The House of Rothschild (9 page)

Altogether more Liberal in outlook, Anthony welcomed Peel’s difficulties with his party in the Commons in the belief—correct as it turned out—that they would make him “a little more liberal & I trust that Sir Robert if he is so will do something for the poor Jews.” As for Lionel, he did not hesitate to lend his support to the Liberal candidate James Pattison at the October 1843 by-election in the City, urging Jewish voters to break the Sabbath in order to vote. These votes were crucial, as Pattison only narrowly beat his Tory opponent, who was none other than one of the Rothschilds’ old rivals, Thomas Baring.

Yet Lionel hesitated to follow David Salomons’s example and involve himself directly in political activity. The most obvious explanation for this hesitation was purely practical: politics took up time which could not easily be spared by the senior partner of a bank as big as N. M. Rothschild & Sons. Perhaps Lionel shared James’s view—expressed as early as 1816—that “as soon as a merchant takes too much part in public affairs it is difficult for him to carry on with his bankers’ business.” On the other hand, the pressure from family members—including James—for him to do something to raise the family’s political profile in England was considerable. James’s notions of political activity remained rooted in his experience of the 1820s, when he and his elder brothers had energetically accumulated titles and decorations by ingratiating themselves with the monarchs of the various states with which they did business. He sought to encourage his nephews to do the same in England in 1838, telling Lionel that he had

Less old-fashioned was Anselm’s hope “in a year or two to be able to congratulate one of you on a seat in Parliament & to admire your eloquent speeches.” When Isaac Lyon Goldsmid became the first Jewish baronet in 1841, Anthony wrote from Paris that he “should have liked Sir Lionel de R. much better & he ought to have tried.” Similarly, when Salomon was made a “citizen of honour” of Vienna in 1843, Anthony pointedly hoped that it would “produce an effect in Old England.”

The pressure mounted in 1845 as David Salomons scored another important point. Having won a contested City ballot for the aldermanry of Portsoken, Salomons was confronted with the oath “upon a true faith of a Christian”; when he refused to take it, the Court of Aldermen declared his election void. Salomons complained to Peel, who—as Anthony had predicted—now proved more sympathetic, instructing the Lord Chancellor, Lyndhurst, to draft a bill removing all remaining municipal disabilities as they affected Jews. The bill was enacted on July 31, 1845.
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Lionel had in fact played a part in securing the passage of the act, having been one of the committee of five sent by the Board of Deputies to lobby Peel on the subject. But Salomons got the glory, and it rankled with Lionel’s competitive relatives. “I shall be glad to see [you] Ld M. of London & M.P for the city,” wrote his brother Nat. “You ought to be canvassing for the E[ast] Ind[ia Company] direction, my dear Lionel.” A year later, he was still harping on the same theme: “Our French fogies ... all say you will soon be in the House of Commons & are preparing yourself.” When Salomons visited Paris shortly after his triumph., Hannah was frosty. “We must allow him,” she wrote to Charlotte, “to enjoy the satisfaction of [the good cause‘s] success and ourselves fully to participate in the good which we so sincerely hope and trust may result to the community we belong to, from which I do not doubt individual merit and exertions will be duly appreciated.”
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Moses Montefiore’s baronetcy in 1846 made Anthony hope that “perhaps when the Whigs come in ... they will think they ought to give something to your Honour.” No sooner had Peel’s government collapsed than Nat was urging his brother to “stand or state officially you will stand for the City,” suggesting that he “engage some clever fellow to come & read with you in the evenings for an hour or so, to be a little more at home on the different questions of political economy.”

Nor was it only members of his own family who urged Lionel to be more politically active. In 1841 a political associate of the Irish leader Daniel O‘Connell invited him “as one of the most influential of your honored nation” to attend a public meeting (“in Exeter Hall in the Anchor Tavern”) at which he proposed to discuss “the political position of the Jews.” Two years later, he was being offered assistance on the assumption that he himself would want to contest the City of London by-election.

Still Lionel remained reluctant. While others wasted no time in entering the breach made by Salomons—among them his brother Mayer, who became High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in February
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—Lionel did nothing. Even when he himself was offered a baronetcy by the new Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, he stubbornly refused to accept it—to the dismay of his relatives.
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His stated reasons for doing so suggest that Lionel had a trait of petulance: he was reluctant to accept an honour which had already been bestowed on two other Jews, and would be content with nothing less than a peerage. Prince Albert reported him as saying: “[Y]ou have nothing higher to offer me?” This was bluntness worthy of his father, but his mother Hannah was incensed:

His brothers, any one of whom would have accepted, were baffled. As Nat cheerily wrote, “If I were you I would accept an English Baronetage, it’s better than being a German Baron.—Old Billy thinks Sir Anthony would sound very well & if you do not wish it for yourself you might get it for him—We have all got very pretty names & Sir Mayer of Mentmore wd even shine in a romance.” James too weighed in:

But Lionel was unmoved. In the end, the only way out of the impasse was for Anthony to accept the honour.
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Even his final capitulation—when he agreed to stand as a Liberal candidate in the general election of 1847—was made only after “hesitation.”

Lionel’s decision to stand for Parliament—he was adopted as a candidate by the Liberal London Registration Association on June 29, 1847—was a watershed in Rothschild history. As a result of his decision, the Rothschild name was to become inextricably linked to the campaign for Jewish political rights; he devoted much of the next decade to a succession of gruelling electoral and parliamentary battles. Why did this most reluctant of public figures do it, when he might easily have left the field to Salomons-or for that matter to Mayer, who simultaneously stood (against his eldest brother’s wishes) in Hythe? The obvious answer is that familial pressure finally proved irresistible. A second possibility is that he was talked into standing not by his own relations but by Lord John Russell, who was himself one of the sitting City MPs and who may have hoped to secure Jewish votes for himself. A third is that Lionel did not expect to win; that what ended up as a
cause célèbre
was intended to be a token gesture. One contemporary at least thought he would lose and that he had merely been drafted in by the Whigs to “pay the whole cost of their expenses.” And it is noteworthy that none of the other Jewish candidates was elected: it was a close contest, and the Whigs and Radicals would have had only a single-figure majority in the Commons had it not been for the Tory split.

The complex electoral politics of the Victorian City of London precluded confidence in victory. The constituency, which stretched as far east as Tower Hamlets, was a large one (nearly 50,000 votes were cast in 1847) which returned four MPs. On this occasion, there were nine candidates—four Liberals, one Peelite, three Protectionists and an independent—and the campaigning was intense, with around twelve public meetings in the space of a month. Lionel’s platform was at first sight unremarkable : in addition to the obvious issue of religious “liberty of conscience,” he declared himself in favour of free trade. He evidently did not follow Nat’s advice “to go a little farther than my Lord John” and “be as liberal as possible.” On closer inspection, he took stances which may even have counted against him: he argued for lower duties on tobacco and tea and the introduction of a property tax, a popular stance with the unenfranchised poor, but one which was hardly calculated to win over a propertied electorate. Despite an explicit offer of Catholic support from an enterprising priest named Lauch—which appears to have been accepted—Lionel declared himself against increasing the grant to the Maynooth Catholic college (though he hedged on the more general principle of state aid to denominational schools). Nor were Jewish votes necessarily as important as might be thought: not many Jews were as yet qualified or registered to vote. Although Lionel received an offer of support from at least one Jewish Conservative and was assured by his mother that that “the Jews ... will go up in a body all nicely dressed and vote for you,” the Peelite Masterman still managed to secure election despite his declared opposition to emancipation.

On the other hand, Lionel had two advantages. The press played a bigger role in London than in most parts of the country, and his contacts with newspapermen
w
ere rapidly developing. To be sure, a specifically Jewish press was in its infancy. In 1841 he and others had invested in Jacob Franklin’s
Voice of Jacob,
though this was soon supplanted by the
Jewish Chronicle.
But Lionel had a far more influential backer in the form of John Thadeus Delane
,
the twenty-nine-year-old editor of The Times, who was prevailed on to help him draft his election address. For his part, Delane believed he had secured Lionel’s victory: he found Charlotte “in a state of almost frenzied delight and gratitude” after the result and was “overwhelmed with thanks” by Nat and Anthony. The Economist also lent its support. On the other hand, the opponents of emancipation had arguably just as influential a journalist on their side. The historian J. A. Froude recalled Thomas Carlyle remarking as they stood in front of 148 Piccadilly:

Somewhat improbably, Carlyle claimed that Lionel had offered him generous remuneration if he would write a pamphlet in favour of the removal of disabilities. Carlyle supposedly told him “that it could not be ... I observed too that I could not conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be seeking seats in a Gentile legislature.” He expressed the same view in a letter to the MP Monckton Milnes: “A Jew is bad, but what is a Sham-Jew, a Quack-Jew? And how can a real Jew, by possibility, try to be a Senator, or even a Citizen of any country, except his own wretched Palestine, whither all his thoughts and steps and efforts tend?”
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Carlyle’s attitude stands in marked contrast to that of Thackeray, who underwent something of a conversion on the subject as a result of social contact with the Rothschilds.
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As the alleged approach to Carlyle suggests, the second and perhaps more important advantage Lionel enjoyed was money. According to Lord Grey, the Whig Secretary for War, he made “no secret of his determination to carry his election by money.” Nat’s subsequent letters from Paris suggest that his brother had indeed “cashed up” “large sums.” In the end, this may well have turned the scale. Lionel was elected third in the poll with 6,792 votes, compared with Russell’s 7,137, Pattison’s 7,030 and Masterman’s 6,772, which beat the other Liberal, Larpent, by just three votes. His Catholic agent Lauch believed that he had saved the day for Lionel; and his motives for supporting a Rothschild were nakedly mercenary.
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To the rest of the family, this was the political victory they had so long thirsted for. It was, wrote Nat, “one of the greatest triumphs for the Family as well as of the greatest advantage to the poor Jews in Germany and all over the world.” His wife called it “the beginning of a new era for the Jewish nation, having a most distinguished champion like you.” “The breach has been made,” exulted Betty, “the obstacle of imputation, prejudice and intolerance is distinctly foundering.” Congratulations even came from Metternich (who perhaps failed to see it as a victory for that liberalism which would drive him into English exile less than a year later). Yet all this euphoria overlooked the fact that, if he wished to take his seat as an MP, Lionel would still have to swear the oath “upon the true faith of the Christian” —unless, of course, the government could pass the measure which it had proved impossible to pass eleven years before, namely a bill doing away with the oath. Russell had already pledged to introduce one. In truth, Lionel’s victory would be complete only once a majority of both Houses of Parliament had voted in favour of such a measure.