The Pillar
There was, however, something of a discrepancy between this imposing image of international power and the quite humdrum appearance of what Nathan Rothschild and his brothers actually did. The real Rothschilds bore little resemblance to the sinister figure portrayed in Die Generalpumpe. According to one of the many curious visitors drawn to the City to see him doing business at the Royal Exchange,2 Nathan was “a very common looking person, with heavy features, flabby pendent lips, and a projected fish eye. His figure, which was stout, awkward and ungainly, was enveloped in the loose folds of an ample surtout.” We have numerous portraits and caricatures which bear this description out. One of the earliest is an etching by Richard Dighton entitled A View from the Royal Exchange and first published in October 1817 (see illustration 10.iii). It is a side view of a man in a black coat and top hat, stomach thrust forward, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a sheet of paper. The image proved a popular one with illustrators: Nathan appears in a similar pose in George Cruikshank’s The Royal Exchange (1821) and in his Beauties of Brighton (1826). Each time it was reproduced, however, it changed subtly. Thomas Jones added a nice detail in his 1829 version A Pillar of the Exchange, which depicted Nathan in front of his favourite pillar at the south-east corner of the exchange (see illustration 10.iv). There is a clever ambiguity to the juxtaposition: Nathan is like the pillar in his solidity and immobility, but there is also an implied contrast between the whiteness and regularity of the pillar and Nathan’s black, protuberant shape.
10.iii: Richard Dighton, A View from the Royal Exchange (1817).
10.iv: Thomas Jones, A PILLAR of the EXCHANGE (1829).
Less subtle artists went further, accentuating Nathan’s protruding lower lip and stomach in ways which were unmistakably hostile. The French artist Jean-Pierre Dantan, for example, made a terracotta statuette of Nathan in 1832 which ranks as one of the most grotesque of all Rothschild caricatures. Here Nathan’s lips droop obscenely from beneath the brim of his hat like those of a large cod, while his distended belly defies gravity atop his skinny legs. Thackeray omitted the fat stomach in his sketch of N. M. Rothschild, Esq. which accompanied the lines quoted above (see illustration 10.v); but the final verses left no doubt that the author found Nathan physically repulsive:
Oh Plutus! your graces are queerly bestowed!
Else sure we should think you behaved infra dig.,
When with favours surpassing, it joys you to load
A greasy-faced compound of donkey and pig.
Here, just as he stands with his head pointed thus,
At full length, gentle reader, we lay him before ye;
And we then leave the Jew (what we wish he’d leave us,
But we fear to no purpose), a lone in his glory.
10.v: William Makepeace Thackeray, N. M. ROTHSCHILD ESQ., National Standard, May 18, 1833).
While the numerous silhouettes produced after Nathan’s death—most of which used the title The Shadow of a Great Man—were more sympathetic, they were not exactly flattering either. Even the various portraits of Nathan commissioned by the family do not really attempt to glamorise him. It is true that some who saw him at work detected, or thought they detected, a faintly heroic aura. The American visitor quoted above declared that “there was something commanding in his air and manner, and the deferential respect which seemed voluntarily rendered him by those who approached him showed that he was no ordinary person. ‘Who is that?’ was the natural question, ‘The King of the Jews,’ was the reply.” But, whatever his temperamental resemblance to Napoleon, the Emperor’s financial counterpart and nemesis was never recast by the romantic imagination in a heroic mould. What contemporaries saw was a fat man buying and selling pieces of paper:
The persons crowding around him, were presenting bills of exchange. He would glance for a moment at a paper, return it, and with an affir matory nod, turn to the next individual pressing for an audience. Two well-looking young men, with somewhat an air of dandyism, stood beside him making a memorandum to assist in the recollections of bargains regulating the whole Continental exchanges of the day.
Nor was his brother James any more ostentatious. In 1837 a Parisian journalist went in search of “M. de Rothschild in person . . . the name which is in every mouth, the Grand Orient of the rente, the key to the safes of all Europe.” He was surprised to see how modestly “the sovereign” entered “his capital”:
M. de Rothschild’s appearances are of short duration, between 3 and 3.25 p.m., that is to say, five or ten minutes before the close of business . . . He usually arrives accompanied by one of his nephews, but his entrance creates not the slightest sensation. People surround him eagerly, above all the brokers who are almost importunate, which does not prevent him from listening to them and replying to them with his habitual good humour. He himself greets and approaches first some of his fellow bankers; his conversation is never long and no one whispers a word of it; the bell rings [and] people start to leave; they go, and he goes just like everyone else—with no more ceremony than accompanied his arrival.
Salomon was apparently even more approachable in Vienna: “Every day from the opening of the Bourse at 12 o’clock to its close at four, he [is] besieged by brokers and stockjobbers anxious to give him reports of the tendency of the market, and eager to receive and to execute his commissions.”
Those who were admitted into the Rothschild offices were struck by the same unpretentious—though to outsiders enigmatic—bustle. When Prince Pückler first sought out Nathan in 1826, he was surprised to find that “the ruler of the City . . . in fact . . . occupies here only an insignificant location . . . and in the little courtyard of the counting house my access to this best-connected member of the Holy Alliance was impeded by a van loaded with silver ingots.” No detailed descriptions of the interior of New Court in Nathan’s day have survived; but we have what (allowing for authorial embroidery) may be an approximate description in Disraeli’s Tancred. Like Pückler, Tancred finds that the Rothschild-like Sidonia is already closeted with a foreign ambassador:
Tancred entered Sequin Court; a chariot with a foreign coronet was at the foot of the great steps which he ascended. He was received by a fat hall porter . . . who, rising in lazy insolence from his hooded chair, when he observed that Tancred did not advance, asked the newcomer what he wanted.
“I want Monsieur de Sidonia.”
“Can’t see him now; he is engaged.”
“I have a note for him.”
“Very well, give it me; it will be sent in. You can sit here.” And the porter opened the door of a waiting-room which Tancred declined to enter. “I will wait here, thank you,” said Tancred, and he looked round at the old oak hall, on the walls of which were hung several portraits and from which ascended one of those noble staircases never found in a modern London mansion . . .
“I can’t disturb master now [said the porter]; the Spanish ambassador is with him, and others are waiting. When he is gone, a clerk will take in your letter with some others that are here.”
At this moment, and while Tancred remained in the hall, various persons entered, and, without noticing the porter, pursued their way across the apartment.
“And where are those persons going?” inquired Tancred.
The porter looked at the enquirer with a blended gaze of curiosity and contempt, and then negligently answered him . . . “Some are going to the counting-house and some are going to the Bank, I should think.”
After this, the ingenuous visitor is left to cool his heels for a while until the ambassador’s departure is finally heralded by “a stir”:
“Now your letter will go in with the others,” [the hall porter] said to Tancred, whom for a few moments he left alone . . .
Tancred was ushered into a spacious and rather long apartment, panelled with old oak up to the white coved ceiling, which was richly ornamented . . . A Turkey carpet, curtains of crimson damask, some large tables covered with papers, several easy chairs, a
gainst the walls some iron cabinets, these were the furniture of the room, at one corner of which was a glass door, which led to a vista of apartments fitted up as counting-houses, filled with clerks, and which, if expedient, might be covered by a baize screen which was now unclosed.
The only thing which casts serious doubt on this is that the atmosphere in the other Rothschild houses was so very different. James, for instance, was always surprisingly accessible in his office. When he paid a visit in the late 1820s, Metternich’s son Viktor found it was:
like a positive magic lantern for people of the most various appearance and every kind of expression were constantly coming in and out. On that particular day the constant coming and going was specially noticeable, as securities quoted on the bourse were fluctuating violently. The great banker himself, who generally maintains an attitude of such dignified calm, betrayed a certain nervousness. Our conversation was frequently interrupted by bourse agents reporting quotations to their chief.
The Frankfurt bank was also, according to a rare contemporary description, “open plan” in its design:
He sits in his office in the midst of his clerks like a Padishah; below him are his secretaries, and around him may be seen a crowd of brokers, for ever coming and going. With a few words he dismisses each, for like a true business genius he knows at once what answer to give to every question, and what decision to arrive at on any business that may be laid before him for consideration . . . To speak to him privately on a matter of business is well nigh impossible; everything in his office is done openly as in a law court.
In other words, what went on in the Rothschild offices was not so very different from what went on at the various exchanges: much toing and froing of brokers, much exchanging of pieces of paper.
Those who came expecting some visible manifestation of Rothschild power therefore were invariably disappointed by what they could glimpse of the brothers’ routine activity—hence the temptation which lies behind so much Rothschild mythology to imagine some invisible mainspring: the Hebrew talisman, for example, or some sort of elaborate fraud of the sort perpetrated by Balzac’s Nucingen. The only real clue contemporaries could find to illuminate the Rothschilds’ prodigious success was the speed with which Nathan was able to make complex financial calculations and the ease with which he committed these to memory. “Even without [his sons’] assistance,” another writer remarked, “he is said to be able to call to mind every bargain he has made.” The same point was later made by his obituarist in The Times:
He never hesitated for a moment in fixing the rate, either as a drawer or a taker, on any part of the world, and his memory was so retentive, that, notwithstanding the immense transactions into which he entered on every foreign post day, and that he never took a note of them, he could dictate the whole on his return home with perfect exactness to his clerks.
“His ambition,” wrote another writer after his death, “was to arrive at his aim more quickly and more effectually than others and to steer towards it with all his energy. When his end was reached it had lost all it charm for him, and he turned his never- wearying mind to something else.”
To some, this restless aptitude could seem almost diabolical. “There is,” observed one who watched Nathan at work,
a rigidity and tension in his features that would make you fancy, if you did not see that it was not so, that someone was pinching him behind and that he was either afraid or ashamed to say so. Eyes are usually denominated the windows of the soul, but here you would conclude that the windows are false ones, or that there were no soul to look out of them. There comes not one pencil of light from the interior, neither is there one scintillation of that which comes from without reflected in any direction. The whole puts you in mind of a skin to let, and you wonder why it stands upright without at least something in it. By-and-by another figure comes up to it. It then steps two paces aside, and the most inquisitive glance that you ever saw . . . is drawn out of the erewhile fixed and leaden eye, as if one were drawing a sword from a scabbard. The visiting figure, which has the appearance of coming by accident and not by design, stops but a second or two, in the course of which looks are exchanged which, though you cannot translate, you feel must be of important meaning. After these, the eyes are sheathed up again, and the figure resumes its stony posture. During the morning, numbers of visitors come, all of whom meet with a similar reception and vanish in a similar manner; and last of all, the figure itself vanishes, leaving you utterly at a loss as to what can be its nature and its functions.
Overdone though it is, this account nevertheless captures another intimidating quality which contemporaries often remarked upon: Nathan’s tendency to veer between sang-froid and sudden, alarming action. In 1821 he was reported to have received the threat of assassination “with a smile, and after returning his thanks for the intelligence, with the observation, that as he felt he had never done wrong to any individual, he could not entertain the idea that any persons could have formed so atrocious a design as that described, and that he really thought the affair unworthy of his attention.” Two years later, however, when he found a stranger occupying his usual place at the Royal Exchange, he became “so excited by being displaced that it was some time before he could compose himself and commence business.” The Circular to Bankers tactfully alluded to Nathan’s “strong and unfettered will” and the “pride of temper resulting from his high new position which made him bear down at any personal risk all opposition.” This overbearing quality, as we have seen, often spilled over into his correspondence. “The language which Mr Rothschild could use when his anger overbalances his discretion,” recalled one who had evidently witnessed him in full flow, “was a licence allowed to his wealth . . . His mode of dictating letters was characteristic of a mind entirely absorbed by money-making; and his ravings when he found a bill unexpectedly protested, were translated into mercantile language ere they were fit to meet a correspondent’s eye.”
His brothers, to whom he wrote in his own hand, were not thus spared. We have already seen how brutal Nathan could be in his private letters to his brothers; he did not much mellow with age. In 1828 Salomon’s son Anselm wrote to Lionel, Nathan’s eldest: “Pray tell to your good father not to write in future such violent letters against Uncle Amschel. They hurt his health I assure you, and for what reason? because he wrote to your Papa, that he is in want for [sic] money and that you owe him in [sic] Account . . . the Man gets old and weak and if you are not a little careful in your letters he will give it up . . .” Six years later Nat reported that Amschel’s “state of health renders him very nervous” and recommended “very strongly” that his father “coax him a little in your letters & by no means . . . scold [him] as it has more effect than you imagine.” There were occasional clashes with the more resilient James too. In 1832 he “protested vehemently” against making a loan to Greece, for example, and did so only when he received a letter from New Court saying: “Under no circumstances must you allow the deal to slip through your fingers.” He was beside himself when Nathan then changed his mind, sending him a second letter saying: “Don’t do anything concerning Greece.” The two had a similar contretemps over Portugal in 1835.
Yet it is not enough to explain the Rothschilds’ financial success purely in terms of Nathan’s personality, important though it was. Increasingly in the 1830s, the main source of fraternal strife was not Nathan’s dominance, which was more or less uncontested, so much as his indifference. In 1831, for example, Lionel relayed a message to his father: “Uncle James hopes Papa does not do all the business in rentes in London for your account for it will quite destroy all the business between the two Houses and in the end others will run away with the business.” Two years later, Nat wrote from Frankfurt that his uncle Amschel “complain[ed] my dear Papa about your doing so little business with him . . . I am sure, my dear Papa, you will see what our good uncle wants, he wishes particularly that you should do as much business with him as formerly.” When this elicited no resp
onse from New Court, Nat was forced to try again:
He begs dear papa you will be so good as to do as much business as possible with him; he complains not a little of your giving the preference to Paris & Vienna. I must say that he is a most excellent man, & if it is possible to please him one ought to do so . . . [W]ith Uncle A. however it is advisable not to pay attention to trifles.
Trifles aside, there was plainly some truth in Amschel’s complaint. By the early 1830s the financial ties between the London and Frankfurt houses seemed to be loosening as the brothers saw less of one another. Nor was this the only sign that centrifugal forces were at work. Just a year later Carl in Naples levelled a very similar charge against James. This time it was Nathan who had to act as arbitrator between the two. “Concerning what our brother Carl has written to you, my dear Nathan, that I have not been regularly writing to him,” James wrote in response to some rebuke on the subject,
The House of Rothschild, Volume 1 Page 45