The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  But the political significance of the triumph has seldom been properly understood. Lionel had triumphed as a Liberal; and the long campaign had forged political and social links with a small but influential group of Liberal MPs. According to his diary, Gladstone dined with him or his brother Mayer four times and corresponded or met with members of the family on at least another four occasions in the period 1856 to 1864. Other Liberals whose names recur in Charlotte’s letters of the 1860s as regular visitors to 148 Piccadilly include Charles Villiers, the MP for Wolverhampton (who was President of the Poor Law Board from 1859 to 1866) and Robert Lowe, Chancellor in Gladstone’s first ministry.31 Yet it was not without significance that Lionel’s first act after signing the roll and shaking hands with the Speaker was to shake hands with Disraeli, whose contribution in this final phase of the battle may well have been decisive. Relations between Disraeli and the Rothschilds had been improving steadily since the early 1850s, and Lionel had in fact been in close communication with Disraeli during the decisive weeks of 1858. In January he had dined at Gunnersbury (along with Cardinal Wiseman and a host of Orléanist exiles). In May, Disraeli was heard to remark after the government had narrowly avoided defeat over policy in India: “What does the Baron say about it? He knows most things!” Two months later, on July 15, Lionel went to see the Chancellor in his office, “as we had not seen him since our Bill was in the House of Commons.” He found him:in excellent spirits, said everything was going on as well as possible ... I told him I hoped that our Bill would pass next Monday. They would manage to have the Queen’s assent obtained immediately. I could not get him to [illegible] it as he said it depended upon others if it would not wait till the [commission] at the end of session for all Bills, or if they could get a commission on purpose so as to enable me to take my seat before the House is up. I dare say I shall be able to manage it ... Dizzy said again today, that it was by the greatest chance possible that we had [illegible] this division for us instead of against us on the 2nd reading of our Bill—he worked all he could for us—so he said.

  Lionel responded to this by asking Disraeli “if he would dine with Johnny [Russell] and Co.”, but:like a sensible fellow he refused, saying that his presence as Minister would spoil the party. I am glad I asked him, as he cannot say that we in any way neglect him. I told him that we were very anxious to have the royal assent to the Bill in time to enable me to take my seat this year, but you know what a humbug he is. He talked of what is customary, without promising anything ... Mrs. Dizzy dined at Mayer’s and went over the old story again, saying how much Dizzy had done for us and how angry he was once because we would not believe it.

  The undertone of scepticism in Lionel’s accounts of these encounters should not be taken to mean that Disraeli did not do all he could in 1858. On the contrary: his influence must surely account for Derby’s grudging capitulation. The closeness of relations between the two men immediately after Lionel’s admission to Parliament confirms that the Rothschilds no longer had any reason to doubt Disraeli’s bona fides. Despite the formidable political constraints under which he had to work, the creator of Sidonia and Eva had not failed his “race.”

  Cambridge

  It is instructive to compare the outright battle over the admission of Jews to Parliament in this period with the pragmatic fudge which allowed them to study at Cambridge. Here too the Rothschilds played a pioneering role. Indeed, their success in circumventing such religious restrictions as remained at Cambridge may explain why they were so taken aback by the intransigence of the House of Lords. It is illuminating to compare their tactics in the two cases.

  The Rothschilds, it should be stressed, did not need to go to Cambridge, much less Oxford, any more than they needed to sit in the House of Commons. The education of Rothschild children remained for most of the nineteenth century a much more cosmopolitan affair than the ancient English public schools and universities could provide. Thus the family continued to rely on private tutors and to send children abroad for a substantial part of their studies, to ensure above all that they maintained the family’s multilingualism. As for learning about banking, the only way to do that was in a bank; if Cambridge offered anything, it was distraction from the priorities of the family business. Moreover, as in the 1820s and 1830s, the Rothschilds continued to attach almost as much importance to the education of daughters—unlike the public schools and universities, which of course remained overwhelmingly masculine until the late twentieth century. Anthony’s daughter Constance and Lionel’s son Natty had German drummed into them with more or less equal vigour. Charlotte in particular was a vehement advocate of formal study for her daughters and nieces. However, Mayer’s attendance at Cambridge had set a precedent which Charlotte was determined all her sons should follow. The trouble was that the position of Jews at Cambridge remained a grey area: formally excluded from taking degrees until 1856, they could nevertheless become members of the university—provided they were willing to fulfil the obligation to attend chapel imposed on undergraduates by all colleges.

  It is curious that—unlike the oath of abjuration—this was an essentially Christian duty which the Rothschilds were prepared in principle to perform, provided their attendance at chapel was minimalistic and passive. As we have seen, Mayer had attended Trinity on just that basis in the 1830s; and when Arthur Cohen, a cousin on his mother’s side, resolved to read mathematics at Cambridge in the autumn of 1849—just after Lionel’s by-election victory over Manners—he assumed a similar arrangement would be possible. Through J. Abel Smith, one of Lionel’s most active political supporters, Mayer sought to persuade the Master of Christ‘s, James Cartmell, to bend the chapel rules for Cohen’s sake, arguing that (as Cartmell put it) “if I admit Mr Cohen, no one, except myself, need know what his religious creed is.” Mayer also told Cartmell “that Mr Cohen is ready to attend divine service in the college chapel.” The Master, however, was unpersuaded. “It would be a breach of good faith to the Society,” he argued, to conceal Cohen’s religion, while “it would be most repugnant to my feelings and contrary to my notions of what is right, to exact from Mr Cohen an outward compliance with a form of worship, the basis and spirit of which he entirely disclaims and disbelieves.”

  To Mayer, this suggested that a precedent might be set “for pointed exclusion of the members of one religious community from the benefits of a Cambridge University education.” He and Moses Montefiore therefore turned to none other than Prince Albert—then Chancellor of the University—asking him to put Cohen’s case to the Master of Magdalene, who was also Dean of Windsor. Royal pressure succeeded where Rothschild pressure had failed in the 1830s, when Mayer had been forced to leave the college over the question of chapel attendance. Cohen was duly admitted on the basis of a deal with the Dean who, as Cohen was able to report, “inform[ed] me that on Wednesday and Friday the Chapel only lasts 10 minutes [and] advised me to attend on these days instead of the other days, and at the same time communicated to me that my attendance on Sacrament Sundays would not be required.”

  Similar arrangements had to be negotiated at Trinity when the next generation of Rothschild men went up, beginning with Natty in 1859. By this time, the acts of 1854 and 1856 meant that Jews were now able to take degrees (except in theology). But the problem of religious obligations persisted at the college level. Although Natty’s tutor Joseph Lightfoot (who became Hulsean Professor of Divinity in 1861) “promised to do all he can about Chapel” the Master William Whewell remained “the stumbling block in the way of reform.” In 1862, as Natty reported to his parents, “the Trinity Dons ... made themselves very unpopular by threatening to gate everyone who refuses to take the sacrament in Chapel; the consequence of this new rule is that a very large number absented themselves from chapel today, and will get into trouble for breaking an important college rule.” Natty plainly felt that little of substance had been achieved by the reforms of the 1850s. “In order to effect anything in the way of reform here,” he complained,it will be necessa
ry to wait some time for as long as the universities are looked upon as seminaries for the Church of England or as part of the established church itself, it will be impossible to do anything more ... [W]hat certainly ought to be done away with is the necessity to take orders after seven years or the total abandonment of the fellowship ... [I]t is very hard for a conscientious individual ... to be deprived of his fellowship, because he will not declare himself a member of the Church of England. I never could see why a national institution like this which is the stepping stone to legal and political preferments as well as ecclesiastical ones should be ruled by priests as if it were a Jesuit’s seminary or a Talmud school ...

  Nor was attendance at chapel the only compromise they had to make at Cambridge. The second-year examination known as the “Little Go” required a detailed knowledge of William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity. An irate letter from Charlotte to Leo shows how much of an obstacle this presented, but also suggests that she felt he should be able to overcome it:[Y]our unaccountable mistake at the examination vexed and annoyed me greatly.—Of course you did not, could. not, intend offering an insult to the Reverend examiners, and no person acquainted with you could have supposed you capable of such an utter want of feeling for the clergy, and of such a complete want of respect for a faith, which though not your own, and indeed unknown to you, ought nevertheless to be held in respect, as the worship of the Almighty by millions of human beings.—But the mistake is nevertheless very reprehensible, and indeed unpardonable. In whatever light it may be viewed, it cannot do otherwise than create a bad impression.—A young man, who appears in the Senate-house, and cannot object to be examined in the evidences of Christianity, ought to make himself acquainted with the subject.—Had I not known you to be surrounded by Revd. instructors, I should have offered some advice, but I really thought you would have had the good, natural, common sense to ask your tutors for a sketch, an outline, if not a history of the Christian faith.—You will pass for the most ignorant, most thoughtless, and most shallow of human beings. I am grieved at it, but I am sorry there is nothing to explain away.

  For his part Leo was baffled by “the mysteries of theology and ... various doxies”: when he dined with a group of disputatious dons one night he felt “so mystified that I did not dare open my lips.” (A friend who was also present feared “they might forget my presence and make some attack upon the Jews.”) Even in the more youthful environment of the debating chamber, the Rothschilds were made to feel ill at ease. Natty recalled how his “blood boiled with rage” one night at the Union when a speaker “quoted as a solitary instance of the too great power of the House of Commons the passing of the Jew Bill. I had hoped that the day was gone by for all [distinctions] of this kind and if I had spoken at once, I might have aroused religious passions, not so easy to quell as arouse.”

  The Rothschild presence at Cambridge was therefore a qualified victory compared with the victory Lionel wished to achieve in the House of Commons. (It was not in fact until 1871 that the final religious tests were abolished at the ancient universities.) There is a marked and not easily explicable contrast between the willingness of his brother and sons to attend college chapel services and study Paley, and his refusal to swear an oath which included a declaration of Christian faith. Presumably if undergraduates had been required to take the sacraments it would have been a different story.

  Great Exhibitions and Crystal Palaces

  Monuments to military victories are not usually built before a battle is won. The Rothschilds, however, began building monuments to their political ascendancy some years before Lionel was finally able to take his seat at Westminster. That, at least, is one way of interpreting the extraordinary burst of architectural activity between 1850 and 1860, when the Rothschilds built no fewer than four immense country houses for themselves, and rebuilt a fifth: at Mentmore, Aston Clinton, Ferrières, Pregny and Boulogne.

  Of course, Nathan and his brothers had begun to acquire country residences from the earliest days of their prosperity, as we have seen. By the time of the 1848 revolution, their houses and estates at Ferrières, Suresnes, Boulogne, Gunnersbury, Schillersdorf and Grüneburg had been in the family for years. Nor did the 1850s witness a complete change in attitude towards these rural retreats. When purchasing new land in Buckinghamshire after 1848, notably the farms at Aston Clinton, the London partners remained as economically rational as their father and uncles had been before them: unless the agricultural land paid 3.5 per cent on the purchasing price, they were not interested. “If you think that Aston Clinton is worth [£]26,000,” wrote Lionel to Mayer in 1849, “I have no objection to yr. offering it, but I think we ought always to be able to rely on 31/2 clear of all charges, it is not like a fancy place, you must consider it entirely .as an investment.” When he visited Schillersdorf in 1849, he commented that it was “a magnificent property and although [Uncle Salomon] paid a little dear for it, it will if well managed pay him a good interest.”

  In buying land when they did—in the wake of the great agricultural crisis of the mid-1840s—the Rothschilds were going in at the bottom of the market. It was in 1848 that the Duke of Buckingham was finally declared bankrupt, and a year later Mayer was receiving estate agents’ reports from Ireland, advising him of the favourable opportunities there. “Potatoes failing all directions and free trade ruining everybody,” ran one such tip; “Ireland completely ruined, now is the time or at least it is fast approaching for buying estates on the sly. When the Parliamentary Title be obtained acknowledge the purchase and resell at a very advanced premium.” In fact, he and his brothers had no interest in such carpet-bagging: their interest in real estate, as their mother remarked, reflected the fact that by December 1849 the yield on consols had fallen to 3.1 per cent. It was “the most proper time” to buy land “when the funds lie so high as they are at present for altho the interest may be reduced on funded property land will always be an equivalent.” Such investments cannot be seen as symptoms of a declining entrepreneurial spirit. The same is true of the French Rothschilds’ purchases of wine-growing estates: Nat’s purchase of Château Brane-Mouton in 1853 (which he renamed Mouton-Rothschild) and James’s long battle to gain control of Château Lafite near Pauillac were informed by a shrewd assessment of the demand for good-quality clarets. James was an old man when he finally secured control of Lafite in 1868 (for £177,600), but almost immediately he began bidding up the price of the new vintage.

  Yet there is a difference between spending £26,000 on farmland and spending an equivalent sum on a palatial new house. It is easily forgotten how few English landowners built themselves new “stately homes” in the nineteenth century: what had been affordable a hundred years before was now out of the question. For the Rothschilds, on the other hand, money was no object. When the London partners withdrew £260,250 from the firm’s joint capital in 1852—primarily to finance their building projects—it represented less than 3 per cent of the total. Yet the quoted price for the new house at Mentmore was just £15,427. For the immense amount of work he undertook for the Rothschilds between 1853 and 1873, the builder George Myers was altogether paid just £350,000.

  The fact that they could afford it, however, does not explain why they decided to spend their money on big houses which plainly did not pay a return on the investment. The banal explanation—and it may be sufficient—is that the Rothschilds liked to spend time in the country; and the advent of railways meant that they could do so without neglecting their work in the City. The London and North Western Line allowed Lionel and his brothers to commute easily between Mentmore and Euston: Lionel could have “a gallop” in the country and still be down in time for an evening debate in the Commons. The Strasbourg-Ligny line, opened in May 1849, did the same for James and his sons at Ferrieres. There is, however, a supplementary and perhaps necessary explanation. The new houses staked a claim to aristocratic status. As early as 1846, Lionel had intimated that he regarded a baronetcy as beneath him, and embarked on his campaign to ent
er the House of Commons only when it was clear that a peerage was not going to be forthcoming. But this was not some symptom of “feudalisation”—of decadent bourgeois submission to anachronistic upper-class values; for it must not be forgotten that Mentmore was being built at the time when Lionel was openly challenging the legislative role of the House of Lords. The Rothschild bid for noble status in Britain was uncompromising and nothing expressed this more tangibly than the houses the family built for themselves. They were more than mere imitations of eighteenth-century country houses. They were advertisements for Rothschild power, five-star hotels for influential guests, private art galleries: in short, centres for corporate hospitality.

  Their very choice of architect was significant. Joseph Paxton had been known to the family since the 1830s and had advised Louise on her Günthersburg house in the 1840s; but it was his design of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition which seems to have convinced the family to entrust him with something more than mere alterations. Work began on Mentmore in August 1851, the year of the Exhibition, and for all its Elizabethan inspiration—Paxton had Wollaton and Hardwick houses in mind as models—it was by the standards of the day an innovative building with its huge glass-roofed hall, hot running water and central heating. It cannot really be understood as a family home for Mayer, his wife and his daughter. Boasting twenty-six rooms on the ground floor alone, it was essentially a hotel where numerous guests could be entertained and accommodated. Those guests were supposed to be reminded of their host’s global influence: indeed, the trophy-like heads of the European sovereigns (in this instance by the Italian sculptor Raphael Monti) were becoming something of a Rothschild trademark. But Mentmore was also an art gallery, intended to link the modern power of the Rothschilds with more historically venerable antecedents—hence the three massive lanterns originally made for the Doge of Venice, the Gobelin tapestries and the collection of antique furniture from sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century France.