The House of Rothschild (52 page)

I could see how strangely like a Royal family the Rothschilds are in one respect
—
namely, that they all quarrel with one another, but are united as against the world.

SIR CHARLES DILKE, MARCH 1879

 

 

I
n Thomas Mann’s 1501 novel
Buddenbrooks,
which depicts the decline and fall of a Hanseatic merchant family and firm, decadence is detectable in the third generation and fatal in the fourth. It is certainly tempting to write the history of the Rothschilds after 1878 with this model in mind. As Mayer Amschel’s grandsons died, so leadership passed to a fourth generation which seemed to lack the entrepreneurial drive and financial aptitude which had made the family firm rise and prosper. New educational opportunities distracted them from business. The process of social assimilation into the traditional aristocracy transported them, physically and emotionally, from City to country. “A new era has decidedly begun in business,” Alphonse had written enthusiastically to his cousins in 1865. “Only the young generation which has had a college education is capable of comprehending the exigencies of the times. It is the young generation therefore which should be entrusted with the direction of the grand financial operations of the epoch.” But this young generation struck contemporaries as epigoni.

The evidence is to hand for the construction of such a narrative. The deaths of Nat (1870), Anselm (1874), Mayer (1874), Anthony (1876) and Lionel (1879) left only their younger cousins in Frankfurt and Paris as representatives of the third generation. Of James’s sons, Alphonse remained a formidable force in French finance until his death in 1905, assisted by his younger brother Gustave, but Salomon James had died at the age of twenty-nine and Edmond played only a minor role in the business. Of the sons of Carl, Adolph withdrew from the business in 1863 and Mayer Carl’s health began to decline in the later 1870s, leaving the pious and financially unambitious Wilhelm Carl to preside over the last years of the Frankfurt house after his brother’s death in 1886.
¹

Even in old age and illness, those members of the third generation who had been active partners in the business remained imbued with their father’s work ethic. Nat had been considered an invalid for many years before his death in February 1870: his servant marvelled how “for 18 years he has fought against what to others would have been an insupportable illness.” Yet, just hours before his death, “he talked to Alphonse about American stocks and the Russian Loan and ... a few seconds before he died he told his servants to bring him a cup of tea early in the morning as he wished to have the newspapers read to him.” Anthony too always remained first and foremost a banker, though he was overshadowed in the public mind by his more politically active elder brother. He invariably greeted friends and relations with the question “What’s the news?”—a true banker’s salutation.
²

For much of his career, Lionel suffered so severely from attacks of rheumatic gout (arthritis would seem the appropriate modern term) that on occasions he had to be carried to the House of Commons gallery to attend debates on Jewish emancipation. “For more than twenty years,”
The Times
observed, “he was wheeled from room to room of his house or from his carriage to his office in a chair constructed for the purpose.” Yet, as the newspaper also recorded, “up to the last working-day before the day of his death he continued to be the mainspring of a business which had no parallel in magnitude” and it was “on his sagacity and assiduity that the direction of the business chiefly depended.” Of course, the paper’s recently retired editor Delane was a close family friend, so allowance should perhaps be made for the obituarist’s enthusiasm; even so, his comments on Lionel’s role and abilities were insightful and are borne out by the performance of the London house under his leadership:

Disraeli had no reason to exaggerate when he called Lionel “one of the ablest men I ever knew.” He was also one of the richest: when he died he left £2,700,000 (all but £15,000 to his wife and children), to say nothing of the houses at Piccadilly and Gunnersbury and one of the biggest private art collections of the era. Equally, those who disliked Lionel testified to his devotion to business. The day before he died, he summoned the broker Edward Wagg to his bedside at 148 Piccadilly to tell him: “I have been looking at my fortnightly account and you have made a mistake in the addition.”
⁴
More than three decades later, stories still circulated which implied an almost avaricious trait: the financier Horace Farquhar told Herbert Asquith maliciously (and probably untruthfully) how “the old Jew always used to have on his table in his office in New Court a little chest in wh. he hoarded his pearls, and in the intervals of business handled and fondled them.”

The eldest of the third generation, Anselm, shared many of these traits—in particular that asceticism which Max Weber identified as the mainspring of capital accumulation (though he sought its origins in Calvinism). He was a keen reader, an enthusiastic and expert collector of
objets d‘art
(which he housed in a specially built gallery in the Renngasse) and an avid theatre-goer with his own box at the opera; but otherwise he lived austerely, occupying only two rooms in the Vienna palace he had inherited from his father, and vacating the castle at Schillersdorf in preference for a small cottage-style house on the estate. He seldom invited guests there. As Hermann Goldschmidt recalled, “he lived the life of an immigrant and a miser. He was averse to any outward displays of wealth, travelled only by hansom cab and never had his own coach and four.” So self-effacing and parsimonious was he that he also refused to have his portrait painted. For most of their married life, he and his wife lived apart (mainly, it seems, because she disliked living in Vienna); but unlike his father, Anselm scrupulously avoided sexual liaisons in Austria, confining himself to fleeting dalliances when he visited London and Paris. (His preferred vice was snuff.) He too seemed to his sons to have boundless energy. When hunting for antiques in France and Holland in the summer of 1868, Ferdinand recalled, “he used to rise at 6 o’clock and remain on his legs until dusk, dragging the unfortunate two men [his secretary and his valet] with him shopping and sight-seeing.—I wish he had handed his constitution down to his sons.” A good deal of the running of the house was delegated to Goldschmidt—Anselm ignored as far as possible the other employees in the office, speaking French to accentuate his distance from them—but he remained the master, and an exacting one. When angry he would throw his pen across the room and spit. Despite a painful bladder complaint, he too remained active in the business to the last.

It was entirely in keeping with Anselm’s old-fashioned style that he requested to be buried “with the greatest simplicity” in Frankfurt. “The funeral was as unpre tending as if it had been that of a poor Jew,” reported
The Times.
“The corpse was removed from the railway station in a mere carrier’s van... As the hour of the funeral had been kept secret, comparatively few persons were at the ceremony.” Yet this was the man who had left in his will a sum in excess of 50 million thalers—double the assets of the Jesuit order, as Bismarck rather gratuitously pointed out. The contrast could scarcely have been more marked with the funerals of James and of Lionel, whose interment at the recently established Willesden cemetery was attended by a throng of relations, Rothschild agents and brokers, MPs (including Sir William Harcourt and Thomson Hankey) and representatives of numerous Jewish organisations.
⁵

It might at first seem odd that it proved difficult to replace the third generation. After all, in an age of high fertility, the fourth generation was inevitably more numerous than the third, and one might have expected to find enough competent businessmen among the forty-four children born into it.
⁶
Contemporaries were certainly impressed by the sheer number of Rothschilds. In 1859 the Goncourts noted with astonishment that there were approximately seventy-four Rothschilds at dinner following the wedding of Gustave and Cécile Anspach. It was Disraeli who famously declared “that there cannot be too many Rothschilds.” Was that not self-evidently true?

Part of the problem was an over-supply of daughters. Though it may seem absurd to us, the third generation was conscious of having difficulty in producing sons: this anxiety is not wholly unintelligible, as the ratio of male to female children in the fourth generation was 17:27. Moreover, no fewer than five of the male children died in infancy.
⁷
It was partly because none of Carl’s sons themselves produced a male heir that the Naples and Frankfurt houses were wound up, the former in 1863, the latter in 1901.

Inevitably, the sons who survived were a step further removed from the ethos of work and calculation on which the family’s fortune had been founded. Indeed, even their own mother had a fairly low opinion of the three young men who were now intended to take over the management of the London house. With that harsh candour which she liked to employ, Charlotte wrote as early as 1840 that Natty “was a thin, ugly baby, but that did not signify; he was a boy, and as such most welcome for his father and the whole family. I never could prefer him to his sisters, and nursed him not so well as he ought to have been nursed.” By the time he was nine she had made up her mind that he “lack[ed] cordiality and frankness. He is reserved and shy and not generous; in fact he is the only one of my children fond of money for the sake of hoarding it ... [H]e is constitutionally indolent.” In the next six years there was an improvement—he seemed to apply himself to his studies—but “he remain[ed] shy” and Charlotte concluded bluntly: “[H]e will not be a clever, but a very well informed, highly cultivated man.”
⁸

Following in the footsteps of his Uncle Mayer, Natty went to Cambridge to read moral science (which included moral philosophy, political economy, modern history, general jurisprudence and the laws of England) in October 1859 and seems to have had no difficulty with his work.
⁹
But he struggled with the commoner’s second year examination known as the “Little Go” because of its compulsory mathematical and theological elements.
¹⁰
His letters to his parents suggest that he devoted more time to riding with the drag hounds, amateur dramatics and attending debates at the Union (a familiar story), though unlike the rest of the family, he showed almost no interest in art and architecture. If anything captured his attention, it was politics: from an early age he evidently enjoyed discussing political news with his well-informed father.

Though a good beginning for a prospective MP, it could be argued that all this was a poor preparation for a dynamic City career. In particular, Natty’s lack of mathematical aptitude would seem to disprove
The Times’s
suggestion that the capacity for financial calculation was hereditary. His parents had expected more, as can be inferred from his self-justifying arguments in favour of hunting and the Amateur Dramatic Company:

Natty managed to pass the Little Go, but despite intensive “coaching” and encouragement from the Master of Trinity, William Whewell, and the Hulsean Professor of Divinity, Joseph Lightfoot (later Bishop of Durham), he seemed unlikely to secure honours, and left Cambridge without taking his final examinations at the end of Michaelmas 1862. After being elected to the Athenaeum (1860), entering the House of Commons as MP for Aylesbury (1865), becoming an officer in the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry and inheriting his uncle’s baronetcy (1876), Natty seemed destined for a political rather than a financial career. Thus it was for the evidence he gave before a Commons committee that he first won applause in the City. Charlotte was evidently surprised.