The House of Rothschild (13 page)

Lionel’s admission to Parliament was, as James wrote, “a real triumph for the family.” At the general election held the following year, his brother Mayer joined him in the Commons (along with David Salomons); and in 1865 his son Natty was elected. As Charlotte pointed out with glee, in a close vote (as in July 1864) Palmerston’s government could be “saved by the Jews.” Lionel’s election also had a wider resonance for the Jewish community as a whole: the Board of Deputies published resolutions expressing its “sincerest gratification ... respect and gratitude” and, henceforth, the anniversary of Lionel’s admission to the Commons would be prize-giving day at the Jews’ Free School—though Lionel pointedly underlined his own commitment to religious toleration by endowing the City of London school with “its most valuable [open] scholarship in honour of his taking his seat.”

But the political significance of the triumph has seldom been properly understood. Lionel had triumphed as a Liberal; and the long campaign had forged political and social links with a small but influential group of Liberal MPs. According to his diary, Gladstone dined with him or his brother Mayer four times and corresponded or met with members of the family on at least another four occasions in the period 1856 to 1864. Other Liberals whose names recur in Charlotte’s letters of the 1860s as regular visitors to 148 Piccadilly include Charles Villiers, the MP for Wolverhampton (who was President of the Poor Law Board from 1859 to 1866) and Robert Lowe, Chancellor in Gladstone’s first ministry.
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Yet it was not without significance that Lionel’s first act after signing the roll and shaking hands with the Speaker was to shake hands with Disraeli, whose contribution in this final phase of the battle may well have been decisive. Relations between Disraeli and the Rothschilds had been improving steadily since the early 1850s, and Lionel had in fact been in close communication with Disraeli during the decisive weeks of 1858. In January he had dined at Gunnersbury (along with Cardinal Wiseman and a host of Orléanist exiles). In May, Disraeli was heard to remark after the government had narrowly avoided defeat over policy in India: “What does the Baron say about it? He knows most things!” Two months later, on July 15, Lionel went to see the Chancellor in his office, “as we had not seen him since our Bill was in the House of Commons.” He found him:

Lionel responded to this by asking Disraeli “if he would dine with Johnny [Russell] and Co.”, but:

The undertone of scepticism in Lionel’s accounts of these encounters should not be taken to mean that Disraeli did not do all he could in 1858. On the contrary: his influence must surely account for Derby’s grudging capitulation. The closeness of relations between the two men immediately after Lionel’s admission to Parliament confirms that the Rothschilds no longer had any reason to doubt Disraeli’s bona fides. Despite the formidable political constraints under which he had to work, the creator of Sidonia and Eva had not failed his “race.”

It is instructive to compare the outright battle over the admission of Jews to Parliament in this period with the pragmatic fudge which allowed them to study at Cambridge. Here too the Rothschilds played a pioneering role. Indeed, their success in circumventing such religious restrictions as remained at Cambridge may explain why they were so taken aback by the intransigence of the House of Lords. It is illuminating to compare their tactics in the two cases.

The Rothschilds, it should be stressed, did not
need
to go to Cambridge, much less Oxford, any more than they needed to sit in the House of Commons. The education of Rothschild children remained for most of the nineteenth century a much more cosmopolitan affair than the ancient English public schools and universities could provide. Thus the family continued to rely on private tutors and to send children abroad for a substantial part of their studies, to ensure above all that they maintained the family’s multilingualism. As for learning about banking, the only way to do that was in a bank; if Cambridge offered anything, it was distraction from the priorities of the family business. Moreover, as in the 1820s and 1830s, the Rothschilds continued to attach almost as much importance to the education of daughters—unlike the public schools and universities, which of course remained overwhelmingly masculine until the late twentieth century. Anthony’s daughter Constance and Lionel’s son Natty had German drummed into them with more or less equal vigour. Charlotte in particular was a vehement advocate of formal study for her daughters and nieces. However, Mayer’s attendance at Cambridge had set a precedent which Charlotte was determined all her sons should follow. The trouble was that the position of Jews at Cambridge remained a grey area: formally excluded from taking degrees until 1856, they could nevertheless become members of the university—provided they were willing to fulfil the obligation to attend chapel imposed on undergraduates by all colleges.

It is curious that—unlike the oath of abjuration—this was an essentially Christian duty which the Rothschilds were prepared in principle to perform, provided their attendance at chapel was minimalistic and passive. As we have seen, Mayer had attended Trinity on just that basis in the 1830s; and when Arthur Cohen, a cousin on his mother’s side, resolved to read mathematics at Cambridge in the autumn of 1849—just after Lionel’s by-election victory over Manners—he assumed a similar arrangement would be possible. Through J. Abel Smith, one of Lionel’s most active political supporters, Mayer sought to persuade the Master of Christ‘s, James Cartmell, to bend the chapel rules for Cohen’s sake, arguing that (as Cartmell put it) “if I admit Mr Cohen, no one, except myself, need know what his religious creed is.” Mayer also told Cartmell “that Mr Cohen is ready to attend divine service in the college chapel.” The Master, however, was unpersuaded. “It would be a breach of good faith to the Society,” he argued, to conceal Cohen’s religion, while “it would be most repugnant to my feelings and contrary to my notions of what is right, to exact from Mr Cohen an outward compliance with a form of worship, the basis and spirit of which he entirely disclaims and disbelieves.”

To Mayer, this suggested that a precedent might be set “for pointed exclusion of the members of one religious community from the benefits of a Cambridge University education.” He and Moses Montefiore therefore turned to none other than Prince Albert—then Chancellor of the University—asking him to put Cohen’s case to the Master of Magdalene, who was also Dean of Windsor. Royal pressure succeeded where Rothschild pressure had failed in the 1830s, when Mayer had been forced to leave the college over the question of chapel attendance. Cohen was duly admitted on the basis of a deal with the Dean who, as Cohen was able to report, “inform[ed] me that on Wednesday and Friday the Chapel only lasts 10 minutes [and] advised me to attend on these days instead of the other days, and at the same time communicated to me that my attendance on Sacrament Sundays would not be required.”

Similar arrangements had to be negotiated at Trinity when the next generation of Rothschild men went up, beginning with Natty in 1859. By this time, the acts of 1854 and 1856 meant that Jews were now able to take degrees (except in theology). But the problem of religious obligations persisted at the college level. Although Natty’s tutor Joseph Lightfoot (who became Hulsean Professor of Divinity in 1861) “promised to do all he can about Chapel” the Master William Whewell remained “the stumbling block in the way of reform.” In 1862, as Natty reported to his parents, “the Trinity Dons ... made themselves very unpopular by threatening to gate everyone who refuses to take the sacrament in Chapel; the consequence of this new rule is that a very large number absented themselves from chapel today, and will get into trouble for breaking an important college rule.” Natty plainly felt that little of substance had been achieved by the reforms of the 1850s. “In order to effect anything in the way of reform here,” he complained,

Nor was attendance at chapel the only compromise they had to make at Cambridge. The second-year examination known as the “Little Go” required a detailed knowledge of William Paley’s
Evidences of Christianity.
An irate letter from Charlotte to Leo shows how much of an obstacle this presented, but also suggests that she felt he should be able to overcome it:

For his part Leo was baffled by “the mysteries of theology and ... various doxies”: when he dined with a group of disputatious dons one night he felt “so mystified that I did not dare open my lips.” (A friend who was also present feared “they might forget my presence and make some attack upon the Jews.”) Even in the more youthful environment of the debating chamber, the Rothschilds were made to feel ill at ease. Natty recalled how his “blood boiled with rage” one night at the Union when a speaker “quoted as a solitary instance of the too great power of the House of Commons the passing of the Jew Bill. I had hoped that the day was gone by for all [distinctions] of this kind and if I had spoken at once, I might have aroused religious passions, not so easy to quell as arouse.”

The Rothschild presence at Cambridge was therefore a qualified victory compared with the victory Lionel wished to achieve in the House of Commons. (It was not in fact until 1871 that the final religious tests were abolished at the ancient universities.) There is a marked and not easily explicable contrast between the willingness of his brother and sons to attend college chapel services and study Paley, and his refusal to swear an oath which included a declaration of Christian faith. Presumably if undergraduates had been required to take the sacraments it would have been a different story.

Monuments to military victories are not usually built before a battle is won. The Rothschilds, however, began building monuments to their political ascendancy some years before Lionel was finally able to take his seat at Westminster. That, at least, is one way of interpreting the extraordinary burst of architectural activity between 1850 and 1860, when the Rothschilds built no fewer than four immense country houses for themselves, and rebuilt a fifth: at Mentmore, Aston Clinton, Ferrières, Pregny and Boulogne.

Of course, Nathan and his brothers had begun to acquire country residences from the earliest days of their prosperity, as we have seen. By the time of the 1848 revolution, their houses and estates at Ferrières, Suresnes, Boulogne, Gunnersbury, Schillersdorf and Grüneburg had been in the family for years. Nor did the 1850s witness a complete change in attitude towards these rural retreats. When purchasing new land in Buckinghamshire after 1848, notably the farms at Aston Clinton, the London partners remained as economically rational as their father and uncles had been before them: unless the agricultural land paid 3.5 per cent on the purchasing price, they were not interested. “If you think that Aston Clinton is worth [£]26,000,” wrote Lionel to Mayer in 1849, “I have no objection to yr. offering it, but I think we ought always to be able to rely on 31/2 clear of all charges, it is not like a fancy place, you must consider it entirely .as an investment.” When he visited Schillersdorf in 1849, he commented that it was “a magnificent property and although [Uncle Salomon] paid a little dear for it, it will if well managed pay him a good interest.”