The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  Of the London-based Rothschilds, Lionel himself was among the first to arrive; his youngest brother Mayer was already there, as he was in the process of completing his studies in Germany. Their father set off from London at the beginning of June, accompanied by his wife and two unmarried daughters, the vivacious Hannah Mayer and the musically inclined Louise. Left behind in London to mind the office at New Court was Nathan’s third son, Nat. His other son Anthony was in Paris, where he would perform the same deputising role when his uncle James also left for Frankfurt. This he did on June 4, preceded by his wife Betty and their four young children: Charlotte, the eldest at eleven, Alphonse, Gustave and the baby Salomon James. They arrived in Frankfurt eight days later. Just before them, James’s brother Salomon had arrived from Vienna accompanied by his son Anselm. While they naturally stayed at the house in the Neue Mainzer Strasse where Anselm’s wife Charlotte and the children awaited them, the less frequent visitors to Frankfurt had to be put up in hotels: the London Rothschilds were booked into the Römische Kaiser, the Paris Rothschilds stayed at the Russische Hof, and the Montefiores—doubly related to the Rothschilds by marriage—in the Englische Hof. Altogether, by the time all had assembled, there were around thirty-six Rothschilds in Frankfurt. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were few other guests: the only “outsiders” referred to in the surviving correspondence are Mayer’s tutor, Dr Schlemmer, and the composer Gioacchino Rossini, a friend of both James and Lionel, whose role was “to add to the gaiety of our party.”

  Left alone in charge of the Paris office for the first time, Anthony felt ill at ease, though this was a consequence more of boredom than of the burdens of responsibility. “Am not in good spirits,” he complained to his brother Nat, similarly situated in London. “Nothing is so disagreeable than to remain alone. Everything is uncommonly flat . . . How do you amuse yourself quite alone? You are better off than I am for here they have all gone and shut up the house, so I dine every day at a Cabaret [tavern].” The Paris market was in the traditional summer doldrums, and his uncle James’s advice from Brussels—where he and Nathan had stopped briefly on business—had scarcely been an encouragement to undertake new business:

  In my opinion you should try to leave everything alone until your good father returns, and if anyone should put a proposal to you, you should reply that you will first have to consult your father, and you will thereby gain some time and some peace and quiet. Don’t take any of this to heart and take my advice, hold on to your money and don’t spend any of it.

  Nat, by contrast, was under pressure, for his father preferred to keep his sons busy in his absence. No sooner had he arrived in Frankfurt than he despatched a characteristically restless letter, not only urging Nat to buy this security or sell that, but also exerting an indirect pressure on his brother in Paris:

  You must always put Anthony in the way of selling, as he belongs to the Bull party and does not like to sell until you have made some few purchases, therefore when the prices are low you can buy a little and encourage Billy [Anthony] to do business and write to him at the same time, that you are pleased and satisfied with his remittances and with everything he does. I have written to him, that every day he must do something whatever may be the price, the same you can write to him.

  A few days later—before James himself had arrived in Frankfurt—Nathan wrote directly to Anthony telling him “to keep business going” and “keep yourselves occupied.” Neither he nor Nat could feel comfortable on receiving such contradictory instructions from their father and uncle.

  Lionel too was faintly disgruntled. He was impatient to be married. Though the match was an arranged one, intended primarily to strengthen the links between the London and Naples branches of the family—and to prevent precious family capital going to outsiders—he had fallen in love with his future wife, or at least had persuaded himself that he had. He was also eager to leave Frankfurt. As he put it to his brother Anthony, he was “heartily glad the day for me quitting beautiful Frankfurt will soon be here”; for, like all the younger Rothschilds who had grown up in England, he found his father’s birthplace not only tediously provincial but also socially uncomfortable, in that the generality of Jews in Frankfurt were still subject to more legal discrimination than their counterparts in London or Paris, even if he and his family were to some extent exempted. His unease was only increased by his father’s late arrival from Brussels, and by every subsequent delay.

  Besides the wedding itself, there were two ulterior motives for this large family gathering—one of the biggest Rothschild conclaves of the nineteenth century, and without question the most important. Lionel’s marriage to Charlotte was not the first endogamous marriage in the family’s history: as we have seen, their uncle James had married their cousin (and his own niece) Betty in 1824; and Anselm had married his cousin Charlotte two years later. More—many more—such intermarriages were to follow. The only question, as Lionel put it, was “how the younger branches of the family will agree”; or, to be precise, who would be paired off with whom. This was the real reason for the presence in Frankfurt of the numerous younger siblings and cousins: they were being assessed for their potential compatibility. Thus Carl’s son Mayer Carl was tentatively identified as a suitable match for Lionel’s youngest sister Louise; Louisa Montefiore was discussed as a possible wife for Anthony; Joseph Montefiore was spurned by both Hannah Mayer and Louise; and their brother Mayer ruled out as a husband for James’s Charlotte. The marriage market evidently provided more entertainment for mothers than for daughters: Hannah Mayer complained of “dreadful tedious long dinners every day” punctuated by German and embroidery lessons. “Only fancy,” wrote a dismayed Louise to her brother in London: “to be seated as I am sometimes between Grossmutter and aunt Eva and to be stuffed so full as scarcely to be able to breathe.” The tedium was relieved only by her daily music lesson with Rossini.

  The third reason for the family gathering—and the most important—was business. Accustomed though they were to reaching major business decisions on the basis of their regular correspondence, even the five Rothschild brothers sometimes found face-to-face meetings indispensable. In the years before 1836 James had often crossed the Channel to meet Nathan, and Nathan had sometimes reciprocated; Salomon, the most peripatetic of the five, had been a frequent visitor to Paris and still travelled back and forth regularly between Frankfurt and Vienna; while Carl too divided his time between Naples, where he did business, and Frankfurt, where he preferred to educate his children. Yet the regularity of such shuttling had declined over the years as the brothers had aged, and as their business and family commitments in their respective places of residence had increased. The last time all five had met together had been in 1828.

  The most important item on their agenda in 1836 was nothing less than their future relations with one another. Since 1810, as we have seen, the house of Rothschild had been a partnership, based primarily on a detailed, legally binding contract as well as on the wills of the various partners, which determined how individual shares in the firm would be passed on to the next generation. It had been the custom to revise and renew the partnership agreement every few years: thus there had been new contracts in 1815, 1818, 1825—when Salomon’s son Anselm had been admitted as a sleeping partner—and 1828, when he had become a “real Associé.” Since then, Nathan’s three elder sons, Lionel, Anthony and Nat, had all entered the firm to serve their financial apprenticeships. By 1836 Nathan felt his eldest son was ready to become a partner on the same footing as Anselm; and it was primarily to agree the terms of his elevation that the brothers now met.

  Apart from the new partnership agreement, there were other matters which the brothers needed to discuss. The year 1836 was critical in the history of their operations in Spain, where a bloody civil war was raging; and there were also important transactions afoot with respect to Greece, Naples and Belgium, all countries in which the brothers had a financial interest. In addition, three of the brothers had recently begun to invo
lve themselves in an entirely new line of business: the financing of railway construction. James in particular was deeply embroiled in battles for control of the fast-developing French rail network—business which to some extent depended on his access, through Nathan, to the larger British capital market. Yet it was far from obvious that Nathan himself approved of this new direction the firm was taking. The first British railway “mania” was reaching its peak in 1836, when no fewer than twenty-nine new railway companies were chartered; but he, in common with all but one of the established London banks, had played no part in it. His preference was for stepping up the bank’s involvement in the United States, continuing to concentrate on making loans to states and financing trade, rather than investing in industrial concerns. Here too, however, there was matter for discussion, not least because of the brewing financial crisis on the other side of the Atlantic, the beginnings of which had begun to manifest themselves (in the form of a monetary tightening in London) on the eve of the brothers’ meeting.

  The negotiations went on between the partners in strict secrecy: all other family members were excluded. “They are now all assembled,” reported Lionel to his brother, “that is, the four are alone in [Papa’]s room and we are shut out. Papa I believe said something about our having a share in the London profit. They all seem to let him do as he likes. I do not know . . . whether they think of getting him round by good words and coaxing.” “The Family arrangements go on very amicably,” thought his mother. “There has been no difference.” By June 12 it appeared that Nathan had got his way without the “high words” his son had feared:

  Papa proposed that we should have half the profits of the London House and that he should have only half the profit the others make. Everything was agreed to immediately and not a word said. I was not in the room but this morning have heard so . . . I am sure you will be pleased in knowing that they all are pleased with each other and that there have not been any disputes . . . They all are very satisfied with the different cash accounts and did not expect to have seen the Houses so flourishing.

  “All parties,” it seemed, were “inclined to keep the peace.” Such fraternal harmony was evidently somewhat unusual. “Till now, thank heavens, there has not been one angry word between the Brothers,” wrote Lionel with evident surprise. “They pass their time at [Papa’s room] and the [counting] house, and dine altogether at one of the three houses quite en famille.” It was one of the rare occasions when the five brothers lived up to the first of the three ideals enshrined in their adopted motto: “Concordia.” The Frankfurt artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim captured this mood of harmony in the portraits he painted of the five brothers to mark the occasion.

  Only one shadow hung over the brothers’ deliberations and over the nuptial preparations beyond their closed doors; and that was the fact that Nathan Rothschild was dying. Or rather he was ill; for no one could conceive that the man who, since the death of his father in 1812, had been the unquestioned leader of the house of Rothschild, might die at the very height of his powers. While at Brussels, Nathan had suffered a recurrence of an earlier complaint, probably an ischio-rectal abscess. As his wife put it, he had “again a visit from his most unpleasant visitor, a disagreeable boil in a most inconvenient place and [which] annoys him considerably particularly in sitting down.” His son was more blunt: “Papa has a most terrible boil on his bottom and suffers very much from it. He has not yet been able to leave his bed and has a great deal of pain. The movement of the carriage inflamed it, so that he requires now double rest.”

  The final illness and death of Nathan Rothschild is a case study in the inadequacies of nineteenth-century medicine. The German doctors may not actually have killed their patient by their interventions, which aimed, not unreasonably, at draining the abscess; but they inflicted excruciating pain on him, unmitigated by any form of anaesthesia. Shortly after his arrival, an attempt was made to lance the boil, but another swelling quickly formed which “creates the same pain and confinement as the first.” “This, dear Anthony,” reported his distraught wife, “is very distressing as these things are so painful . . . but the doctors assure us of no danger. You know how impatient Papa is if he is ill,” she concluded hurriedly, “and I therefore must go to him.” “The large opening,” Lionel was able to report on June 13, “has been running famously and no other operation, it is expected, will be necessary. Professor Chelius arrived this morning and found both wounds in a much more forward state than he had imagined; in fact he is quite satisfied with the way they are going on and assures us that only time is requisite to see Papa quite restored.” His mother was equally reassured by this “celebrated Professor from Heidelberg, who unites great safeness of manner and incessant attention, with renowned ability” and by his “assurances that there is nothing more forming and the opening [is] going on well.”

  Needless to say, Nathan’s illness blighted the wedding celebrations. Although the bride’s parents decided to proceed with the ball they had planned to give on June 13, the bride herself was so “agitated” that she could not attend. Yet Nathan—with the phenomenal resolve which had characterised his whole life—refused to have the wedding postponed on his account. Indeed, he insisted on being present at it. On the day of the wedding, as his wife recorded, “he took courage at 6 o’clock in the morning to get up and walk to Charlotte’s which he effected tolerably and afterwards dressed—and went to Charles’s [Carl’s] to be present at the celebration of the ceremony.” “Everything passed off perfectly well,” the relieved groom was able to report to his absent brothers that afternoon. “Papa was well enough to come . . . and as his complaint is only one that gives pain, it required but a little resolution, of which you know Papa has enough. The ceremony lasted but half an hour and was very solemn . . . [It] went off uncommonly well as Papa was there and our family circle complete.” Indeed, Nathan seems to have gone out of his way to play down his illness, trying “with jokes of every kind . . . to shorten the speech of the worthy Rabbi and to cheer up those present.” It was an act. Immediately after the ceremony, “he was seized with the excessive pain which usually comes on about 2 o’clock and lasts for 6 hours.” Rather than return to the hotel, he was put to bed in his daughter’s house. While the newlyweds departed for a brief twenty-four-hour honeymoon at Wilhelmsbad,1 an increasingly irritable Nathan submitted once again to the surgeon’s knife. Although he bore “all his operations and dressing without a murmur,” he was now worried enough to insist that his doctor and erstwhile neighbour in New Court, Benjamin Travers, be summoned.

  For six weeks the family waited in vain for Nathan to recover. By the end of June he was well enough to resume dictating his orders to Nat via Lionel, but the final negotiation of the partnership agreement was postponed—to the evident irritation of James, who complained of eye-ache and longed for the comfort of a spa. Lionel was equally impatient. “Papa is going on pretty well but slowly,” he told his brothers. “Every day we have a family dinner which is long and tedious and all the day long they are running from one house to the other, doing nothing and talking of nothing.” But the doctors continued to open and drain the wounds of “hardness,” “matter” and “fibres” with little sign of real improvement in the long-suffering patient, who sought comfort in “Soda Water, Lavender, Oranges, Arrowroot and fruit” sent by courier from England. “The second [wound] was opened this morning,” reported Lionel on July 9, a month after his father had arrived in Frankfurt. “Papa underwent the operation with the greatest possible courage and all the time made jokes. The wound was larger than the first as the boil was most terribly deep and must have been very painful.” And so it went on, with the gathering financial crisis eerily mirroring the patient’s condition.

  Finally, on July 24, Nathan lapsed into a “violent” fever and was plainly “in danger”—probably the onset of septicaemia. The next day, in an agitated and near-delirious state, he summoned his son. “He has this instant called me,” an anxious Lionel wrote to Nat,

&nb
sp; to write that he wishes you to go on selling English Securities and Exchequer Bills, as well as £20,000 India Stock more. You are also to send an account of the different Stocks on hand. I do not know if I misunderstood him, but I did not like to ask for an explanation. [He also] said you are to sell . . . the securities that the Portuguese Government has given for the money they owe us, not minding one or two per cent.

  To Lionel, such sales across the board—and heedless of losses as large as 2 per cent—seemed so out of character as to be almost incomprehensible. Suddenly conscious that their father was dying, Nat and Anthony prepared to leave for Frankfurt. 2 But on July 28, before they could reach him, his brothers, his wife and the two sons present gathered round what was now unmistakably Nathan’s deathbed.

  It was a decisive as well as fraught moment in the history of the firm: for the head of the family was dying before the new partnership agreement had been signed. As Salomon told the Austrian Chancellor Metternich in a letter written less than two weeks after his brother’s death: “The agreements between us for a further period of three years [had] been drawn up, embodying every point, and they were ready for signature, for we still believed that our late brother would, with God’s help, recover. However, this was not to be, fate had decided otherwise.” Yet Nathan had just enough energy left for a final exercise of his domineering will. Salomon described how “three days before his death he told me all his thoughts and wishes with regard to the will which he then drew up, and which I then had written out in accordance with his intentions.” He was not always coherent now: his brothers remarked how he alternated between “more decisive demands” and “utterances already gradually interrupted and obscured by his sufferings.” But his message to the family was intelligible enough. Above all, they were to maintain “harmony, constant love and firm unity”—a conscious echo of his own father’s last words. What that meant in practice he spelt out with characteristic precision.