SEVEN

“The Caucasian Royal Family”

I could see how strangely like a Royal family the Rothschilds are in one respectnamely, that they all quarrel with one another, but are united as against the world.

SIR CHARLES DILKE, MARCH 1879

In Thomas Mann’s 1501 novel Buddenbrooks, which depicts the decline and fall of a Hanseatic merchant family and firm, decadence is detectable in the third generation and fatal in the fourth. It is certainly tempting to write the history of the Rothschilds after 1878 with this model in mind. As Mayer Amschel’s grandsons died, so leadership passed to a fourth generation which seemed to lack the entrepreneurial drive and financial aptitude which had made the family firm rise and prosper. New educational opportunities distracted them from business. The process of social assimilation into the traditional aristocracy transported them, physically and emotionally, from City to country. “A new era has decidedly begun in business,” Alphonse had written enthusiastically to his cousins in 1865. “Only the young generation which has had a college education is capable of comprehending the exigencies of the times. It is the young generation therefore which should be entrusted with the direction of the grand financial operations of the epoch.” But this young generation struck contemporaries as epigoni.

The evidence is to hand for the construction of such a narrative. The deaths of Nat (1870), Anselm (1874), Mayer (1874), Anthony (1876) and Lionel (1879) left only their younger cousins in Frankfurt and Paris as representatives of the third generation. Of James’s sons, Alphonse remained a formidable force in French finance until his death in 1905, assisted by his younger brother Gustave, but Salomon James had died at the age of twenty-nine and Edmond played only a minor role in the business. Of the sons of Carl, Adolph withdrew from the business in 1863 and Mayer Carl’s health began to decline in the later 1870s, leaving the pious and financially unambitious Wilhelm Carl to preside over the last years of the Frankfurt house after his brother’s death in 1886.1

Even in old age and illness, those members of the third generation who had been active partners in the business remained imbued with their father’s work ethic. Nat had been considered an invalid for many years before his death in February 1870: his servant marvelled how “for 18 years he has fought against what to others would have been an insupportable illness.” Yet, just hours before his death, “he talked to Alphonse about American stocks and the Russian Loan and ... a few seconds before he died he told his servants to bring him a cup of tea early in the morning as he wished to have the newspapers read to him.” Anthony too always remained first and foremost a banker, though he was overshadowed in the public mind by his more politically active elder brother. He invariably greeted friends and relations with the question “What’s the news?”—a true banker’s salutation.2

For much of his career, Lionel suffered so severely from attacks of rheumatic gout (arthritis would seem the appropriate modern term) that on occasions he had to be carried to the House of Commons gallery to attend debates on Jewish emancipation. “For more than twenty years,” The Timesobserved, “he was wheeled from room to room of his house or from his carriage to his office in a chair constructed for the purpose.” Yet, as the newspaper also recorded, “up to the last working-day before the day of his death he continued to be the mainspring of a business which had no parallel in magnitude” and it was “on his sagacity and assiduity that the direction of the business chiefly depended.” Of course, the paper’s recently retired editor Delane was a close family friend, so allowance should perhaps be made for the obituarist’s enthusiasm; even so, his comments on Lionel’s role and abilities were insightful and are borne out by the performance of the London house under his leadership:

A business which mainly depends on the delicate and incessant variations of the money market in all parts of the world ... requires ... a sort of intuitive instinct for appreciating the effect of variations of exchange, which is, perhaps, hereditary, and cannot, like most forms of ability, be acquired to order. But this is only, as it were, the instrument of calculation, and the qualities upon which its due use depends are far higher. Everything must, of course, depend on obtaining information from all parts of the world, and upon forming a just estimate of it when obtained; and for this is needed not merely a knowledge of men in general, but an almost cosmopolitan knowledge of the peculiarities of various countries and nations. Nor is it sufficient for this capacity of judgement to be exercised on mere matters of commercial exchange. Political prospects are intimately involved in the estimate to be formed of any great monetary transaction, and to appreciate these a close acquaintance is requisite with the course of public affairs throughout the world and with the character of public men. Baron Lionel de Rothschild possessed these qualities in a very eminent degree, and they combined to render him, not merely a successful manager of his great house, but a very considerable figure in the social and political world. Nothing diverted him from attention to the daily operations of his firm, and almost to the last he held in his hand the threads of all its intricate interests. He was as thorough in its management every day as if he was laying over again the foundation of his house’s fortunes.3

Disraeli had no reason to exaggerate when he called Lionel “one of the ablest men I ever knew.” He was also one of the richest: when he died he left £2,700,000 (all but £15,000 to his wife and children), to say nothing of the houses at Piccadilly and Gunnersbury and one of the biggest private art collections of the era. Equally, those who disliked Lionel testified to his devotion to business. The day before he died, he summoned the broker Edward Wagg to his bedside at 148 Piccadilly to tell him: “I have been looking at my fortnightly account and you have made a mistake in the addition.”4 More than three decades later, stories still circulated which implied an almost avaricious trait: the financier Horace Farquhar told Herbert Asquith maliciously (and probably untruthfully) how “the old Jew always used to have on his table in his office in New Court a little chest in wh. he hoarded his pearls, and in the intervals of business handled and fondled them.”

The eldest of the third generation, Anselm, shared many of these traits—in particular that asceticism which Max Weber identified as the mainspring of capital accumulation (though he sought its origins in Calvinism). He was a keen reader, an enthusiastic and expert collector of objets d‘art(which he housed in a specially built gallery in the Renngasse) and an avid theatre-goer with his own box at the opera; but otherwise he lived austerely, occupying only two rooms in the Vienna palace he had inherited from his father, and vacating the castle at Schillersdorf in preference for a small cottage-style house on the estate. He seldom invited guests there. As Hermann Goldschmidt recalled, “he lived the life of an immigrant and a miser. He was averse to any outward displays of wealth, travelled only by hansom cab and never had his own coach and four.” So self-effacing and parsimonious was he that he also refused to have his portrait painted. For most of their married life, he and his wife lived apart (mainly, it seems, because she disliked living in Vienna); but unlike his father, Anselm scrupulously avoided sexual liaisons in Austria, confining himself to fleeting dalliances when he visited London and Paris. (His preferred vice was snuff.) He too seemed to his sons to have boundless energy. When hunting for antiques in France and Holland in the summer of 1868, Ferdinand recalled, “he used to rise at 6 o’clock and remain on his legs until dusk, dragging the unfortunate two men [his secretary and his valet] with him shopping and sight-seeing.—I wish he had handed his constitution down to his sons.” A good deal of the running of the house was delegated to Goldschmidt—Anselm ignored as far as possible the other employees in the office, speaking French to accentuate his distance from them—but he remained the master, and an exacting one. When angry he would throw his pen across the room and spit. Despite a painful bladder complaint, he too remained active in the business to the last.

It was entirely in keeping with Anselm’s old-fashioned style that he requested to be buried “with the greatest simplicity” in Frankfurt. “The funeral was as unpre tending as if it had been that of a poor Jew,” reported The Times. “The corpse was removed from the railway station in a mere carrier’s van... As the hour of the funeral had been kept secret, comparatively few persons were at the ceremony.” Yet this was the man who had left in his will a sum in excess of 50 million thalers—double the assets of the Jesuit order, as Bismarck rather gratuitously pointed out. The contrast could scarcely have been more marked with the funerals of James and of Lionel, whose interment at the recently established Willesden cemetery was attended by a throng of relations, Rothschild agents and brokers, MPs (including Sir William Harcourt and Thomson Hankey) and representatives of numerous Jewish organisations.5

The Fourth Generation

It might at first seem odd that it proved difficult to replace the third generation. After all, in an age of high fertility, the fourth generation was inevitably more numerous than the third, and one might have expected to find enough competent businessmen among the forty-four children born into it.6 Contemporaries were certainly impressed by the sheer number of Rothschilds. In 1859 the Goncourts noted with astonishment that there were approximately seventy-four Rothschilds at dinner following the wedding of Gustave and Cécile Anspach. It was Disraeli who famously declared “that there cannot be too many Rothschilds.” Was that not self-evidently true?

Part of the problem was an over-supply of daughters. Though it may seem absurd to us, the third generation was conscious of having difficulty in producing sons: this anxiety is not wholly unintelligible, as the ratio of male to female children in the fourth generation was 17:27. Moreover, no fewer than five of the male children died in infancy.7 It was partly because none of Carl’s sons themselves produced a male heir that the Naples and Frankfurt houses were wound up, the former in 1863, the latter in 1901.

Inevitably, the sons who survived were a step further removed from the ethos of work and calculation on which the family’s fortune had been founded. Indeed, even their own mother had a fairly low opinion of the three young men who were now intended to take over the management of the London house. With that harsh candour which she liked to employ, Charlotte wrote as early as 1840 that Natty “was a thin, ugly baby, but that did not signify; he was a boy, and as such most welcome for his father and the whole family. I never could prefer him to his sisters, and nursed him not so well as he ought to have been nursed.” By the time he was nine she had made up her mind that he “lack[ed] cordiality and frankness. He is reserved and shy and not generous; in fact he is the only one of my children fond of money for the sake of hoarding it ... [H]e is constitutionally indolent.” In the next six years there was an improvement—he seemed to apply himself to his studies—but “he remain[ed] shy” and Charlotte concluded bluntly: “[H]e will not be a clever, but a very well informed, highly cultivated man.”8

Following in the footsteps of his Uncle Mayer, Natty went to Cambridge to read moral science (which included moral philosophy, political economy, modern history, general jurisprudence and the laws of England) in October 1859 and seems to have had no difficulty with his work.9 But he struggled with the commoner’s second year examination known as the “Little Go” because of its compulsory mathematical and theological elements.10 His letters to his parents suggest that he devoted more time to riding with the drag hounds, amateur dramatics and attending debates at the Union (a familiar story), though unlike the rest of the family, he showed almost no interest in art and architecture. If anything captured his attention, it was politics: from an early age he evidently enjoyed discussing political news with his well-informed father.

Though a good beginning for a prospective MP, it could be argued that all this was a poor preparation for a dynamic City career. In particular, Natty’s lack of mathematical aptitude would seem to disprove The Times’s suggestion that the capacity for financial calculation was hereditary. His parents had expected more, as can be inferred from his self-justifying arguments in favour of hunting and the Amateur Dramatic Company:

I have found my experience that in order to get on here at all it is absolutely necessary to take two hours at least of violent exercise per diem, so that if I do not go with the drag [hounds] I must do something else in the same way... The ADC takes up some time, but I have found I do not work one bit more if I do nothing but work and only destroy my health and make life up here a curse and a plague... I came up here unprepared and cannot expect to do much. If I am never seen, people will expect more and at the end of the time set me down for a greater fool than I am.

Natty managed to pass the Little Go, but despite intensive “coaching” and encouragement from the Master of Trinity, William Whewell, and the Hulsean Professor of Divinity, Joseph Lightfoot (later Bishop of Durham), he seemed unlikely to secure honours, and left Cambridge without taking his final examinations at the end of Michaelmas 1862. After being elected to the Athenaeum (1860), entering the House of Commons as MP for Aylesbury (1865), becoming an officer in the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry and inheriting his uncle’s baronetcy (1876), Natty seemed destined for a political rather than a financial career. Thus it was for the evidence he gave before a Commons committee that he first won applause in the City. Charlotte was evidently surprised.

It may of course be asked why she and Lionel so desperately wished their sons to be academically successful: despite Alphonse’s faith in “college education,” there is no obvious reason why an honours degree from Cambridge would have been an advantage in the City. On the other hand, the proportion of City bankers educated at public school, Oxford or Cambridge rose markedly in the course of the nineteenth century. Charlotte urged Leo to “find an hour or two in the course of the day to write English exercises ... [as] it would enable you, even in the practical routine of New Court life to draw up contracts, make statements upon important financial transactions, and furnish those great papers, which should really not be drawn up by clerks.” But her real aim, one suspects, was less to prepare Leo for “the real business of life... at New Court” than to give him the classical education she herself had missed and craved—and in so doing to add another trophy to the Rothschild collection. A degree, like a seat in the Commons, had no functional value to the Rothschilds as bankers, but was a prize in their campaign for complete social parity with the Gentile elite. “University honors,” she lectured her youngest son in 1865, “are excellent credentials; if they do not prove the winner to be possessed of great gifts and remarkable talents, they prove that he has applied and exerted himself to acquire knowledge, that he has a firm will, energy, assiduity and perseverance, and those are valuable qualities.” Two years later, she reverted to the same theme:

distinctions achieved at the University must be a passport, a letter of introduction to the favorable opinion of the world.—In your own family, in business, in society, in the House of Commons, at home and abroad, and in all classes of the community—a man who has taken a good degree at Cambridge or Oxford is more highly thought of, and this good opinion acts as an encouragement to every useful exertion throughout life.

She and Lionel were furious when Leo lent some money to a friend, for this was a betrayal of social origins which Cambridge was partly supposed to efface:

I always thought you had common sense, and never thought you silly enough to advance five hundred pounds to a stupid scamp, who has hardly as many shillings in the world that he can call his own. [D]anger ous as it is for all individuals to lend money—it is far more so for any one, who bears the name of Rothschild.—Indeed I have not expressed myself correctly; it is absolutely impossible that any person, any member, great or insignificant[,] of our family should think, for one single instant of anything so absurd.—the loan of money is perfectly certain to change a friend into an enemy.—Nobody would think of returning money to a Rothschild, but would shun the lender in consequence, and probably for ever—and we might sacrifice enormous sums without doing any good, or giving any pleasure.—I have never in the whole course of my existence, lent any one a single six pence;—if a gift can be of service, well and good; is [sic] the petitioner too proud to accept five or ten pounds let him, if he can refund the money, give it to a charity. I have acted upon that principle all my life—and thank God, have no imprudence to regret...

PS Why can’t you lock yourself up ... and keep away from all the idle, lazy, good-for-nothing young men, who infest Cambridge, and steal your precious time, your good intentions and your energy away[?]

But academic credentials eluded this generation. At best Natty did not disgrace himself at Cambridge; his younger brothers did rather worse. Charlotte may have been anxious that Alfred “should visit Cambridge and distinguish himself there,” but after only a single year (1861-2) he was taken ill and never returned. Efforts were made to introduce Alfred to the world of philanthropy and politics: under Anthony’s supervision, he sat on a City committee “for the Relief of distress” in the hard winter of 1867. “I hope and believe that your brother will attend,” wrote his anxious mother. “It will do [Alfred] good to accustom himself to popular meetings, and, in time, he may perhaps become reconciled to the idea of entering parliament, which, at present, seems so repugnant to his tastes.” In 1868 he became the first Jew to be elected to the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, another appointment he owed entirely to his family rather than his ability. But he conspicuously failed to make this the position of influence which Alphonse made his role as regent of the Banque de France.11 Alfred lived the life of a fin de siècle aesthete, at once effete and faintly risque. Max Beerbohm’s cartoon—A quiet evening in Seymour Place. Doctors consulting whether Mr Alfred may, or may not, take a second praline before bedtime—captures the former quality (see illustration 7.i). So does Alfred’s somewhat feeble bon mot when another Bank of England director (reflecting on Anselm’s will) “suggested that in fifty years the Times would announce that your brother had left all Buckinghamshire. ‘You make a mistake’ was the reply to a very unseemly remark, ’believe me I shall leave a great deal more, I shall leave the world.‘ ”

7.i: Max Beerbohm, A quiet evening in Seymour Place. Doctors consulting whether Mr Alfred may, or may not, take a second praline before bedtime.

028

Leopold (Leo) was, if anything, an even greater disappointment, if only because Lionel and Charlotte pinned their last remaining hopes for academic success on him. Despite—perhaps because of—a relentless bombardment of parental exhorta- tions and reproofs throughout his Cambridge career, Leo had to postpone his Little Go, was marked down for his limited knowledge of Christian theology and scraped a third in his final exams. His mother feared that he would “pass for the most ignorant, most thoughtless, and most shallow of human beings” and was mortified to hear her friend Matthew Arnold say “that he cannot believe you are or ever will be a reading man, as you talked of going to Newmarket which he thought was a pity, as you seemed to him made for better things. I assure you I am not exaggerating—and that Mr. Arnold reverted three times to the race-course.” Lionel, who like Charlotte had hoped to see him in “Class I and very high up,” later commented acidly: “Your examiners were quite right in saying you were a good hand at guessing.” It is hard not to sympathise with Leo and his brothers. “Dear Papa does not expect any so-called news from your pen,” ran a typical letter from home in 1866,

but he wishes to know how you spend your time, at what hour you separate yourself from your beloved pillow, when you breakfast, with a description of the breakfast-table and of the ingredients of that earliest meal, how many hours you devote to serious conscientious studies, divided into preparations and lessons, what authors you are reading in Greek and Latin, in prose and poetry, how much leisure you devote to lighter reading such as modern poetry and history, how much, on how little to still lighter literature, such as romances and novels, in French and English—how much exercise you take.

Any university teacher knows how counter-productive this kind of parental pressure can be. If Leo preferred to idle away his time in the company of “idle, lazy, good-for-nothing young men” like Cyril Flower,12 it may partly have been a reaction against his mother and father’s incessant lecturing. The more desperately Charlotte urged him to “study something—drawing, painting, music, languages”—the more his interests turned elsewhere, principally to horse-racing.13 In the end, the only “English” Rothschild of this generation to secure a university degree (in law) was Nat’s son James Edouard, who grew up and studied in France. It can hardly be claimed that he was an advertisement for higher education. An ardent bibliophile who accumulated a large collection of rare books, obsessively excluding volumes with the slightest blemish, he is said to have committed suicide in 1881 at the age of thirty-six, perhaps the first Rothschild in whom the desire to accumulate valuable objects took on a dysfunctional character.

Of course, Leo’s devotion to the Turf had a precedent. His uncle Anthony had been a keen racegoer in his youth and his uncle Mayer was even more of an equine enthusiast. Indeed, it was said of Mayer in the 1860s that he was “so constantly away and amusing himself that his partners’ and nephews’ ... softly modulated voices had become inaudible to him.” In “the Baron’s Year” of 1871, his horses won four of the five “classic” races: the Derby, the Oaks, the Thousand Guineas and the St Leger. Eight years later, Leo himself was the owner of the Derby winner when his little-known horse Sir Bevys beat the Earl of Rosebery’s Visconti into third place (though Leo had used the bogus name “Mr Acton” to conceal his identity). He nearly won the Derby again with St Frusquin in 1896 (the horse came second to the Prince of Wales’s Persimmon) and did win it a second time in 1904 with St Amant. This was a symbol more of continuity than of decadence, then; the fact that he could earn as much as £46,766 in prize money in a single season may even be taken as a sign of traditional acumen. At the same time, sport was now an integral part of City life—witness the cricket match between a Stock Exchange XI and Leo’s own XI in 1880, a classic example of late-Victorian corporate hospitality. Another novelty was Leo’s enthusiasm for motor cars, the supreme rich man’s toy of the fin-de-siècle. There was also something new about the extravagance of having a racehorse like St Frusquin modelled in silver by Fabergé (with twelve bronze replicas for friends).

The sons of Anselm evinced similar tendencies. The eldest, Nathaniel (b. 1836), studied at Brünn but quarrelled bitterly with his father, who considered him spendthrift and financially incompetent. Ferdinand (b. 1839) showed even less interest in the family business, preferring to spend his time in England, where both his mother and wife had been born and raised. He was quite candid about his lack of the most important of Rothschild traits. “It is an odd thing,” he wrote forlornly in 1872, “but whenever I sell any stock it is sure to rise and if I buy any it generally falls.” That left Salomon Albert (b. 1844), usually known in the family as “Salbert.” Albert had studied at Bonn as well as at Brünn “with great energy, perseverance, devotion and success” but, when his father was taken ill in 1866, seemed “overanxious, over-alarmed, dreadfully frightened at [the prospect of] his undivided responsibility” for the Vienna house. When Anselm finally died eight years later, he left most of his real estate and art collection to Nathaniel and Ferdinand and only his share of the family partnership to Albert, who regarded himself as having been “not very well treated.” In short, Albert had to be forced into the business, faute de mieux.

In Paris, of course, it was the third generation rather than the fourth which came to power after James’s death in 1868. Yet here too there seemed to be a falling off. Part of the problem was that James had been such a domineering father. Feydeau commented that James had “never delegated the smallest part of his enormous responsibility to his children or his employees.” “What submissiveness on the part of his sons,” he marvelled ironically. “What a feeling of hierarchy! What respect! They would not permit themselves, even with respect to the most minimal transaction, to sign—with that cabalistic signature which binds the house—without consulting their father. ‘Ask Papa,’ you are told by men of forty, who are almost as experienced as their father, no matter how trifling the inquiry you address to them.” The, Goncourts noticed the same tendency.

The eldest son Alphonse—who was forty-one when his father died—seems to have withstood the years of paternal dominance the best, suggesting once again that it was the first-born of the third generation who was most likely to inherit or imbibe the mentality of the Judengasse. Educated at the College Bourbon, Alphonse had an enthusiasm for art (and for stamp-collecting), but he never allowed these interests to distract him from the serious business of the bank. In March 1866, he was asked by a friend after dinner “why, when he was so rich, he worked like a negro to become more so. ‘Ah!’ he replied, ‘You don’t know the pleasure of feeling heaps of Christians under one’s boots.’ ” Like Lionel and Anselm, he took pleasure in austerity: when he was observed in 1891 taking the train from Nice to Monte Carlo (where he “played very little”) it was his very ordinariness which was remarkable: “He waits for the train sitting on a bench, like any common mortal, and smoking his cigar”—albeit watched like a hawk by the conductor who stood ready to open the door of his compartment as soon as he showed any sign of boarding. Gustave too shared many of the attitudes of the older Rothschilds. As Mérimée remarked wryly when he dined with him and his wife at Cannes in 1867, “he seemed to have a good deal of religion and to think on the subject of money like the rest of his house.” When he later heard that Gustave had impulsively left for Nice, he had no doubt he had sub-let his villa in Cannes at a profit.

It was James’s younger sons who struggled. The Goncourts observed in 1862 how imperiously Salomon James (b. 1835) was treated by his father. After losing a million francs at the bourse, he:

received this letter from the father of millions: “Mr Salomon Rothschild will go to spend the night at Ferrières, where he will receive instructions which concern him.” The next day, he received the order to leave for Frankfurt. Two years passed in the counting house there; he believed his penance was over; he wrote to his father who replied: “Mr Salomon’s business is not yet finished.” And a new order sent him to spend a couple of years in the United States.

This was a caricature but one based on reality, as a letter from James to his elder sons in August 1861 indicates. Offering his sons 100,000 francs apiece of new Piedmontese bonds, he explicitly ordered that Salomon should have “nothing to do with realising them and should give the matter no thought at all, as I wish to avoid at any price giving him an opportunity to speak with brokers or coming once again into contact with the open market... I do not want to allow ideas of speculation to enter his head again.” He was never admitted into the partnership as an associé.

Just three years later, Salomon was dead—killed, so the Goncourts heard, “by the stress of speculating at the bourse—a Rothschild dead from the stress of money!” Alas for poetic justice, it seems to have been a horse rather than the bourse which precipitated his heart failure. As Charlotte reported:

[P]oor Salomon’s uncontrollable love of excitement was the result of the ever agitated condition of his heart and circulation. He was at the races last Sunday, and came home much fatigued, from having driven a spirited horse, which nearly pulled his arms off. In the middle of the night he woke covered with cold perspiration, and seized with a great diffi-culty of breathing; he rushed to the window for air—but the indisposition passed off—and he was I believe tolerably well unto Wednesday, when the fatal attack seized him. From the beginning the Doctors declared that there was no hope, for the poor patient began to spit blood, and the fluttering of his heart was most distressing; he was conscious until within a few moments of his end, and did not seem to be aware of his condition.14

The youngest son, Edmond (b. 1845), fared better; but as late as 1864 his eldest brother dismissed him as “a child, who ought not to go into the bureau for the next five or six years.” A studious young man, Edmond passed his baccalaureate “not only satisfactorily but brilliantly” (to Charlotte’s envious chagrin) and was rewarded by being allowed to visit Egypt—the beginning of a lifelong interest in the Middle East.

In part, the seeming decadence of the new generation was a reflection of the sheer number of Rothschilds there now were, only a minority of whom were required to enter the partnership and work, but all of whom had the means to live like princes. Apart from anything else, that meant a great deal of work for architects. The acquisition of country estates and the building of country houses, as we have seen, predated the 1870s and 1880s by several decades. There was therefore nothing qualitatively new about the way that Natty and his wife Emma regarded their house at Tring; indeed, having been bought by Lionel for his newly married son, Tring in many ways represented a continuation of the older generation’s aspirations. Like Ferdinand’s Waddesdon and Alfred’s Halton—the other English properties bought or built on in this period—it seemed to contemporaries to represent just another addition to the family’s territorial empire in and around the Vale of Aylesbury.15 Nor could Natty resist the family habit of altering existing buildings beyond recognition: with the assistance of the architect George Devey, he managed to turn an elegant Wren house into a rather stolid, institutional Victorian pile. Leo did something similar to Ascott, which he acquired from his uncle Mayer, using the same firm of architects to remodel the house in the mock Tudor style. Both Natty and Leo also followed the fashion for building picturesque new cottages for tenants and employees on their estates; indeed, Natty took pains to create a kind of paternalistic “welfare state” at Tring.

It was the quantity rather than the quality of such Rothschild investments in real estate which was new. The more numerous French Rothschilds acquired, modernised or built from scratch at least eight new country houses in this period, including Edmond’s S-shaped chateau d‘Armainvilliers, built in the Anglo-Norman rustic style by Langlais and Emile Ulmann in the 1880s.16 In Austria Nathaniel bought two new country estates: one at Reichenau, where the architects Armand-Louis Bauqué and Emilio Pio built the polychromatic château Penelope, and another at Enzesfeld near Vöslau, which he acquired from Graf Schönburg. His brother Albert also bought Langau, an estate in the Kalkalpen mountains in Lower Austria, and their sister Alice had two houses built: Eythrope on the Waddesdon estate and a villa in Grasse in the south of France. Finally, in the late 1880s, the remaining Frankfurt Rothschilds, Wilhelm Carl and Hannah Mathilde, built a villa at Königstein in the Taunus hills, also using Bauqué and Pio. There were at least seven new town houses too.17 Mention should also perhaps be made of the reconstruction of the original Rothschild house “zum grünen Schild” in 1884 at the time the remainder of the Judengasse was torn down: the Rothschilds consciously sought to preserve it as a monument to their ghetto origins.18 As in the past, styles and architects were swapped within the family regardless of national borders. The only real difference between the third and fourth generations, perhaps, was the preference for French architects and styles of the 1870s and 1880s, compared with the Anglophilia of the 1850s—a trend exemplified by Destailleur’s work for both Ferdinand and Albert.

Similarly, more Rothschilds meant more art collections. In fact, the previous generation had probably made more numerous acquisitions and accumulated bigger collections; but the division of these between their heirs gave each an incentive to acquire more. This was without question the period when the Rothschilds became the world’s leading art buyers, driving up prices of the artists and genres they coveted to unprecedented heights at the major sales of the 1880s. The Blenheim, Leigh Court and Fountaine sales all saw big Rothschild purchases, to the disquiet of (among others) Sir James Robinson, Keeper of Queen’s Pictures—though Charlotte herself believed that the Marlborough collection should be bought for the nation. This mania for art had its grotesque side. In 1870 Ferdinand paid £6,800 for a dam ascened shield by George de Gys which had cost barely £250 twenty-eight years before. In 1878 Edmond paid between £24,000 and £30,000 for a Sèvres-clad commode designed for Mme du Barry, a mistress of Louis XV; it had cost her just £3,200. Two years later, Mayer Carl paid the Merkel family of Nuremberg £32,000 for a parcel-gilt and enamelled standing cup made in 1550 by the Nuremberg silver-smith Wenzel Jamnitzer, making it the dearest work of art that had ever been sold. Yet by 1911, when much of his collection of silverware was sold, only fourteen out of eighty-nine lots fetched more than £1,500. Both Ferdinand and Gustave spent in excess of £7,000 on two oval enamel dishes at the Fountaine sale in 1884, while Ferdinand and Alphonse spent more than a quarter of a million pounds apiece for three (supposed) works by Rubens in the Duke of Marlborough’s collection. It was the first time any picture in history had fetched more than £20,000. Fifteen years later, Edmond went still further, spending £48,000 on the duc de Choiseul’s ludicrously ornate bureau (previous owners included Talleyrand and Metternich). Even Natty—reputedly uninterested in art—could not resist adding to the collection of eighteenth-century English works he had inherited from his father. In 1886 he paid around £20,000 for Reynolds’s Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy in the sale of the 2nd Earl of Dudley’s collection. Leo too added to the thirty-six paintings he inherited from his parents, though his tastes were more eclectic, ranging from Boucher to Stubbs, from Franz Snyders to Hogarth (The Harlot’s Progress: Quarrels with her Protector).

What was qualitatively new was the priority which certain members of the new generation—Alfred, Nathaniel and Ferdinand in particular—gave their country houses, their gardens and their art collections. In itself, the house designed in the French seventeenth-century style for Alfred at Halton by William Rogers (built between 1882 and 1888) was no more spectacular than Mentmore; indeed, its main hall was smaller. It was the novelties like the private circus ring, bowling alley, ice-skating rink, indoor swimming pool and Indian pavilion which struck visitors as faintly absurd. Nor was Alfred’s collection of paintings and works of art more impressive than his father’s. The Dutch masters, the eighteenth-century English and French paintings, the Sèvres porcelain, the French furniture, the silver—these had all been to the taste of the older generation. Although he bought over 160 new paintings in all (compared with the thirty-eight he inherited), they represented variations on his father’s favourite themes (Greuze, Romney, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Cuyp). The only real shift was Alfred’s evident preference for the French eighteenth century. It was the fact that he published a lavishly bound and illustrated two-volume catalogue of the collection which was new; the fact that he accumulated such an immense amount of Sèvres (including sixty vases and objects and six full services); and perhaps also the enthusiasm for female portraits. Nor was Alfred the first Rothschild to show an interest in music (he composed six piano pieces entitled Boutons des Roses in honour of Mayer Carl’s daughters); but he was surely the first to conduct his own orchestra. The older Rothschilds had not been above ostentatious displays, but it is hard to imagine any of them dressing up as a circus ringmaster, complete with top hat, blue frock coat and lavender gloves, or wielding a diamond studded boxwood baton. Small wonder some guests were repelled by “the hideous-ness of the things, the showiness! the sense of lavish wealth, thrust up your nose... the ghastly coarseness of the sight.” Sir Algernon West, Gladstone’s secretary, dismissed it as “an exaggerated nightmare of gorgeousness and senseless and ill-applied magnificence”; his successor Edward Hamilton agreed. “The decorations,” he commented, “are sadly overdone, and one’s eyes long to rest on something which is not all gilt and gold.” David Lindsay was more contemptuous: Alfred, he recalled, had been “tinged with the tarnish of wealth.”

Designed by Destailleur in a style which mixed Renaissance and eighteenth-century French elements, Ferdinand’s house at Waddesdon proved far from easy to build on the sandy and poorly drained terrain he had chosen; but the result was a triumph, arguably the greatest of the Rothschild houses. It had (and has) magnificent gardens, with fifty greenhouses and at least as many staff: the gardens alone cost his sister Alice £7,500 a year to maintain when she inherited Waddesdon in 1898, and a further £10,000 to maintain the other grounds, including the farm and dairy. Inside, there was a glittering collection, including Dutch works by Cuyp, de Hooch and ter Borch as well as English paintings by Romney, Reynolds and Gainsborough (whom Ferdinand did much to make fashionable).

Yet Waddesdon—a Loire château in deepest Buckinghamshire—was not to every taste. Gladstone’s daughter Mary also felt “oppressed with the extreme gorgeousness and luxury” when she visited. The Liberal Lord politician Richard Haldane, who acted as a Rothschild legal adviser for many years, mocked the preciousness of Ferdinand’s hospitality. “I do love all seemly luxury,” he declared in 1898. “When lying in bed in the mornings it gives me great satisfaction when a lacquey softly enters the room and asks whether I will take tea, coffee, chocolate or cocoa. This privilege is accorded to me in the houses of all my distinguished friends: but it is only at Waddesdon that on saying I prefer tea, the valet further enquires whether I fancy Ceylon, Souchong or Assam.” David Lindsay remarked on the way “Baron Ferdinand[‘s] hands always itch with nervousness”:

[He] walks about at times petulantly, while jealously caring for the pleasure of his guests. I failed to gather that his priceless pictures give him true pleasure. His clock for which he gave £25,000, his escritoire for which £30,000 was paid, his statuary, his china, and his superb collection of jewels, enamels and so forth (“gimcrack” he calls them)—all these things give him meagre satisfaction; and I felt that the only pleasure he derives from them is gained when he is showing them to his friends. Even then one sees how bitterly he resents comment which is ignorant or inept... [I]t is in the gardens and the shrubberies that he is happy... It is only when among his shrubs and orchids that the nervous hands of Baron Ferdinand are at rest.19

Ferdinand’s often neurotic letters to another close friend, the Earl of Rosebery, give a similar impression. Even by the standards of the period, this was a highly charged relationship, though it seems that Ferdinand’s passionate feelings were not wholly requited. He summed his own personality up well when he told Rosebery in 1878: “I am a lonely, suffering and occasionally a very miserable individual despite the gilded and marble rooms in which I live.”20 Another friend, Edward Hamilton, wrote an ambivalent memoir following Ferdinand’s death in 1898 which deserves to be quoted at length:

There was no one of late years of whom I have seen more, or from whom I had received greater and more uniform kindnesses. He always had a room for me at Waddesdon and a cabin on board his yacht... Though presumably he had to buy his experience when he was young, I believe he was less “taken in” than almost any other collector. The only times when his taste sometimes failed was in his choice of presents to others ... [He] was not open-handed like other members of the family, for he disliked parting with shillings... and had a horror of being done ... He had rather an unfortunate manner, and was not infrequently gauche. He gave and took offence easily; but au fond was most kind-hearted and loyal as a friend. No man was more uniformly glad to see one... and gave one the heartiest of welcomes. Having lived so much alone, and having at his command everything that he wanted, he was rather selfishly disposed, which is not to be wondered at. The spoilt child became the spoilt man... His leading characteristic was perhaps his impulsive and impatient nature. He was always in a hurry. He did not eat but devoured. He did not walk but ran... He could not wait for anybody or anything... There were some curious contradictions about him. He was very nervous about himself and sent for a doctor on the smallest provocation; but he often declined to follow the doctor’s advice. He took great care of himself as a rule, and yet he would often commit imprudences. He was proud of his race and his family; and liked talking about his predecessors as if he had an illustrious ancestry and the bluest of bloods... I doubt if he ever was a really happy man.

This gives a good flavour not only of Ferdinand’s character but of the often ambiguous quality of the relationships between members of the family and members of the political elite.

Like Alfred and Ferdinand, Nathaniel devoted most of his energies to houses, art and his own delicate sensibilities. The Renaissance style palais he built in the Theresianumgasse was one of the great Rothschild town houses; according to one account, he ran out of money at an early stage and had to borrow a million gulden from his father. (This did not stop him later spending tens of thousands of gulden on imported roses from Naples.) Inside, it was almost entirely French in style (one of the reception rooms by the sculptor François-Antoine Zoegger was especially ornate) and the art collection was the familiar mix: paintings by Greuze, Reynolds, Rembrandt and Van Dyck and numerous articles of furniture associated with Marie-Antoinette: in short, “le gout Rothschild” epitomised. Like Alfred, Nathaniel had his own orchestra; like Ferdinand, he lavished attention on his gardens, especially the park and hothouses at Hohe Warte created for him in 1884 by Bauqué and Pio and Jean Girette.21 And—predictably—Nathaniel was an excessively sensitive soul. A hypochondriac, he was especially prone to insomnia. Indeed, according to Hermann Goldschmidt, it was his search for a place conducive to sleep which led him to buy both the Reichenau and Enzesfeld estates, though he stayed only one night in the latter, leaving by the first train when he heard of the locality’s reputation for epidemics. When cruising in his 4 million gulden English-built yacht, he refused to sail too far from the coast for fear of drowning.

This is not to disparage the Rothschilds’ collective contribution to the arts in this period. As a trustee of the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection, Alfred put his connoisseur’s expertise to public use, just as Ferdinand bequeathed some of the more unusual pieces which he had inherited from his father’s Schatzkammer to the British Museum, along with some he himself had collected.22 Alphonse too made a substantial public contribution to the museums of the Third Republic. Elected a member of the Académie des beaux-arts in 1885, he not only built up an impressive private collection of mainly Dutch masters, but also donated around 2,000 works—including pieces by contemporary artists like Rodin—to 150 different museums. The point is that for Alfred, Ferdinand and Nathaniel the aesthetic had taken over from the ascetic. It was a transformation hinted at in Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Model Millionaire, a note of admiration,” published in 1887, which describes how an impoverished young man-about-town gives a sovereign to a miserable old beggar whose portrait an artist friend is painting. The “beggar” turns out to be a disguised “Baron Hausberg,” “one of the richest men in Europe... [who] could buy all London to-morrow without overdrawing his account ... has a house in every capital [and] dines off gold plate.” He is also the artist’s patron, having commissioned him “to paint him a beggar.” (Predictably, the Baron repays the young man’s generosity by providing him with the £10,000 he needs to marry his beloved.) Here a classic Rothschild anecdote is translated into the idiom of the fin de siècle: “the model millionaire” has become a benevolent artistic patron, far removed from the origin of his millions—even if it is a little hard imagining Alfred dressing up as a beggar, even for the sake of a practical joke.

Partners

The question nevertheless remains how far all these symptoms of “decadence” actually affected the performance of the Rothschilds as bankers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they did. When the ambitious young Hamburg banker Max Warburg arrived to serve a part of his apprenticeship at New Court in the 1890s, he was firmly told by Alfred: “A gentleman is not to be found in the office before eleven and never stays beyond four.”23 According to a Rothschild employee who joined the bank after the First World War, Leo’s routine was to arrive at 11 a.m., go to lunch at 1.30 p.m. and return home at 5 p.m.; Alfred generally arrived at 2 p.m., lunched at 3.30-4 p.m. and spent much of the remainder of the afternoon sleeping on a sofa in the partners’ room. Although he worked a good deal harder, Natty too gave the impression of being a reluctant banker. Asked if he had a formula for financial success, Natty habitually replied, “Yes, by selling too soon”—an attitude which has sometimes been seen as indicative of excessive risk-aversion. He grumbled to Rosebery about having to remain at the office like “a solitary hermit” after the end of the London “season.” Competitors were scathing about New Court as they had never been before. Edward Baring commented that the Rothschilds had become “so unreasonable and lazy that it is difficult to ensure a business being properly carried through under their direction. They refuse to look into new things and their intelligence and capacity is not of a high order.” Ernest Cassel, one of the dynamic newcomers to the City in the 1890s, was even more dismissive: the brothers, he declared in 1901, were “absolutely useless & not remarkable for intelligence.”

To be sure, the London Rothschilds had an invaluable assistant in the “ever industrious” form of another young Hamburger, Carl Meyer, who became one of the confidential clerks in the 1880s. Meyer’s letters to his wife suggest that outside the partners’ room business at New Court continued to be conducted at a frenetic pace. “I have been working ever since this morning like a nigger,” he told her in a typical series of letters from the mid-1880s:

His Lordship [Natty] asked me to lunch with him in the private dining-room—so you may imagine how I have worked ... I have been extremely busy again all day long and shall continue to be so if I want to get away on Friday evening. But it must be done... I have very little to tell you, except the old story that I can hardly hold my pen, so busy have I been all day long... I am really too beastly overworked.

Meyer was a regular guest at the partners’ lunches not for the sake of his small talk but because these were intelligence-gathering exercises to which other bankers, brokers and civil servants were invited. Yet when he sought promotion to procurist in 1890 (asking for £6,000 a year, the right to sign for the firm and his own private office) he was turned down and his resignation was accepted in 1897. According to City gossip, the brothers felt he was getting “too big for his boots.” He left to work with Ernest Cassel.

This de haut en bas treatment of subordinates was endemic. In 1905 Carl Meyer heard that Alfred was “becoming more unbearable than ever to the staff and treats men of 30 years service like office boys.” Stockbrokers also chafed at such treatment. As Alfred Wagg of Helbert Wagg recalled, “an interview with Lord Rothschild had to be amazingly rapid... He came in, placed a watch on his desk, and intimated that the interview would last five minutes, or three, or even less.” On one occasion, Natty asked the broker Fred Cripps the price of Rio Tinto shares. Having heard the answer, he said: “You are wrong by a quarter of a point.” To this Cripps not unreasonably replied: “Why did you ask me if you already knew?” “There was,” he recalled, “an awful silence in the room. I was utterly crestfallen, and under cover of the stifled hush I rapidly retreated.” Alfred Wagg had a similar experience in 1912, when he went to inform Natty that his firm was to leave the stock exchange:

On arriving at New Court, I asked to see Lord Rothschild privately and he came to see me in a little room at the back of the building. I gave him the letter [explaining the firm’s withdrawal], the terms of which couldn’t have been nicer. He sat down and read it attentively. He then got up saying, “Well, you know your own business best,” and walked out of the room. Not one word of good wishes or of regret that the hundred years of intimate connection between the two firms was to cease.

As we shall see, Fred Cripps was not wide of the mark when he commented on the quasi-royal quality of an “audience” with Natty: “One waited in an ante-room before being ushered into the presence, and then one filed through as though it were Buckingham Palace.” This kind of thing struck those on the receiving end as both anachronistic and out of proportion to the firm’s relative financial importance.

Similar charges of complacency have been levelled against the French house for the same period. In 1875 Henri Germain of the Credit Lyonnais remarked that Alphonse brought to business questions “a sort of dignity which was not conducive to success. He never puts himself out, he always waits for people to come and find him.” Palmade has argued that by this time the Rothschilds were “on the wane,” yielding their primacy in French economic life to industrialists like Schneider. A study published in 1914 observed that although the Rothschild name continued to figure in major loans issued on the French market, it was actually the deposit banks which now placed most of the new bonds. It retained its “moral” influence—especially where diplomatic factors were important—but the Paris house’s real financial power was allegedly declining.

There is evidence to support these views in the partners’ own correspondence: repeated complaints about competition from rivals, for example. “Others have become Millionaires,” grumbled Mayer Carl in 1869, “& ... the public laughs at our constant stupidity.” “The fact is,” he continued morosely the following year,

that all these associations [meaning joint-stock banks] are so strong and find every body to support them that they do not want to us [and] are too glad if we leave it all to them as the public does not care any more about names & merely wants profit... It is useless to ... fancy that our position is the same which it was 30 years ago. Unless we want to be perfectly isolated we must pull with others & I have no doubt that you are of the same opinion as all these banks try to oppose us whenever they can and do not mind what sacrifice they make to show that they are just as powerful & influential than [sic] we are... [Y]ou have no idea how great the competition is & how difficult our position becomes in consequence of all these new banks who merely want to show that they can turn us out.

Nor was this merely a temporary feature of the Grunderzeit. In 1906, Natty inveighed—with more than a hint of envy—against his former pupil “Warburg at Hamburg who resembles the frog in the fable & is swollen up with vanity & the belief in his own power to control the European markets, & interest all big houses in any & every syndicate.” There were also occasional expressions of complacency. “I share your opinion, my dear Alfred,” wrote Alphonse in 1891, “not to become apprehensive of competition nor of threatening Finance Ministers. We should do only business which suits us and under conditions convenient to us.” “We are glad to go on in our old humdrum & jog trot way,” wrote Natty in 1906 (in a letter expressing criticism of the methods of the Credit Lyonnais), “& are quite satisfied ... No doubt Monsieur Germain was a very able administrator & wonderfully good at organisation; but we here were old fashioned enough to believe that the system on which he transacted his business was essentially vicious.”

Yet—as we shall see—it is not absolutely clear that the Rothschild houses did fare all that badly after 1878 in terms of profits and capital (figures for which were, of course, unavailable to contemporaries outside the partnership). In fact, the continuing effectiveness of key figures—in particular Natty, Alphonse and Albert—to some extent compensated for the feebleness of the likes of Alfred, Ferdinand and Nathaniel: To be sure, there were disagreements and even quarrels between the partners; but that was nothing new. If there was a problem it was that the world was no longer ideally suited to the activities of a multinational private bank with bases in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Vienna. Conflicts of interest between the various houses had always been a feature of the Rothschild system; but from the 1860s they became progressively more and more acute and ultimately ended in the disintegration of the partnership system in the early 1900s. Though personal factors played some part in this, it was primarily a consequence of economic and political events beyond their control: the segmentation of the European capital market, the political effects of the wars of 1859-71 and the reorientation of British and French foreign investment to extra-European markets.

The theory of the Rothschild system continued to be enunciated regularly. “Where all four Rothschild houses act in their own names,” declared Mayer Carl in 1862, “they truly need no associates.” The best response to increased competition, wrote Alphonse the following year, was “to tighten once again the ties which unite our houses and pull together all our forces with a common thread.” “We must stick together,” James declared in 1865, “but in order to do that each must go hand in hand with the other to be sure that there is no difference between the different parts of the business and that one house encourages the other and keeps it accurately informed about its business and neither one nor the other tries to draw everything to itself.” His will was perhaps the final expression of this philosophy of parternship by one who had imbibed it directly from Mayer Amschel; but it would be easy to cite a score of such affirmations of the old system in the years after his death. As late as 1895, the mantra was still being repeated. “Each house does what it considers best,” wrote Carl Meyer, “but on the other hand they know that the houses are all associated and for this reason no house would do a business which it knew would be against the interests of one of the other houses.”

Practice did not always conform to such confederal principles, however. The first obvious sign of fragmentation was Adolph’s apparently unilateral decision to withdraw from the partnership and close down the Naples house in 1863 on the ground that the Naples market had been “deprived of its importance.” This was an unprecedented event which shocked James and took months of negotiations to resolve. It was a sign of the new mood of suspicion that Adolph initially demanded three months to study the books of the various houses before accepting a definitive settlement, even threatening to open a new, independent bank if he did not get his way. He did. On September 22, 1863, he relinquished his partnership, withdrawing the sum of £1,593,777 as his share—more or less equivalent to the capital of the Naples house (£1,328,025) which was now wound up. However, his efforts to carry on business in Italy in a semi-detached role were evidently stymied by James, who now denounced him as “riff-raff” and a “great lump”; he wanted to tell him “to go to the devil,” he told his sons, “without doing him the honour of writing to him.” In particular, James was furious to hear that his nephew intended doing business in competition with the Paris house in the Turin market. Having abandoned his birthright, Adolph was now privately anathematised, though James was outwardly careful to conciliate his nephew lest he defect to the Credit Mobilier. In the end, Adolph avoided an outright breach by retiring from business altogether, selling the family residence in Naples and frittering away the remainder of his life on his collection of objets d‘art at Pregny.

A second sign of trouble was the increasing autonomy of the Vienna house under Anselm, which actually predated the 1863 agreement. When Adolph announced his withdrawal, Anselm seems to have sought to end the Vienna house’s technical subordination to the Frankfurt house, though he was advised by the family lawyer Rein ganum not to do this (in essence, the problem was that Anselm had a personal 25 per cent share in the combined capital, though the Vienna house itself remained relatively much smaller). The persistence of this imbalance led to a steady deterioration in relations between Anselm and the rest of the family. By 1867 James “regarded the association as illusory given the novel way in which our dear Uncle [Anselm] understands it.” Anselm felt obliged to defend himself, accusing the Paris house of treating him like a mere “agent or correspondent.” To reinforce his point, he repaid all the Vienna house’s outstanding debts to the Frankfurt house two years ahead of schedule, precipitating further friction between himself and Mayer Carl. This was followed by a similar accounting “divorce” between London and Vienna in 1870.

Relations between Paris and the other houses also deteriorated somewhat, and not only because of the political upheaval of 1870-71. In February 1868 Nat felt obliged to warn his brothers in London that “on the day you should come to such an understanding [with other parties] on a matter of business negotiable on our place, the public would be entitled to believe that our long existing association has been severed.” A symptom of growing estrangement was the increasing secretiveness of the Paris partners. Members of the other branches of the family continued to visit Paris quite regularly as of old—Anthony and Alfred in 1867, for example—but they found themselves marginalised in the office, following James from one meeting to another or signing routine letters. Ferdinand was especially put out by his reception in 1871. “I assure you my dear Uncle,” he told Lionel,

when one has spent some little time in England and has become accustomed to the cordial and amiable and pleasant manner of the “London” family the great contrast of the Parisian relatives strikes one most forcibly.—Gustave seemed frightened out of his wits that I might discover some of his bureau-secrets and whenever I put a question to him—he answered it in the most evasive and round about manner.

The feeling of distrust was not unreciprocated: criticisms of the Parisians’ business methods were frequent. “In Paris,” grumbled Mayer Carl in a typical letter to New Court, “they will take everything in hand and particularly things what [sic] they do not understand, the consequence being that they must be mismanaged and others reap the fruit of our exertion.” Admittedly, these complaints may have been prompted partly by envy of the relative growth of the Paris house. When Alphonse drew up his balance sheet following James’s death, he was “delighted” (and the other houses not a little dismayed) to find that in the previous five years the Paris house had made “over four Millions sterling.” On the other hand, it gives an insight into Rothschild accounting practices that this came as a shock even to the French partners .24

These sources of conflict—as much as deteriorating Franco-Prussian relations—explain Mayer Carl’s subsequent resolution not “to have anything to do with them,” meaning his Paris cousins. There was no mistaking his Schadenfreude when Ferrières was occupied by the Prussians and the rue Laffitte by the Communards. “[I]f the Paris house insists,” he thundered in 1871, “upon not paying attention to what I say they will face the consequences of their proceedings sooner or later, perhaps too late!” For his part, Alphonse felt that it was he who was trying to maintain the spirit of family unity against the separatist tendencies of the other houses. And he could not resist the occasional dig at Mayer Carl’s relatively poor financial performance. “I know only too well my dear cousin’s habit of putting blame on all the other Houses,” he wrote acerbically in 1882. “The best proof of his superior competence would be to present better balance sheets.” The upshot was that by the end of the 1870s co-operation between the four houses was not much greater than co-operation between each house and its local allies.

All this made the revision of the partnership agreement—necessary as partners died—increasingly difficult. So bad had relations become by the time of James’s death in 1868 that Alphonse sought to avoid holding a family summit to revise the contract, fearing acrimonious exchanges “the moment certain extremely heterogeneous elements of the family come face to face. Won’t M[ayer] Carl and Anselm simply grab one another by the hair[?]” Even before the partners finally met in August 1869, the bickering began, and when Nat died a year later Alphonse once again sought to avoid “striking a new balance sheet.” This time he was successful: negotiations for a new agreement did not resume until 1874 and henceforth such matters were settled by post without the traditional family summits. Even so, acrimony was still liable to erupt. “If the policy which he pursues in Vienna is at all similar to his conduct towards his relatives of late,” grumbled Natty to Alphonse following a row with Albert about Ferdinand’s will, “the only thing I can say is I am astonished there is so little anti-semitic feeling in Vienna.”

The partnership agreements after 1874 had three notable features. Firstly, following the precedent set by Adolph, the partners now began to withdraw substantial capital sums from the partnership rather than living solely from fixed interest. This issue had first surfaced in 1869, apparently at the suggestion of the London partners, when sums of the order of £500,000 per house were discussed. By 1872 the figure had been increased to £700,000 because (as Alphonse put it) “the Houses are so prosperous that a capital deduction cannot cause any harm.” Inevitably, Anselm was opposed to any reduction in the capital of the Vienna house. His death, however, removed the principal obstacle and the new agreement of 1874—5 allowed no less than £8 million to be withdrawn from the combined capital of £35.5 million. The 1879 contract following Lionel’s death saw a repeat of the procedure: this time £4.7 million was withdrawn, reducing the combined capital to £25.5 million. A further half million came out when James Edouard died in 1881, followed by £3.8 million later the same year. The 1887 contract (following Mayer Carl’s death the previous year) withdrew £3.4 million, the 1888 contract a further £2.7 million, and £2.8 million was withdrawn in 1898, followed by £1.1 million a year later; £6.4 million was taken out when Wilhelm Carl died, £2 million when Arthur died, £1.4 million when Nathaniel died and £4.5 million when Alphonse died.25Altogether £41.3 million was withdrawn from the partnership between 1874 and 1905. If that money had remained in the business, its capital would have been more than double what it actually was in 1905 (L37 million). That the Rothschilds were able to afford such immense capital reductions is in itself remarkable; that they no longer ploughed their profits back into the family firm is, however, the more telling point.

Apart from the obvious need to settle the wills of deceased partners, the formal justification for this was the need to maintain some sort of equilibrium between the various partners’ shares; yet this was not the effect. Under the terms of the 1863 contract, the shares had been equal: James had 25 per cent, as did Anselm (as Salomon’s heir), the sons of Nathan and the sons of Carl. Under the terms of the 1879 contract, by contrast, the sons of James had 31.4 per cent; the sons of Anselm 22.7 per cent; Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl 22.3 per cent; the sons of Lionel 15.7 per cent and the sons of Nat 7.9 per cent. Because Nat’s sons were French by birth and upbringing, they could be expected to side with the Parisians in any dispute, giving the French partners a considerably larger stake than the others, though not an outright majority. The vagaries of inheritance altered these figures somewhat, but without reducing the French predominance. By 1905 the French partners had some 46.8 per cent of the total capital, excluding Henri’s 3.9 per cent; the Austrians 25.9 per cent; the English just 23.4 per cent. These figures nevertheless understated the greater size of the Paris house, which accounted for fully 57 per cent of the combined capital, compared with 22 per cent for Vienna and 20 per cent for London. The discrepancy between personal and institutional shares is explained by the fact that—again as a result of intermarriage and inheritance—the Austrian and English Rothschilds had substantial individual stakes in the Paris house. In this sense, the partnership did remain an integrated multinational entity until it was discontinued (at some point between October 1905 and July 1909).

Secondly, it was necessary after 1874 to distinguish explicitly between active and “sleeping” partners as the number of partners increased (by 1879 there were twelve in all). For example, Lionel and Anthony were adamant that Nat’s French-born sons James Edouard and Arthur should not inherit their father’s full rights as partners with executive power in the London house. It was also firmly asserted in the 1875 contract that, of Anselm’s sons, neither Nathaniel nor Ferdinand would be allowed to play an executive role.26 (Interestingly, this contract attempted to clip the wings of the Vienna house: it was stipulated that Albert would “not undertake any important transaction without having beforehand consulted with the other houses and having obtained the approval of at least one of them.”) Another “sleeping” partner was James Edouard’s son Henri. However, no distinction was drawn between dominant and subordinate partners: in terms of his capital share, Alphonse always had equal status with his brothers Gustave and Edmond; similarly, Natty, Alfred and Leo were treated as equals in the partnership acts, though Natty was unquestionably in charge at New Court. The same was true in Frankfurt, where Mayer Carl was the dominant partner, to the extent that he and his brother Wilhelm Carl were barely on speaking terms—they even erected a partition across the desk they shared to avoid seeing one another when signing letters.

Finally, a seeming paradox should be explained: as the partnership between the various Rothschild houses became in practice looser, it was renewed more and more regularly. This has a prosaic explanation: the introduction of taxes on inheritance necessitated more precise methods of assessment of individual shares in the partnership, so that in 1899 it was decided for the first time to draw up combined balance sheets on an annual basis. There was also probably a legal need to tighten up the somewhat imprecise and irregular form of the partnership: Lord Haldane later recalled how in around 1889 he had “rearranged the Rothschild partnerships which had got into a very vague relation, placing the whole family potentially at the mercy of one dishonest partner.” In its last decade, however, the partnership was in reality little more than an Anglo-French axis, with minimal links to Vienna. Typically, of the £28 million of bills discounted by the London house in 1906, £12 million were for the account of the Paris house. On the other hand, when the Vienna house issued a large Austrian loan in 1908, New Court was not even notified. Under these circumstances, it is not entirely surprising that the partnership was not renewed after 1905.

This date, then—when the London, Paris and Vienna houses established by Nathan, James and Salomon became entirely separate entities—is the real watershed in Rothshild history, for it was at this point that the unique “confederal” system of a multinational partnership, dating back to the 1820s, finally came to an end. As early as 1868, a shrewd French journalist had divined what such a break-up would imply. “The five sons of Mayer [Amschel],” wrote Roqueplan, recalling the origins of the system,

establish bet ween themselves a sort of financial equilibrium which is not without a certain resemblance to the continental equilibrium dreamt of by Richelieu. None of the places where the brothers are based is sacrificed to the others and the appeal made by everyone-states and individuals—to their credit and their capital obliges all who borrow to act with restraint, as they find themselves under supervision. This leads to a general entente and a middle way which soothes sources of friction, tempers ambition, diminishes miscalculations ... The house of Rothschild ... becomes the superintendent of the finances of Europe. Divide up the house of Rothschild into a French house, an English, an Austrian, a Neapolitan, and its mediating influence disappears. You have [just another] national bank; you no longer have this universal bank house, where the rivalries between the different European states come to be limited and resolved.

Yet, although it is tempting to explain the problems which beset the Rothschild partnership system in personal terms, structural factors were probably more important. Throughout the period, the principal bone of contention between Vienna and the other houses was the willingness of Anselm to do business with rival banks, including associates of the Pereire brothers, the Credit Foncier and even members of the hated Erlanger “clique.” Part of the difficulty was that the other houses regarded the Creditanstalt as effectively a subsidiary of the Vienna house, whereas Anselm insisted that it was not. Similar conflicts arose with respect to the different railway companies in which the Rothschilds had large but not controlling interests. The fact was that the development of joint-stock institutions—and indeed of other private banks—in all the major financial markets was bound to create conflicts of loyalty. The Rothschilds were no longer so dominant that they could underwrite major bond issues without assistance from other local banks. Increasingly, each house developed informal partners in its own market—Barings in London, the haute banque in Paris, the Creditanstalt in Vienna and the Disconto-Gesellschaft in Germany—and the volume of business done with these soon began to exceed the volume of cross-border business with other Rothschild houses. It was all very well to accuse the Frankfurt house of having becoming Hansemann’s “satellite,” but the Paris house was not offering sufficient business to keep Mayer Carl in its own orbit.

In a similar way, it became progressively more and more difficult to rely on the traditional system of salaried agents. As the case of Becker & Fuld in Amsterdam illustrated, agents could not be expected to confine themselves solely to Rothschild business when so many other opportunities presented themselves; yet the more they did business on their own account, the more like competitors they became. Natty might talk of “pulling up” agents by “adopt[ing] ... a system similar to the one the Jesuits practise. First of all never leave a man too long in one place and then have a wandering Jew to spy & to report.” But there was no denying that the old agency system was obsolescent. Mayer Carl’s reliance on Hansemann’s Disconto-Gesellschaft and his animus against Bleichröder were part of the same trend.

Even within the offices of the Rothschild houses, the old ways were in decline. “Every moment,” complained Mayer Carl in 1873,

one of the clerks leaves the House, either to become the manager of a Bank or for the sake of establishing himself on his own account. Jews with their terrible ambition are the worst employees. I know they merely want to poke their nose everywhere and try to find out as much as they can to cut their stick when it suits their purpose. There is not a good clerk to be had and I assure you it is a perfect nuisance... all these new Banks pay such salaries that no one thinks of coming forward.

From its inception, the Rothschild system had ruled out the possibility that talented “outsiders” would ever rise above the status of “clerks” in order to prevent any challenge to the continuity of family control. Once joint-stock banks offered “careers open to talent,” however, it became increasingly difficult to attract and retain able employees—hence Carl Meyer’s departure.

Similarly, the decline of the Frankfurt house was not solely due to the failure of Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl to produce a male heir. Nor can too much blame be laid at the door of the two brothers for failing to make the business a more successful one, though its results were disappointing and Wilhelm Carl was ready to throw in his hand as early as 1890. It was also partly the consequence of the decline of Frankfurt as a financial centre relative to Berlin. In fact, the other partners contemplated opening a “resuscitated or new Frankfurt House” after Wilhelm Carl’s death, but this plan was abandoned, possibly because of a dispute about taxation with the Frankfurt authorities. As a result, the fons et origo of the Rothschild fortunes—the firm of M. A. von Rothschild & Söhne—was finally wound up in 1901. The Rothschilds remained a presence in Frankfurt, to be sure. Indeed, Minna’s husband Max Goldschmidt managed to keep the Rothschild name going, albeit after a hyphen. But although “von Goldschmidt-Rothschild” was the town’s (and indeed the German Reich’s) wealthiest man before the First World War, and although members of the family accounted for five of its top ten taxpayers in 1911, the income on their capital was conspicuously low.27 It was symbolic of the Rothschilds’ waning power that most of the old bank’s staff now went to work for the Disconto-Gesellschaft; while, under the terms of Wilhelm Carl’s will, the office in the Fahrgasse built by Amschel and Salomon in the first flower of their prosperity became a museum for Jewish antiquities.28

In this context, it is significant that the 1860s and 1870s saw the last wave of Rothschild intermarriage: of the thirty-one members of the fourth generation who married, thirteen married another Rothschild.29 Between 1849 and 1877, there were altogether nine such weddings, beginning with Anselm’s daughters Hannah Mathilde (to Wilhelm Carl in 1849) and Julie (to Adolph in 1850); and followed a decade later by James’s sons Alphonse (to Leonora in 1857) and Salomon James (to Mayer Carl’s daughter Adèle in 1862). The wedding three years later of Anselm’s son Ferdinand to Lionel’s daughter Evelina was one of the supreme moments of Rothschild endogamy. The post-nuptial dinner at 148 Piccadilly was attended by 126 people including Disraeli, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Austrian and French ambassadors; and the subsequent ball was graced by the Duke of Cambridge. It was intended and interpreted as a renewal of the ties between the London and Vienna houses (Ferdinand’s mother had, of course, been Lionel’s elder sister Charlotte) and the couple planned to divide their time between Piccadilly and Schillersdorf. Indeed, Anselm “deplored the non-existence of more Evys than one in order that all his sons might be equally well provided.”

It was also evidently a love-match, even if Ferdinand’s passion for the wedding jewellery somewhat comically exceeded that of his betrothed. In December 1866, however, while her husband was in Austria helping his father in the wake of Königgrätz, Evelina died in childbirth. It was one of the most painful events in the history of the English Rothschilds. “Henceforth my life can merely be wrought with sorrow and with anguish and with bitter longing,” Ferdinand told Leo:

Mine is a loss which years cannot repair, nor any accidental circumstances relieve. Ever since my childhood I was attached to her. The older I became, the more we met, the deeper I loved her and in later years she had so grown into my heart that my only wishes, cares, joys, affections, whatever sentiments in fact a man can possess were directly or indirectly wound up with her existence. I can find no consolation in the future. It may partly come from the past, in the recollection of those happy bygone days, when she lived, when we were so intensely happy.

“[C]rushed by the calamity which has fallen on a house of sunshine and happiness, which has made his life gloomy and desolate,” he‘did not remarry, but increasingly relied on the company of his sister Alice, who remained a spinster. He left two poignant memorials to his dead wife: a children’s hospital named after her in the New Kent Road in Southwark and a mausoleum in the Jewish cemetery at Forest Gate.30

This tragedy did not deter Charlotte from seeking a spouse for her eldest son from within the “fairy circle.” Initially, she hoped Natty “would fall in love or glide into that delightful feeling and make the excellent Baronet [Anthony] supremely happy by proposing to one of his daughters.” However, she was just as pleased when Natty expressed interest in Mayer Carl’s daughter Emma, and they were duly married in Frankfurt in 1867. Although their engagement was a blow to Nat’s son James Edouard, who had been earmarked for Emma by other members of the family, it was probably for the best. The austere Natty and the stern Emma were well suited to each other, while James Edouard’s marriage in 1871 to Emma’s sister Laura Thérèse was also regarded as a good if unglamorous match. As Ferdinand reported: “There never was a happier couple than they are, they bill and they coo and they speak about their baby and their house, as if no one else had ever been married, and as if their Henri was the only Henri in the world. (I believe he is a fright.) I must say that I never saw a funnier looking little couple than they are; so short and fat and dumpy.”

All this goes to show that these marriages were not necessarily imposed by parental design, but were often based on genuine affection; it was just that the family’s pattern of working, socialising and holidaying together narrowed the range of possible spouses. When Charlotte heard that Albert had become engaged to Alphonse’s daughter Bettina in 1875, she commented that “no young man ever appears on the horizon without it being said that he seeks the hand of a cousin, and the surmise is not extraordinary as hitherto we have intermarried so very much.” They were wed the following year. The only alternative Albert had apparently considered was one of Mayer Carl’s daughters. Finally, in 1877, Alphonse’s youngest brother Edmond married Wilhelm Carl’s daughter Adelheid, having previously been rejected by her cousin Margaretha.

By this time, however, there were signs that the practice of endogamy could not be sustained for much longer. In 1874, Charlotte had heard that “there would not be the slightest use, at present, of invading the territory of the Austrian Rothschilds for matrimonial purposes”—though no reason was given for this. She also sympathised when Margaretha refused to marry Edmond: “[P]robably the idea of being the 8th Rothschild lady in Paris does not please her.” For reasons which were never made explicit, Edmond’s marriage to Adelheid proved to be the last such pure Rothschild match.

A question inevitably poses itself: was this because the family became more aware of the genetic risks of such “inbreeding”? When Natty married Emma, after all, he was marrying the daughter of his father’s sister and his mother’s brother. In the eyes of a modern geneticist, such a pairing was ill advised (for reasons discussed in chapter 6 of volume 1). And it is tempting to explain the idiosyncrasies of some members of the fourth and fifth generation in genetic terms. Yet it seems unlikely that the Rothschilds gave up cousin marriage on medical grounds. Although Gregor Mendel’s research into heredity began in the 1860s it was largely unknown until the early 1900s, while the theory of “eugenics” which became fashionable in the 1880s positively encouraged inbreeding at least within racial groups if not families. It was not science which ended Rothschild endogamy but a change in the family’s attitude towards the rest of society—and especially society’s elite.

Peers and Peerages

A major difference between the fourth generation and their parents was that a number of female Rothschilds now married outside the Jewish faith, without incurring the opprobrium which had fallen on Hannah Mayer when she had married Henry Fitzroy in 1839. The first of these marriages was between Anthony’s daughter Annie and Eliot Yorke, third son of the 4th Earl of Hardwicke, in 1873. Five years later, Annie’s sister Constance married Cyril Flower, Leo’s Cambridge friend (later Lord Battersea), and in 1878 Mayer’s daughter, Hannah, married Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, already established as a rising star in the Liberal party, later Foreign Secretary (1886 and 1892-3) and Gladstone’s successor as Prime Minister (1894-5). In the same year, Mayer Carl’s daughter Margaretha married Agénor, duc de Gramont (the son of the former Foreign Minister) and in 1882 her youngest sister Bertha Clara married Alexandre Berthier, prince de Wagram, a descendant of Napoleon’s Chief of General Staff. Finally, in 1887, Hélène, daughter of Salomon James, married the Dutch Baron Etienne van Zuylen de Nyevelt.

This too could be interpreted as a sign that the original culture of the family—once so determinedly loyal to Judaism—was being diluted. That was the view taken by some Jewish contemporaries. “The rabbinical query is on every lip,” wrote the Jewish Chroniclein October 1877, “ ‘If the flame is seized on the cedars, how will fare the hyssop on the wall; if the leviathan is brought up with a hook, how will the minnows escape?’ ” In fact, none of the four women who did this converted to Christianity. Constance apparently thought of doing so before her marriage, noting that she was “only Jewish by race, not by religion or doctrine.” “My mind is not in the least impregnated by Jewish doctrine, I have not the feeling of pride in isolation,” she wrote. “My Church is the universal one, my God, the Father of all mankind, my creed charity, toleration and morality. I can worship the great Creator under any name.” Indeed, on one occasion she went so far as to declare: “I wish I could be a Christian. I love the faith and the worship.” In the end, however, she decided that conversion would be “impossible” and “a falsehood,” though she remained for the rest of her life “at the very outer gates of Christianity.” Annie too remained at least nominally. attached to Judaism. Hannah’s commitment to her family’s faith was probably stronger. Although she was married in a church and allowed her children to be raised as Christians, she continued to light candles on Friday evenings, to attend synagogue and to fast and pray on the Day of Atonement. Despite embracing her husband’s Scottish cultural heritage, she was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Willesden rather than at Dalmeny.

Nor was the family’s approval of the matches unqualified. Mayer Carl cut Margaretha out of his will for converting to Christianity. As late as 1887, Salomon James’s widow Adèle disinherited her Hélène for marrying outside the faith, leaving her house in the rue Berryer to the French government fine arts administration. Even Alphonse’s grandson Guy was reminded by his parents “at every opportunity” that “the most important rule was the one forbidding marriage with a woman who was not Jewish, or not willing to be converted to the Jewish faith.” Charlotte’s letters in the 1860s reveal the persistence of the assumption that Rothschilds should marry within the faith, if not the family. The ideal spouse for a Rothschild girl, she thought, was “some substantial Jew, belonging to a good family.” Among the possible husbands she considered suitable for Annie and Constance—or indeed for their cousin Clementine—was Julian Goldsmid.31 When she first heard that Anthony’s daughters were being courted by non-Jews (Lord Henry Lennox, the MP for Chichester, was one of those mentioned), Charlotte was sure that “Uncle Anthony, in the event of proposals, is sure to say ‘no’ ” and that their mother “would not say ’Yes.‘ ” “Caucasian husbands,” she noted, “would, of course, be much preferred to flat-nosed Franks as Mr. Disraeli calls the Christian beaux.”

By late 1866 Charlotte seemed to accept that Constance would choose a Christian spouse. But when Annie revealed that Eliot Yorke had proposed, her father came under strong pressure from Lionel and Natty not to give his consent. Mayer and his wife Juliana also expressed disapproval, which was apparently (and ironically) echoed by their daughter Hannah; as did James’s widow Betty. “The sentiments of sadness fill me more at this moment than I can express,” she wrote pointedly to Annie’s mother. “They do not, however, stop me from assuring you of my greatest sympathy in your distress and that of my dear nephew Sir Anthony.” It was only after the match had received support from Nat’s widow Charlotte, Anselm and Alfred (“on behalf of everyone at Gunnersbury”) that Anthony gave in to his daughter’s entreaties. Even so, Constance recollected after the registry office ceremony, “Papa looked so sad. We all felt it dreadfully, Annie included.” In one way, subsequent events seemed to vindicate the doubters: though the marriage was apparently happy, Yorke died five years later.

Nor was the second such “mixed” marriage between Annie’s sister Constance and Leo’s friend Cyril Flower an unqualified success. The problem in this case was that the “wonderfully handsome” Flower was very probably a homosexual, celebrated for his female impersonations at Cambridge. In fairness, the earnest Constance seems to have enjoyed being married to one of the more “advanced” Liberal MPs of the day—she herself was a keen teetotaller—and doubtless welcomed his elevation to the peerage as Lord Battersea in 1892. But when he was offered the Governorship of New South Wales by Gladstone the following year, Constance refused to leave her mother (and her charitable work) for Australia and he had to turn down the appointment—a decision which his wife feared had “blighted my dear Cyril’s career” and condemned them to “years of misery.”

The best known of all the mixed marriages of the period was that between Mayer’s daughter Hannah and Rosebery. Here too there is evidence of some Rothschild opposition. Though rumours of a match had circulated since 1876, their engagement was not announced until both her parents were dead; and no male Rothschild attended the wedding, so that Disraeli gave the bride away. And here too it might be thought that Rosebery gave up bachelorhood reluctantly. In the most malicious view, Rosebery was a misogynist who married a Rothschild primarily for financial reasons. She, after all, was one of the richest heiresses of the period, having inherited not only Mentmore and 107 Piccadilly but also £100,000 a year. That made her an attractive prospect to an ambitious politician, despite the fact that (as her cousin Constance put it), she took “no interest in big subjects” and expressed herself (according to her husband) in a “childish” way.

It has also been claimed that Rosebery harboured faint anti-Semitic prejudices. “One night at Mentmore,” David Lindsay, the Earl of Balcarres, recalled many years later, “when Hannah Rothschild had had a house party in which her compatriots were unusually numerous, all the ladies had gathered at the foot of the great staircase and were about to go up with lighted candles. Rosebery standing aloof from the bevy of beauty raised his hand—they looked at him, rather puzzled, and then he said in solemn tones: ‘To your tents, O Israel.’ ” Lindsay also heard that “within a week of Hannah’s death he began to cut off subscriptions to Jewish charities, and before long all had been cancelled.” Finally, there is the connection alleged by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, between Rosebery, his private secretary Lord Drumlanrig and the homosexual circle whose most notorious member was Oscar Wilde.32

Yet these arguments cannot be sustained. Apart from anything else, Rosebery already owned a large estate in Scotland (Dalmeny) as well as a house at Epsom (the Durdans), and had an income of more than £30,000 a year. He of all people did not need to marry for money. Nor is there any doubt that Rosebery loved Hannah. Writing to Gladstone, he described his engagement as “the most momentous event of my life.” The fact that his diary says so little about her has sometimes been interpreted as evidence of a lack of ardour but, given that he treated it mainly as a record of his political activities, the reverse is more likely. The number of references to dinners and lunches with members of the family in 1877 suggests an energetic courtship, while the complete silence of the 1878 volume for the months after the wedding suggests that Hannah gave him better things to do than diary-writing. Balcarres misconstrued a simple joke; while Queensberry can be dismissed as the harbinger of the lunatic “sodomite conspiracy” theory advanced during the First World War by Noel Pemberton Billing.33

Moreover, there is good testimony that Rosebery relied on Hannah to provide the political “drive” which on his own he lacked. Lord Granville half-seriously urged her that “if you keep him up to the mark, [he] is sure to have his page in history”; while Edward Hamilton remarked on her “notable ... faculty of getting other people to work and of quickening their energies.” Winston Churchill too described her as “a remarkable woman on whom he [Rosebery] had leaned ... She was ever a pacifying and composing element in his life which he was never able to find again because he never could give full confidence to anyone else.” Such comments lend some credibility to the suggestion that Hannah provided the model for the ambitious Marcella Maxwell in Mrs Humphry Ward’s novelsMarcella (1894) and Sir George Tressady (1909).34 Churchill thought Rosebery “maimed” by Hannah’s tragic and painfully protracted death from typhoid in 1890, a view which is borne out by his terse but plainly tortured diary entries. Observing him at the funeral, Sir Henry Ponsonby saw that he “never spoke but remained close to the coffin till it was lowered into the grave. Lord Rothschild led him back to the chapel but he looked down the whole time ... He wishes to show in public that he is able to put aside his sorrow, but in private he breaks down.” After her death, relations between Rosebery and other members of the Rothschild family remained close.

It should also be stressed that there could be unease on the other side about such mixed marriages. Rosebery’s mother, the Duchess of Cleveland, was strongly opposed to her son’s choice of “one who has not the faith & hope of Christ” as his spouse. “No two persons of different religions can marry without making a very great sacrifice,” she told her son, “and—pardon me for adding, grieving and disappointing those who love them best ... You must also of course expect to be unkindly judged by the world.” Three days after his wife’s funeral, Rosebery himself poignantly told Queen Victoria: “There is ... one incident of this tragedy only less painful than the actual loss: which is that at the moment of death the difference of creed makes itself felt, and another religion steps in to claim the corpse. It was inevitable, and I do not complain; and my wife’s family have been more than kind. But none the less it is exquisitely painful.”

Finally, it is important to remember that none of these marriages involved a male Rothschild. As the heirs to the capital of the partnership and to the religious legacy of Mayer Amschel, they had much less freedom of choice when it came to marriage. For this reason, the really problematic relationship was between Alfred and his mistress Marie (“Mina”) Wombwell, née Boyer—not only a Christian but a married woman. Although he may have had an illegitimate child by her (the child’s name Almina suggests a combination of “Al” and “Mina”) we do not know if Alfred ever contemplated marriage; it is conceivable that he dismissed the idea in view of inevitable and insuperable family opposition (though another possibility is that Alfred was in fact a homosexual). Alfred nevertheless committed a sin which his great-grandfather would have regarded as equally grave. He gave Almina a £500,000 dowry when she married the Earl of Carnarvon (in addition to settling his debts of £150,000) and left a large portion of his £1.5 million estate to them and their children (£125,000 and the house in Seamore Place).35

In short, the various “mixed” marriages described above should not be taken as evidence of a profound change in attitudes. Still, it is hard to imagine them happening while James still lived. The fact that all the marriages involved an alliance with aristocratic families (with the partial exception of Constance’s to Cyril Flower, who was made a peer only later) is no coincidence. The social benefits of association of the English and French elite, it might be thought, were felt to outweigh the costs of religious compromise. But it would be wrong to imply a kind of strategy of social advancement. To some extent, as the Jewish Chronicle suggested, it was precisely the fact of the Rothschilds’ social advancement which made such marriages happen: Constance had met Cyril Flower because her cousin had been to Cambridge; Hannah met Rosebery because her father was an established political and sporting figure (they are said to have been introduced by Mary Anne Disraeli at Newmarket) and because Ferdinand knew Rosebery well. As Cassis has shown, a very high proportion of late nineteenth-century City bankers married the daughters of aristocrats (no fewer than 38 per cent of the private bankers in his sample and at least 24 per cent of all bankers and bank directors).

The question of the relationship between the Rothschilds of this period and the aristocracy has often been discussed. The point is made that Natty’s elevation to the peerage in 1885 represented the final triumph of the campaign for social assimilation which the Rothschilds had waged since the time of Mayer Amschel. At the same time, those who argue that a process of “feudalisation” sapped the entrepreneurial and/or liberal spirit of the bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century cite this as an archetype. The reality is more complex. The transition from baronet to hereditary peer had its roots in Rothschild relations with successive Prime Ministers as well as with members of the royal family; for social promotion was at once a reward for political or public service and a sign of royal favour. It is also worth noting that, as with the rights of Jews to take their seats in the Lower House of Parliament, England was in some ways behind some continental states.

The Austrian case illustrates the subtle gradations of status involved. Technically, the Rothschilds had first acquired noble status—the prefix “von” and a coat of arms—from the Habsburg Emperor as early as 1816, adding the title “Baron” (Freiherr) six years later. However, it was not until 1861 that a Rothschild—Anselm—was given the political equivalent of a peerage, a seat in the Reichsrat or imperial council. And the ultimate social achievement—the right to be presented at court—did not come until December 1887, when Albert and his wife were formally declared hoffähig.As The Times reported, this was “the first time that such a privilege has been conceded in Austria to persons of the Jewish religion, and the event is causing a sensation in society.” It was only after this that members of the Rothschild family and members of the Austrian royal family began to mix socially in Austria itself.36 Nathaniel in particular was accepted into Viennese aristocratic society in a way which had entirely eluded his father and grandfather, being addressed with the familiar “du” by such grandees as Count Wilczek, who regarded him as “an unusually charming man and a really noble [sic] character.” The connection to the Metter nichs also remained socially invaluable.

According to contemporary gossip, Nathaniel had an affair with Baroness Maria Vetsera, who later became the mistress of Crown Prince Rudolph. Moreover, when Rudolph and Maria committed suicide together at the royal hunting lodge at May erling in January 1889, it was Nathaniel’s brother Albert—as chairman of the Nordbahn—who received the first telegraph reports of the tragedy and had to relay the news to the imperial palace. This may be apocryphal, but it is undoubtedly the case that Rudolph’s mother, the Empress Elisabeth, became friendly with Adolph’s widow Julie; indeed, she had just visited the Rothschild house at Pregny in Switzerland when she was murdered at Lake Geneva by an Italian anarchist in September 1898. When Franz Joseph celebrated his diamond jubilee in 1908 with a grand reception, Albert was there—one of the few who attended in civilian dress.

In Germany, there was a similar progression from elevation to the peerage to social intercourse. Mayer Carl, as we have seen, had been appointed to the Prussian Upper House (Herrenhaus) in 1867 and was treated as hoffähig thereafter. Although he never ceased to disparage Bleichröder’s social climbing—and was beside himself with glee when the latter’s ennoblement did not confer on him the title of Freiherr 37—Mayer Carl himself rarely omitted to mention his own encounters with Prussian royalty, no matter how inconsequential. He and his wife’s work in establishing a hospital for the war wounded in Frankfurt in 1870-71 undoubtedly earned them royal favour. “I have just had an interview with the Emperor which lasted a whole hour,” he gushed in December 1871, “and I need not tell you that we are on the best terms, particularly in consequence of what I gave the Empress for her hospital which seemed to please His Majesty beyond anything else. Louisa is a great favourite of the Empress and Her Majesty delighted in showing her how much she appreciated all she had done ... which is a capital thing for our own interests.” The Empress seems to have been especially friendly. A still closer relationship later developed between Wilhelm Carl’s wife Hannah Mathilde and Victoria, the widow of Kaiser Frederick III and daughter of Queen Victoria, who evidently enjoyed the faintly Anglophile atmosphere of the Rothschild house at Königstein. Although Victoria’s son William II was viewed with deep suspicion by members of the family and harboured quite strong anti-Semitic prejudices, his accession in 1888 did not harm the Rothschilds’ position. In 1903 Wilhelm Carl’s son-in-law Max Goldschmidt was given the title “Freiherr von Goldschmidt-Rothschild.”38

In England, by contrast, the process happened in reverse, with the Rothschilds winning acceptability at court and intimacy with royalty some years before they were able to secure a seat in the House of Lords; for, despite the fact that it became legally possible for a Jew to become a peer in 1866, Queen Victoria proved strongly resistant to the idea in practice. The Rothschilds were considered presentable at court as early as 1856, when Victoria noticed the “extremely handsome” looks of Lionel’s daughter Leonora at a royal drawing room. The real social breakthrough, however, came at Cambridge in 1861, when Natty was introduced to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) by the Duke of St Albans. A common enthusiasm for hunting in turn led to introductions for Alfred and Leo. Horse racing played a similar role: Mayer was “delighted” when the Prince “[partook] of his cake, Mayonnaise and champagne” at the Derby in 1864 and again in 1866. Soon members of the family were regularly being invited to court functions or to aristocratic gatherings at which royalty was also present.39 In turn they entertained members of the royal family, principally—though not exclusively—the Prince of Wales.40 In March the following year, he went out stag-hunting with Mayer at Mentmore and two months later he dined at Anthony’s; he and Princess Alexandra attended “an interminable banquet” at Lionel’s in 1871 and the Prince dined at Ferdinand’s along with Disraeli four years after that. The Prince also attended the Rosebery—Rothschild marriage in 1878 (along with his uncle the Duke of Cambridge) and Leo’s wedding to Marie Perugia in 1881—a remarkable gesture of royal religious tolerance.

In addition to these more or less formal occasions, “Prince Hal” (as Disraeli called him) was also entertained in the more louche style that he preferred: Alfred, for example, could be relied on to produce opera stars like Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti and the actress Sarah Bernhardt at his dinners; another family friend from the emerging world of “show business” was the librettist Sir Arthur Sullivan.41 Ferdinand too knew how to amuse the heir to the throne: when the Prince fell downstairs and broke his leg at Waddesdon in 1898, the story made the national newspapers.42 As an ardent Francophile, he was a regular Rothschild guest on other side of the Channel too. In the summer of 1867. James entertained him at Boulogne. He also visited Ferrières five years later (returning there in 1888); and he lunched with Alphonse at Cannes in 1895. Such contacts did not cease on his accession to the throne—rather the reverse. Members of the Rothschild family were an integral part of Edward VII’s cosmopolitan social circle, along with the Sassoons, the railway financier Maurice de Hirsch, Ernest Cassel, Horace Farquhar and others identified by Edward Hamilton as the “smart set.”

However, it would be quite wrong to portray the Rothschilds as in any way in awe of the royal family or, for that matter, especially eager for elevation to the peerage. Natty, for example, initially found the Prince of Wales’s conversation “commonplace and very slow.” “He is excessively fond of the chase,” he told his parents,

very fond of riddles and strong cigars and will I suppose eventually settle down into a well-disciplined German Prince with all the narrow views of his father’s family. He is excessively polite and that is certainly his redeeming quality. If he followed the bent of his own inclination, it strikes me he would take to gambling and certainly keep away from the law lectures he is obliged to go to now.

Five years later, he had not changed his view, commenting drily “that war and peace, and the state of politics do not occupy H.R.H. half so much as his amusements.” His mother shared these sentiments. Though she thought the future King “most enchantingly agreeable” with “manners ... not to be surpassed anywhere,” she felt it was “to be deplored that he does not give a portion of his time to serious pursuits, nor any of his friendship or society to distinguished men in politics, art, science or literature.” He had, she concluded (after he left the Commons gallery during a speech by Gladstone), “no taste for serious subjects.” When the Prince won a “large stake” on a Rothschild horse, Charlotte was tight-lipped: “[O]f course, I would infinitely rather he won than lost upon a Rothschild horse—but the future King of England should not go about betting.”

Nor was it only the Prince of Wales who came in for criticism. When Lady Alice Peel lent her Queen Victoria’s privately printed Highland album, Charlotte was scathing:

There is not a ray, indeed not the faintest glimmering of talent or even of pretty writing in the volume, which seems astonishing, as very great and illustrious statesmen pronounce the Queen to be remarkably clever ... [T]he redeeming and truly interesting feature of the work is its extraordinary and almost incredible simplicity; there is not the remotest allusion to royalty or sovereign power; the most humble minded of Her Majesty’s subjects might have written it; not a single word reminds the reader that the writer rules over hundreds of millions of human beings, and that the sun never sets over her dominions ... [I]n reality there is not a newspaper which is not ten thousand times more interesting.

Ferdinand and Alice shared her dismay at the Queen’s “allusions to the gillies, and the foot-note devoted to ‘John Brown’ [the Queen’s ’Highland attendant‘] and his curly hair.”

Such attitudes reflected the enduring streak of asceticism which had been inherited from the generation born in the Frankfurt ghetto. Indeed, having risen so far by their own efforts the Rothschilds considered themselves in many ways superior to the aristocracy, not least in financial terms. It was well known that the Prince of Wales and his brothers were inclined to live beyond their allowances provided by the Civil List; keeping up the family tradition of lending to future rulers, Anthony offered his assistance and by August 1874 the Queen was alarmed to hear of “a large sum owing to Sir A. de Rothschild” by her eldest son.43 However, the Rothschilds’ role between then and his accession twenty-seven long years later seems primarily to have been to keep the Prince out of debt, aside from a £160,000 mortgage on San dringham which was discreetly hushed up.

A less obvious sign of aristocratic, if not royal, financial dependency came when a son of the Duke of Argyll, Lord Walter Campbell, expressed the wish to enter the City as confidential clerk to the Rothschilds’ stockbroker Arthur Wagg for a salary of £1,000 a year. Lionel cautiously “advised Lord Walter to go and speak to the Duke at Inverary, as that proud nobleman might not like his son to enter into partnership with an Israelite”; but Charlotte was gleeful because of the Campbells’ royal connections: “The Waggs will be overjoyed, if the partnership should really take place, to be connected in business with the brother-in-law of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise. This will be more extraordinary, if it occurs, than the invasion of Caucasian beauties into ... London fashionable society.” Such links between the court and the City were commonplace by 1907, when Leo suggested as a possible director of Rio Tinto “the Earl of Denbigh, a very honourable man, Colonel of the City Artillery and formerly Lord in Waiting to the Queen and then to the King, a catholic peer with pleasant manners.”

For his part, Natty welcomed such signs of aristocratic compromise. As a strongly Liberal student, he had resented the unearned privileges enjoyed by aristocrats at Cambridge. “I cannot yet make out,” he had complained to his parents, “why noblemen and their sons etc. can take their degree after seven terms and have no Little Go to pass. Both noblemen and fellow Commoners should be done away with, but I am afraid these things never will take place.” As late as 1888—after he himself had become Lord Rothschild—he commented sternly about “the harm which a few of the aristocracy do to their class by frequently displaying a want of sense and honour in money affairs and by resorting to gambling.” The Rothschilds did not think of themselves as becoming aristocratic, even if it appeared that they were; if anything, they wished the aristocracy to become more like them. As Charlotte said, it was better for a younger son of the Earl of Mayo to “earn [a] living in the city handsomely, but by great exertion, activity and labour, instead of starving in the West End.”

The key to the Rothschild attitude was that, as the nearest thing the Jews of Europe had to a royal family, they considered themselves the equals of royalty. When Charlotte heard that Prince Alfred was to visit Bonn, where Albert was studying, she sought to arrange a meeting between “the gifted scion of the Caucasian royal family ... and the clever scion of the royal family of England.” For other Jews, she declared a few weeks later, “un marriage d‘ambition” meant a marriage to “a Rothschild or a Koh-i-Noor [a Cohen, an allusion to her mother-in-law’s family] ... since there are no jewish Queens and Empresses in the 19th century.” In a similar vein, Juliana and Hannah were “a queen and a Princess of Israel and of Mentmore.” Such notions explain the Rothschilds’ tendency to compete with the royal family. Typically, Natty reported with satisfaction the superiority of his own horse to the Prince’s when they hunted together at Cambridge. Likewise, when Ferdinand went to Buckingham Palace, “he thought and said that no lady was to be compared to his wife—and no equipage to the one that conveyed” them there; and when an especially lavish supper was provided at Stafford House, it was “not royal but Rothschildian.” Invited to dine at the Palace, Mayer set out resolved “to find fault with every thing.” On at least one occasion, his sister-in-law Charlotte preferred a minor family engagement to a royal ball and sought to avoid attending royal drawing rooms, which she found “tiring and tedious in the superlative degree.” And when the Empress of Austria visited England in 1876, Charlotte was adamant that she had enjoyed her reception more at Waddesdon than at Windsor. Contemporaries often used the phrase “Kings of the Jews” when they talked about the Rothschilds: the evidence of the family’s own correspondence suggests it was not an unwelcome compliment.

Yet despite all this—perhaps even because of the family’s pretensions—it proved impossible to persuade Victoria to elevate Lionel to the House of Lords. Rumours of such a promotion were current as early as 1863. However, there were those at court who were hostile towards the Rothschilds, a hostility which they were able to express more freely after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. At the time of the Prince of Wales’s marriage, Charlotte complained of the family’s exclusion from the festivities. “Lord Sydney,” she wrote bitterly, “though fed from time immemorial upon all the delicacies in and out of season by all the continental Rothschilds, and not disdaining our dinners either, never thought us worthy of being asked to court. When the poor Prince was alive, dear Papa used to apply to him—when forgotten or omitted. Now one would not like to trouble the Queen.” Another enemy at court was Lord Spencer, who advised that the Prince and Princess should not attend a Rothschild ball as “the Prince ought only to visit those of undoubted position in Society.” “The Rothschilds are very worthy people,” he added, “but they especially hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out.” Nor did Sir Francis Knollys, the Prince’s private secretary, give unqualified approval to the Rothschilds’ intimacy with his master; while the Queen’s equerry Arthur Hardinge felt it necessary to take a visiting Russian royal to Westminster Abbey “as a corrective” after a Rothschild dinner “resplendent with Hebrew gold.” The Prince of Wales himself evidently resisted such pressures. When Natty and Alfred attended a royal levee in 1865, Charlotte was able to report triumphantly

the Prince was gracious, as usual, smiled and shook hands—but H.R.H. has accustomed them to much kindness and cordiality; what amused them, however, was the rebuke he gave to Lord Sydney, who fine gentleman and jew-hater as he is, announced Natty as Monsieur “Roshil”—“Mr. de Rothschild” was the correction he received from royal lips.

Another welcome ally in this period was Lady Ely, who invited Natty, Alfred, Ferdinand and Evelina to a select ball for the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1865.

But neither she nor the heir to the throne was in a position to influence the Queen on matters of royal patronage. That Victoria was reluctant to give “a title and mark of [her] approbation to a jew” had been intimated to the Rothschilds as early as 1867 by Disraeli, though it should be emphasised that Lionel himself had no desire to accept a peerage from Disraeli. “Our friend [Charles Villiers, the Liberal MP for Wolverhampton] is famously intrigued about the paragraph in the papers respecting my being raised to the Peerage,” he remarked in a letter to his wife in March 1868:

Just the same as everything else, the Liberals would like to carry out everything themselves ... He could not understand nor could they at Lady P[almerston]’s that I won’t accept anything from the present Government. They all fancy Dis is under great obligations to us—so the best thing is to hold my tongue and let them think what they like—it is only amusing to hear all their nonsense.

That was prescient, for no sooner had he become Prime Minister than Gladstone proposed Lionel as one of eleven new Liberal peers he wished the Queen to create. The idea, as expressed by the Liberal leader in the Lords Earl Granville, was that the Rothschilds now represented “a class whose influence is great by their wealth, their intelligence, their literary connections, and their numerous seats in the House of Commons. It may be wise to attach them to the Aristocracy rather than to drive them into the democratic camp.” But the Queen would have none of it.44 Granville had to report regretfully that the Queen had “a strong feeling on the subject”: “To make a Jew a peer,” she told him, “is a step she cd. not consent to.” Beaten, Granville advised Gladstone not to force the issue: “She will yield, but reluctantly, and there will be criticism enough reaching Her, to confirm her in her opinion that she was a better judge than her Govt, and make her more difficult on another occasion.” Gladstone was irked by what seemed to him an inconsistency, and refused to find an alternative (Christian) “commercial man.” “The merit of Rothschild is that his position is well defined and separated,” he argued with his usual intellectual rigour. “Her argument is null and void. If it be sound, she has been wrong in consenting to emancipate the Jews.” Lionel, he argued, stood “so much better for the promotion, than anyone whom we can put in his place.” To exclude him would be “to revive by Prerogative the disability which formerly existed by Statute, and which the Crown and Parliament thought proper to abolish.” The Prime Minister explored every available option—giving Lionel an Irish peerage, for example—but was eventually forced to back down. He sought to revive the idea again in 1873, but was again overruled. As a result, Lionel died a commoner.

Was Queen Victoria an anti-Semite? She certainly did admit to a “feeling of which she cannot divest herself, against making a person of the Jewish religion, a Peer.” But the charge of racial prejudice seems unfounded in view of her affection for Disraeli, who made so much of his Jewish origins.45 In fact, her objections were as much social and political as religious. As she put it in her journal, “I shall have to refuse on the score of his religion, as much as on that of his wealth, being in fact derived largely from money contracts &c., also pointing out the folly of the Whigs wanting to make such a number of Peers.” She elaborated on the second point in a letter to Gladstone of November 1, 1869:

She cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Govts. for loans, or to successful speculations on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British peerage. However high Sir [sic] L. Rothschild may stand personally in Public estimation, this seems to her not the less a species of gambling, because it is on a gigantic scale—and far removed from that legitimate trading which she delights to honour, in which men have raised themselves by patient industry and unswerving probity to positions of wealth and influence.—such men as the late Thomas Cubitt [the builder], or George Stephenson would have done honour to any house of Peers.

This, however, can be dismissed as mere excuse-making, as at this date there were already three peers whose fortunes stemmed from banking.46 A more plausible reason for her opposition can be inferred from Granville’s allusion to “the present unfortunate antagonism between the Lords and the Commons.” The Lords had been the principal source of opposition to the admission of Jews into Parliament and had consented to a fudged compromise only in 1858, giving the Commons the right to modify its own oath to new members. The Queen may have feared that making Lionel a peer would lead to a repeat of the constitutional wrangles of the 1850s. It is noteworthy that Gladstone had deliberately raised the possibility of a “Jew peer” at the same time as that of a Roman Catholic peer (in the person of Sir John Acton). As Granville put it when the issue resurfaced in 1873, the idea of a Rothschild peerage was intended to “be a complement to that of the Catholic.” Much more was at stake here than a reward to a loyal Liberal MP for services rendered.

It is worth noting that all this went on without any encouragement from the Rothschilds themselves. Many years before, Lionel had turned down the offer of a baronetcy as beneath his dignity, but by the 1860s he was evidently unwilling to chase after a peerage. “Rothschild is one of the best I know,” commented Gladstone as he broached the issue at Balmoral in 1873, “and if I could but get from him a Mem[orandum]. of certain services of his father as to the money during the war I think it wd carry the case over all difficulty. But though I have begged & they have promised for about 4 years, I have never been able to get this in an available form.” Nor can it be said that Lionel’s son set out to acquire a peerage for himself after his father’s death; on the contrary, as we shall see, his politics were increasingly at odds with those of Gladstone (so much so that Alphonse assumed it was Salisbury who had secured him the peerage in 1885). During the long debates between the Queen and her Prime Minister, the Rothschilds were entirely passive.

So what happened between 1873 and 1885 to “overcome the strong scruples” in the Queen’s mind? As far as Gladstone’s secretary Hamilton was concerned, the significance of a Rothschild peerage had not changed: “[I]t removes the last remnant of religious disqualifications.” Natty himself echoed the sentiment when he thanked “the greatest champion of civil and religious liberty” for “bestow[ing] for the first time a peerage on a member of our faith”; and he doubtless relished re-enacting his father’s triumph in the Commons when, on July 9, 1885, he was sworn in with his hat on his head and his hand on a Hebrew Old Testament. Gladstone’s allusions to “really valuable public service” may help to explain why the Queen withdrew her opposition.47 True, Gladstone was alluding to Nathan’s role in the Napoleonic Wars; but, as we shall see, the Rothschilds’ direct and enthusiastic involvement in British imperial finance can really be dated from Disraeli’s period in office in the mid- 1870s, and it seems plausible that this did not go unnoticed by the Queen—though it is too much to portray the peerage as a direct reward for financial services rendered in Egypt. As we shall see, elevating Natty to the Lords may even have been Gladstone’s attempt to “kick upstairs” an increasingly troublesome backbench critic of his foreign policy.

The Rothschild peerage also needs to be seen as part of a more general social sea-change. The aim, as Edward Hamilton put it, was “to give an addition to commercial strength to the House of Lords,” and Natty’s elevation coincided with Edward Baring’s becoming Lord Revelstoke. Cassis has also shown that a high percentage of City bankers were titled in the two and a half decades before the First World War and nearly a fifth of them acquired their peerages in the period after 1890. Most of the inherited peerages had been created only in the previous decade. (Lord Adding-ton, Lord Aldenham, Lord Avebury, Lord Biddulph and Lord Hillingdon were all hereditary peers created at around the same time.) The creations of 1885 were thus part of a veritable boom in City peerages. Moreover, Natty was soon joined in the Lords by other Jewish peers: Lord Wandsworth (Sydney James Stern), Lord Swaythling (Samuel Montagu) and Lord Pirbright (Henry de Worms, himself a descendant of Mayer Amschel’s eldest daughter Jeanette).

That did not mean that Natty’s elevation secured the “universal welcome” predicted by Gladstone; as Hamilton observed, some people “turn[ed] up their noses at the Rothschild peerage.” Such snobbery persisted; many of the adverse comments about Alfred and other members of the family cited above can be read as its typical expressions. For the Rothschilds, however, it was a moment to reassert familial pride. Unlike most other business peers, and to the delight of his relations, Natty retained his surname by taking the title of Baron Rothschild of Tring. After 1885 any traces of prejudice within the royal family seem to have vanished. Members of the Rothschild family were involved in the various commemorations of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee; and in May 1890 the Queen herself paid a visit to Ferdinand at Waddesdon. Indeed, the effete and fussy “Ferdy” became something of a royal favourite in his old age. The Queen also visited his sister Alice’s villa at Grasse several times while she was staying in the south of France in 1891.48

In other words, the fact that the Rothschilds formally joined the aristocracy and entered “court society” in this period should not merely be seen as a sign of “feudalisation” or docile assimilation to the values of the established European elite. Even those of the fourth generation who devoted themselves to their gilded palaces and manicured gardens remained conscious and proud of their family’s Jewish identity. Ferdinand was typical in that he was (to quote Edward Hamilton again) “proud of his race and his family; and liked talking about his predecessors as if he had an illustrious ancestry and the bluest of bloods.” He, Alfred and Nathaniel had ceased to be hard-working businessmen; but in becoming fin de siècle aesthetes they had not ceased to be Jews, just as Hannah had not ceased to be a Jew in marrying a Scottish earl. Assimilation is the wrong word to describe the Rothschilds’ assertion of their own status as—in Charlotte’s idiosyncratic phrase—“the Caucasian royal family.” In the 1840s Georges Dairnvaell had commented that the Rothschilds were, after the Saxe-Coburgs, “the most numerous dynasty in Europe”; and the similarities between the two extended, cosmopolitan families had increased over the succeeding years. When Alfred visited Leopold II in Brussels in 1892, at least one of them saw it as a meeting of equals: “To me the King simply said: ‘Votre famille m’a toujours gate’ [‘Your family has always spoiled me’], upon which I replied: ‘Pardon Sire, c’est Votre Majesté qui a toujours gate notre famille.‘ Short and sweet.”49

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