SEVEN

Barons

When [Rothschild] obtained the . . . title [of baron], it was said,“Montmorency est le premier Baron Chrétien, et Rothschild est le premier Baron Juif.”

—THOMAS RAIKES

Amschel’s garden in the Bockenheimer Landstrasse was a symbol of emancipation from the ghetto. However, it would be wrong to suggest that his brothers and their descendants were motivated solely by the same yearnings as Amschel in their decisions to purchase property. As Carl’s counter-proposal for a more imposing town house suggests, considerations of economic utility and social prestige also required more spacious residences—a place where members of the political elite could be wined and dined in comfort. Two possibilities were discussed at the same time that Amschel was buying his garden: the purchase of more elegant town houses; and the purchase of country estates.

Carl got his way in Frankfurt with the purchase in 1818 of the relatively modest house at 33 Neue Mainzer Strasse. In Nathan’s case, the need for a town house separate from New Court was, of course, even more pressing: by 1817 he and Hannah had no fewer than five children—all under ten—and another on the way. (As yet, all his brothers apart from Salomon were still childless, and Salomon had only Anselm and Betty, who lived in relative comfort with their mother in the Schäfergasse house in Frankfurt.) In June 1817 Nathan therefore offered the stockbroker James Cazenove £15,750 “payable in cash immediately” for Grosvenor House. Characteristically, however, Nathan refused to pay more than he thought an investment was worth: when Cazenove demanded £19,000 the deal fell through. In fact, it was not until 1825—by which time there were seven children—that Nathan finally acquired the lease on 107 Piccadilly from a member of the Coutts family. At the same time, Moses Montefiore, his brother-in-law and neighbour in St Swithin’s Lane, also moved west to Green Street, off Park Lane.

James, of all the brothers the most aesthetically and socially ambitious, was quicker off the mark. In 1816 or 1817 he moved from his original quarters in the rue Le Peletier to the rue de Provence in the Chaussée d’Antin (Paris’s main financial centre, in the 9th arrondissement). This did not satisfy him, however, for in December 1818 he bought the hôtel at 19 rue d’Artois (renamed rue Laffitte in 1830) which had been built for the banker Laborde before the Revolution, and occupied during the Empire by Hortense, the daughter of Josephine, and Napoleon’s Police Minister Fouché. Twelve years later, his brother Salomon bought the house next door (17 Rue Laffitte), though it was not until the mid-1830s that the work of renovation and redecoration of both houses was complete.¹Only in Vienna did it prove impossible to purchase a town house in this period: Salomon continued to rent the Hotel zum Römischen Kaiser in the Renngasse until in 1842 he finally secured an exemption from the rule barring Jews from owning property in the imperial capital.

Nathan, Salomon and James also lost no time in acquiring places in the country—though it should be remembered that in those days, before the growth of London and Paris and the development of railways, it was neither feasible nor necessary to travel far in search of a rural retreat; “suburban retreat” might be a more accurate description. Nathan’s first step in this direction was taken in 1816, when he purchased what his sister Henrietta called “a beautiful country estate”—in fact an eight-acre property on the road between Newington and Stamford Hill in the Parish of St John at Hackney. It was there, rather than in New Court, that he and his family thenceforth lived—in contrast to James, who continued to live “over the shop,” just a short distance away from the bourse and the Banque de France. It was not until nearly twenty years later that Nathan moved westwards (and upwards), buying the larger and more distinguished Gunnersbury Park near Acton. Built in 1802 for George III’s youngest daughter Amelia, Gunnersbury was a large Italianate villa with extensive gardens including a small ornamental lake and a neo-classical “temple.” Nathan commissioned the architect Sydney Smirke to enlarge the building, adding an orangerie and a dining room, and to enliven the austere façade with some fake marble decoration; he also consulted the landscape specialist John Claudius Loudon about the park.

Nathan himself remained at heart an urban creature: country life—even at Stamford Hill—did not really suit him. “One of my neighbours,” he told Buxton a year before the move to Gunnersbury, “is a very ill-tempered man; he tries to vex me, and has built a great place for swine, close to my walk. So, when I go out, I hear first grunt, grunt, squeak, squeak.” Though he was quick to insist that “this does me no harm, I am always in good humour,” it is hard to miss the confirmed city-dweller’s unease with the alien world of agriculture. It may just have been the smell, of course, but Nathan may also have suspected that his neighbour’s choice of livestock had an anti-Jewish connotation. Nor—in marked contrast to James and his own sons—did he have the slightest desire to ride, hunt or watch horses race.² In this passage from Endymion, Disraeli evidently had Nathan (here “Neuchatel”) and Gunnersbury (“Hainault House”) in mind:

[Neuchatel] was always preparing for his posterity. Governed by this passion, although he himself would have been content to live forever in Bishopsgate Street . . . he had become possessed of a vast principality, and which, strange to say, with every advantage of splendour and natural beauty, was not an hour’s drive from Whitechapel.

Hainault House had been raised by a British peer in the days when nobles were fond of building Palladian palaces . . . [I]n its style, its beauty, and almost in its dimensions, [it] was a rival of Stowe or Wanstead. It stood in a deer park, and was surrounded by a royal forest. The family that had raised it wore out in the earlier part of this century. It was supposed that the place must be destroyed and dismantled . . . Neuchatel stepped in and purchased the whole affair—palace, and park, and deer, and pictures, and halls, and galleries of statue and bust, and furniture, and even wines, and all the farms that remained, and all the seigneurial rights in the royal forest. But he never lived there. Though he spared nothing in the maintenance and the improvement of the domain, except on a Sunday he never visited it, and was never known to sleep under its roof. “It will be ready for those who come after me,” he would remark, with a modest smile.

Although we know that Nathan did sometimes stay there during the week as well, there seems little doubt that he bought Gunnersbury primarily for the sake of his children; and it was not until two years after his death that the house was used for large-scale entertainment.

In France, James and Salomon both bought houses outside Paris, beginning in 1817 when James acquired what was in effect a summer house with a three acre garden at Boulogne-sur-Seine. Nine years later Salomon bought the rather grander house across the river at Suresnes built for the duc de Chaulnes in the eighteenth century. With its ten acres situated on the banks of the Seine (near what is now the rue de Verdun), it played a similar role to Gunnersbury as a country residence within convenient distance of the city. James waited until 1829 before buying the much bigger hunting estate at Ferrières, with its dilapidated château and 1,200 acres some twenty miles to the east of Paris. Unlike Nathan, James genuinely seems to have enjoyed country life. He looked forward to sleeping at Ferrières as soon as he had bought it and when Hannah Mayer visited him and Betty there in 1833, she found them happily “superintending a little farm.”

For the Rothschilds based in Frankfurt and Vienna, however, the purchase of rural estates had to wait. Amschel himself observed that “the first question anyone asks in Germany is: ‘Do you have a country estate?’ ” But he and Carl agreed that it would be a mistake to rise to this socially alluring bait. The ownership of an estate implied a claim to aristocratic status which the ownership of a mere garden did not, and they evidently feared that evincing such delusions of grandeur would fuel the anti-Jewish backlash of the post-war period. At the same time, they doubted the economic rationality of buying agricultural land. What did they know about farming? “Often these estates bring in not more than two per cent,” warned Carl—indicating that the brothers were still inclined to regard land as just another form of investment. Such attitudes persisted: Rothschild purchases of land in the next generation were always based on calculations of future yield; and the family managed its immovable assets as carefully as the more liquid components of its portfolio.

Society

The original and most frequently cited justification for acquiring these properties had been typically instrumental: each of the brothers needed a large and respectable house in which to entertain the ministers and diplomats who were their most important clients. The acid test of this strategy was whether the sort of figures the Rothschilds wished to entertain would accept their invitations. It was an uphill struggle.

In December 1815 Buderus—the brothers’ trusted partner in their dealings with Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel—threw a ball. “Bethmann, Gontard, and all the ministers and merchants are invited,” complained Amschel bitterly. “We lent the silver. [But] the FinanzräteRothschild are again left out and not invited.” Carl’s theory was that Buderus was embarrassed by his former intimacy with them: “He thinks we do not feel the proper respect for him, and that he therefore could not appear before us in such a dignified state. For you ought to know that honours and profits do not go hand in hand.” There was a similar snub three months later, when Amschel was bluntly informed that, had he been invited, “rumours would have gone round that we had paid for the ball.” At around the same time, Amschel complained that Gontard refused to see him too frequently on business lest his friends “start to treat him as a Jew.” Their exclusion as Jews from the Frankfurt Casino (gentlemen’s club) also rankled.

The tables could be turned, however. In May 1816 Salomon gave a dinner to which he invited the leading members of the diplomatic corps, as well as Bethmann and Gontard. All accepted. As a Rothschild cousin related with glee:

Today Kessler [a Frankfurt broker] asked me at the Stock Exchange whether it was true that it was really so exquisite at the Rothschilds’ house. Apparently there was much talk about it at the casino. He also wanted to know who was present. I mentioned the Ministers, Bethmann, Gontard etc. I assure you that Bethmann as well as Gontard were full of praise, saying that it was a very lively affair and that Madame Rothschild knew how to arrange everything well. Bethmann especially liked the children, Anselm and Betty; he said that Betty had a fine education.

When one of the family’s most ardent foes heard that “Gontard was dining with Salomon, he said: ‘Mr Gontard as well?’ and sighed . . . He seemed upset and that is something.” Three months later Amschel and Carl threw an even larger dinner, principally for the diplomatic representatives of the larger German states. Among those present was Wilhelm von Humboldt. The exercise was successfully repeated a year later. Only the Frankfurt Bürgermeister and one other invitee declined to attend.

The speed of this shift in attitudes astonished the Bremen Bürgermeister Smidt, one of the most determined opponents of Jewish emancipation of all the state delegates in Frankfurt. “Right up until the end of last year,” he commented in August 1820,

it was against all customs and habits of life to admit a Jew into so-called “good society.” No Frankfurt banker or merchant would invite a Jew to dine with him, not even one of the Rothschilds, and the delegates to the Confederal Diet had such regard for this custom that they did the same. Since my return I find to my great astonishment that people like the Bethmanns, Gontards [and] Brentanos eat and drink with the leading Jews, invite them to their houses and are invited back, and, when I expressed my surprise, I was told that, as no financial transaction of any importance could be carried through without the co-operation of these people, they had to be treated as friends, and it was not desirable to fall out with them. In view of these developments, the Rothschilds have also been invited by some of the ambassadors.

It was not long before Amschel was inviting him too. He accepted. By the 1840s Amschel was routinely giving such dinners “about once a fortnight [to] all visitors of rank.”

In Vienna it proved much harder to overcome the traditional social barriers. Although Metternich had no objection to “taking soup” with Amschel in Frankfurt in 1821, the Austrian capital was a different matter. Contemporary comment strongly suggests that social life in Vienna remained more segregated along religious lines than elsewhere. In the 1820s, Gentz remarked, the Jewish “aristocracy of money” tended to dine and dance together, apart from the aristocracy proper. When the English writer Frances Trollope (the novelist’s mother) visited Vienna in the 1830s, she encountered the same schism:

Neither in London nor in Paris is there anything in the least degree analogous to the station which the bankers of Vienna hold in their society. Their wealth as a body is enormous and, therefore, as a body they are, and must be, of very considerable influence and importance to the state . . . And yet with all this—with title, fortune, influence and a magnificent style of living—the bankers are as uniformly unadmitted and inadmissible in the higher circles, as if they had continued as primitively unpretending in station as their goldsmith progenitors.

Trollope was no unbiased observer, of course. She herself disliked being “surrounded . . . at the the largest and most splendid parties of the monied aristocracies . . . by a black-eyed, high-nosed group of . . . unmistakable Jews” (a prejudice which she managed to pass on to her son). But, writing in the 1830s, it was not unreasonable for her to doubt:

how far they are, or will ever be kindly or affectionately amalgamated with the other members of this Christian and Catholic Empire . . . Their power, as a rich body, is very great and penetrates widely and deeply amongst some important fibres of the body politic; but they are not, perhaps, the better loved for this by their Christian fellow subjects, and the consequence is, that their social position is more pre-eminently a false one than that of any set of people I have ever had an opportunity of observing . . . No one who visits Vienna with his eyes open and mixes at all in society, but will find reason to agree with me in the opinion that any attempt to blend Christians and Jews in social and familiar union may answer for an hour or a day, but will not eventually lead to affection or tolerance on either side.

Only in the late 1830s were senior political figures willing to accept invitations to dine with Salomon in the Hotel zum Römischen Kaiser. The Metternichs did so in January 1836, along with Princess Marie Esterházy and a number of other distinguished guests who were duly impressed by his French chef. But when Count Kolowrat accepted an invitation from Salomon (evidently for the first time) in 1838, “some people of his own position in society told him that this was giving offence. ‘What would you have me do?’ he said. ‘Rothschild attached such enormous importance to my coming that I had to sacrifice myself to the interests of the service, as the State needs him.’ ”

Nathan had fewer difficulties. Foreign ambassadors and other dignitaries accepted his invitations to dinner from an early stage: he dined with the Humboldts in 1818, as we have seen, Chateaubriand dined with him in 1822, and the Esterházys were regular guests. Prince Pückler’s letters record a number of different social occasions at Nathan’s, including a “splendid dinner” in 1828, the dessert of which was served on solid gold dishes. What is not certain is whether Nathan’s apparently close relations with Tory politicians like Herries, Vansittart and Wellington extended as far as the dinner table: quite possibly the greater part of the conversations he had with such figures took place in their offices. By contrast, proponents of Jewish emancipation among the Whig aristocracy like the Duke of St Albans and the Earl of Lauderdale were happy to dine with him, as was the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, a prominent supporter in the Commons, who was a Rothschild guest in 1831. It also seems reasonable to assume that most of the visiting English aristocrats whom James invited to dinner in Paris had already been entertained by Nathan: “your charming Lady Londonderry,” for example, whom James “stuffed” with best British venison provided by Nathan in 1833; and the Duke of Richmond, whom he invited to dinner a year later. The brothers’ careful cultivation of the British royal family and its Saxe-Coburg relations also paid social dividends (though it was not until after Nathan’s death that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge accepted an invitation to Gunnersbury). In the winter of 1826 Carl played host to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, entertaining him with amateur dramatics, “balls and soirees” at his villa in Naples. Then, as now, members of the social elite found it difficult to resist the offer of Mediterranean hospitality in the middle of the North European winter. The Montefiores also found Carl entertaining and being entertained by the indigenous aristocracy when they visited him in 1828.

Of all the Rothschild brothers, James made the most determined effort to achieve social success; perhaps his superior education gave him the confidence to do so. In 1816, equipped with a handbook of etiquette, he scored his first success, inviting the duc de Richelieu’s private secretary to dinner à deux. But he too encountered resistance. Despite the social upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napeolonic eras, the French capital was far from free of snobbery and prejudice, and he was treated to an especially flagrant snub from his rivals Baring and Labouchère in 1818. It was not until March 2, 1821, that James really launched himself as a society host with his first full-scale ball in the refurbished rue d’Artois hôtel. The somewhat world-weary Berliner Henrietta Mendelssohn described how

for the past two weeks nothing has been talked about in the world of the great and the rich here, save a ball which Herr Rothschild finally gave yesterday evening in his new and magnificently decorated house. As yet I have no details as to how it went, but I can scarcely believe it was other than as I have heard for more than ten days—I do not exaggerate—from people of every age and class: that 800 people were invited and at least as many besieged him with visits, letters and pleas in the hope of getting an invitation . . . As I am presently feeling—for whatever reason—daily more miserable and peevish, I did not make use of my invitation to this ball, though it was sent by Herr Rothschild with the most courteous billet ever written.

The campaign was relentless. In April 1826 the Austrian ambassador described a sumptuous meal chez “M. de Rothschild” attended not only by the other ambassadors of the great powers, but also by Metternich, the Duke of Devonshire, the Russian Prince Razumovski and a small galaxy of French aristocrats: the duc and duchesse de Maillé, baron de Damas (the French Foreign Minister of the day), the duc de Duras and the comte de Montalembert. A year and a half later, when the maréchal de Castellane dined with James, he encountered the English and Russian ambassadors, the duc de Mouchy and the comte Juste de Noailles. On average James had around four dinners a week, each with at least ten guests and sometimes as many as sixty. The night before the birth of his first child, Charlotte, he had eighteen to dinner; the following evening twenty-six.

Part of the attraction of a Rothschild event—as James well knew—was the sheer extravagance of the hospitality. As Henrietta Mendelssohn commented sardonically, invitations to James’s ball in 1821 went to a premium when it was heard “that all the ladies would be given a bouquet of flowers on entering the ballroom with a diamond ring or brooch” or that there would at least be “a lottery which would give a prize to each of the ladies.” When Apponyi dined with him in 1826, the table was dominated by an immense silver-plated platter in the form of a candelabrum—worth, Apponyi guessed, at least 100,000 francs—and the food was prepared by the famous chef Antonin Carême, who numbered among his previous employers the Prince Regent and Tsar Alexander. So rich was the combination of turtle soup and madeira that a dyspeptic Apponyi resolved to pay the customary visite de digestion eight days later than usual.

In many ways, Carême’s elaborate cuisine was James’s principal attraction in this early phase of his social ascent. The popular writer Lady Sydney Morgan was only one of many who drooled over his cooking when she dined with James at Boulogne: “[T]he delicate gravies were made with almost chemical precision . . . each vegetable still had its fresh colour . . . the mayonnaise was whipped ice cold . . . Carême deserves a laurel wreath for perfecting an art form by which modern civilisation is measured.” The coup de théâtre on this occasion was an enormous cake with her name inscribed in icing sugar, surrounded by all the supporters of the Holy Alliance. James took pains to find a worthy successor to Carême when he needed a new cook. Nor was he the only member of the family to value his chef. Though they themselves never tasted a mouthful of it, both Amschel and Salomon insisted on providing their guests in Frankfurt and Vienna with the best of French cooking. Disraeli was one of the most frequent recipients of Rothschild food outside the immediate family itself, and his account in Endymion of “delicate dishes which [guests] looked at with wonder, and tasted with timidity” gives an idea of its crucial social function.

Snobbery

Yet, although their invitations were accepted, it cannot be said that the Rothschild brothers were liked. Contemporaries found Nathan Rothschild an intimidating man: unprepossessing in aspect and coarse to the point of downright rudeness in manner. Prince Pückler was given a typically rough ride when he called on “the ruler of the City” at New Court for the first time in 1826:

I found the Russian consul there, engaged in paying his court. He was a distinguished and intelligent man, who knew perfectly how to play the role of the humble debtor, while retaining the proper air of dignity. This was made the more difficult since the guiding genius of the City did not stand on ceremony. When I had handed him my letter of credit, he remarked ironically that we rich people were fortunate in being able to travel about and amuse ourselves, while on him, poor man, there rested the cares of the world, and he went on, bitterly bewailing his lot, no poor devil came to England without wanting something from him. “Yesterday,” he said, “there was a Russian begging of me” (an episode which threw a bittersweet expression over the consul’s face) “and,” he added, “the Germans here don’t give me a moment’s peace.” Now it was my turn to put a good face on the matter . . . All this in a language peculiarly his own, half English, half German, the English with an entirely German accent, yet all declaimed with an imposing self-possession which seemed to find such trifles beneath his notice.

Flattery was only partially successful. When Pückler and the visiting Russian declared “that Europe could not subsist without him” Nathan “modestly declined our compliment and said, smiling, ‘Oh no, you are only jesting; I am but a servant whom people are pleased with because he manages their affairs well, and to whom they let some crumbs fall as an acknowledgement.’ ” This was sarcasm, as the discomfited Pückler knew only too well.

In his novel Tancred, Disraeli—who, as we shall see, came to know Nathan’s son Lionel well in the 1830s—drew on similar recollections when describing his hero’s attempt to gain an audience with the elder Sidonia, a character at least partly based on Nathan:

At this moment there entered the room, from the glass door, the same young man who had ushered Tancred into the apartment. He brought a letter to Sidonia. Lord Montacute felt confused; his shyness returned to him . . . He rose, and began to say good morning when Sidonia, without taking his eyes off the letter, saw him, and waving his hand, stopped him, saying, “I settled with Lord Eskdale that you were not to go away if anything occurred which required my momentary attention.” . . .

“Write,” continued Sidonia to the clerk, “that my letters are twelve hours later than the despatches, and that the City continued quite tranquil. Let the extract from the Berlin letter be left at the same time at the Treasury. The last bulletin?”

“Consols dropping at half-past two; all the foreign funds lower; shares very active.”

They were once more alone.

Such bruising encounters in the office were later distilled into the famous “two chairs” joke, probably the most frequently reprinted Rothschild joke, which must surely have been inspired by Nathan. An eminent visitor is shown into Rothschild’s office; without looking up from his desk, Rothschild casually invites him to “take a chair.” “Do you realise whom you are addressing?” exclaims the affronted dignitary. Rothschild still does not look up: “So take two chairs.” (One of many variants has the visitor indignantly announcing himself as the Prince of Thurn und Taxis; Rothschild implicitly offers each a chair.)

Nor was it only on his own territory—his office—that Nathan was famed for his blithe disregard for social rank. Even to the dining rooms of polite society he brought the abrasive manners and harsh, puncturing humour of the Frankfurt Judengasse. When Prince Pückler was invited to dine with Nathan he was “diverted” to “hear him explain to us the pictures around the dining room, (all portraits of the sovereigns of Europe, presented through all their ministers) and talk of the originals as his very good friends, and, in a certain sense, his equals”:

“Yes,” said he, “the ____ once pressed me for a loan, and in the same week in which I received his autograph letter, his father wrote to me also with his own hand from Rome to beg me for Heaven’s sake not to have any concern in it, for that I could not have to do with a more dishonest man than his son. ‘C’était sans doute très Catholique’; probably, however, the letter was written by the old ____ who hated her own son to such a degree that she used to say of him,—everybody knows how unjustly,—‘He has the heart of a t_____ with the face of an a____ .’ ”

After a dinner at which Nathan had brutally deflated a fellow guest, the German ambassador Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote to his wife:

Yesterday Rothschild dined with me. He is quite crude and uneducated, but he has a great deal of intelligence and a positive genius for money. He scored off Major Martins beautifully once or twice. M. was dining with me too and kept on praising everything French. He was being fatu- ously sentimental about the horrors of war and the large numbers who had been killed. “Well,” said R., “if they had not all died, Major, you would probably still be a drummer.” You ought to have seen Martins” face.

Even in less exalted company Nathan could seem a boor: witness the Liberal MP Thomas Fowell Buxton’s account of Nathan’s table talk at a dinner they both attended at Ham House in 1834. Here, it seems, is the self-made millionaire at his self-satisfied worst, proffering pat explanations for his own success and banal advice to others:

“I have seen . . . many clever men, very clever men, who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them. Their advice sounds very well, but fate is against them; they cannot get on themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, how can they do good to me? . . .

“To give . . . mind, and soul, and heart, and body, and everything to business; that is the way to be happy. I required a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very soon. Stick to one business, young man . . . stick to your brewery, and you may be the great brewer of London. Be a brewer, and a banker, and a merchant, and a manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette.”

When a guest at the same dinner expressed the hope “that your children are not too fond of money and business, to the exclusion of more important things. I am sure you would not wish that,” Nathan retorted bluntly: “I am sure I should wish that.”

Nathan struck some who encountered him as a tight-fisted philistine. The ornithologist Audubon recalled failing to persuade Nathan to subscribe to his lavishly illustrated Birds of America, instead sending him the work in advance of payment. But when Nathan was presented with the bill he “looked at it with amazement and cried out, ‘What, a hundred pounds for birds! Why sir I will give you five pounds, and not a farthing more!’ ” A frequently repeated anecdote has Nathan telling the composer Louis Spohr: “I understand nothing of music. This”—patting his pocket and making his money rattle and jingle—“is my music; we understand that on ’Change.” In another he responds irritably to a request for a charitable contribution: “Here! Write a cheque; I have made one [damned] fool of myself!” Buxton was shocked by Nathan’s somewhat crass attitude towards philanthropy. “Sometimes,” he explained, “to amuse myself, I give a beggar a guinea. He thinks it is a mistake, and for fear I shall find it out, off he runs as hard as he can. I advise you to give a beggar a guinea sometimes; it is very amusing.” It was entirely in character for him to point out to his own dinner guests that a particular service had cost £100.

The notion that an ill-educated Jew could behave this way in polite society and get away with it purely on account of his newly acquired and largely paper wealth variously fascinated and appalled contemporaries, depending on their social position and philosophical attachment to the traditional hierarchical order. Prince Pückler, for example, did not apparently resent the way Nathan teased him when he first presented himself at New Court with his credit note. On the contrary, he summed him up as “a man who one cannot deny has geniality and even a kind of great character . . . reallyun très bon enfant and generous, more than others of his class—as long, that is, as he is sure he is not risking anything himself, which one can in no way hold against him . . . This man is really a complete original.” As we have seen, Humboldt was also condescendingly amused by the combination of bad manners, sharp wit and lack of deference which Nathan brought to polite society.

In the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, by contrast, James’s many faux pas—his unprompted introduction of his own wife to the duc d’Orléans, for example, or his use of Count Potocki’s Christian name Stanislas—were viewed with distaste. Like so many of James’s socially superior guests, the maréchal de Castellane did not much care for his host even as he accepted his hospitality: “His wife . . . is pretty enough and very well-mannered. She sang well, though rather tremulously; her German accent is disagreeable. James . . . is small, ugly, arrogant, but he gives banquets and dinners; the grand seigneurs make fun of him and yet are no less delighted to go to his house, where he brings together the best company in Paris.”

According to Moritz Goldschmidt’s son Hermann, whose memoir is one of the few detailed first-hand descriptions we have, Salomon was even more lacking in social graces. “Why should I eat badly at your place, why don’t you come and eat well at mine,” he was once heard to reply to a dinner invitation from the Russian ambassador. Another “highly placed personality” who asked for a loan received a blunt negative: “Because I don’t want to.” Salomon therefore “seldom went into high society, [because] he felt that because of his lack of education he would have to play a difficult and uncomfortable role,” and preferred to leave “intercourse with the beau monde” to Goldschmidt’s father. On the rare occasions when he did have the Metternichs to dine with him, he could not resist vulgar displays of wealth, showing them the contents of his safe as a post-prandial treat. Even in his own more familiar (that is, Jewish) circle, he cut a coarse figure. If his barber was late in the morning—and Salomon habitually rose at 3 a.m.—he would be reviled as “an ass.” If someone came into the office smelling slightly, Salomon would press his handkerchief to his nose, open the window, and shout: “Throw him out, the man stinks.” He dined unsociably early at 6.30 p.m. and habitually drank two bottles of wine before going for a stroll in the park with “blindly loyal toadies and hangers-on.” When he visited the Goldschmidts at their house in Döbling on Sundays he flirted with the prettier girls present “in a manner which was not always proper or polite.” This included cracking crude jokes if any women present were pregnant.

It is not that all these stories are wholly misleading; no doubt Nathan and his brothers did seem to many who met them like the incarnation of “new money,” with all its rough edges. Nothing makes the point more explicit than the 1848 cartoon (produced as the first of a series of “Pictures from Frankfurt”) which cruelly juxtaposed Moritz von Bethmann and Amschel, the former elegant on his coach and four, the latter slouched atop a money box (see illustration 7.i).Yet such judgements are not the best kinds of historical evidence. Firstly, they tell us only how the Rothschilds seemedto others. Secondly, because “new money” has been the object of scorn for more than 2,000 years, there are tropes which tend to be repeated no matter how little the nouveau riche individual in question actually conforms to the stereotype. The brothers’ own letters tell a very different story.

In fact, the brothers themselves disliked intensely the great majority of social functions they gave. Amschel “thanked God” when his dinners were over, and Carl thought them expensive “humbug”—“it was very nice, but the money was nicer,” he commented when the chef they had hired presented his bill. “However,” he con-ceded, “it is as good as bribes”: it is noteworthy that at least five of the guests at the 1817 dinner also received parcels of the new city of Paris loan. In Berlin too, where he had relatively little difficulty in securing prestigious invitations from Hardenberg and the British and Austrian ambassadors, Carl retained his scepticism about the value of such socialising: “I don’t really care, because I find we always do better business with those who do not invite us.” Nathan was as much out of his natural element in the ballroom or the salon as in the countryside. As Amschel said of him in 1817, if Nathan gave a mere tea party, he felt his morning had been “stolen.” Even his daughter Charlotte expressed a utilitarian view in 1829 when she hoped that “the Season will be very lively as this is always, I think, an encouragement for trade.”

7.i: Ernst Schalk and Philipp Herrlich, Baron Moritz von Bethmann and Baron Amschel von Rothschild, Bilder aus Frankfurt, Nr. 1 (1848).

James shed light on his brother’s fundamentally anti-social temperament when, contemplating yet another ball, he said: “I now feel exactly as you do. I would gladly stay at home and don’t want to drive myself crazy with all the rubbish.” He too was much less enamoured of such occasions than his condescending guests generally assumed. From the outset, he took much the same functional view of socialising. “I think of nothing else but business,” he assured Nathan. “If I attend a society party, I go there to become acquainted with people who might be useful for the business.” To prove the point, early social contacts like Richelieu’s secretary were pumped for useful information. Privately, James admitted to being weary of his lavish balls; he continued to give them, he confessed to Nathan in January 1825, only lest people think he could no longer afford to. “My dear Nathan,” he wrote wearily,

I am obliged to give a ball because the world claims that I am broke, for the people who have become accustomed to my giving three to four balls, as I did during the previous winter, will otherwise set their tongues wagging, and quite honestly the French are evil people. Well, the carnival takes place next week and I wish it were already over. I give you my word that my heart is not in it but one must do everything to put on a show for the world.

Six years later, in the wake of the revolutionary crisis of 1830, Charlotte discerned the same link between her uncle’s economic performance and his sociability: although Betty felt too “fatigued” to give “her customary balls,” “the rentes still [continue] to rise so rapidly [that] James would be disposed to give them.” As we shall see, throwing balls was one of the vital ways in which James signalled to the Parisian beau monde that he had survived the financial and political storm of 1830.

The Honours “Racket”

It was not only by giving parties that the Rothschilds sought to transcend the traditional social barriers which confronted Jews, no matter how wealthy, in Restoration Europe. In a social world still dominated by a hierarchy of ranks and orders, they hastened to acquire formal marks of status for themselves. It is perhaps a sign of how fragile the restored Metternichian regime was that they found this exceedingly easy: that is the real point of the “Jew baron” story quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of this point is the fact that the Rothschilds were able to acquire noble status from the Emperor Francis II as early as 1817. This was arranged in Vienna after lobbying by the Austrian Treasury official Schwinner, the Finance Minister Stadion and Metternich, and was seen by them primarily as a reward for the Rothschilds’ role in paying British subsidies and French reparations payments to Austria. The significance of this should not be exaggerated, of course. The Rothschilds were not the first Jews to be elevated in this way: six other families had been ennobled (though all the others had converted to Christianity by 1848). Nor did ennoblement by the Habsburg Emperor connote social elevation of the sort achieved two generations later, when Nathan’s grandson Natty Rothschild was given a hereditary peerage by Queen Victoria. Like the Austrian currency, the Austrian nobility had been debased compared with its more exclusive British counterpart. On the other hand, ennoblement gave the brothers three valuable assets: the right to the prefix “von” (“de” in France and England); a coat of arms (albeit not quite the grandiose design they had originally hoped for); and, in 1822, the title “Freiherr” (“Baron” in France and England).³

Nor were these the only trophies of social ascent which the Rothschilds picked up in the years after 1814. Just as their father before them had sought to enhance his prestige by acquiring the title of Hoffaktor and court banker from as many courts as possible, so too his sons and grandsons applied to be appointed “Financial Councillors” by the family’s old friend the Elector of Hesse-Kassel, and later by the King of Prussia. Such titles were purely honorific, but socially useful because they entitled the bearer to wear a uniform, almost a sine qua non when attending court functions. The titles of Austrian consul, which was secured for Nathan in 1820, and consul-general, which he and James received in 1821-2 as rewards for their financial support during the Neapolitan crisis, had essentially the same sartorial significance, though notionally they also entailed some responsibility for protecting Habsburg commercial interests in Britain and France. That the Rothschilds made use of such uniforms can be seen from a variety of contemporary references. As early as 1817 Carl sought permission to wear the navy and gold uniform of the Hessian Kriegscollegium. James was spotted in 1825 wearing his red consular outfit to Charles X’s coronation at Rheims. Two years later the young Charles Bocher mistook him for an English general when saw him emerging from the Tuileries in his scarlet coat with gold epaulettes.

A uniform was good; but a uniform with decorations—medals, ribbons or braid—was better. These too the brothers began to thirst after from as early as 1814. In late 1817 Carl was publicly presented with a ribbon by the Prussian Chancellor Hardenberg, having found himself one of only two people at the Prussian court with nothing on his chest. A year later the Grand Duke of Darmstadt bestowed orders on James. When he and Salomon both received the Order of St Vladimir from the Tsar during the Congress of Verona in 1822, Salomon made sure—through Gentz—that it was reported in the German press. A year later James added the Knight’s Cross of the French Legion of Honour to his tally (though he did not become a full member of the Legion until 1841). By 1827 Salomon was sufficiently blasé to request an order—the Constantine Order of St George—for his senior clerk, Leopold Wertheimstein, for services rendered to the Duchess of Parma. When Nat went to Constantinople in 1834—the first Rothschild to do so—he could not conceal his excitement at the prospect of a new and exotic gong:

You do not know what it is to be received by the Sultan, no person of inferior rank than a minister plenipotentiary can be presented at court—I however consider myself Ambassador . . . & consequently have a right to the most brilliant reception.—The Sultan signified that it was his intention to bestow a mark of his satisfaction, but I do not know whether it is to be a ring, a snuffbox or a grand decoration—I hope the latter. I have already given them to understand that the diamond crescent will be the most acceptable.

As his letter suggests, royal gifts like rings and engraved snuffboxes, though not unwelcome, were second best.

The Rothschilds’ pursuit of titles and orders is often seen as a kind of absurd foible: a “weakness” for imitating the nobility, as Capefigue put it. That is undoubtedly the way it seemed to established nobles. Metternich suspected them of “vanity” and “a craving for honours and distinctions”; while critics of the Restoration regime, notably Heine, mocked their apparent deference to aristocratic mores.⁴ Yet the brothers themselves privately viewed these mores with a certain amount of contempt. Coats of arms were, as Carl put it, “part of the racket. As for uniforms, James privately joked that “if you go to see a Minister here, you must always be made up as if on a visit to your bride.” The brothers even parodied their new titles on occasion: Carl, for example, addressed one letter to “James de Rothschild, Knight of the Society for the Liberation of Christian Slaves [sic], Financial Councillor of Electoral Hesse etc. etc. etc..” When the King of Denmark also invited him “to ask for a title,” he could only ask: “What are we going to do with all these titles?” Indeed, when he was offered “a ribbon with a buckle such as soldiers wear” by the Elector of Hesse-Kassel, he turned it down as beneath his dignity. Nor were the Rothschilds willing to pay over the odds for badges of status: when Nat heard that the Austrian government wished to provide his brother Lionel with a consular secretary—at an annual cost to the firm of £500—he was outraged: “For my part I wd. see the whole consulate at the deuce before I would pay £500 a year for it & have a disagreeable fellow to be master . . . I should like to know who will pay £500 a year for the honor of being Austrn. Consul.” Even Amschel, in many ways the most susceptible of all the family to such things, knew their place. As he put it in 1814, “If we had always worried about what other people were going to think, we would now be left with a great many decorations etc., but without money. And in the end, we would be left without praise, without decorations and without money.” “The highest decoration,” in his view, was “a quiet life, God willing.”

There were two arguments for nevertheless accepting such honours. The first, as we have seen, was that they improved the partners’ access to the corridors of power. The second argument was that titles and other honours were “a mark of distinction for our nation”—that is, for European Jewry. The Rothschilds’ ennoblement was widely interpreted in Frankfurt as a slap in the face for those in the town who wished to to reimpose the old disabilities on Jews. “[I]f one Jew is a Baron every Jew is a Baron:” that was how they saw it in the Judengasse. In the same way, Nathan’s appointment as Austrian consul in London was “a lucky thing for the Jews” according to Carl. Even the fact that the brothers could be awarded decorations with explicitly Christian insignia—the names of saints, even the sign of the cross itself— was regarded as a kind of victory. Though Amschel refused to accept such orders, Carl had no hesitation in accepting the ribbon and star of the newly founded Order of St George from Pope Gregory XVI in 1832, while Lionel accepted the Order of Isabella from the Queen of Spain three years later. As Heine noted, the Order had originally been established “to glorify the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain”; how piquant that “Herr von Shylock zu Paris” should thus be acknowledged as “the mightiest Baron of Christendom.” Certainly, it seemed that way to scandalised Christian commentators like the Austrian Baron Kübeck:

His Holiness receives a member of the House of Rothschild, and with heavenly forbearance the representative of Jesus Christ on earth decorates a descendant of the people that allowed Christ to be put to death, with the ribbon and star of a newly founded order of St George, and in return allows his hand instead of his foot to be kissed. And still Rothschild refuses to become a Christian.

In this light, perhaps the hardest thing to explain is Nathan’s apparent doubt about the value of such honours. For example, a number of letters would seem to suggest that he was offered but turned down the offer of a knighthood (or “Night-hood,” as James wrote it) in 1815 or 1816. When someone tried to tell Carl that his brother had accepted, he refused to believe it “because you love simplicity.” The 1816 ennoblement patents conspicuously omitted Nathan, and the approved coat of arms showed four arrows instead of five. Furthermore, unlike his brothers and eldest son, he rarely used the title “Baron” or the prefix “de.” Was this a matter of milieu, as Corti suggested—a desire not to be too publicly associated with reactionary Austria?⁵ Mace argues that there is a more practical explanation: although Nathan secured the right to bear arms in 1818 (hence legitimising the fifth arrow), when he applied to the Royal College of Arms for registration of the Austrian title in 1825 he was turned down—probably because he had only received his own royal letters patent of denization eight years before. However, it may also have been partly because, as Amschel thought, Nathan just “did not want” to be ennobled. Thus, when Nathan declined a Prussian decoration in 1818, he suggested that it be given to Salomon instead because “here in London I have no use for such a thing” whereas “my brother . . . loves ribbons and is a Baron who intends to live in Paris, where one can decorate oneself with such things.” James too was at first reluctant to call himself “de Rothschild.” “Let us remain merchants,” he urged his brothers in 1816. “It is extremely nice to possess the title and not to make use of it, except in private.” A positive business letter from a finance minister was “worth more than all the titles of nobility.”

But, while James’s reservations faded quickly, in Nathan’s case disdain for aristocratic trappings persisted, and perhaps ran deeper. When Prince Pückler visited the English Rothschilds in 1827, he was treated to a bizarre after-dinner performance, as an evidently tipsy Nathan donned “his new Austrian consular uniform, which, as he said, his friend M[etternich] had send him from Vienna”:

[He] showed it to us, and even suffered himself to be persuaded to try it on before the looking glass, and to walk about in it. And, as virtuosi when they have once begun never know when to stop, he now sent for other magnificent Court dresses, and changed his toilette several times, as if he had been on the stage . . .

It was . . . rather droll to see how this otherwise serious tradesman like man tried to assume the various bendings and bowings, and the light and gracious air, of a courtier, and, not in the least disconcerted by our laughing, assured us, with as much confidence as joviality that N.M.R., if he liked, could act any part; and, with the help of five or six glasses of wine extra, could make as good a figure at Court as the best of them.

As Pückler’s evidently somewhat mixed feelings suggest, this was surely a characteristic bid by Nathan to épater l’aristocratie. He might be willing on occasion to exchange his sober surtout for the gaudy apparel of the old order; but he regarded it as little more than fancy dress. In its way, this vivid scene—of a tipsy Jewish banker making fun of the Habsburg Empire’s diplomatic finery in front of an impecunious prince—encapsulates the deep ambivalence of the Rothschilds’ relationship with the Restoration social order.

“Fine Education”

Despite their reputation as philistines, the younger Rothschild brothers took at least some interest in what we would now call “high culture”—something of a misnomer given the rapid development of a “public sphere” in this period as a more or less free market for the production and consumption of music, drama, books and paintings. This interest was partly a logical consequence of entertaining in the ways described above: it was, at the very least, difficult to own a large house without acquiring pictures and other ornaments to decorate its rooms. At the same time, in order to be able to communicate with members of the social elite about matters other than money and politics, a basic knowledge of their favourite painters, composers and authors was a prerequisite. Yet busy middle-aged bankers (all the brothers save James were over forty in 1820) generally make poor students of the arts. True, they had all inherited from their father an appreciation of antique objets d’art, and were discerning about the gifts they sent their favourite politicians. They commissioned portraits of themselves, their wives and children from respectable artists like Sir William Beechey, Louis Amié Grosclaude and Moritz Daniel Oppenheim;⁶ and in both Frankfurt and Paris they had regular boxes reserved at the theatre. But James was the only member of the second generation to show any serious interest in culture on his own account. He read Schiller and Goethe when he was in his twenties, for example, and in the 1820s retained an artist named Allard on 5 francs a month, as well as subscribing to the Courrier des Spectacles and Journal des Théâtres. His brothers tended to take the view that this sort of thing was better made available to their children.

The obvious is perhaps worth stating here: if the Rothschild brothers really had been philistines, they would not have educated their children as well as they did. Of course, Nathan wanted his sons “to give mind, and soul, and heart, and body, and everything to business”; at the time he made that much misunderstood remark, all but one of them had completed their educations and had been working for the firm for several years. And he and his brothers recognised that there might be a conflict between higher education and a successful business apprenticeship. As Carl put it when Salomon was pondering the fifteen-year-old Anselm’s future: “I advise you not to let him study . . . more than another two years so that he should enter the business when 17 years old. Otherwise he would not be deeply attached to business.” The subsequent business career of Mayer, the only one of Nathan’s sons to attend an English university, proved that analysis to be only too accurate. But none of the brothers for a moment doubted that a successful business career was compatible with the best possible secondary education. Indeed, they viewed the latter as an essential preparation for the former. Moreover, the male Rothschilds of the third generation were in practice given even longer than Carl suggested before being expected to abandon their studies and enter the “counting house.” Judging by the first appearance of his name in the business correspondence, Anselm was twenty-three before he took a serious part in the running of the firm (though he was admitted a partner a year earlier, and presumably did routine work for his father which has gone unrecorded). Lionel was twenty when he first began to write and receive business letters; Anthony and Nat were eighteen, and Mayer twenty-one. None of Carl’s sons feature in the firm’s deliberations before the age of twenty; indeed, the pious Wilhelm Carl was not really regarded as competent to act unsupervised until he was twenty-four. Both James’s sons, Alphonse and Gustave, were nineteen before they began to write their own business letters. Given their parents’ view that the best apprenticeship was learning by doing, there is little reason to think that any of the third generation had worked for long before these first recorded appearances.

In any case, the older Rothschilds had no desire to impose on their offspring the deprivations and rigours of their own childhoods. Anselm’s mother took pride in her eleven-year-old son’s precocious letter-writing not just because it would stand him in good stead in business; she genuinely wanted him and his sister to have “a fine education” for its own sake. The influence on her of contemporary notions of Bildung is apparent in a letter she wrote to her husband in 1820 (which accompanied another letter from their now teenage son): “He is so uninhibited towards me, the good, sweet boy, which pleases me particularly, for you know, dear husband, that it has always been my aim that our dear children should not conceal from us their true, innermost feelings; and I—or rather we—have achieved it.” Nathan indulged his children in less sentimental ways. After work, he played with them, letting them (as a friend recalled) “make their equestrian exercises on your back’; indeed, on one occasion he horsed around so energetically that he managed to dislocate his shoulder. He bought them a miniature carriage with four white goats to drive about the garden at Stamford Hill. The family painted by William Armfield Hobday in 1821 was—as it looks today—a happy one: to the left, the three-year-old Mayer tries to pull a letter from his father’s hand; at Charlotte’s feet, Hannah Mayer has dropped her bonnet; and the older boys vainly attempt to restrain the family dog as it chews Lionel’s hat. Small wonder the faintest hint of a smile plays on the lips of the relaxedpaterfamilias as he reclines, legs crossed, in his armchair.⁷ And he continued to indulge them—even to spoil them—as they grew up. At the age of seventeen, Hannah Mayer was enjoying life in Brighton, sitting for her first portrait. When Thomas Fowell Buxton met Anthony the following year, he was already “a mighty hunter; and his father lets him buy any horses he likes. He lately applied to the emperor of Morocco for a first-rate Arab horse. The emperor sent him a magnificent one, but he died as he landed in England. The poor youth said very feelingly, ‘that was the greatest misfortune he ever had suffered.’ ”

In Coningsby, Disraeli portrayed the younger Sidonia as a model of modern education:

Shut out from universities and schools, those universities and schools which were indebted for their first knowledge of ancient philosophy to the learning and enterprise of his ancestors, the young Sidonia was fortunate in his tutor . . . [He] penetrated the highest mysteries of mathematics with a facility almost instinctive . . . The circumstances of his position, too, had early contributed to give him an unusual command over the modern languages . . . When he was nineteen, Sidonia . . . possessed a complete mastery over the principal European languages . . . At seventeen he . . . commenced his travels. He resided . . . some time in Germany, and then, having visited Italy, settled at Naples . . .

This was not far removed from the kind of education Lionel and his brothers and cousins actually received. One of the Montefiores recalled how in 1815 Lionel and Anthony had been taken away from their first teacher, “a Pole [who] used to wear a tall Polish hat and stride about the schoolroom with a cane ferociously stuck in his Wellington boots.” Instead, their parents and some friends “got Garcia, who was previously a book-keeper at Barrow and Lousada’s counting house, to establish a more select academy at Peckham, and there Lionel and Anthony . . . were sent.” The favoured curriculum was indeed modern, rather than classical, and that slant continued when the time came for a kind of modified grand tour in 1827. Aged respectively nineteen and seventeen, the two boys were despatched to see the sights of Germany—not Italy, the classicist’s favoured destination—travelling with their tutor John Darby from Frankfurt through the principal towns of Saxony, then on to Prague and Vienna, returning via Baden and Strasbourg. (Prussia was conspicuously omitted, though they do seem to have gone to Hanover in order to visit the university at Göttingen.) The aim was obviously to acquire a grounding in German Kultur: besides trailing round countless art galleries and princely piles, the brothers paid a respectful call on the aged Goethe.

It was only after this tour that Lionel and Anthony were expected to turn their minds to business: in January 1829 one of the bookkeepers in the Frankfurt office was entrusted with the task of raising Anthony’s numeracy to the level required of a banker. “I ceaselessly instruct him in all the arithmetical problems,” the new tutor reported to Nathan, “and I am glad to perceive that he has the intellectual grasp and makes good use of what I have to teach him. In due course I shall give to the young Baron systematically the knowledge of the art of arithmetic and I shall continue to explain to him arbitration of exchange and all of the business circulation of the counting house.”

Visits like the one made by Nathan’s sons to Frankfurt evidently encouraged a degree of Anglo-German parental rivalry. In 1831 Charlotte wrote to her mother Hannah urging her to “make [Mayer] write a letter in German if he can, if not, in his best writing in English to Mrs S[alomon] de R[othschild]. Uncle Charles’s boys [Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl] both write very well and it is sure to be compared.” Four years later it was the English Mayer’s turn to visit Germany; but this was a more academic trip than his elder brothers had made. With his tutor Dr Schlemmer he spent several months studying at the University of Leipzig before going on to Heidelberg. In this he was following in the footsteps of Anselm, the first Rothschild to attend university, who had acquired “a lively interest in science” while studying at Berlin. He then returned to England, where he became the first of many Rothschilds to study at Cambridge, first at Magdalene and then, when the college proved punctilious about his attendance at chapel (still formally a requirement for undergraduates), to larger and laxer Trinity. (Oxford was ruled out because matriculation was conditional on subscription to the thirty-nine articles; whereas in Cambridge non-conformists and Jews could become members of the university, though they could not be awarded degrees, scholarships or fellowships.)⁸

Not to be outdone, Carl sent his son Mayer Carl to Göttingen, where he studied law, and then to Berlin, where he attended lectures by the leading light of German jurisprudence, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, and Leopold von Ranke, the pre-eminent historian of the age. His brother Wilhelm Carl was in turn subjected to an extraordinarily rigorous secondary education: at the age of fifteen he was studying twenty different subjects including five languages and five sciences under a team of tutors led by the French physiologist Henri Blanvalet. His flight into religious Orthodoxy may have been partly a reaction against such state-of-the-art cramming. James’s sons were no less thoroughly educated. Alphonse studied at the Collège Bourbon (later the Lycée Condorcet) and was tutored privately for his baccalauréat by Désiré Nisard, who later became director of the Ecole Normale and a member of the Académie Française. Nor was it only the Rothschild boys who were given the benefit of a good education. Though little is known about her formal schooling, Carl’s daughter Charlotte—perhaps the brightest Rothschild of the third generation—was a highly literate woman, to judge by her elegant English letters and intense German diaries.

If the aim of all this had been to produce great intellectuals, we would have to judge it a failure: with the exception of Charlotte, none of the third generation can be said to have had scholarly minds. But the aim was rather to produce men and women who would fit more easily into the elite social milieus of Europe than their fathers—without losing the desire to carry on their business as bankers. In those terms, the education of the third generation of Rothschilds was a success. Mayer Amschel’s grandchildren no longer spoke the rough-hewn German of the Judengasse: Castellane disliked Betty’s German accent not her Jewish accent, and no contemporary appears to have detected anything remotely unusual about the easy and idiomatic way Nathan’s sons spoke English. Nor did the younger Rothschilds invariably write their letters in the Hebrew characters used by their fathers: although Salomon and Carl’s sons continued to do so, the English and French Rothschilds of the third generation did not (though they could read Judendeutschwithout difficulty). Indeed, from the late 1820s onwards, the business of the five houses was conducted multilingually, with each partner tending to write in his first language, occasionally lapsing into the language of his place of work or addressee in postscripts. To all intents and purposes, as their letters show, the third generation wrote English, German and French as well as—and in some cases rather better than—their aristocratic contemporaries. Moreover, the very conventionality of their cultural tastes was proof that the tutors had done their work well. They liked Scott’s novels; Meyerbeer’s operas; Murillo’s paintings; Marie Antoinette’s furniture. The boys also picked up the hobbies and vices of the social elite—riding horses, hunting foxes and stags, betting on racehorses, as well as smoking cigars, drinking fine wines and chasing unsuitable women. They even had clubbish nicknames for one other: Lionel was “Rab,” Anthony “Billy” or “Fat Bill” and Mayer “Muffy” or “Tup.” All outward traces of the Frankfurt ghetto had been expunged, save, it might be said, those of physiognomy—and even in that respect few members of the family actually conformed to the hostile caricaturists’ Jewish stereotypes, least of all James. He and his brothers had found it easy to become barons, wearers of royal orders, property-owners and society hosts. Now they had made it possible for the third generation of Rothschilds to become something more elusive: gentlemen.