The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  The typically Victorian corollary of this system of arranged marriages was that male Rothschilds were allowed to “sow wild oats”: the personal letters which Nathan’s sons, nephews and their friends exchanged hint at a number of premarital liaisons. These were tolerated by the older generation provided nothing took place which might impede or damage the system of intermarriage. In 1829, for example, Anthony—who was evidently the playboy of the generation—overstepped the mark by forming too serious an attachment with an unidentified (but unsuitable) girl in Frankfurt. His father angrily summoned him home, accusing Amschel of having failed in his avuncular duties.

  The first and most important reason for the strategy of intermarriage was precisely to prevent the five houses drifting apart. Related to this was a desire to ensure that outsiders did not acquire a share in the five brothers’ immense fortune. Like most arranged matches of the period, each marriage was therefore accompanied by detailed legal agreements governing the property of the two contracting parties. When James married Betty, she acquired no right to his property, but her dowry of 1.5 million francs (£60,000) remained part of her own distinct property and, had he predeceased her without issue, she would have recouped not only the dowry but a further 2,250,000 francs. When Anselm married Charlotte a year later, she received not only a dowry of £12,000 (in British stocks) from her father, but a further £8,000 from her uncle and new father-in-law “for her separate use,” and £1,000 from Anselm as a kind of pre-nuptial down-payment; while Anselm got £100,000 from his father and £50,000 from Nathan. Such large dowries were easily given when the money was staying in the family.

  But, mercenary considerations aside, there was also a genuine social difficulty in finding suitable partners outside the family. By the mid-1820s the Rothschilds were so immensely rich that they had left other families with similar origins far behind. Even as early as 1814 the brothers had found it hard to find a suitable husband for their youngest sister Henrietta, only deciding on Abraham Montefiore (to whom Nathan was already related through his sister-in-law) after much agonising. Their original choice, a man named Holländer, had seemed unsuitable to Carl not because Henrietta did not love him—that was neither here nor there—but because, as he put it, “There seems a horrible crowd connected with the Holländers . . . [T]o tell the truth young men of good class are very rare these days.” On the other hand, the man she loved, Kaufmann, was “a crook.” A decade later, when the brothers’ eldest sister Schönche (also known as Jeannette or Nettche) was persuaded by Amschel and Salomon to remarry following the death of her husband Benedikt Worms, her younger brothers disapproved. As James complained to Nathan, her new husband was merely an impecunious stockbroker from the Judengasse:

  She has nothing to live on and she told my wife that she doesn’t have any bread in the house. The man is a scoundrel. He gambled her dowry away. Today he went to the Bourse again and perhaps he will earn again what he lost. However I don’t believe that he will. Tell me, what is your opinion? Do we want to make something for her every year? In the meantime I personally gave her a present of several thousand francs.

  By this time only a Rothschild would really do for a Rothschild.

  Nothing illustrates better the exclusiveness of both the partnership system and the intermarriage policy than the experience of Joseph Montefiore in August 1836. Though his mother Henrietta was born a Rothschild, his suggestion (in the wake of her brother Nathan’s death) that he might be “taken as one of the partners in the Firm” elicited an icy response from Lionel. “He was averse to this,” Montefiore told his uncle Moses, “alleging that there were already too many [partners] and that it would be a bad precedent, however that I might ask my Uncles at Frankfort, and that he should vote with the majority, observing that if I became a partner I must change my name to that of Rothschild.” This was plainly calculated to kill the idea, and it had the desired effect: Montefiore “most decidedly did not like this condition” and indeed “approved of it so little that [he] resolved not even to speak about it to [his] Uncles.” As the next best thing, this thick-skinned young man then suggested that he might join the London house without the status of a partner but with the possibility of marrying Lionel’s sister Hannah Mayer. But this proposal too was rejected, as we shall see.

  There was a danger in the policy of intermarriage, however, which the Rothschilds can scarcely have realised. Prohibitions on cousin marriage had been widespread within Christian culture since the sixth century, when Pope Gregory ruled that “the faithful should only marry relations three or four times removed.” In nineteenth-century America, eight states passed laws criminalising cousin marriage and a further thirty made it a civil offence. William Cobbett even cited the fact that “Rothschild married his own niece” as an argument against Jewish emancipation. But Jewish law had no such restrictions, while the enforced exclusiveness of the ghetto in a town like Frankfurt positively encouraged cousin marriage. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that the scientific study of heredity began, and only in the second half of the twentieth century that a real understanding of the effects of cousin marriage and other forms of group endogamy has been reached by geneticists. It is now known, for example, that the high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews of Tay-Sachs disease—a condition which fatally damages the brain—is the legacy of centuries of marriage between relatively closely related individuals. Marrying a cousin—especially when the family had spent centuries in the Frankfurt ghetto—was from a strictly medical point of view risky, no matter what the financial rationale. If either Mayer Amschel or Gutle had carried a single copy of a harmful recessive gene, then every time two of their grandchildren married (and it happened four times), there would have been a one in sixteen chance of both partners inheriting a copy of the damaged gene; in which case their children would have had a one in four chance of receiving two copies of it and hence suffering from the disease in question.

  The Rothschilds were fortunate not to fall victim to the kind of recessive gene which spread haemophilia through the ranks of nineteenth-century royalty. The only indication of poor health in the next generation is the fact that, of Mayer Amschel’s forty-four great-grandchildren, six died before the age of five. By modern standards that is a high level of infant mortality (13.6 per cent compared with 0.8 per cent today); on the other hand, around 25 per cent of all children died before their fifth birthday in Western Europe in the 1840s. Of course, the alternative possibility exists that there was a Rothschild “gene for financial acumen,” which intermarriage somehow helped to perpetuate. Perhaps it was that which made the Rothschilds truly exceptional. But that cannot easily be demonstrated, it seems unlikely, and, even if it was the case, those concerned knew nothing of it.

  SEVEN

  Barons

  When [Rothschild] obtained the . . . title [of baron], it was said,“Montmorency est le premier Baron Chrétien, et Rothschild est le premier Baron Juif.”

  —THOMAS RAIKES

  Amschel’s garden in the Bockenheimer Landstrasse was a symbol of emancipation from the ghetto. However, it would be wrong to suggest that his brothers and their descendants were motivated solely by the same yearnings as Amschel in their decisions to purchase property. As Carl’s counter-proposal for a more imposing town house suggests, considerations of economic utility and social prestige also required more spacious residences—a place where members of the political elite could be wined and dined in comfort. Two possibilities were discussed at the same time that Amschel was buying his garden: the purchase of more elegant town houses; and the purchase of country estates.

  Carl got his way in Frankfurt with the purchase in 1818 of the relatively modest house at 33 Neue Mainzer Strasse. In Nathan’s case, the need for a town house separate from New Court was, of course, even more pressing: by 1817 he and Hannah had no fewer than five children—all under ten—and another on the way. (As yet, all his brothers apart from Salomon were still childless, and Salomon had only Anselm and Betty, who lived in relati
ve comfort with their mother in the Schäfergasse house in Frankfurt.) In June 1817 Nathan therefore offered the stockbroker James Cazenove £15,750 “payable in cash immediately” for Grosvenor House. Characteristically, however, Nathan refused to pay more than he thought an investment was worth: when Cazenove demanded £19,000 the deal fell through. In fact, it was not until 1825—by which time there were seven children—that Nathan finally acquired the lease on 107 Piccadilly from a member of the Coutts family. At the same time, Moses Montefiore, his brother-in-law and neighbour in St Swithin’s Lane, also moved west to Green Street, off Park Lane.

  James, of all the brothers the most aesthetically and socially ambitious, was quicker off the mark. In 1816 or 1817 he moved from his original quarters in the rue Le Peletier to the rue de Provence in the Chaussée d’Antin (Paris’s main financial centre, in the 9th arrondissement). This did not satisfy him, however, for in December 1818 he bought the hôtel at 19 rue d’Artois (renamed rue Laffitte in 1830) which had been built for the banker Laborde before the Revolution, and occupied during the Empire by Hortense, the daughter of Josephine, and Napoleon’s Police Minister Fouché. Twelve years later, his brother Salomon bought the house next door (17 Rue Laffitte), though it was not until the mid-1830s that the work of renovation and redecoration of both houses was complete.1 Only in Vienna did it prove impossible to purchase a town house in this period: Salomon continued to rent the Hotel zum Römischen Kaiser in the Renngasse until in 1842 he finally secured an exemption from the rule barring Jews from owning property in the imperial capital.

  Nathan, Salomon and James also lost no time in acquiring places in the country—though it should be remembered that in those days, before the growth of London and Paris and the development of railways, it was neither feasible nor necessary to travel far in search of a rural retreat; “suburban retreat” might be a more accurate description. Nathan’s first step in this direction was taken in 1816, when he purchased what his sister Henrietta called “a beautiful country estate”—in fact an eight-acre property on the road between Newington and Stamford Hill in the Parish of St John at Hackney. It was there, rather than in New Court, that he and his family thenceforth lived—in contrast to James, who continued to live “over the shop,” just a short distance away from the bourse and the Banque de France. It was not until nearly twenty years later that Nathan moved westwards (and upwards), buying the larger and more distinguished Gunnersbury Park near Acton. Built in 1802 for George III’s youngest daughter Amelia, Gunnersbury was a large Italianate villa with extensive gardens including a small ornamental lake and a neo-classical “temple.” Nathan commissioned the architect Sydney Smirke to enlarge the building, adding an orangerie and a dining room, and to enliven the austere façade with some fake marble decoration; he also consulted the landscape specialist John Claudius Loudon about the park.

  Nathan himself remained at heart an urban creature: country life—even at Stamford Hill—did not really suit him. “One of my neighbours,” he told Buxton a year before the move to Gunnersbury, “is a very ill-tempered man; he tries to vex me, and has built a great place for swine, close to my walk. So, when I go out, I hear first grunt, grunt, squeak, squeak.” Though he was quick to insist that “this does me no harm, I am always in good humour,” it is hard to miss the confirmed city-dweller’s unease with the alien world of agriculture. It may just have been the smell, of course, but Nathan may also have suspected that his neighbour’s choice of livestock had an anti-Jewish connotation. Nor—in marked contrast to James and his own sons—did he have the slightest desire to ride, hunt or watch horses race.2 In this passage from Endymion, Disraeli evidently had Nathan (here “Neuchatel”) and Gunnersbury (“Hainault House”) in mind:

  [Neuchatel] was always preparing for his posterity. Governed by this passion, although he himself would have been content to live forever in Bishopsgate Street . . . he had become possessed of a vast principality, and which, strange to say, with every advantage of splendour and natural beauty, was not an hour’s drive from Whitechapel.

  Hainault House had been raised by a British peer in the days when nobles were fond of building Palladian palaces . . . [I]n its style, its beauty, and almost in its dimensions, [it] was a rival of Stowe or Wanstead. It stood in a deer park, and was surrounded by a royal forest. The family that had raised it wore out in the earlier part of this century. It was supposed that the place must be destroyed and dismantled . . . Neuchatel stepped in and purchased the whole affair—palace, and park, and deer, and pictures, and halls, and galleries of statue and bust, and furniture, and even wines, and all the farms that remained, and all the seigneurial rights in the royal forest. But he never lived there. Though he spared nothing in the maintenance and the improvement of the domain, except on a Sunday he never visited it, and was never known to sleep under its roof. “It will be ready for those who come after me,” he would remark, with a modest smile.

  Although we know that Nathan did sometimes stay there during the week as well, there seems little doubt that he bought Gunnersbury primarily for the sake of his children; and it was not until two years after his death that the house was used for large-scale entertainment.

  In France, James and Salomon both bought houses outside Paris, beginning in 1817 when James acquired what was in effect a summer house with a three acre garden at Boulogne-sur-Seine. Nine years later Salomon bought the rather grander house across the river at Suresnes built for the duc de Chaulnes in the eighteenth century. With its ten acres situated on the banks of the Seine (near what is now the rue de Verdun), it played a similar role to Gunnersbury as a country residence within convenient distance of the city. James waited until 1829 before buying the much bigger hunting estate at Ferrières, with its dilapidated château and 1,200 acres some twenty miles to the east of Paris. Unlike Nathan, James genuinely seems to have enjoyed country life. He looked forward to sleeping at Ferrières as soon as he had bought it and when Hannah Mayer visited him and Betty there in 1833, she found them happily “superintending a little farm.”

  For the Rothschilds based in Frankfurt and Vienna, however, the purchase of rural estates had to wait. Amschel himself observed that “the first question anyone asks in Germany is: ‘Do you have a country estate?’ ” But he and Carl agreed that it would be a mistake to rise to this socially alluring bait. The ownership of an estate implied a claim to aristocratic status which the ownership of a mere garden did not, and they evidently feared that evincing such delusions of grandeur would fuel the anti-Jewish backlash of the post-war period. At the same time, they doubted the economic rationality of buying agricultural land. What did they know about farming? “Often these estates bring in not more than two per cent,” warned Carl—indicating that the brothers were still inclined to regard land as just another form of investment. Such attitudes persisted: Rothschild purchases of land in the next generation were always based on calculations of future yield; and the family managed its immovable assets as carefully as the more liquid components of its portfolio.

  Society

  The original and most frequently cited justification for acquiring these properties had been typically instrumental: each of the brothers needed a large and respectable house in which to entertain the ministers and diplomats who were their most important clients. The acid test of this strategy was whether the sort of figures the Rothschilds wished to entertain would accept their invitations. It was an uphill struggle.

  In December 1815 Buderus—the brothers’ trusted partner in their dealings with Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel—threw a ball. “Bethmann, Gontard, and all the ministers and merchants are invited,” complained Amschel bitterly. “We lent the silver. [But] the Finanzräte Rothschild are again left out and not invited.” Carl’s theory was that Buderus was embarrassed by his former intimacy with them: “He thinks we do not feel the proper respect for him, and that he therefore could not appear before us in such a dignified state. For you ought to know that honours and profits do not go hand in hand.” There was a simila
r snub three months later, when Amschel was bluntly informed that, had he been invited, “rumours would have gone round that we had paid for the ball.” At around the same time, Amschel complained that Gontard refused to see him too frequently on business lest his friends “start to treat him as a Jew.” Their exclusion as Jews from the Frankfurt Casino (gentlemen’s club) also rankled.