by Colin Brown
The anti-Semitic smears against the Rothschilds were resurrected for Nazi propaganda against the Jews at the start of the Second World War by Nazi spinmeister Joseph Goebbels. In 1940, after the Fall of France when Britain stood alone against the Nazis, Goebbels produced a propaganda film showing Nathan Rothschild bribing a French general to lose the Battle of Waterloo so that the Jewish financier could make his fortune by defrauding the Stock Exchange. It seems incredible that Goebbels would have bothered to recycle the smears about Rothschild at Waterloo for Hitler’s Nazis, but he wanted to spread poison about the Rothschilds to stir up hatred in Britain against the many Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany.
Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Rothschild’s role in the Battle of Waterloo still circulate on the Internet. One posted on a battle website in 2014 said: ‘Napoleon stood in opposition to Rothschild, which is why Wellington was sent to fight him.’ That would come as news to Wellington. The conspiracy theorists continue to claim Rothschild rigged the market with news of the battle, and by not prosecuting him the government that he served as its banker was complicit in a cover-up. The truth lies in N.M. Rothschild’s own archives, the letters between the brothers, the trading accounts and in the faded newspapers that were his daily life. Far from being delighted by his trading that morning on the Stock Exchange, Nathan and his brothers fell out. Amschel complained he was ‘swimming’ in gold coins in Frankfurt. Carl stopped payments and found he could not sell the British treasury bills in Amsterdam, even at a bigger discount. John Rowarth, the Rothschild agent in Paris, confirmed that he had been handed back unwanted Prussian specie worth £230,000 when he had reached Dunmore, Wellington’s Commissary-General. Rowarth had to go to considerable lengths to get to him – he described walking from Mons to Genappe ‘in the midst of a cloud of dust under a burning and scorching sun’ (it was hot before the torrential rains) and sleeping ‘under the cannon’s mouth on the ground’ to deliver the bullion, only to be told it was unwanted. Nathan petulantly accused his brothers of failing to follow his orders and frantically set about trying to minimise the damage when he went to the stock exchange.
In its famous edition of 22 June 1815, which carried Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch, The Times carried a clue to Rothschild’s trading on the news of the battle. It reported:
Those who attended minutely to the operations of the Stock Exchange yesterday were persuaded that the news of the day before would be followed up by something still more brilliant and decisive. Omnium rose in the course of the day to 6 premium, and some houses generally supposed to possess the best information were among the purchasers …
When it referred to ‘some houses’, The Times clearly meant N.M. Rothschild – and it makes it clear Rothschild was buying stocks, not dumping them. Nathan and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore bought up government stock ‘on a tremendous scale’.
The Course of Exchange, detailing the daily movement of government stocks during the weeks before and after Waterloo, shows the price of government stock did not crash after 18 June; it steadily rose, in response to the news and Rothschild’s concerted buying. The records for the Exchange show there was a fall in the value of 4 per cent Consols from 71 on 10 June to 69 on 15 June where they remained until the 17th. Sunday 18 June was not a trading day. When the markets opened on Monday 19 June, the price of Consuls gradually rose to reach over 70 on the 22nd when The Times appeared with Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch.10 The daily prices in The Morning Chronicle showed 3 per cent Consols at 56 on 21 June rising to 58 on Friday, 23 June. But it was weeks before they spiked – they took off in early October and reached over 61 before falling back slightly.
As rumours of a Wellington victory arrived in the City others followed Nathan’s lead and started buying, raising the price of government stocks. These rises helped N.M. Rothschild cover some of his losses on gold, but they were not enough to make his first million. Victor Rothschild, in his history of his family, estimated that for Nathan to have made £1 million in profits on the news from Waterloo, he would have had to invest over £14 million and he simply did not have that sum available. At the most, he had about £2 million to invest.
The truth is far more complex. The historian Niall Ferguson, who wrote the definitive biography of the Rothschilds, said Nathan made his fortune on a gamble over a much longer period.11 He used the Rothschilds’ gold to invest heavily on the bond market. On 20 July 1815 the London Courier reported Nathan had made great purchases of British government bonds, though many thought the price he paid was too high. His gamble was that peace would lead to a sharp reduction in government spending, which would send the price of the government long-term loan stocks up as its requirement for borrowing fell. His brothers had a serious cash-flow crisis and pleaded with him to sell his stocks to refloat their coffers. He flatly refused. Instead, he kept on buying government stocks. Salomon complained: ‘Dear Nathan, You write that you have one million or two million over there. Well you really must have, because our brother Amschel is bust. We are bust. Carl is bust. So one of us must have the money.’
The stress was almost unbearable for Nathan, for in the midst of this turmoil his sister Julie died, aged 35. Her death almost stopped him trading. Two weeks after Waterloo, Nathan told his brother Carl:
I feel my spirits very depressed indeed and by no means able to attend to business as I could wish. The melancholy communication of the death of my sister has entirely unhinged my mind and have done but very little business today on that account.
But Nathan held his nerve. As the price of bonds began to rise over the coming months, he kept on buying. Despite his brothers’ desperate entreaties to sell, Nathan continued to hold his nerve for two years.
In July 1817, with bond prices up by 40 per cent, he sold his holdings. Today, his profits on that transaction would be worth an estimated £600 million. It was on that gamble that Nathan built the empire of N.M. Rothschild, not the outcome of the battle at Waterloo. He undoubtedly made a windfall on the news from Waterloo, but the evidence suggests he made his fortune despite the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, not because of it.
Nathan signed a new twenty-one-year lease on New Court in December 1815 at a rent of £175 per annum. But by 1816 the pressures of a growing business and family, together with a high public profile, led Rothschild – by now he had six children – to move to a more spacious villa at Colberg Place, Stamford Hill (where a number of notable Jewish merchants’ families later lived), leaving New Court as the business headquarters of his growing finance house. Nathan bought Gunnersbury Mansion – now a public park – in West London in 1835, the year before he died.
New Court was to become the bustling hub of an international financial empire. In 1824 Nathan and Moses worked together to found the Alliance Assurance (now developed into Royal and Sun Alliance). By 1826 Nathan had made enough to come to the rescue of the Bank of England around the corner when there was a run on the Bank. New Court also was to become the scene of many meetings to secure civil rights including the right to sit in Parliament for the Jewish community won by Catholics in 1829. When he died, a funeral shawl suggests he left around £5 million, as well as a lasting legacy of one of the world’s great finance houses in his adopted country. He rose from rags to become the richest man in Britain and possibly the world. Aristocrats such as the Duke of Devonshire earned as much from the land each year as Nathan Mayer Rothschild did from financial deals on the Stock Exchange, but they were heavily in debt to the bankers, having taken out loans to finance their lavish estates. A social reckoning was coming.
In its report of the Battle of Waterloo, The Times of 22 June 1815 observed: ‘Whoever fell on this glorious day cannot have fallen in vain. The fabric of rebellion is shaken to its base.’12 That might have been true about the revolution in France but it was wholly wrong about unrest in Britain.
Notes
* The hotel has preserved the rooms in their original appearance.
** Rear Admiral Sir Pulte
ney Malcolm commanded a Royal Navy squadron in the North Sea during Napoleon’s 100 days from his flagship, HMS Royal Oak.
* The Colonial Office was on the left at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was later demolished to make way for the Victorian Foreign Office.
* The bet for 500 guineas between Lord Cholmondeley and Lord Derby is listed in the club’s historic betting book for 1785.
1. Lord Rothschild, The Shadow of a Great Man (privately printed, 1982; reprinted 1991), p. 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Vansittart to J.C. Herries, 11 January 1814, RAL T37/8 (copy).
4. Lord Rothschild, The Shadow of a Great Man, p. 22.
5. Lucien Wolf, ‘Waterloo’, Westminster Gazette, 26 June, 1909.
6. 5th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 172.
7. Rowarth, 27 July 1815, Rothschild Archive Library, 112/51 T3/341.
8. Louise J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers (London: J. Murray, 1884, www.openlibrary.org), p. 59.
9. N.M. Rothschild, letter to Carl Rothschild, 20 June, RAL T5/98.
10. Appendix, The Waterloo Despatch, Reginald Colby Monograph 24, (London: Wellington Museum HMSO, 1965), p. 41.
11. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild Money’s Prophets 1798–1848 (London: Penguin).
12. The Times of London, 22 June 1815.
9
REGENCY RIOTS
The Regency period has been dubbed the Age of Elegance. It is famous for fine houses on classical lines, flamboyant balls, ladies in elegant dresses, Beau Brummel and, topping it all like a star on a tiered cake, the Prince Regent himself. The Regency was also an age of riots and when Wellington’s men returned from the battle to end the Napoleonic Wars they found a country at war with itself.
Just three months before the Battle of Waterloo, Lady Melbourne, one of the fading beauties of the Regency period, wrote to her niece Annabella, Lady Byron, about a mob riot outside her elegant stucco-fronted house overlooking Horse Guards Parade in the heart of Whitehall:
A Mob having assembled upon the Parade (Horse Guards) to rescue a Man who had been taken up by the constables, it was necessary to have ye assistance of the Military and about a dozen of the Horse Guards galloped at the people and dispersed them. Two Men were rode over but not hurt – and this passing close to my Windows* made it impossible not to leave off writing and it was with great difficulty I could finish my letter … last Night the Mob had many attempts upon different Houses but found them all guarded and no mischief was I believe done.
The mob was protesting against a bill to keep the price of corn artificially high to protect the farmers – including the landowning aristocracy – that also increased the price of bread, the staple food of the poor. Riots caused panic in the government of Lord Liverpool and redcoats ringed the Houses of Parliament to protect MPs from the violence of the mobs when they voted the Corn Laws through. Nicholas Vansittart, the Chancellor, told MPs that if they voted against the Corn Laws they were giving in to mob rule:
There would be more real cowardice in giving way to the threatening riots which existed, and in transferring the legislative functions from their constitutional guardians, the King, the Lords, and Commons, to an outrageous mob.
Riots were not new – they had been going on for a generation in protest at the hardship caused by the social upheaval with a mass population shift from the country to the factories, as Britain changed from an agricultural society to the first industrialised nation on earth – but Lady Melbourne noted that the violence had increased:
Today it rains hard which will probably prevent their assembling in great Numbers and the Town is full of Military so I conclude the Ministers think themselves tolerably Safe – they were very much frightened and not without reason for this Mob seems to be extremely savage and much more in earnest than any I ever remember. They tear up the Iron rails and force open the door of the House and if they get in as they did at Mr Robinson’s (Frederick John Robinson was a vocal advocate of the Corn Laws) they throw all the furniture out of the Windows into ye Street where it is broken to pieces or carried away …
Elizabeth Milbanke, Lady Melbourne, was remarkable, even in an age of extraordinary women. She had a string of lovers including the two royal princes, George and Frederick (Duke of York), both of whom fathered children by her, but she was far more politically astute than her fashionable friend, Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire, and just as beautiful in her prime. Lady Melbourne climbed the social ladder on her back, securing titles and advancement for her family through her lovers while presiding over a Whig salon that attracted the shining wits* of the age, including Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who drew on Georgiana and Lady Melbourne for Lady Teazle and Lady Sneerwell in his farce School for Scandal. In her letter, dated 12 March 1815, Lady Melbourne said someone had tossed a loaf of bread into the gardens at the Prince Regent’s Carlton House as a warning about the Corn Laws. It had been dunked in blood, she said, and tied up in a black mourning crape: ‘This has caused some mirth as it must have been done by some person as a Joke but which I have no doubt would be taken very seriously,’ she added. Lady Melbourne was hinting at fears there was a darker, more sinister threat to the monarchy from the turmoil on the streets. The French Revolution began with a bread march by women seeking relief from hunger to Versailles, supposedly prompting Marie Antoinette to say: ‘Let them eat cake.’ The aristocrats of Britain feared the Terror that had gripped Paris was stalking London. It was only three years since Spencer Perceval, the prime minister, was assassinated by John Bellingham. It had nothing to do with revolution – he was a deranged businessman with a grudge against the government – but it unnerved Cabinet ministers. Lady Melbourne had a daily reminder across the road from her front door that King Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in 1649, long before the French adopted the idea. Bread riots carried real menace in Regency Britain, and the poverty was made worse by the sudden outbreak of peace that left many ex-soldiers destitute. Tens of thousands of men were discharged from the army with little prospect of work.
As N.M. Rothschild predicted, the government adopted austerity with the peace by abolishing income tax and slashing spending. The defence budget was cut by 75 per cent from £43 million in 1815 to £10.7 million in 1820. The army was more than halved over the next decade from 233,000 in 1815 to 92,000. The soldiers – the ‘scum of the earth’ – had to find a living where they could, mostly in the new factories. Rifleman Benjamin Harris saw:
thousands of soldiers lining the streets and lounging about the different public houses with every description of wound and casualty incident to modern warfare … the Irishman shouting and brandishing his crutch; the English soldier reeling with drink; and the Scot with grave and melancholy visage sitting on the steps of the public house amongst the crowd listening to the skirl of his comrades’ pipes …1
The Prince Regent seemed impervious to the plight of his people, and came to embody all the grievances of the mob. He had become regent in 1811 to take over the powers of the king from his father, King George III, when he became incapacitated by bouts of ‘madness’, thought to be a blood disorder called porphyria.* He celebrated with a lavish party at Carlton House terrace – live fish were carried in an ornamental canal on the banquet table and the dinner service cost £60,000 – and he went on a huge palace spending spree to match his new powers. The Prince Regent overspent the £2.8 million (the equivalent purchasing power of £181 million today) he was granted on the Civil List over the three years from 1812 to 1815 by a staggering £900,000 (£58m today). Worse, ‘Prinny’ asked Parliament to advance him a further £100,000 (£6.4m) to celebrate becoming an unrestricted Regent, including a new suit of clothes. He ran up bills all over town – he had a massive credit account of £490 – equivalent to £31,000 today – at his Savile Row tailor Jonathan Meyer (later Meyer and Mortimer) often for letting out his clothes to accommodate his growing girth. They st
ill have the account books in copperplate script for enlarging a jacket in the breast and a yellow waistcoat made higher in the neck with added lace to hide his double chins. He was lampooned as a gluttonous, drunken, womanising, gambling, bloated buffoon, but ‘Prinny’, like a spoiled child, refused to tighten the royal belt. In 1815 he commissioned his architect John Nash – the architect for his ambitious redesign of central London with Regent Street – to carry out a lavish refurbishment of interiors at Carlton House and turn his classical villa by the sea at Brighton into a Moghul-inspired pleasure palace with domes and fabulously exotic chinoisserie that brought the shock of the Orient to the East Sussex coast. Here he could indulge his twin passions of food and fun. The Whig MP George Tierney successfully demanded a Commons inquiry into the royal expenses after protesting the Prince Regent had run up bills of £260,000 for furniture, upholstery costing £49,000 and plate and jewels costing £23,000 in a single year for Carlton House.
By 1816, even the Tory government of Lord Liverpool had become alarmed at the prince’s excesses. In an extraordinary move, the prime minister, the Leader of the Commons Lord Castlereagh and Chancellor Sir Nicholas Vansittart wrote a joint letter to the prince warning him to call a halt to his lavish extravagance or they would not weather the coming storm. They clearly feared the Prince Regent’s spending could be the spark that could set off an English revolution. Tom Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man had proved popular, vastly outselling Edmund Burke’s 1790 attack on the revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France. They reminded him the government was having to ‘enforce a system of economy and retrenchment’ to reduce the debts caused by the Napoleonic Wars and the aftermath of Waterloo. Landowners were ‘obliged to submit to losses and privations as well as to retrenchment’. They told him bluntly the only means of ‘weathering the impending storm is by stating on the direct authority of Your Royal Highness and by your command … that all new expenses for additions or alterations at Brighton or elsewhere will … be abandoned.’