The House of Rothschild (59 page)

In addition to these more or less formal occasions, “Prince Hal” (as Disraeli called him) was also entertained in the more louche style that he preferred: Alfred, for example, could be relied on to produce opera stars like Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti and the actress Sarah Bernhardt at his dinners; another family friend from the emerging world of “show business” was the librettist Sir Arthur Sullivan.
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Ferdinand too knew how to amuse the heir to the throne: when the Prince fell downstairs and broke his leg at Waddesdon in 1898, the story made the national newspapers.
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As an ardent Francophile, he was a regular Rothschild guest on other side of the Channel too. In the summer of 1867. James entertained him at Boulogne. He also visited Ferrières five years later (returning there in 1888); and he lunched with Alphonse at Cannes in 1895. Such contacts did not cease on his accession to the throne—rather the reverse. Members of the Rothschild family were an integral part of Edward VII’s cosmopolitan social circle, along with the Sassoons, the railway financier Maurice de Hirsch, Ernest Cassel, Horace Farquhar and others identified by Edward Hamilton as the “smart set.”

However, it would be quite wrong to portray the Rothschilds as in any way in awe of the royal family or, for that matter, especially eager for elevation to the peerage. Natty, for example, initially found the Prince of Wales’s conversation “commonplace and very slow.” “He is excessively fond of the chase,” he told his parents,

Five years later, he had not changed his view, commenting drily “that war and peace, and the state of politics do not occupy H.R.H. half so much as his amusements.” His mother shared these sentiments. Though she thought the future King “most enchantingly agreeable” with “manners ... not to be surpassed anywhere,” she felt it was “to be deplored that he does not give a portion of his time to serious pursuits, nor any of his friendship or society to distinguished men in politics, art, science or literature.” He had, she concluded (after he left the Commons gallery during a speech by Gladstone), “no taste for serious subjects.” When the Prince won a “large stake” on a Rothschild horse, Charlotte was tight-lipped: “[O]f course, I would infinitely rather he won than lost upon a Rothschild horse—but the future King of England should not go about betting.”

Nor was it only the Prince of Wales who came in for criticism. When Lady Alice Peel lent her Queen Victoria’s privately printed Highland album, Charlotte was scathing:

Ferdinand and Alice shared her dismay at the Queen’s “allusions to the gillies, and the foot-note devoted to ‘John Brown’ [the Queen’s ’Highland attendant‘] and his curly hair.”

Such attitudes reflected the enduring streak of asceticism which had been inherited from the generation born in the Frankfurt ghetto. Indeed, having risen so far by their own efforts the Rothschilds considered themselves in many ways superior to the aristocracy, not least in financial terms. It was well known that the Prince of Wales and his brothers were inclined to live beyond their allowances provided by the Civil List; keeping up the family tradition of lending to future rulers, Anthony offered his assistance and by August 1874 the Queen was alarmed to hear of “a large sum owing to Sir A. de Rothschild” by her eldest son.
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However, the Rothschilds’ role between then and his accession twenty-seven long years later seems primarily to have been to keep the Prince out of debt, aside from a £160,000 mortgage on San dringham which was discreetly hushed up.

A less obvious sign of aristocratic, if not royal, financial dependency came when a son of the Duke of Argyll, Lord Walter Campbell, expressed the wish to enter the City as confidential clerk to the Rothschilds’ stockbroker Arthur Wagg for a salary of £1,000 a year. Lionel cautiously “advised Lord Walter to go and speak to the Duke at Inverary, as that proud nobleman might not like his son to enter into partnership with an Israelite”; but Charlotte was gleeful because of the Campbells’ royal connections: “The Waggs will be overjoyed, if the partnership should really take place, to be connected in business with the brother-in-law of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise. This will be more extraordinary, if it occurs, than the invasion of Caucasian beauties into ... London fashionable society.” Such links between the court and the City were commonplace by 1907, when Leo suggested as a possible director of Rio Tinto “the Earl of Denbigh, a very honourable man, Colonel of the City Artillery and formerly Lord in Waiting to the Queen and then to the King, a catholic peer with pleasant manners.”

For his part, Natty welcomed such signs of aristocratic compromise. As a strongly Liberal student, he had resented the unearned privileges enjoyed by aristocrats at Cambridge. “I cannot yet make out,” he had complained to his parents, “why noblemen and their sons etc. can take their degree after seven terms and have no Little Go to pass. Both noblemen and fellow Commoners should be done away with, but I am afraid these things never will take place.” As late as 1888—after he himself had become Lord Rothschild—he commented sternly about “the harm which a few of the aristocracy do to their class by frequently displaying a want of sense and honour in money affairs and by resorting to gambling.” The Rothschilds did not think of themselves as becoming aristocratic, even if it appeared that they were; if anything, they wished the aristocracy to become more like them. As Charlotte said, it was better for a younger son of the Earl of Mayo to “earn [a] living in the city handsomely, but by great exertion, activity and labour, instead of starving in the West End.”

The key to the Rothschild attitude was that, as the nearest thing the Jews of Europe had to a royal family, they considered themselves the equals of royalty. When Charlotte heard that Prince Alfred was to visit Bonn, where Albert was studying, she sought to arrange a meeting between “the gifted scion of the Caucasian royal family ... and the clever scion of the royal family of England.” For other Jews, she declared a few weeks later, “un marriage d‘ambition” meant a marriage to “a Rothschild or a Koh-i-Noor [a Cohen, an allusion to her mother-in-law’s family] ... since there are no jewish Queens and Empresses in the 19th century.” In a similar vein, Juliana and Hannah were “a queen and a Princess of Israel and of Mentmore.” Such notions explain the Rothschilds’ tendency to compete with the royal family. Typically, Natty reported with satisfaction the superiority of his own horse to the Prince’s when they hunted together at Cambridge. Likewise, when Ferdinand went to Buckingham Palace, “he thought and said that no lady was to be compared to his wife—and no equipage to the one that conveyed” them there; and when an especially lavish supper was provided at Stafford House, it was “not royal but Rothschildian.” Invited to dine at the Palace, Mayer set out resolved “to find fault with every thing.” On at least one occasion, his sister-in-law Charlotte preferred a minor family engagement to a royal ball and sought to avoid attending royal drawing rooms, which she found “tiring and tedious in the superlative degree.” And when the Empress of Austria visited England in 1876, Charlotte was adamant that she had enjoyed her reception more at Waddesdon than at Windsor. Contemporaries often used the phrase “Kings of the Jews” when they talked about the Rothschilds: the evidence of the family’s own correspondence suggests it was not an unwelcome compliment.

Yet despite all this—perhaps even
because
of the family’s pretensions—it proved impossible to persuade Victoria to elevate Lionel to the House of Lords. Rumours of such a promotion were current as early as 1863. However, there were those at court who were hostile towards the Rothschilds, a hostility which they were able to express more freely after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. At the time of the Prince of Wales’s marriage, Charlotte complained of the family’s exclusion from the festivities. “Lord Sydney,” she wrote bitterly, “though fed from time immemorial upon all the delicacies in and out of season by all the continental Rothschilds, and not disdaining our dinners either, never thought us worthy of being asked to court. When the poor Prince was alive, dear Papa used to apply to him—when forgotten or omitted. Now one would not like to trouble the Queen.” Another enemy at court was Lord Spencer, who advised that the Prince and Princess should not attend a Rothschild ball as “the Prince ought only to visit those of undoubted position in Society.” “The Rothschilds are very worthy people,” he added, “but they especially hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out.” Nor did Sir Francis Knollys, the Prince’s private secretary, give unqualified approval to the Rothschilds’ intimacy with his master; while the Queen’s equerry Arthur Hardinge felt it necessary to take a visiting Russian royal to Westminster Abbey “as a corrective” after a Rothschild dinner “resplendent with Hebrew gold.” The Prince of Wales himself evidently resisted such pressures. When Natty and Alfred attended a royal levee in 1865, Charlotte was able to report triumphantly

Another welcome ally in this period was Lady Ely, who invited Natty, Alfred, Ferdinand and Evelina to a select ball for the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1865.

But neither she nor the heir to the throne was in a position to influence the Queen on matters of royal patronage. That Victoria was reluctant to give “a title and mark of [her] approbation to a jew” had been intimated to the Rothschilds as early as 1867 by Disraeli, though it should be emphasised that Lionel himself had no desire to accept a peerage from Disraeli. “Our friend [Charles Villiers, the Liberal MP for Wolverhampton] is famously intrigued about the paragraph in the papers respecting my being raised to the Peerage,” he remarked in a letter to his wife in March 1868:

That was prescient, for no sooner had he become Prime Minister than Gladstone proposed Lionel as one of eleven new Liberal peers he wished the Queen to create. The idea, as expressed by the Liberal leader in the Lords Earl Granville, was that the Rothschilds now represented “a class whose influence is great by their wealth, their intelligence, their literary connections, and their numerous seats in the House of Commons. It may be wise to attach them to the Aristocracy rather than to drive them into the democratic camp.” But the Queen would have none of it.
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Granville had to report regretfully that the Queen had “a strong feeling on the subject”: “To make
a Jew
a peer,” she told him, “is a step she cd.
not
consent to.” Beaten, Granville advised Gladstone not to force the issue: “She will yield, but reluctantly, and there will be criticism enough reaching Her, to confirm her in her opinion that she was a better judge than her Govt, and make her more difficult on another occasion.” Gladstone was irked by what seemed to him an inconsistency, and refused to find an alternative (Christian) “commercial man.” “The merit of Rothschild is that his position is well defined and separated,” he argued with his usual intellectual rigour. “Her argument is null and void. If it be sound, she has been wrong in consenting to emancipate the Jews.” Lionel, he argued, stood “so much better for the promotion, than anyone whom we can put in his place.” To exclude him would be “to revive by Prerogative the disability which formerly existed by Statute, and which the Crown and Parliament thought proper to abolish.” The Prime Minister explored every available option—giving Lionel an Irish peerage, for example—but was eventually forced to back down. He sought to revive the idea again in 1873, but was again overruled. As a result, Lionel died a commoner.

Was Queen Victoria an anti-Semite? She certainly did admit to a “feeling of which she cannot divest herself, against making a person of the Jewish religion, a Peer.” But the charge of racial prejudice seems unfounded in view of her affection for Disraeli, who made so much of his Jewish origins.
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In fact, her objections were as much social and political as religious. As she put it in her journal, “I shall have to refuse on the score of his religion, as much as on that of his wealth, being in fact derived largely from money contracts &c., also pointing out the folly of the Whigs wanting to make such a number of Peers.” She elaborated on the second point in a letter to Gladstone of November 1, 1869: