The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  When Disraeli finally secured the cherished premiership, Mary Anne confided in the Rothschilds at once, and the French Rothschilds wrote to express their delight at the success of the “extraordinary man.” Though realistic about the minority administration’s chances of survival, Lionel was critical of Delane for attacking the new Prime Minister in The Times. Disraeli for his part was remarkably candid with Lionel about his intentions with regard to the composition of the Cabinet, though he continued to keep him guessing about his legislative programme. On the Irish Church question, Lionel remarked in March 1868, “I fancy he has no fixed ideas and, like the Reform Bill, will be guided by circumstances.” “[T]here is no knowing,” he added two days later, “what Dis will do to keep on the top of the tree.” It seems that Lionel was now actively assisting Disraeli in his efforts by “leaking” information about Opposition intentions. “Yesterday the Diz’s were our only visitors,” he told his wife on March 9. “[H]e did not tell me much and wanted to know all the reports. When I told him that they [his Liberal sources] said many of his supporters would go against him in this Irish Question, he said that whatever he brought forward would be supported on his side by everyone. I recommended him to give some good evening parties.” When Disraeli was defeated in the 1868 election, Lionel remained supportive. “[I]n that great parliamentary struggle in which you play so prominent a part,” he wrote in March the following year, “if the tide has turned for a moment, it will only be an opportunity for you to display additional power of eloquence, and talent, and you will allow me to say that we shall always rejoice in your success, and feel personally grateful for the friendly feelings, which on every occasion you have evinced towards us.” Symbolically, he named a racehorse after a character in Disraeli’s novel Lothair, dashed off in the wake of defeat, while Anthony provided “a battalion of pheasants, and some hares.”

  Their relationship continued on the same footing while Disraeli was in Opposition. Disraeli was invited to 148 Piccadilly at least three times in 1870 and there were all kinds of other social contacts. He offered critical thoughts on one of Constance’s books, while Alfred offered him rooms in London when his own were unavailable. “[P]ray consent to spend some time under this roof,” wrote Charlotte from Gunnersbury in September 1873. “The sooner you come and the later you stay after the 1 st of October which is our great fast & day of atonement, the better we shall all be pleased and the more grateful we shall feel.” In addition to hospitality, Lionel could always offer valuable news from the other side of the political lines: inside information about the contents of a Liberal bill for example, or the editorial line Delane was planning to take in The Times. “Baron Rothschild ... is a Liberal,” Disraeli explained to Lord Bradford in a revealing aside, “and ... knows everything.” Small wonder the Liberals feared that Disraeli would pre-empt them by giving Lionel a peerage when he returned to power in 1874.

  The closeness of the friendship between Disraeli and the Rothschilds in these years can hardly be exaggerated; it is tempting (though not quite accurate) to say that he was treated as one of the family, especially after his wife Mary Anne’s death in 1872. It was Disraeli who gave Hannah away when she married Rosebery in 1878; and when the Prime Minister made his will that December, he nominated Natty as one his executors along with his lawyer Sir Philip Rose. Following Lionel’s death the following June, his sons replied to Disraeli’s condolences by telling him that their father “looked upon you as his ‘dearest friend.’” It is hard to think of anyone who was closer to him in these later years.

  Lionel’s sons continued their father’s gravitation towards “Beaconsfieldism,” though like him they continued to sit on the Liberal side of the Commons. By the time Disraeli’s “jingo” policy on the Eastern Question was being put to the vote in the Commons in 1878, the Liberal leadership had more or less written Natty off. Gladstone’s loyal lieutenant Sir William Harcourt suggested that, in common with many other “commercial men ... who find their pecuniary interests greatly damaged by the present state of things,” the Rothschilds had “gone Tory altogether.” Much as William Harcourt expected, Natty defied the official party line of abstention when the government sought emergency credits in February, and again two months later when Sir Wilfrid Lawson pressed an amendment opposing the calling out of the reserves in April, voting with the government on both occasions. He also opposed Lord Hartington’s two resolutions on the movement of Indian troops (May 23) and the Treaty of Berlin (August 2). This, it has sometimes been argued, was the political crossroads for the Rothschilds and other wealthy Jews, the moment at which their loyalty to Liberalism, forged in the prolonged campaign for Jewish emancipation, finally yielded to the appeal of Disraelian imperialism. It would be more accurate to see it as the first overt step away from Gladstonian Liberalism by a largely aristocratic or county-based Whig group numbering around forty.

  As Disraeli’s government crumbled in 1879-80 under Gladstone’s fierce onslaught on “Beaconsfieldism” (remembered in the history books as the Midloth ian campaign after the Scottish county seat which Gladstone was persuaded to contest at the election), Natty increasingly acted as a Tory in Liberal clothing. On one occasion, as he told Monty Corry in obvious embarrassment, he “got into the House just as the division was taking place & as I did not receive a hint from anyone found that I had voted in the majority wh was a censure on the Govt. I write this to you although you know I wd sooner have cut off both my hands than do such a thing.” He made amends in March 1879 when he warned Disraeli that Sir Charles Dilke intended moving a Liberal vote of censure over the government’s South African policy in the wake of the Zulu victory at Isandhlwana and that “a good many conservatives would abstain from voting.” This sort of information—gathered, as Natty put it, “from conversations in West End clubs and in the City”—may seem trivial now; but it was really the only way for a Victorian Prime Minister “to hear the opinions of the public” (meaning the political elite). By December 1879 Natty was obliquely affirming his new political allegiance by referring to the Liberal leader as “that archfiend Gladstone,” ending his New Year greetings to Disraeli with the wish “that he [Gladstone] will do you good and himself harm.” Ferdinand echoed this sentiment when he told Rosebery: “I wish your Mr G. at the bottom of the sea.”

  After the Liberal election victory in 1880, Alfred offered Disraeli a suite of rooms in his house at 1 Seamore Place, while Natty continued to furnish the latest news of Liberal infighting—though one suspects that the aim now was more to cheer an old man than to kindle the fires of effective Opposition. When Endymion was published, containing yet another fictionalised version of the Rothschilds in the form of the “Neuchatels,” Natty was fulsome in his praise (perhaps recognising that one of the differences between Sidonia and Adrian Neuchatel was the difference in social standing between himself and his father):One of these days “When the flag of St George’s waves over the plains of Rasselas” and Cyprus is a flourishing colony, “those who have failed in literature and arts” will no longer talk of your works as the dreams of a poet or the imagination of a visionary but will acknowledge as I have always done that you are one of the greatest British statesmen.

  It was, he declared, a “magnificent addition to British literature.” The venerable author continued to stay with Alfred—“the best and kindest host in the world”—until January 1881, when he moved into the house at 19 Curzon Street which he had bought with the proceeds of Endymion; and Alfred was one of the guests when he entertained there for the first and last time on March 10, 1881. When Disraeli died in the early hours of April 19, it fell to Natty to carry out his last wishes that he be buried alongside his wife at Hughenden and that his funeral “be conducted with the same simplicity as hers.” This meant politely declining the public funeral which Gladstone (through gritted teeth) proposed.

  Politics in “Bucks”

  Disraeli had been, as Alphonse said, “the best and the truest friend of our Family.” But it was not just this fri
endship which lured the Rothschilds away from the Liberal party. Of equal importance were ideological differences between Gladstonian Liberals—some of them distinctly Radical—and more conservatively inclined Whigs. These manifested themselves most obviously at elections.

  When the Rothschilds had first begun to establish themselves as a political force in Buckinghamshire during the 1850s, elements of the established Whig leadership in and around Aylesbury had been quite hostile. Lord Carrington referred to them caustically as the “Red Sea” while Acton Tindal talked of resisting the “circumcision” of the Aylesbury party. In 1865 Natty was returned unopposed for the seat, but there remained obvious differences with Tindal (for example over the abolition of Church rates). Three years later, however, it was the Rothschilds who all at once seemed to be on the right of the party. The Radical League secretary George Howell was more or less foisted upon them in Aylesbury, ending the cosy arrangement whereby a Rothschild and a Tory had been returned unopposed for the two-member constituency. In the City, Lionel found himself embarrassed by association with the Liberal candidate in Tower Hamlets, a convert from Judaism named Joseph d‘Aguilar Samuda. This may have been one of the reasons that he lost his seat—an unusual defeat in an election which saw an increase in the Liberal vote overall. Six years later, Lionel lost again. This time, however, the reason was the rift which had opened up between him and Gladstone on fiscal policy. As The Times later recalled, Lionel pointed out (“at perhaps the only great election meeting which he attended”),that Mr Gladstone’s proposal to abolish the Income-tax &c. would deprive the country of £9,000,000 a year and that the surplus would not reach more than half that amount. For the other half there must be more new taxes. When his audience shouted “No” and “Economy,” he replied that economy had not got so far as to save four millions and a half a year. Baron de Rothschild’s opinion was that new taxes must be imposed, and that they must be imposed upon property. He suggested license duties, such as are paid by commercial men in Austria.

  That advocating higher taxes can have negative electoral consequences is no modern discovery. Lionel was nevertheless vindicated by Northcote’s budget of 1874, which retained the income tax, albeit with a higher threshold and lower effective rate for incomes below £400 a year.

  The party political tensions between the Rothschilds and Gladstone came to a head in 1876, when Disraeli’s elevation to the Lords necessitated a by-election in his Buckinghamshire constituency at the very height of Gladstone’s “atrocitarian” campaign. Gladstone was eager for a Liberal victory and evidently saw the Bulgarian question as a means to that end: he sent the Liberal candidate Rupert Carington “250 little ones” (copies of his pamphlet) and followed the campaign with keen interest. When a friend of Granville’s sounded out Lionel five days before the ballot, he found himviolently in favour of Dizzy, & Derby—but talked as if he was in favour of Carrington [sic] but how impossible it was under the present system of voting to know how votes would go—Gave an instance 3 of his tenants, could not tell whether they would vote with him or the rector. His belief was that F[remantle] [the Tory candidate] would win by 5 or 600.

  This proved an accurate forecast.

  Two years later, the rift widened still further when the second Aylesbury seat was won by the Liberal candidate George W E. Russell—the nephew of Lord John. In a good example of the anti-Semitic undertone of the campaign against “Beaconsfieldism,” Russell had, as Granville admitted to Gladstone, “attacked Dizzy as a Jew, a Jingo & something else beginning with a J” (the other word was “Juggler”). When this was reported in the local Conservative Buckinghamshire Herald (despite Russell’s attempts to retract the word “Jew”) Natty was furious and took “the first opportunity of throwing dirt” at Russell when he next saw Gladstone. That leading Liberals were willing to act in this way makes it difficult to claim that the Rothschilds’ gravitation toward Disraeli was governed purely by differences with Gladstone over foreign policy.

  Diplomatic factors were undoubtedly important in their own right. It was a matter of “regret” in the eyes of the French Rothschilds when the Liberals won in 1880 because they regarded Conservative governments as more likely to “maintain the prestige and the influence of old England”; and “Mr Gladstone’s disregard for foreign policy” was the main reason they fervently wished Salisbury to remain in power at the end of 1885. It is true that, when Ferdinand decided to enter politics in 1885, he insisted that he wished to stand as a Liberal. But he intimated to the radically inclined Dilke that he had qualms about the party’s foreign policy and implied that his political allegiance might be conditional on the Liberals sticking to an imperialist line. This letter deserves to be quoted at length as an illustration of the Rothschilds’ political ambivalence in this period:I am not as you think by nature a conservative. Conservativism has been the ruin of several foreign countries and liberal politics have been the making of England. To liberalism we—you—owe everything. On no point and in no manner do I incline towards Toryism in any form. On the other hand though I may not be competent to express decided opinions on such matters I deplore for the sake of the country which I have adopted and I love truly the restricted policy of the present Govt. who have sacrificed if not the interests yet the magic powers of the English flag and name to the narrow issues of Parliamentary reforms. I am perhaps “plus catholique que le Pape” but I would cheer the Union Jack planted on every island of the Polynees, on every crag of the Himalayas, on every minaret of the East (this is a metaphor). You (I mean the Govt.) have to come [to] it [imperialism] after all in the long run. Vide the present expedition to Khartoum and augmentations to your colonies ...

  If I ever succeed in entering the House of Commons I mean to support the liberal Government of the day ... [But] if I find that after all in the future politics shape themselves in a manner which might be disquieting to my sympathies (I use on purpose a strong expression) I shall give up the game and retire into the usual obscurity of my existence.

  The significance of this letter becomes apparent when it is remembered that Ferdinand became a parliamentary candidate for the new single-member constituency of Mid-Buckinghamshire only because his cousin Natty had been made a peer. It has already been suggested that one reason Gladstone chose to elevate Natty at the end of his second ministry was to replace him in the House of Commons at the impending election; and it should by now be intelligible why he might have wished to do so. On October 29, 1884, Hartington’s secretary Reginald Brett wrote a letter on the subject to Lord Richard Grosvenor, the Liberal Chief Whip and patronage secretary, which illuminates this point. Brett began by suggesting “that some special civility should paid by you or Mr Gladstone to Natty Rothschild. He is not a very robust Liberal, but I suppose there is not much object in letting him drift, and still less in driving him over to the Tories.” This was an oblique suggestion that the idea of a Rothschild peerage be resuscitated. But he then went on to warn Grosvenor that replacing Natty in the Commons with Ferdinand would be unlikely to have the effect the Liberal leadership desired:If it is thought that the Rothschilds can be played off one against the other, and that because Ferdinand may be a more acceptable or more pliant colleague, he can be put forward at Natty’s expense, a very great mistake is made.

  The Rothschilds have held together for generations, and discipline in their family is differently understood from what it is in that of the Rus sells. If the Liberal party breaks with Natty, it breaks with the whole clan, and there is I imagine nothing to be gained by such a proceeding.

  Ferdinand’s letter to Dilke more than confirmed that diagnosis: if he was to take Natty’s place, the Rothschild line on foreign policy would remain the same. As its recipient sourly commented, “F. Rothschild wants to get into Parliament and I told him that he is a Tory and ought to stand as a Tory ... He will never get in as a Liberal nowadays, I’m sure.” This proved more or less correct: although Ferdinand initially stood as a Liberal (even expressing support for temperance in pursuit
of the Non-conformist vote), by 1890 he was describing himself in the House as “a drastic and ardent supporter of the [Salisbury] government.”

  The visitors book Ferdinand kept at Waddesdon provides a fascinating insight into the ambiguity of his politics. A survey of the more regular political visitors between 1881 and 1898 gives a slight predominance to the Liberals: Edward Hamilton leads the field with no fewer than fifty-two visits, followed by the Liberal leader Hartington (ten visits), the Liberal Home Secretary and Chancellor Harcourt (nine), Rosebery (nine) and Dilke (two). Other Liberal visitors included Gladstone, Reginald Brett, the historian Lord Acton, his colleague James Bryce (later Chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster and President of Board of Trade), the future leader of the party Herbert Asquith, Lord Carrington (who became Governor of New South Wales) and the Earl of Dalhousie (who became Secretary of State for Scotland). However, two of the most regular visitors were Liberal Unionists: the Attorney General Henry James, who visited seventeen times, and Joseph Chamberlain, who was a guest at Waddesdon on twelve occasions, often accompanied by his son Austen. And there were almost as many Tory visitors as Liberals: Harry Chaplin (President of the Boards of Agriculture and later Local Government) who stayed at Waddesdon twenty-six times; Lord Salisbury’s nephew and successor Arthur Balfour (eight visits); George Curzon, Salisbury’s Assistant Private Secretary and Under-Secretary of State for India (also eight); the President of the Board of Agriculture Walter Long (five); Lord Randolph Churchill (twice); the Under-Secretary of State for War Earl Brownlow (also twice); and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir James Fergusson.4