The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  If this was rather more cosy than the mock-Renaissance, five-star splendour of Paris, it was meant to be. To English eyes, the rue Laffitte hôtels seemed almost too grand. “When finished,” Louise told her father in 1830 (after a visit to the house at number 17 which Salomon had just bought), “I think it will be most magnificent, it is immense and could hold almost three families.” Lionel felt the same ambivalence when he took a similar house in Paris shortly before his marriage: the ground floor would, he told his bride-to-be, “rival . . . any palace; at Paris, a rich man whether Banker or Prince can act in the same way, but in every other place, such an establishment would appear ridiculous. The first floor, the daily habitation, is nearly as splendid, so much gold that for the first few days one is quite dazzled.” “The houses here are splendid,” Nat wrote to Lionel two years later, “you know about them. [Aunt] Betty’s rooms are very nice, indeed rather too fine.”

  There were differences too between the English and French residences in the country. For most of his life James stuck close to Paris: neither Ferrières nor Boulogne was very far from the city. His English nephews, by contrast, began looking within five years of their father’s death for some more authentically rural seat than semi-suburban Gunnersbury. It still sufficed for certain social functions, and the family remained fond of it: Hannah added 33 acres to the 76 she inherited from her husband and Lionel extended the estate to no less than 620 acres between 1840 and 1873. But, as Disraeli said of its fictional analogue Hainault House (in Endymion), it was not “fashionable.” Above all, it was too close to the city for its owners to indulge in that favourite pastime of Victorian England: hunting. No sooner had they added to the Gunnersbury property than they began looking further afield, perhaps encouraged by their mother’s glowing descriptions of the Devonshire and Fitzwilliam estates in Derbyshire. Of course, it would have been quite impracticable for “City men” to have bought land so far from London; but Buckinghamshire seemed to offer all the advantages of genuine country life at a manageable distance. The first step in this direction came when Nathan rented Tring house in 1833 for the summer. Three years later Hannah bought some land near Mentmore, north-east of Aylesbury, and in 1842, alerted by a newspaper advertisement, Mayer bought a small group of farms in the parishes of Mentmore and Wing, laying the foundation of what would rapidly become a substantial Rothschild enclave in the county. Absent on duty in Paris, his elder brother Anthony was envious: “It is no harm to have your money in Land. I wish I knew of a nice place, I would do the same & I hope one of these days to have it.”

  Contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, the purchase of rural land by the Rothschilds did not symbolise some kind of dilution of their capitalist “spirit” or compromise with the “feudal” old regime. Lionel was singularly unimpressed by the vast piles of the nobility when he visited them: Castle Howard he thought “rather a nice place but nothing wonderful. It is in fact just the same as Blenheim, only much smaller . . . altogether a place not worth putting oneself out to go to see.” What he and his brothers were doing in the 1840s was buying farmland, and it would have been uncharacteristic if they had not regarded their purchases at least partly as straightforward investments. There is no doubt that Lionel drove a hard bargain when the family sought to acquire another property at Creslow. “I should not mind having it,” he told his brothers in 1844, “as a 33 per cent purchase would pay me 3 per cent, and there are so many little places round it which might be bought worth the money, that the whole together might be made to pay a fair rate of interest.” Indeed, the estates he and his brother Anthony subsequently bought to the south of Mentmore following the bankruptcy of the Duke of Buckingham in 1848 and the death of Sir John Dashwood the following year, were typical Rothschild acquisitions: bought at the bottom of the market. There was also, as we shall see, a secondary and equally pragmatic rationale for buying several estates in one county: the British system of local government and parliamentary representation made such a concentration of land a useful source of political influence. (According to one account, this was why their land agents Horwood and James advised buying land in one area only.) It was not until the 1850s that the brothers began to indulge themselves by building their own “stately homes.”

  Outside France and England, as we have seen, there were limits on how much property the Rothschilds, as Jews, could acquire. After 1830 these restrictions began to crumble. In 1841 Carl bought himself the Villa Pignatelli near Naples, which his daughter fondly remembered as “a paradise upon earth, with a view over the bay and the islands, over the celebrated Mount Vesuvius, the most animated street and the Villa Reale, the Neapolitan Kensington Gardens.” It was more difficult in Vienna, however, where Salomon continued to live in the rented Hotel zum Römischen Kaiser in the Renngasse. Of course, he owned property elsewhere, in Paris as well as in Frankfurt. But there was a principle at stake—or so Salomon argued in a “special appeal” he addressed to Metternich in January 1837 concerning “the destiny of my co-religionists . . . the hopes of so many fathers of families and the highest aspirations of thousands of human beings.” When the government once again refused to grant any general relaxation of discrimination—lest “the public . . . suddenly draw the conclusion that full emancipation of the Jews is contemplated”—Salomon faced a dilemma; for Metternich intimated that the Emperor was willing, at his own discretion and as a special privilege, to grant individual Jews permission to own houses in Vienna. This was the old story of the prince and the Hofjude, whereby the state “bought off ” the Jewish banker on whom it was dependent with special exemptions. Salomon did not rush to take advantage of this offer; but in 1842—five years later—he succumbed. His request to own real estate in the city was speedily granted, allowing him finally to buy the Renngasse hotel as well as the adjoining house, which he demolished and rebuilt. As he acknowledged, this—along with the grant of honorary citizenship which went with it—made him “a privileged exception in the midst of my fellow believers, who . . . [ought to] have the right to enjoy the same rights as those who belong to other religious confessions.”

  It might be thought that this compromise ran counter to the stance taken on questions of Jewish civil rights by other members of the family; but, like Mayer Amschel before them, most Rothschilds seem to have seen general rights and individual privileges as complementary rather than dichotomous: if the former could not be had, the latter should be accepted. Salomon was not criticised for his decision to accept Metternich’s offer. Indeed, even before he did, one of his English nephews was urging him “to get permission from Prince Metternich to purchase an estate in Bohemia.” In 1843 Salomon took his advice, though it was in fact in neighbouring Moravia that he sought the Emperor’s permission not only to buy an estate but also to pass it on to his heirs. Once again he was obliged to adopt the tones of the humble but deserving court Jew, listing his various financial contributions to the Empire as “adequate proof of his unshakeable devotion to the Austrian monarchy” and expressing his “most ardent desire to own property in a country whose rulers have shown him so many signal marks of their favour.” Again the petition was granted, despite the reservations of the Moravian estates. As one official put it, Salomon’s “position in society is so exceptional that he has been entirely removed from the ordinary circumstances of his co-religionists; his remarkable qualities and rare intelligence make it entirely inappropriate to apply strictly in his case the regulations in force with regard to other Israelites.” The Lord Chancellor Count Inzághy was rather more candid: it was, he argued,

  highly desirable that Baron Rothschild should be more closely bound to the Imperial State of Austria by the investment of his money in real property in this country; and . . . it would create a very strange impression abroad if his particular wish to settle permanently in that country, where he has been so actively engaged for a long period of years, and has been associated with the Government in more extensive and important transactions than has ever been the case before with a p
rivate individual, were to be refused after the special distinctions that have been conferred upon him.

  In addition to the estate Salomon duly purchased at Koritschau in Moravia—which together with his property in Vienna gave him real estate in the Empire worth 2 million gulden—he also acquired property in Prussia, buying the castle of Schillersdorf in 1842. It was a dispute relating to the rights attached to this estate which prompted Heine’s warning in 1846 that “Prussian aristocrats would like to use the paw of the plebeian to stir up public opinion against the exceptional family (for that term is the one constantly used to describe the house of Rothschild in proceedings regarding the right of patronage over Schillersdorf and Hültschin).”

  Surprisingly, in view of the protracted efforts of the town authorities to return the Jewish community to the ghetto in the years after 1814, “the exceptional family” encountered less of this sort of hostility when they sought to buy new properties in Frankfurt—a reflection perhaps of the changed political climate in the town after 1830. In 1831, after much hesitation, Amschel finally commissioned the Paris-trained Friedrich Rumpf to redesign and expand the house in his beloved garden on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse. Rumpf transformed the original and quite modest cube-shaped house into the central pavilion of a larger neo-classical villa, adding two wings with Corinthian three-quarter columns and remodelling the garden itself along strictly symmetrical lines. This mélange of Baroque and Renaissance styles was fairly typical of the houses favoured by the town’s Gentile elite in this period, suggesting a new self-confidence on Amschel’s part—in marked contrast to the mood of insecurity when he had first acquired the property. In the succeeding years, his attachment to it showed no sign of waning: during a visit to her married daughters Charlotte and Louise in 1844, Hannah was able to report that “a handsome and very large orangery and some magnificent trees of many sorts” had been added to the garden.

  An even clearer signal of assumed equality with the Bethmanns and Gontards came in 1834, when Amschel bought the large, four-storey town house at number 34 on the prestigious street known as the Zeil. In the same year Anselm bought a similar “palais” (indeed, by the same architect) in the nearby Neue Mainzer Strasse (number 45), a much grander residence than the building at number 33 acquired by Carl in 1818 and made even more grand by Rumpf, who was commissioned to add a new façade in the Renaissance style. It was also Rumpf whom Mayer Carl commissioned to expand the house he bought on the banks of the Main in 1846; but by this time mere imitation was no longer the Rothschild objective. Untermainkai 15—which today houses the Frankfurt Jewish Museum—had been built in 1821 at the end of an elegant row of neo-classical houses for the banker Joseph Isaak Speyer, and was already distinguished from its neighbours by its Italian Renaissance style. Rumpf made it stand out even more. Although he preserved some original features, notably the polygonal vestibule projecting from the side wall, he doubled its length and added some distinctly Oriental features (notably two new oriels with Moorish corner pillars and arabesque balustrades). The effect was to dominate, albeit subtly, the rest of the street—a symbol of the Rothschilds’ now well-established dominance of the city’s economic life.

  The Rothschilds also acquired rural retreats in the vicinity of Frankfurt during this period. In 1835 Amschel bought a country Schloss at Grüneburg and two years later Carl acquired a similar property, the Günthersburg. In fact, the literal translation (“castle”) somewhat exaggerates the size of the original houses, and at 150 acres or so their grounds were relatively modest. In one respect, however, the Frankfurt Rothschilds were more ambitious than their relatives, for they were the first members of the family to build their own country houses rather than merely renovate the existing buildings. This gave rise to an aesthetic debate within the family, in which the English (represented at Frankfurt by Anselm’s wife Charlotte and Mayer Carl’s wife Louise) emphatically lost.

  In 1840 Mayer Carl commissioned Rumpf to build a new “country residence” at Günthersburg. The design was not dissimilar to that of the Untermainkai house, with Doric pilasters across the ground and first floors and Corinthian ones on the upper floors of the two side projections. “The house is large and when finished will be a magnificent residence,” reported his mother-in-law Hannah, “but the grounds and garden do not accord with English taste.” Her son shared her opinion: it would be “a most magnificent house, large enough to hold us all” and the garden would be “pretty,” “but it is a pity that such a large house is not in the middle of 10,000 acres about ten miles from the town.”1 The argument continued when Anselm resolved to build a new “garden house” on the Grüneburg estate.2 Doubtless remembering her childhood at Gunnersbury, his wife Charlotte insisted that the new house be “perfectly English” in style, and asked her brothers to supply designs from London. “I am hesitating between the Elizabethan and the cottage style,” she told her mother. “She wants some of the Gothic, Elizabethan and all sorts,” reported Lionel somewhat dismissively. “Not a palace but a good sized House.” But she was evidently overruled. The design she and her husband eventually agreed on was for a long rectangular house in the style of a Loire château. With its tower-like projections at the corners, its layers of sandstone on the ground floor, its balustrades, obelisks, volutes and chimneys, it was an eclectic edifice. The only concession to Charlotte was a tall neo-Gothic brick tower at the northern end of the park—a conspicuously English touch.

  Elite Pursuits

  Such arguments about architectural style are indicative of an important sea-change in Rothschild attitudes in the period which followed Nathan’s death. Before 1836, as we have seen, he and his brothers had tended to regard the acquisition of more spacious residences in an essentially functional light: apart from simply being more comfortable, they provided settings where the great and the good could be wined and dined—and pumped for useful news or lucrative business. After 1836, the endless round of dinner parties and balls continued. The ball in March 1836 which James threw to show off his refurbished hôtel was probably not untypical: “As at all Rothschild soirées,” Heine reported, the guests were “a strictly selected set of aristocratic illustrations, able to make an impression by reason of great name or high rank or (in the case of the ladies) beauty and finery.” Contemporaries generally agreed on this: whereas before 1830 there had been one or two Restoration grandees who had continued to decline James’s invitations, after the advent of the “bourgeois monarchy” the faubourg Saint-Germain had less cause to remain aloof. “The company all the elite of Paris,” was Disraeli’s succinct summary of the guests invited to the ball he attended at Salomon’s in 1843. The guest lists of dinners given by James tell much the same story.

  In London too Rothschild hospitality became more lavish, more modish. In July 1838 Lionel hosted an extravagant summer ball at Gunnersbury to which he invited over 500 people, among them the dukes of Cambridge, Sussex, Somerset and Wellington. After a concert by leading musicians and singers, dinner was served followed by (according to Moses Montefiore) “a grand ball . . . in a magnificent tent erected for the purpose.” The Cambridges dined at Gunnersbury again that September; and five years later they were in attendance at another ball there, along with the Duchess of Gloucester and Ernst I of Saxe Coburg, Prince Albert’s father—an impressive trio of royal relations. Even in Frankfurt the last social constraints seemed to fall away. In 1846, for example, Lionel’s sister Charlotte gave “a magnificent ball” there. Among the Frankfurt Rothschilds’ dinner guests in this period were the King of Württemberg, Prince Loewenstein and Prince Wittgenstein. Disraeli is once again apposite (this time fictionalising in Endymion):

  In a very short time it was not merely the wives of ambassadors and ministers of state that were found at the garden fêtes of Hainault, or the balls, and banquets, and concerts of Portland Place, but the fitful and capricious realm of fashion surrendered like a fair country conquered as it were by surprise. To visit the Neuchatels became the mode; all solicited to be their
guests, and some solicited in vain.

  As the frequency of such descriptions suggests, the scale and ostentation of Rothschild hospitality never ceased to fascinate contemporaries—especially socially ambitious men of letters like Disraeli. In Tancred, there is an exquisite dinner at Sidonia’s, “served on Sèvres porcelain of Rose du Barry, raised on airy golden stands of arabesque workmanship; a mule bore your panniers of salt, or a sea-nymph proffered it you on a shell just fresh from the ocean, or you found it in a bird’s nest; by every guest a different pattern . . . The appearance of the table changed as if by the waving of a wand, and as silently as a dream.” In Endymion, the same author caricatures what is unmistakably a weekend party at Gunnersbury. “Sunday was a great day at Hainault, the Royal and the Stock Exchanges were both of them always fully represented; and then they often had an opportunity, which they highly appreciated, of seeing and conferring with some public characters, MPs of note or promise, and occasionally a secretary of the Treasury, or a privy councillor.” At dinner a sycophantic writer named St Barbe—a caricature of Thackeray—holds forth in praise of his hosts:

  “What a family this is!” he said; “I had no idea of wealth before! Did you observe the silver plates? I could not hold mine with one hand, it was so heavy. I do not suppose there are such plates in all the world . . . But they deserve their wealth,” he added; “nobody grudges it to them. I declare when I was eating that truffle, I felt a glow about my heart that, if it were not indigestion, I think must have been gratitude . . . He is a wonderful man, that Neuchatel. If I had only known him a year ago! I would have dedicated my novel to him. He is a sort of man who would have given you a cheque immediately . . . If you had dedicated it to a lord, the most he would have done would have been to ask you to dinner, and then perhaps cut up your work in one of the Quality reviews.”3