The House of Rothschild (83 page)

In January 1888, Rhodes wrote a long letter to Natty seeking his support for the new concession he had just secured from Lobengula to develop the “simply endless” gold fields on the other side of the Limpopo River. It is clear from this that, though he hoped the Rothschilds would “take a share” in the venture, Rhodes was more interested in their political influence than their money. There was, he reported, “a good deal of opposition at home to the size of our concession,” principally from the rival Bechuanaland Exploration Company, established by Lord Gifford and George Cawston, as well as from the Portuguese government. He was especially worried to hear talk of replacing his pliant friend Sir Hercules Robinson as the British high commissioner in Cape Colony, for reasons which made his own long-term objectives absolutely plain:

Later the same year, Rhodes wrote to Natty in a similar vein, now imagining De Beers as “another East India Company ... with the enormous back country daily developing,” and outlining more of his “visionary dreams”:

It is difficult not to see a direct line from these schemes to the fiasco of the “Jameson Raid” in December 1895, and perhaps even to the outbreak of war with the Boers in 1899. Rhodes was bent on a programme of encirclement and expansion which was incompatible with the independent existence of the Boer republics; and he expected Natty to support him.

So convinced was he that Natty would help realise his vision that in June 1888 he revised his will in order to leave him all his property bar 2,000 De Beers shares (which he left to his brothers and sisters). To leave several hundred thousand pounds to one of the richest men in the world might seem perverse; but in a letter accompanying the will Rhodes intimated to Natty that this money should be used to found what his biographer has called “a society of the elect for the good of the Empire.” “In considering question suggested take Constitution Jesuits if obtainable,” Rhodes scribbled, “and insert English Empire for Roman Catholic Religion.” It is highly unlikely that Rhodes (much less Rothschild) had ever read the Jesuit constitution drafted by St Ignatius in 1558; this was just shorthand for the kind of dedicated brotherhood which was his ideal. What is striking is that—like that other very different visionary of the period, Theodor Herzt—Rhodes saw the legendary Lord Rothschild as the one man with resources capable of making his dream a reality.

It is usually assumed that Rhodes’s expansionist aspirations must have been shared by the Rothschilds: why else tell Natty so much about them? There is, however, a need for caution. To be sure, Natty and his brothers were not opposed to the idea of an enlarged British South Africa. When Rhodes joined forces with Gifford and Cawston of the Bechuanaland Company to create a new Central Search Association—to spearhead his plans for Mafabeleland—Natty was a major shareholder, and increased his involvement when this became the United Concessions Company in 1890. He was also a foundation shareholder when Rhodes established the British South Africa Company in 1889, and acted as the company’s investment adviser free of charge.
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More important, as a letter of January 1892 shows, Natty had no illusions about Rhodes’s ambitions. “[O]ur first and foremost wish in connection with South African matters,” he told Rhodes, “is that you should remain at the head of affairs in that Colony and that you should be able to carry out that great Imperial policy which has been the dream of your life.—I think you will do us the justice to admit that we have always loyally supported you in the carrying out of that policy, and you may rest assured that we shall continue to do so.”

Indeed, Natty would no longer willingly listen to criticism of Rhodes. When the increasingly unstable Randolph Churchill returned from South Africa in 1891 denouncing the prospects of Mashonaland and declaring in the press that “no more unwise or unsafe speculation exists than the investment of money in [mining] exploration syndicates,” Natty was incensed—especially as he had financed Churchill’s trip. Sir William Harcourt’s son Lewis (“Loulou”) described in his diary an extraordinary confrontation between Natty and Churchill at Tring in early 1893, when the latter:

Nor did the Rothschilds have any qualms about Rhodes’s use of force against the Matebele and other black African tribes who got in his way. Writing from Paris in October 1893, Arthur de Rothschild made the classic imperialist connection between “a little spurt in the shares of the Chartered Co.” and “a sharp engagement having taken place with the Matabeles, 100 of them having been killed, whilst there was, I am happy to say, hardly a single casualty on our side.” The senior partners in the Paris house were equally enthused, not least by Rhodes’s autocratic style of governing the Cape after he became its Prime Minister in 1890.

Yet there was always a substantial gap between Rhodes and Rothschild with respect to the
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of extending British influence from the Cape. Philosophically, Rhodes was always closer to Liberal imperialism than to the policy of the Salisbury governments, which tended to subordinate the ambitions of white colonists on the periphery to the diplomatic interests of the metropolitan government. He was in favour of Home Rule, for example, the litmus test of late-Victorian politics. Having expected so much from Natty, Rhodes was quickly disillusioned. He was frustrated by the Rothschilds’ inability to persuade the Portuguese government to cede Delagoa Bay, the principal sea port on the Mozambique coast and therefore the strategic key to the future of the Transvaal. Negotiations on this subject dragged on, but although Natty talked optimistically of buying the land from Portugal, diplomatic obstacles proved insuperable. Rhodes felt Salisbury had “treated [him] very badly over the Portuguese business,” a charge which Natty was at pains to dispute. “You must not forget,” he explained to the impetuous empire-builder,

When Rhodes tried again with a direct approach to the Portuguese envoy Luiz de Soveral, he felt Natty’s support was lukewarm. “It appears that you take Soveral’s view that nothing can be done,” he complained in May 1893:

In this, as in much else, he was moving too rapidly for the Rothschilds, who grew weary of explaining that the Portuguese government had no intention of selling the territory in question. As early as February 1891, Rhodes confided in Reginald Brett that he regarded Natty as “honest but without sufficient brains.” It was not long before he revised his will once again, appointing a second trustee of his fortune alongside Natty. “The thought torments me sometimes,” he declared, “that if I die all my money will pass into the hands of a man who, however well-disposed, is absolutely incapable of understanding my ideas. I have endeavoured to explain them to him, but I could see from the look on his face that it made no impression ... and that I was simply wasting my time.”
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For his part, Natty was perturbed by the cavalier way in which Rhodes set about using De Beers Consolidated to advance his designs in Matabeleland. The first bone of contention was Rhodes’s determination that De Beers should be a major shareholder in the British South Africa Company, usually referred to in correspondence as “the Charter.” Natty’s view was “that De Beers should not hold so speculative a security,” a view strongly supported by Carl Meyer, always “a great pessimist about the Charter.” In January 1892 Natty spelt his views out in “perfectly frank” terms:

To Rhodes’s complaint that the Charter Company needed money, Natty replied:

It is not difficult to imagine what Rhodes thought of the idea of submitting De Beers and the Charter to such direct political control.

In such negotiations, Natty was always careful to avoid antagonising the volatile Rhodes: “[Y]ou know I do not like to interfere in their [De Beers‘] internal administration,” he assured him in July 1892, “and only hope that the company will be able to pay good dividends in the future and gradually diminish their indebtedness.” There were in fact a number of occasions when Rhodes was able to disregard “orders” from London (for example when he insisted on buying the Premier or Wes selton mine). But Natty did not disguise from Rhodes that the big De Beers shareholders on the London board held the purse strings. Such conflicts between the London board and the life governors flared up again in 1899, when Rhodes wished De Beers to invest money in Rand gold mines and railways at a time when it was having to borrow to pay its dividend. Natty’s opposition to this and his criticism of the system of life governorships prompted Rhodes to complain that “the whole of my policy in connection with De Beers has been opposed by the London board almost ever since it was created” and to subject Carl Meyer to “violent abuse.” Yet he could not get around the fact that Natty together with “the majority of the French shareholders ... represent[ed] the larger portion of the Company’s capital,” and in the end they were able to insist on the the abolition of life governorships. It is also worth noting that Rhodes himself owed the Rothschilds substantial sums on his own account: in mid-1895, when he was premier of Cape Colony, he owed them as much as £16,515, though he was by this time a millionaire in his own right, mainly thanks to his holdings of De Beers shares. This was far more than Randolph Churchill owed them when he was in office.