The House of Rothschild (58 page)

Nor was the second such “mixed” marriage between Annie’s sister Constance and Leo’s friend Cyril Flower an unqualified success. The problem in this case was that the “wonderfully handsome” Flower was very probably a homosexual, celebrated for his female impersonations at Cambridge. In fairness, the earnest Constance seems to have enjoyed being married to one of the more “advanced” Liberal MPs of the day—she herself was a keen teetotaller—and doubtless welcomed his elevation to the peerage as Lord Battersea in 1892. But when he was offered the Governorship of New South Wales by Gladstone the following year, Constance refused to leave her mother (and her charitable work) for Australia and he had to turn down the appointment—a decision which his wife feared had “blighted my dear Cyril’s career” and condemned them to “years of misery.”

The best known of all the mixed marriages of the period was that between Mayer’s daughter Hannah and Rosebery. Here too there is evidence of some Rothschild opposition. Though rumours of a match had circulated since 1876, their engagement was not announced until both her parents were dead; and no male Rothschild attended the wedding, so that Disraeli gave the bride away. And here too it might be thought that Rosebery gave up bachelorhood reluctantly. In the most malicious view, Rosebery was a misogynist who married a Rothschild primarily for financial reasons. She, after all, was one of the richest heiresses of the period, having inherited not only Mentmore and 107 Piccadilly but also £100,000 a year. That made her an attractive prospect to an ambitious politician, despite the fact that (as her cousin Constance put it), she took “no interest in big subjects” and expressed herself (according to her husband) in a “childish” way.

It has also been claimed that Rosebery harboured faint anti-Semitic prejudices. “One night at Mentmore,” David Lindsay, the Earl of Balcarres, recalled many years later, “when Hannah Rothschild had had a house party in which her compatriots were unusually numerous, all the ladies had gathered at the foot of the great staircase and were about to go up with lighted candles. Rosebery standing aloof from the bevy of beauty raised his hand—they looked at him, rather puzzled, and then he said in solemn tones: ‘To your tents, O Israel.’ ” Lindsay also heard that “within a week of Hannah’s death he began to cut off subscriptions to Jewish charities, and before long all had been cancelled.” Finally, there is the connection alleged by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, between Rosebery, his private secretary Lord Drumlanrig and the homosexual circle whose most notorious member was Oscar Wilde.
³²

Yet these arguments cannot be sustained. Apart from anything else, Rosebery already owned a large estate in Scotland (Dalmeny) as well as a house at Epsom (the Durdans), and had an income of more than £30,000 a year. He of all people did not need to marry for money. Nor is there any doubt that Rosebery loved Hannah. Writing to Gladstone, he described his engagement as “the most momentous event of my life.” The fact that his diary says so little about her has sometimes been interpreted as evidence of a lack of ardour but, given that he treated it mainly as a record of his political activities, the reverse is more likely. The number of references to dinners and lunches with members of the family in 1877 suggests an energetic courtship, while the complete silence of the 1878 volume for the months after the wedding suggests that Hannah gave him better things to do than diary-writing. Balcarres misconstrued a simple joke; while Queensberry can be dismissed as the harbinger of the lunatic “sodomite conspiracy” theory advanced during the First World War by Noel Pemberton Billing.
³³

Moreover, there is good testimony that Rosebery relied on Hannah to provide the political “drive” which on his own he lacked. Lord Granville half-seriously urged her that
“if you keep him up to the mark,
[he] is sure to have his page in history”; while Edward Hamilton remarked on her “notable ... faculty of getting other people to work and of quickening their energies.” Winston Churchill too described her as “a remarkable woman on whom he [Rosebery] had leaned ... She was ever a pacifying and composing element in his life which he was never able to find again because he never could give full confidence to anyone else.” Such comments lend some credibility to the suggestion that Hannah provided the model for the ambitious Marcella Maxwell in Mrs Humphry Ward’s novels
Marcella
(1894) and
Sir George Tressady
(1909).
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Churchill thought Rosebery “maimed” by Hannah’s tragic and painfully protracted death from typhoid in 1890, a view which is borne out by his terse but plainly tortured diary entries. Observing him at the funeral, Sir Henry Ponsonby saw that he “never spoke but remained close to the coffin till it was lowered into the grave. Lord Rothschild led him back to the chapel but he looked down the whole time ... He wishes to show in public that he is able to put aside his sorrow, but in private he breaks down.” After her death, relations between Rosebery and other members of the Rothschild family remained close.

It should also be stressed that there could be unease on the other side about such mixed marriages. Rosebery’s mother, the Duchess of Cleveland, was strongly opposed to her son’s choice of “one who has not the faith & hope of Christ” as his spouse. “No two persons of different religions can marry without making a very great sacrifice,” she told her son, “and—pardon me for adding, grieving and disappointing those who love them best ... You must also of course expect to be unkindly judged by the world.” Three days after his wife’s funeral, Rosebery himself poignantly told Queen Victoria: “There is ... one incident of this tragedy only less painful than the actual loss: which is that at the moment of death the difference of creed makes itself felt, and another religion steps in to claim the corpse. It was inevitable, and I do not complain; and my wife’s family have been more than kind. But none the less it is exquisitely painful.”

Finally, it is important to remember that none of these marriages involved a male Rothschild. As the heirs to the capital of the partnership and to the religious legacy of Mayer Amschel, they had much less freedom of choice when it came to marriage. For this reason, the really problematic relationship was between Alfred and his mistress Marie (“Mina”) Wombwell, née Boyer—not only a Christian but a married woman. Although he may have had an illegitimate child by her (the child’s name Almina suggests a combination of “Al” and “Mina”) we do not know if Alfred ever contemplated marriage; it is conceivable that he dismissed the idea in view of inevitable and insuperable family opposition (though another possibility is that Alfred was in fact a homosexual). Alfred nevertheless committed a sin which his great-grandfather would have regarded as equally grave. He gave Almina a £500,000 dowry when she married the Earl of Carnarvon (in addition to settling his debts of £150,000) and left a large portion of his £1.5 million estate to them and their children (£125,000 and the house in Seamore Place).
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In short, the various “mixed” marriages described above should not be taken as evidence of a profound change in attitudes. Still, it is hard to imagine them happening while James still lived. The fact that all the marriages involved an alliance with aristocratic families (with the partial exception of Constance’s to Cyril Flower, who was made a peer only later) is no coincidence. The social benefits of association of the English and French elite, it might be thought, were felt to outweigh the costs of religious compromise. But it would be wrong to imply a kind of strategy of social advancement. To some extent, as the
Jewish Chronicle
suggested, it was precisely the fact of the Rothschilds’ social advancement which made such marriages happen: Constance had met Cyril Flower because her cousin had been to Cambridge; Hannah met Rosebery because her father was an established political and sporting figure (they are said to have been introduced by Mary Anne Disraeli at Newmarket) and because Ferdinand knew Rosebery well. As Cassis has shown, a very high proportion of late nineteenth-century City bankers married the daughters of aristocrats (no fewer than 38 per cent of the private bankers in his sample and at least 24 per cent of all bankers and bank directors).

The question of the relationship between the Rothschilds of this period and the aristocracy has often been discussed. The point is made that Natty’s elevation to the peerage in 1885 represented the final triumph of the campaign for social assimilation which the Rothschilds had waged since the time of Mayer Amschel. At the same time, those who argue that a process of “feudalisation” sapped the entrepreneurial and/or liberal spirit of the bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century cite this as an archetype. The reality is more complex. The transition from baronet to hereditary peer had its roots in Rothschild relations with successive Prime Ministers as well as with members of the royal family; for social promotion was at once a reward for political or public service and a sign of royal favour. It is also worth noting that, as with the rights of Jews to take their seats in the Lower House of Parliament, England was in some ways behind some continental states.

The Austrian case illustrates the subtle gradations of status involved. Technically, the Rothschilds had first acquired noble status—the prefix “von” and a coat of arms—from the Habsburg Emperor as early as 1816, adding the title “Baron” (Freiherr) six years later. However, it was not until 1861 that a Rothschild—Anselm—was given the political equivalent of a peerage, a seat in the Reichsrat or imperial council. And the ultimate social achievement—the right to be presented at court—did not come until December 1887, when Albert and his wife were formally declared
hoffähig.
As
The Times
reported, this was “the first time that such a privilege has been conceded in Austria to persons of the Jewish religion, and the event is causing a sensation in society.” It was only after this that members of the Rothschild family and members of the Austrian royal family began to mix socially in Austria itself.
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Nathaniel in particular was accepted into Viennese aristocratic society in a way which had entirely eluded his father and grandfather, being addressed with the familiar “du” by such grandees as Count Wilczek, who regarded him as “an unusually charming man and a really noble
[sic]
character.” The connection to the Metter nichs also remained socially invaluable.

According to contemporary gossip, Nathaniel had an affair with Baroness Maria Vetsera, who later became the mistress of Crown Prince Rudolph. Moreover, when Rudolph and Maria committed suicide together at the royal hunting lodge at May erling in January 1889, it was Nathaniel’s brother Albert—as chairman of the Nordbahn—who received the first telegraph reports of the tragedy and had to relay the news to the imperial palace. This may be apocryphal, but it is undoubtedly the case that Rudolph’s mother, the Empress Elisabeth, became friendly with Adolph’s widow Julie; indeed, she had just visited the Rothschild house at Pregny in Switzerland when she was murdered at Lake Geneva by an Italian anarchist in September 1898. When Franz Joseph celebrated his diamond jubilee in 1908 with a grand reception, Albert was there—one of the few who attended in civilian dress.

In Germany, there was a similar progression from elevation to the peerage to social intercourse. Mayer Carl, as we have seen, had been appointed to the Prussian Upper House (Herrenhaus) in 1867 and was treated as
hoffähig
thereafter. Although he never ceased to disparage Bleichröder’s social climbing—and was beside himself with glee when the latter’s ennoblement did not confer on him the title of Freiherr
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—Mayer Carl himself rarely omitted to mention his own encounters with Prussian royalty, no matter how inconsequential. He and his wife’s work in establishing a hospital for the war wounded in Frankfurt in 1870-71 undoubtedly earned them royal favour. “I have just had an interview with the Emperor which lasted a whole hour,” he gushed in December 1871, “and I need not tell you that we are on the best terms, particularly in consequence of what I gave the Empress for her hospital which seemed to please His Majesty beyond anything else. Louisa is a great favourite of the Empress and Her Majesty delighted in showing her how much she appreciated all she had done ... which is a capital thing for our own interests.” The Empress seems to have been especially friendly. A still closer relationship later developed between Wilhelm Carl’s wife Hannah Mathilde and Victoria, the widow of Kaiser Frederick III and daughter of Queen Victoria, who evidently enjoyed the faintly Anglophile atmosphere of the Rothschild house at Königstein. Although Victoria’s son William II was viewed with deep suspicion by members of the family and harboured quite strong anti-Semitic prejudices, his accession in 1888 did not harm the Rothschilds’ position. In 1903 Wilhelm Carl’s son-in-law Max Goldschmidt was given the title “Freiherr von Goldschmidt-Rothschild.”
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In England, by contrast, the process happened in reverse, with the Rothschilds winning acceptability at court and intimacy with royalty some years before they were able to secure a seat in the House of Lords; for, despite the fact that it became legally possible for a Jew to become a peer in 1866, Queen Victoria proved strongly resistant to the idea in practice. The Rothschilds were considered presentable at court as early as 1856, when Victoria noticed the “extremely handsome” looks of Lionel’s daughter Leonora at a royal drawing room. The real social breakthrough, however, came at Cambridge in 1861, when Natty was introduced to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) by the Duke of St Albans. A common enthusiasm for hunting in turn led to introductions for Alfred and Leo. Horse racing played a similar role: Mayer was “delighted” when the Prince “[partook] of his cake, Mayonnaise and champagne” at the Derby in 1864 and again in 1866. Soon members of the family were regularly being invited to court functions or to aristocratic gatherings at which royalty was also present.
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In turn they entertained members of the royal family, principally—though not exclusively—the Prince of Wales.
⁴⁰
In March the following year, he went out stag-hunting with Mayer at Mentmore and two months later he dined at Anthony’s; he and Princess Alexandra attended “an interminable banquet” at Lionel’s in 1871 and the Prince dined at Ferdinand’s along with Disraeli four years after that. The Prince also attended the Rosebery—Rothschild marriage in 1878 (along with his uncle the Duke of Cambridge) and Leo’s wedding to Marie Perugia in 1881—a remarkable gesture of royal religious tolerance.