spread called “Like a Duchess”, and she increasingly embedded herself in British culture, taking up acting in the West End, being awarded her own official Scottish tartan and buying a pub in Fitzrovia with Ritchie.
Of course, not everything was perfect. Over the years, Madonna complained about the local work culture – saying workers take “bank holidays every minute” and demand weeks of paid holiday – as well as NHS hospitals, describing them as “old and Victorian”. Amusingly, she also disliked her British nickname, saying: “That’s one of the reasons I left England – so I don’t have to hear the word ‘Madge’ anymore”.
Still, when she moved her base back to New York after her 2008 divorce, she is said to have missed the UK. As the saying goes, there is “none so pious as the new convert”, and over the years, Madonna managed to stay in touch with British life and culture – even the bits we ourselves often find uncomfortable. Few British celebrities, for example, would openly talk about their mansions in Marylebone or their thoughts on expensive boarding schools for fear of sounding elitist, but the Michigan-born star seems to harbour no such worries.
As for the currently unsubstantiated reports that she is looking at Cheltenham Ladies’ College for her daughters (where the principal is Malawian-born, just like the twins) – it is not the first time Madonna has admired the £68,000-a-year school, which she is said to have put her older daughter’s name down for decades ago. In the end, Lourdes, 29, was largely educated in the US, but her son, Rocco, 25, attended a private arts school in Hampstead and continues to live in London today (and speaks with an English accent).