The House of Rothschild (14 page)

In buying land when they did—in the wake of the great agricultural crisis of the mid-1840s—the Rothschilds were going in at the bottom of the market. It was in 1848 that the Duke of Buckingham was finally declared bankrupt, and a year later Mayer was receiving estate agents’ reports from Ireland, advising him of the favourable opportunities there. “Potatoes failing all directions and free trade ruining everybody,” ran one such tip; “Ireland completely ruined, now is the time or at least it is fast approaching for buying estates on the sly. When the Parliamentary Title be obtained acknowledge the purchase and resell at a very advanced premium.” In fact, he and his brothers had no interest in such carpet-bagging: their interest in real estate, as their mother remarked, reflected the fact that by December 1849 the yield on consols had fallen to 3.1 per cent. It was “the most proper time” to buy land “when the funds lie so high as they are at present for altho the interest may be reduced on funded property land will always be an equivalent.” Such investments cannot be seen as symptoms of a declining entrepreneurial spirit. The same is true of the French Rothschilds’ purchases of wine-growing estates: Nat’s purchase of Château Brane-Mouton in 1853 (which he renamed Mouton-Rothschild) and James’s long battle to gain control of Château Lafite near Pauillac were informed by a shrewd assessment of the demand for good-quality clarets. James was an old man when he finally secured control of Lafite in 1868 (for £177,600), but almost immediately he began bidding up the price of the new vintage.

Yet there is a difference between spending £26,000 on farmland and spending an equivalent sum on a palatial new house. It is easily forgotten how few English landowners built themselves new “stately homes” in the nineteenth century: what had been affordable a hundred years before was now out of the question. For the Rothschilds, on the other hand, money was no object. When the London partners withdrew £260,250 from the firm’s joint capital in 1852—primarily to finance their building projects—it represented less than 3 per cent of the total. Yet the quoted price for the new house at Mentmore was just £15,427. For the immense amount of work he undertook for the Rothschilds between 1853 and 1873, the builder George Myers was altogether paid just £350,000.

The fact that they could afford it, however, does not explain why they decided to spend their money on big houses which plainly did not pay a return on the investment. The banal explanation—and it may be sufficient—is that the Rothschilds liked to spend time in the country; and the advent of railways meant that they could do so without neglecting their work in the City. The London and North Western Line allowed Lionel and his brothers to commute easily between Mentmore and Euston: Lionel could have “a gallop” in the country and still be down in time for an evening debate in the Commons. The Strasbourg-Ligny line, opened in May 1849, did the same for James and his sons at Ferrieres. There is, however, a supplementary and perhaps necessary explanation. The new houses staked a claim to aristocratic status. As early as 1846, Lionel had intimated that he regarded a baronetcy as beneath him, and embarked on his campaign to enter the House of Commons only when it was clear that a peerage was not going to be forthcoming. But this was not some symptom of “feudalisation”—of decadent bourgeois submission to anachronistic upper-class values; for it must not be forgotten that Mentmore was being built at the time when Lionel was openly challenging the legislative role of the House of Lords. The Rothschild bid for noble status in Britain was uncompromising and nothing expressed this more tangibly than the houses the family built for themselves. They were more than mere imitations of eighteenth-century country houses. They were advertisements for Rothschild power, five-star hotels for influential guests, private art galleries: in short, centres for corporate hospitality.

Their very choice of architect was significant. Joseph Paxton had been known to the family since the 1830s and had advised Louise on her Günthersburg house in the 1840s; but it was his design of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition which seems to have convinced the family to entrust him with something more than mere alterations. Work began on Mentmore in August 1851, the year of the Exhibition, and for all its Elizabethan inspiration—Paxton had Wollaton and Hardwick houses in mind as models—it was by the standards of the day an innovative building with its huge glass-roofed hall, hot running water and central heating. It cannot really be understood as a family home for Mayer, his wife and his daughter. Boasting twenty-six rooms on the ground floor alone, it was essentially a hotel where numerous guests could be entertained and accommodated. Those guests were supposed to be reminded of their host’s global influence: indeed, the trophy-like heads of the European sovereigns (in this instance by the Italian sculptor Raphael Monti) were becoming something of a Rothschild trademark. But Mentmore was also an art gallery, intended to link the modern power of the Rothschilds with more historically venerable antecedents—hence the three massive lanterns originally made for the Doge of Venice, the Gobelin tapestries and the collection of antique furniture from sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century France.

In building Mentmore, Mayer had set a standard for the rest of the family. Aston Clinton, altered for Anthony between 1854 and 1855 by Paxton’s son-in-law George Henry Stokes, was a botched job by comparison. Attempting to enlarge the existing house, Stokes failed altogether to realise Louisa’s “dream,” though she hoped that “in time I may grow attached to this little place which I thought at first sight the ugliest on earth.” By contrast, James set out determinedly to trump Mentmore at Ferrières. To the chagrin of the French architectural profession, to say nothing of the local stonemasons, he called in Paxton and Myers. It was a commission they more than once regretted accepting, for James felt no compunction about rejecting Paxton’s first design after seeking a second opinion from the French architect Antoine-Julien Hénard; while friction between the English and French workers on the site led to a strike and finally violence over pay differentials. The final result—which was not completed until 1860—was an eclectic mixture of French, Italian and English styles. Sophisticates like the Goncourts loathed it: “Trees and waterworks created by spending millions, round a chateau costing eighteen millions, an idiotic and ridiculous extravagance, a pudding of every style, the fruit of a stupid ambition to have all monuments in one!” Bismarck thought it looked like “an overturned chest of drawers.” The poet and diplomat Wilfrid Scawen Blunt called it “a monstrous Pall Mall club decorated in the most outrageous Louis Philippe taste”; while the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont dismissed it as “an incredible bric-a-brac shop.”

It was nevertheless a state-of-the art affair: James famously moved the kitchens a hundred yards away from the house to prevent his guests from smelling the cooks at work, building a small underground railway to connect them with the basement beneath the dining room. And like Mentmore it was part advertisement (with Charles-Henri Cordier’s caryatids symbolising Rothschild dominance over the four quarters of the globe), part hotel (with over eighty rooms), and part gallery (with the great hall functioning as James’s increasingly cluttered “personal museum”). It was all on a hypertrophic scale—as Evelina said, “the place was too regal to be without sentinels”—yet it had an exotic, theatrical quality due largely to the interiors by the stage-designer Eugène Lami, who gave the smoking room its faintly kitsch Venetian frescoes. Château Pregny, built by Stokes for Adolph in 1858, was a modest affair in comparison. Overlooking Lake Geneva, this Louis XVI-style building was primarily intended as a show-case for Adolph’s collection of paintings and
objets d‘art
—exotic rock crystals, precious stones and wood carvings. The work done on the house at Boulogne by Armand-Auguste-Joseph Berthelin in 1855 was similar in quality, though Berthelin took his inspiration from the Versailles of Louis XIV

The 1850s and 1860s also saw substantial transformations in the gardens around the Rothschild houses. At Ferrières, under Paxton’s direction, there was a new pond with ornamental bridges, as well as elaborate greenhouses and winter gardens. Though her daughter Evelina preferred the grounds of Gunnersbury and Mentmore, Charlotte’s descriptions of Ferrières in this period gush with enthusiasm about

At Boulogne the landscape gardener Poyre built an elaborate water garden with cascades and romantic rockeries, while James added “geese with curled feathers,” white ducks, Egyptian donkeys and a talking parrot to his collection of exotic fauna. At Pregny too there was a menagerie for Adolph’s collection of Patagonian hares, kangaroos and antelopes. Even the older houses had their gardens redesigned: though he rarely went there, Anselm turned the grounds of Schillersdorf into a Silesian version of Regent’s Park. He also added a lake to attract wild duck and a large number of English-style cottages for the estate workers—an early example of Rothschild paternalism in the country, just as the various animal and bird collections showed the first stirrings of the later Rothschilds’ passion for zoology.

Nor were the family’s residences in the great European cities neglected. Lionel acquired the house next door to 148 Piccadilly from the MP Fitzroy Kelly and commissioned Nelson & Innes to rebuild a new and :much larger house on the site of the two houses, moving to Kingston House in Knightsbridge while the work was in progress.
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To get an impression of the finished building (which was demolished a century later when Park Lane was widened for traffic), one need only walk into one of the grander London clubs: the basement was set aside for the male servants’ quarters and wine cellar, the ground floor was a spacious hall, the staircase a mass of marble leading to the huge reception rooms on the first floor, leaving the second floor for the private rooms and the garret for the maids. The kitchens were moved under the terrace in the garden. The various hotels in Paris were on a similar scale and shared the same basic structure.
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And of course the task of filling all these houses with appropriate furniture and ornaments was never complete. A not untypical shopping expedition by Charlotte in Paris yielded a list of possible purchases including a marble group for £2,000; four small statues; a crystal chandelier; four busts of Roman Emperors; “two marvellous vases of rosso antico, most beautifully carved, and exhibiting Neptune surrounded by tritons and sea-nymphs” for 5,000 guineas; and a table for £150. A year later the London art dealers were offering her, among other things, a painting by Rubens, “a wonderful chimney-piece by Inigo Jones, a beautiful Sir Joshua [Reynolds], representing a lovely woman ... and last though not least Mr. Russell’s long promised Japanese or Chinese collection.” Snobs like the Goncourts liked to sneer at the Rothschilds’ reliance on art dealers: one of their malicious stories describes Anselm offering an optician 36,000 francs if he could invent “a lorgnette which could give him the ability to see with the eyes of a man of taste”; another imagines James throwing in a dress for the dealer’s daughter to secure a Veronese at a good price. The reality was that the Rothschilds were now among the elite of art collectors ; perhaps even at its head. “A trumpery little Raphael [for] 150,000 f[ran]cs—the Cuyp 92.000 f[ran]cs,” reported Nat to his brothers from a Paris auction in 1869. “One must have plenty of money now to buy pictures”—or, as his cousin Gustave put it, “money to be spent in a moment.” But who had that kind of money if not the Rothschilds?

After all this, the rebuilding of the bank offices at New Court in the early 1860s seemed an afterthought. To be sure, Charlotte thought the new building “quite marvellous, and intended for magnificent business.” It remained to be seen how far politics—not to mention art and architecture—would henceforth distract the younger generation of Rothschilds from fulfilling that intention.

[Mjoi, je serais charmé de faire une niche à ce juif qui nous
jugule.

CAVOUR

 

 

The 1850s were a difficult time for the Rothschilds: that, at least, is the traditional view. Firstly, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, of whom James had always been suspicious, overthrew the republican constitution and proclaimed himself Emperor, his uncle’s lineal successor. Secondly, James’s financial rival Achille Fould—the younger brother of Benoît, Heine’s “chief rabbi of the Rive Gauche” railway—became Finance Minister. According to an often quoted account by the comte de Viel-Castel, Fould told Napoleon: “It is absolutely necessary that Your Majesty free yourself from the tutelage of Rothschild, who reigns in spite of you.” Thirdly, the formation of new “universal” banks like the Credit Mobilier—the brainchild of James’s former associates the Pereires—threatened the dominant position of the Rothschilds not only in France, but throughout Europe. Finally, the 1850s were a time of international instability: for the first time since 1815 the Rothchilds’ nightmare of major wars between the great powers became a reality, first in the Crimea (Britain and France against Russia over Turkey) and then in Italy (France against Austria over Italy).

Yet this account is misleading in two respects. Because historians have relied too heavily on biased sources like the diaries of Count Hübner, Apponyi’s successor as Austrian ambassador, it overstates the difficulties which James experienced under Napoleon’s regime. Moreover, it is too Francocentric: such difficulties as James experienced should not be seen in isolation at a time when the other Rothschild houses were prospering.