The Rothschilds: a family of fortune

303 Pages·1973·1.41 MB·English

by  Cowles

THE ROTHSCHILDS: A Family of Fortune

VIRGINIA COWLES
Copyright © Virginia Cowles 1973

The right of Virginia Cowles to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988.

First published in 1973 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Dedicated to my dear children Andrew, Harriet and Randall who,
I feel sure, would have won the approbation of Mayer Amschel Rothschild for
their devotion to one another when not locked in physical combat
Table of Contents

CHAPTER I — THE JEW AND THE PRINCE (1763-1806)
CHAPTER II — THE ROTHSCHILDS AND NAPOLEON
CHAPTER III — FIVE BROTHERS IN FIVE CAPITALS
CHAPTER IV — UNEASY TIMES (1825-36)
CHAPTER V — SUPREMACY (1836-49)
CHAPTER VI — THE CHALLENGE (1849-68)
CHAPTER VII — VICTORIAN HIGH NOON (1860-80)
CHAPTER VIII — MAGNIFICENT BROTHERS (1880-1901)
CHAPTER IX — END OF AN ERA (1898-1918)
CHAPTER X — THE YEARS BETWEEN (1918-39)
CHAPTER XI — THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939-45)
CHAPTER XII — THE ROTHSCHILDS TODAY:
CHAPTER XIII — THE ROTHSCHILDS TODAY:
THE OTHERS (1953-73)
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many Rothschilds in England and France who helped
me with information and pictures; and Lord Rosebery who gave me permission
to publish the letter written by his father announcing his engagement to Hannah
Rothschild.
I am also grateful to John Curtis and Jonathan Martin at Weidenfeld, for their
interest and expertise, and to Mrs Enid Gordon who shepherded the book
through its various stages and selected the pictures.
Lastly, my thanks to Mrs Joanna Birt who endlessly re-typed the manuscript.
CHAPTER I — THE JEW AND THE PRINCE (1763-1806)

When the Seven Years War came to an end in 1763, two young men at opposite
ends of the social scale, one a Prince, one a Jew, both twenty years old, returned
to the great imperial city of Frankfurt on the Main. The Prince had never heard
of his lowly contemporary: yet their paths were destined to cross and re-cross
until the fame of the Jew and his sons had spread across Europe, eclipsing the
importance of the Prince so completely that his name is remembered only as an
incident in the rise of the Rothschild family.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild was a tall, spare man with piercing black eyes and
a slightly quizzical smile. His inky beard was small and pointed and he wore a
wig which, as a Jew, he was not allowed to powder. On his coat was sewn the
yellow patch compulsory in Frankfurt for members of his race. When he crossed
the bridge over the Main he had to pay Jew tax; and as he walked through the
city streets more than one urchin jeered: ‘Jew, do your duty’. Almost
automatically and with remarkable good temper he removed his hat each time
and bowed.
There was no mistaking the ghetto. Although it was nothing more than a street
twelve feet wide, wedged between the city walls and a trench, it differed from
other streets by its dramatic entrance: a pair of heavy iron doors, closed on
Sundays, and Feast days, and an arch over which was written: ‘Under the Roman
Emperor’s Majesty and the Holy Emperor’s Protection.’
The 2,800 inmates of the ghetto had to pay high taxes for this fictitious
protection. The custom had been instigated in the thirteenth century after a
pogrom which had wiped out the two hundred Jewish inhabitants of Frankfurt,
whose ancestors had lived in the city since the days of Charlemagne. Although
in those times the Jews were not confined to a ghetto and enjoyed the same
rights as the Christians, the current Emperor, Frederick II, had seized upon the
idea of ‘protection’ to raise extra revenue. But nothing stopped the periodic
pogroms which always seemed to spring from a wave of utterly irrelevant
hysteria. In 1349, when the Black Plague was raging, bands of Flagellants burst
into Frankfurt accusing the Jews of poisoning the wells. When the citizens
ignored these provocations the Brothers secretly set fire to several houses and
ran through the streets crying ‘Now the Jews are burning down your houses.’
This resulted in a general massacre.
Yet it was not for another hundred years, in 1442, that the Holy Roman
Emperor bowed to pressure from the Church and ordered the Jews to remove
themselves to a specified quarter of the city. The Judengasse, or Jews’ Alley,
offered enough space for the 150 inhabitants but by 1760 nearly three thousand
people were crammed into three hundred houses. The street was almost always
deep in mud and garbage, and the stench unbearable. The heavily-bearded,
Oriental figures in caftans and stove-pipe hats rooting through the stalls of
second-hand junk alarmed young Goethe who grew up in Frankfurt. ‘The limited
area, the filth, the crowd, the accent of an unpleasant language, all combined to
produce a most disagreeable impression,’ he wrote, ‘even if one merely looked
in as one passed the gates.’[1] Not only disagreeable but frightening for
Gottfried’s Chronicle, read by German schoolboys, claimed that Jews spirited
away Christian children and offered them as human sacrifices. Yet to Mayer
Amschel Rothschild the jostling and the bargaining brought back nostalgic
memories. He had grown up in the Judengasse with its welter of cheap
merchandise, as had his father and grandfather before him. Despite the insistence
of many writers, Jews were not denied the right of a surname; indeed, the fact
that they clung to Oriental habit, referring to their male children as Sons of So
and So, was a source of irritation and confusion to the authorities who eventually
forced them to conform to Christian practice. Until this happened, however,
many families identified themselves by nailing a picture or a sign over their front
door. In 1585 records show that Mayer’s forebears had lived in a house with a
red shield — hence the name Rot-schildt.
But now home meant a small, damp dwelling known as the House of the
Saucepan, which Mayer shared with his two brothers, Moses and Kalmann. The
boys had lost their parents in a smallpox epidemic in 1755 when Mayer was
eleven years old. The father had been a small trader, and as a child Mayer liked
nothing better than to accompany him on journeys in the surrounding
countryside, walking behind a donkey laden with samples. Although the man
and the boy rarely covered more than ten or fifteen miles a day, they frequently
passed through several principalities, for the Holy Roman Empire, the system
under which Central Europe had lived for a thousand years, still encompassed
most of Germany. As an institution it was almost moribund; indeed Voltaire
inquired caustically in what sense it was either Holy or Roman or an Empire. Its
elected Emperors, almost always chosen from the Habsburg family, were no
more than honorary presidents of a loose confederation which, by the middle of
the century, consisted of over three hundred independent states. Governed by
absolute rulers ranging from imperial knights to sovereign abbots, from
landgraves to dukes, from electors to princes and kings, almost all of them were
feudal and military.
As each state had its own treasury, and each treasury minted its own coins,
Mayer Amschel was taught the intricacies of money at a tender age. He not only
learned to translate gold and silver into the copper coins in common use, but to
calculate with lightning speed the exchange rate between thalers and ducats and
florins and gulden. He became so proficient that when his father opened a money
bureau in the ghetto he often left his youngest son to mind the shop. The many
picturesque and obsolete coins that passed through Mayer’s hands awakened the
collector’s instinct; and before long the child had an array of rare specimens
coming from such faraway places as the Palatinate and Russia and China.
When Mayer was ten he was sent by his parents to a yeshiva — a Jewish
religious school — near Nuremberg to study to be a rabbi, a calling which
several of his ancestors had adopted. The ghetto was famous for its scribes and
scholars and no occupation commanded more respect than the pursuit of
knowledge. Mayer was thought to have the application for such a life, but after a
few months the boy became restless. The jingle of coins not only conjured up
ancient lore but sang a song of freedom and power that was heady music to a
ghetto boy.
Mayer remained at the school for eighteen months after his parents’ death but
finally persuaded one of his mother’s relations that he was not cut out to be a
scholar. Although he was only thirteen in 1757, he was sent to live in Hanover
with a cousin who got him a job as an apprentice in the famous Oppenheimer
bank. Here life was far from dull as the Seven Years War was in progress and
the city crowded with troops. The conflict had begun when Frederick the Great
of Prussia had grabbed Silesia from Maria Theresa of Austria. The latter
persuaded Russia, Sweden and France to support her and soon almost all the
states of the Holy Roman Empire were drawn into the quarrel. Frederick aptly
compared himself to ‘a stag pursued by a pack of kings and princes’. Although
most of his battles took place in eastern Germany, one of his few military allies,
Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, with an army made up of Hessians and
Hanoverians subsidized by Britain, fought the French in and out of Hanover,
Frankfurt and Cassel.
Very little is known of Mayer Amschel’s life in Hanover except that the city
was invested several times, and that he made the acquaintance of General von
Estorff, an ardent numismatist who was so impressed by the boy’s rare coins that
he employed him to help with his own collection. The general does not seem to
have been very active in the war; but he followed Duke Ferdinand’s fortunes
closely, as much of the fighting took place in the principality of Hesse-Cassel,
not far from Hanover, which was owned by his friend, the Landgrave Frederick
II.
Indeed, when peace was signed in 1763 the general accepted an invitation to
join the court of the Landgrave’s son and heir, Prince William, who had been
fighting in the Duke of Brunswick’s army. Although William’s father ruled from
Cassel, which had been occupied by the French for several years the Prince had