The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  But, while James’s reservations faded quickly, in Nathan’s case disdain for aristocratic trappings persisted, and perhaps ran deeper. When Prince Pückler visited the English Rothschilds in 1827, he was treated to a bizarre after-dinner performance, as an evidently tipsy Nathan donned “his new Austrian consular uniform, which, as he said, his friend M[etternich] had send him from Vienna”:

  [He] showed it to us, and even suffered himself to be persuaded to try it on before the looking glass, and to walk about in it. And, as virtuosi when they have once begun never know when to stop, he now sent for other magnificent Court dresses, and changed his toilette several times, as if he had been on the stage . . .

  It was . . . rather droll to see how this otherwise serious tradesman like man tried to assume the various bendings and bowings, and the light and gracious air, of a courtier, and, not in the least disconcerted by our laughing, assured us, with as much confidence as joviality that N.M.R., if he liked, could act any part; and, with the help of five or six glasses of wine extra, could make as good a figure at Court as the best of them.

  As Pückler’s evidently somewhat mixed feelings suggest, this was surely a characteristic bid by Nathan to épater l’aristocratie. He might be willing on occasion to exchange his sober surtout for the gaudy apparel of the old order; but he regarded it as little more than fancy dress. In its way, this vivid scene—of a tipsy Jewish banker making fun of the Habsburg Empire’s diplomatic finery in front of an impecunious prince—encapsulates the deep ambivalence of the Rothschilds’ relationship with the Restoration social order.

  “Fine Education”

  Despite their reputation as philistines, the younger Rothschild brothers took at least some interest in what we would now call “high culture”—something of a misnomer given the rapid development of a “public sphere” in this period as a more or less free market for the production and consumption of music, drama, books and paintings. This interest was partly a logical consequence of entertaining in the ways described above: it was, at the very least, difficult to own a large house without acquiring pictures and other ornaments to decorate its rooms. At the same time, in order to be able to communicate with members of the social elite about matters other than money and politics, a basic knowledge of their favourite painters, composers and authors was a prerequisite. Yet busy middle-aged bankers (all the brothers save James were over forty in 1820) generally make poor students of the arts. True, they had all inherited from their father an appreciation of antique objets d’art, and were discerning about the gifts they sent their favourite politicians. They commissioned portraits of themselves, their wives and children from respectable artists like Sir William Beechey, Louis Amié Grosclaude and Moritz Daniel Oppenheim;6 and in both Frankfurt and Paris they had regular boxes reserved at the theatre. But James was the only member of the second generation to show any serious interest in culture on his own account. He read Schiller and Goethe when he was in his twenties, for example, and in the 1820s retained an artist named Allard on 5 francs a month, as well as subscribing to the Courrier des Spectacles and Journal des Théâtres. His brothers tended to take the view that this sort of thing was better made available to their children.

  The obvious is perhaps worth stating here: if the Rothschild brothers really had been philistines, they would not have educated their children as well as they did. Of course, Nathan wanted his sons “to give mind, and soul, and heart, and body, and everything to business”; at the time he made that much misunderstood remark, all but one of them had completed their educations and had been working for the firm for several years. And he and his brothers recognised that there might be a conflict between higher education and a successful business apprenticeship. As Carl put it when Salomon was pondering the fifteen-year-old Anselm’s future: “I advise you not to let him study . . . more than another two years so that he should enter the business when 17 years old. Otherwise he would not be deeply attached to business.” The subsequent business career of Mayer, the only one of Nathan’s sons to attend an English university, proved that analysis to be only too accurate. But none of the brothers for a moment doubted that a successful business career was compatible with the best possible secondary education. Indeed, they viewed the latter as an essential preparation for the former. Moreover, the male Rothschilds of the third generation were in practice given even longer than Carl suggested before being expected to abandon their studies and enter the “counting house.” Judging by the first appearance of his name in the business correspondence, Anselm was twenty-three before he took a serious part in the running of the firm (though he was admitted a partner a year earlier, and presumably did routine work for his father which has gone unrecorded). Lionel was twenty when he first began to write and receive business letters; Anthony and Nat were eighteen, and Mayer twenty-one. None of Carl’s sons feature in the firm’s deliberations before the age of twenty; indeed, the pious Wilhelm Carl was not really regarded as competent to act unsupervised until he was twenty-four. Both James’s sons, Alphonse and Gustave, were nineteen before they began to write their own business letters. Given their parents’ view that the best apprenticeship was learning by doing, there is little reason to think that any of the third generation had worked for long before these first recorded appearances.

  In any case, the older Rothschilds had no desire to impose on their offspring the deprivations and rigours of their own childhoods. Anselm’s mother took pride in her eleven-year-old son’s precocious letter-writing not just because it would stand him in good stead in business; she genuinely wanted him and his sister to have “a fine education” for its own sake. The influence on her of contemporary notions of Bildung is apparent in a letter she wrote to her husband in 1820 (which accompanied another letter from their now teenage son): “He is so uninhibited towards me, the good, sweet boy, which pleases me particularly, for you know, dear husband, that it has always been my aim that our dear children should not conceal from us their true, innermost feelings; and I—or rather we—have achieved it.” Nathan indulged his children in less sentimental ways. After work, he played with them, letting them (as a friend recalled) “make their equestrian exercises on your back’; indeed, on one occasion he horsed around so energetically that he managed to dislocate his shoulder. He bought them a miniature carriage with four white goats to drive about the garden at Stamford Hill. The family painted by William Armfield Hobday in 1821 was—as it looks today—a happy one: to the left, the three-year-old Mayer tries to pull a letter from his father’s hand; at Charlotte’s feet, Hannah Mayer has dropped her bonnet; and the older boys vainly attempt to restrain the family dog as it chews Lionel’s hat. Small wonder the faintest hint of a smile plays on the lips of the relaxed paterfamilias as he reclines, legs crossed, in his armchair.7 And he continued to indulge them—even to spoil them—as they grew up. At the age of seventeen, Hannah Mayer was enjoying life in Brighton, sitting for her first portrait. When Thomas Fowell Buxton met Anthony the following year, he was already “a mighty hunter; and his father lets him buy any horses he likes. He lately applied to the emperor of Morocco for a first-rate Arab horse. The emperor sent him a magnificent one, but he died as he landed in England. The poor youth said very feelingly, ‘that was the greatest misfortune he ever had suffered.’ ”

  In Coningsby, Disraeli portrayed the younger Sidonia as a model of modern education:

  Shut out from universities and schools, those universities and schools which were indebted for their first knowledge of ancient philosophy to the learning and enterprise of his ancestors, the young Sidonia was fortunate in his tutor . . . [He] penetrated the highest mysteries of mathematics with a facility almost instinctive . . . The circumstances of his position, too, had early contributed to give him an unusual command over the modern languages . . . When he was nineteen, Sidonia . . . possessed a complete mastery over the principal European languages . . . At seventeen he . . . commenced his travels. He resided . . . some time in Germany, and then, having visited Italy
, settled at Naples . . .

  This was not far removed from the kind of education Lionel and his brothers and cousins actually received. One of the Montefiores recalled how in 1815 Lionel and Anthony had been taken away from their first teacher, “a Pole [who] used to wear a tall Polish hat and stride about the schoolroom with a cane ferociously stuck in his Wellington boots.” Instead, their parents and some friends “got Garcia, who was previously a book-keeper at Barrow and Lousada’s counting house, to establish a more select academy at Peckham, and there Lionel and Anthony . . . were sent.” The favoured curriculum was indeed modern, rather than classical, and that slant continued when the time came for a kind of modified grand tour in 1827. Aged respectively nineteen and seventeen, the two boys were despatched to see the sights of Germany—not Italy, the classicist’s favoured destination—travelling with their tutor John Darby from Frankfurt through the principal towns of Saxony, then on to Prague and Vienna, returning via Baden and Strasbourg. (Prussia was conspicuously omitted, though they do seem to have gone to Hanover in order to visit the university at Göttingen.) The aim was obviously to acquire a grounding in German Kultur: besides trailing round countless art galleries and princely piles, the brothers paid a respectful call on the aged Goethe.

  It was only after this tour that Lionel and Anthony were expected to turn their minds to business: in January 1829 one of the bookkeepers in the Frankfurt office was entrusted with the task of raising Anthony’s numeracy to the level required of a banker. “I ceaselessly instruct him in all the arithmetical problems,” the new tutor reported to Nathan, “and I am glad to perceive that he has the intellectual grasp and makes good use of what I have to teach him. In due course I shall give to the young Baron systematically the knowledge of the art of arithmetic and I shall continue to explain to him arbitration of exchange and all of the business circulation of the counting house.”

  Visits like the one made by Nathan’s sons to Frankfurt evidently encouraged a degree of Anglo-German parental rivalry. In 1831 Charlotte wrote to her mother Hannah urging her to “make [Mayer] write a letter in German if he can, if not, in his best writing in English to Mrs S[alomon] de R[othschild]. Uncle Charles’s boys [Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl] both write very well and it is sure to be compared.” Four years later it was the English Mayer’s turn to visit Germany; but this was a more academic trip than his elder brothers had made. With his tutor Dr Schlemmer he spent several months studying at the University of Leipzig before going on to Heidelberg. In this he was following in the footsteps of Anselm, the first Rothschild to attend university, who had acquired “a lively interest in science” while studying at Berlin. He then returned to England, where he became the first of many Rothschilds to study at Cambridge, first at Magdalene and then, when the college proved punctilious about his attendance at chapel (still formally a requirement for undergraduates), to larger and laxer Trinity. (Oxford was ruled out because matriculation was conditional on subscription to the thirty-nine articles; whereas in Cambridge non-conformists and Jews could become members of the university, though they could not be awarded degrees, scholarships or fellowships.)8

  Not to be outdone, Carl sent his son Mayer Carl to Göttingen, where he studied law, and then to Berlin, where he attended lectures by the leading light of German jurisprudence, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, and Leopold von Ranke, the pre-eminent historian of the age. His brother Wilhelm Carl was in turn subjected to an extraordinarily rigorous secondary education: at the age of fifteen he was studying twenty different subjects including five languages and five sciences under a team of tutors led by the French physiologist Henri Blanvalet. His flight into religious Orthodoxy may have been partly a reaction against such state-of-the-art cramming. James’s sons were no less thoroughly educated. Alphonse studied at the Collège Bourbon (later the Lycée Condorcet) and was tutored privately for his baccalauréat by Désiré Nisard, who later became director of the Ecole Normale and a member of the Académie Française. Nor was it only the Rothschild boys who were given the benefit of a good education. Though little is known about her formal schooling, Carl’s daughter Charlotte—perhaps the brightest Rothschild of the third generation—was a highly literate woman, to judge by her elegant English letters and intense German diaries.

  If the aim of all this had been to produce great intellectuals, we would have to judge it a failure: with the exception of Charlotte, none of the third generation can be said to have had scholarly minds. But the aim was rather to produce men and women who would fit more easily into the elite social milieus of Europe than their fathers—without losing the desire to carry on their business as bankers. In those terms, the education of the third generation of Rothschilds was a success. Mayer Amschel’s grandchildren no longer spoke the rough-hewn German of the Judengasse: Castellane disliked Betty’s German accent not her Jewish accent, and no contemporary appears to have detected anything remotely unusual about the easy and idiomatic way Nathan’s sons spoke English. Nor did the younger Rothschilds invariably write their letters in the Hebrew characters used by their fathers: although Salomon and Carl’s sons continued to do so, the English and French Rothschilds of the third generation did not (though they could read Judendeutsch without difficulty). Indeed, from the late 1820s onwards, the business of the five houses was conducted multilingually, with each partner tending to write in his first language, occasionally lapsing into the language of his place of work or addressee in postscripts. To all intents and purposes, as their letters show, the third generation wrote English, German and French as well as—and in some cases rather better than—their aristocratic contemporaries. Moreover, the very conventionality of their cultural tastes was proof that the tutors had done their work well. They liked Scott’s novels; Meyerbeer’s operas; Murillo’s paintings; Marie Antoinette’s furniture. The boys also picked up the hobbies and vices of the social elite—riding horses, hunting foxes and stags, betting on racehorses, as well as smoking cigars, drinking fine wines and chasing unsuitable women. They even had clubbish nicknames for one other: Lionel was “Rab,” Anthony “Billy” or “Fat Bill” and Mayer “Muffy” or “Tup.” All outward traces of the Frankfurt ghetto had been expunged, save, it might be said, those of physiognomy—and even in that respect few members of the family actually conformed to the hostile caricaturists’ Jewish stereotypes, least of all James. He and his brothers had found it easy to become barons, wearers of royal orders, property-owners and society hosts. Now they had made it possible for the third generation of Rothschilds to become something more elusive: gentlemen.

  EIGHT

  Sudden Revolutions (1830-1833)

  In the present state of Europe something great & decisive must be done or its kingdoms and their population will be soon again in worse confusion than they were under the French Revolution and the influence of Napoleon. The march of mind is too rapid to permit the old arrangements of society to continue long as they are. The modern extraordinary advance in the arts and sciences, will ’ere long, if I am not greatly deceived, change the whole organisation of the social systems over the world greatly to the benefit of all; but it may very suddenly render all anticipated wealth, as money is, of very little use. It may be well therefore, without losing the advantages which money gives under the existing arrangements of society, to secure also similar benefits in case of sudden revolutions in all the states of Europe which may now any day take place.

  —ROBERT OWEN TO HANNAH ROTHSCHILD, JULY 1828.1

  In July 1830 the French King Charles X was overthrown by a combination of parliamentary opposition and popular violence in Paris. In something like a political chain-reaction, comparable changes of regime occurred or were attempted (with varying degrees of violence) in Brussels, Warsaw, Modena and Bologna, as well as in a number of German states, notably Brunswick, Hesse-Kassel and Saxony, and in Portugal. In Belgium, Italy and Poland, the revolutionaries were as much concerned to free themselves from foreign rule as to achieve constitutional reforms. Elsewhere, constitutional reform
s were enacted without the deposition of a monarch. This was the case not only in England, Scotland and Ireland—sometimes neglected in accounts of the 1830 revolution—but also in Hanover, where the change of monarch was the result of George IV’s not untimely death in June 1830. In Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, rulers felt constrained to make concessions to liberals. Nor did political instability end in 1832, by which time the revolts in Poland and Italy had been crushed and Holland had been obliged to accept the secession of Belgium. Uncertainty about the stability of new political arrangements persisted throughout Europe until the middle of the decade and beyond.

  The fact that the Rothschilds were able to survive these political upheavals led many observers to conclude that, as Byron and others had earlier suspected, their power was actually as great as, if not greater than, that of the kings to whom they lent money. In November 1931, in his tenth bulletin from Paris, Ludwig Börne explicitly “equated Rothschild . . . with kings”:

  [T]hat should certainly not annoy him, even if he should not wish to belong in their ranks, because he should know best how far below par a king stands in Paris today. But he is the great dealer in all state bonds, who gives monarchs the power to spite freedom and deprives peoples of the courage to resist violence. Rothschild is the high priest of fear, the Goddess on whose altar liberty, patriotism, honour and all civic virtues are sacrificed. Rothschild should sell off all his paper in one hour on the stock exchange, so that they crash into the deepest abyss; then he should rush into my arms and feel how strongly I press him to my heart.