The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  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 Consta
nce 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 Chronicle in 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 r
elied 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 novels Marcella (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.”