Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Marriage - Hardcover
A fascinating insight into the life of the illustrious couple Lionel and Charlotte Rothschild who were blessed with great wealth and a powerful love but oppressed by dogmatic Victorian anti-semitism. Lionel and Charlotte's papers are a vivid snapshot of what it was like to be rich and famous - and different - in mid-Victorian life. With a cast of colourful characters, eminent historian, Stanley Weintraub, tells this as a compelling love story and family chronicle like no other. When Lionel de Rothschild, from the famous banking dynasty, wrote to his mother to thank her 'for my bride', he had just met his cousin Charlotte in Frankfurt. She was sixteen, and beautiful. An arranged family marriage joining two branches of Europe's most powerful banking firm, it seemed an unlikely love match. Yet it lasted through tragedies and triumphs, as Charlotte became one of the grand chatelaines of the Victorian era, while Lionel became England's leading financier, and the first of his faith to win a seat in Parliament. That dramatic campaign was a prolonged battle that, Charlotte wrote, was 'screaming about the house' for eleven years. Despite - perhaps because - of a surfeit of wealth, and her realization of what money could not buy, she concealed beneath a stubborn will and a sparkling wit an inner melancholy that only her great admirer (and Lionel's best friend) Benjamin Disraeli seemed to recognize. Love and money were the cardinal preoccupations in Victorian life, and the Rothschilds abundantly possessed both, as well as an iconic name. But life works in mysterious ways, often with mixed blessings. This is their enthralling story, told by one of the masterful biographers of nineteenth-century figures - of Victoria and Albert, and Edward Prince of Wales; and Disraeli, Whistler, Rossetti, Beardsley and Shaw.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Stanley Weintraub is Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University and the author of notable histories and biographies including 11 Days in December, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, MacArthur's War, Long Day's Journey into War, and A Stillness Heard Round the World: The End of the Great War. He lives in Newark, Delaware.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One: Investing in a Bride 1808-1836
"[I] have to thank you for my fair bride," Lionel Rothschild wrote to his mother, Hannah, from Frankfurt on May 15, 1836. Charlotte was clever, beautiful, and sixteen. Lionel, the eldest of Nathan Mayer's four sons, was already twenty-seven. Although they were first cousins, Charlotte hardly knew him. There weren't many alternatives for the world's wealthiest Jews if they wished to marry within their faith and maintain their status. Lionel might have been surprised by his own reaction, since theirs was an arranged marriage that could easily have failed to please either of the pair.
The betrothal was no surprise to the shrewd and formidable Hannah Cohen Rothschild, wife of the richest man in London. She had arranged it with the elegant, society-focused Adelheid Herz von Rothschild, spouse of Nathan Mayer's brother Carl (or Charles), head of the Naples branch of the banking octopus. Their primary home was in Frankfurt, where Adelheid stylishly entertained many of the prominent non-Jewish families, who seldom if ever reciprocated the invitations.
Adelheid knew a good, even a grand, match when she saw one. Yet she wanted no wedding before her daughter, however precocious, was seventeen. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, dreamy and inexperienced, Charlotte had learned about life largely from books and had been protected from other suitors.
The family had been prominent for just two generations. There were nineteen grandchildren of the founding father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfurt. Eight would marry one another. Five others married within the family but across the generations. Two never married. Only four (all daughters) "married out."
The family patriarch, Lionel and Charlotte's grandfather, had begun his startling career as a teenage money changer and coin dealer in the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt, and gone on to create one of history's greatest banking dynasties. Mayer Amschel had died a very rich man in 1812. His venerable wife, Gutle, now in her eighties, exhibited her rejection of every vanity by stubbornly refusing to leave the old Jewish ghetto, the narrow, grimy Frankfurt Judengasse. Much of her life had been spent in the Stammhaus "zum grunen Schild," where the family firm had first thrived. The unpretentious house "of the green shield" hints at how the family got its name. In the 1560s a predecessor named Isak lived in a house in the ghetto identified as "zum roten Schild" from the symbol on his door. After legal surnames were mandated, the identification survived changes of address in the Judengasse, even new doorway symbols of a Hinterpfann (warming pan) and, finally, the green shield. Charlotte's father, the most handsome of Mayer Amschel's sons, had relocated, once anti-Semitic laws eased, to a mansion and a country house befitting his income and style. (He had another home in Naples.)
Four of Mayer's five sons had prefixed to "Rothschild" the posh German von or the French de, thanks to baronies granted by the Austrian Emperor in 1822. Only Nathan Mayer, in London, ignored the title, taking public pride in being simply "Mr. Rothschild." But in 1825, harboring private second thoughts about the cachet of the barony in class-conscious England, N. M. applied to the Royal College of Arms to register it. Since he had only "denizen" (permanent residence) status and was not a citizen, he was denied use of a foreign honorific. Such technicalities were ignored by Hannah, Nathan's wife, who called herself Baroness de Rothschild although she knew she had no legal basis for it. N. M. made a virtue of being an unpolished but acknowledged gentleman, a condition which money could buy.
With or without the aristocratic prefix, Lionel would inevitably succeed as head of the nearly mythic English branch of the firm at New Court, St. Swithin's Lane, notable for having bankrolled the Duke of Wellington's armies which defeated Napoleon. (Nathan had, perhaps too hastily, turned down a knighthood in August 1815 which recognized his achievements.) Born on November 22, 1808, in rooms above Nathan Mayer's offices at 2 New Court, Lionel was the second oldest of seven children, and the oldest of four boys. The family lived among so much bullion stored in the living area of the building that, according to an obituary decades later, "the family literally walked on gold." According to malicious gossip, Nathan kept pistols under his pillow to secure his person and his fortune. He never did, but it was useful not to deny the rumor. Below their apartments, Nathan, having become a financial magnate, was alleged to have received an unnamed prospective client whose self-importance it was necessary, for business reasons, to diminish. Since the great dispenser of state loans was still busy, he advised, at first kindly, "Take a chair."
"But I am -- " interposed the visitor.
"Take two chairs, then," said Rothschild.
Lionel grew up in the years after the Napoleonic wars that had prompted the large state expenditures for which, across Europe, the Rothschild brothers were relied upon for their efficiency and their probity. Yet wealth and status opened no public school doors for Nathan's four sons in England. But for boy cousins in Europe, and his younger brothers at home, Lionel had no companions in London and grew up shy and withdrawn in a household of strong-minded parents. Lionel's and his brother Anthony's first tutor, in 1815, when they were seven and five, was a Pole who strode about their home schoolroom in a tall hat and with a cane stuck into one of his tall boots. When he failed to work out, Nathan replaced him with a mentor named Garcia, apparently a Sephardic Jew, once a bookkeeper, who was subsidized to set up an academy at Peckham, where the boys became his first charges.
At home the stocky, balding Nathan Mayer offered himself as an implicit model. Already able to purchase whatever material pleasures life offered, his sons in their early teens needed, Nathan thought, the spur of competition and risk, and the sense of joy in hard work. That was how one maintained success in business and made it grow. "It takes ten times more cunning to preserve a fortune," he preached, "than it does to make it, and the task requires sacrificing body and soul, heart and mind."
Admonishing the young Nathan Mayer for the untidy state of his accounting books, his father in Frankfurt had once warned that "lack of order will turn a millionaire into a beggar." Everything that Nathan now did was brusque and efficient. There was no small talk, even with his four brothers. The Prussian ambassador, Alexander von Humboldt, took sardonic delight "in the combination of bad manners, sharp wit and lack of deference which Nathan brought to polite society." N. M. (as he preferred to be known) considered deference as akin to insignificance, and skill in dealing as akin to nerve. Although not as insensitive as he preferred to be characterized, he once told the music master of one of his daughters, as he jangled the coins in his pocket, "That's my music."
In the ruthless mercantile world of the City, where financiers were segregated into interest groups, each was allocated a pillar area on the trading floor of the Royal Exchange. Jews received the remote right-hand corner column. Nathan did not intend to be that obscure. In the bullion crisis of 1825, the Rothschilds maintained the solvency of the Bank of England. Without "old Rothschild," the Duke of Wellington conceded, "the Bank must have stopped payment." Later, in 1835, Nathan made possible the end of slavery in the British West Indies by raising, together with his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore, #15 million. It was a riskily immense sum, one that enabled the government to compensate slave owners for freeing their chattels. Nathan's faith in the stability of the government proved justified when the former slave owners bought government bonds with their payments, and the public's imagination was again fired by the Rothschild house's interest, whatever its profits, in the public good.
While Wellington had long been in Nathan Mayer's debt for services rendered, both civil and military, his friendship had its political limits in an age of open discrimination against Jews. As prime minister, he was urged to follow parliamentary emancipation for Catholics with legislation permitting Jews to sit in the House of Commons. Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, who, with Moses Montefiore, led the Jewish Association for Obtaining Civil Rights and Privileges, tried to persuade Rothschild to join in an appeal to the great duke for alteration of the oath. (To sit in Parliament, one then swore "upon the true faith of a Christian.") When Montefiore reached Rothschild on the road from Stoke Newington on January 29, 1830, N. M. was in a carriage with Lionel and Anthony. Montefiore explained his mission and then changed conveyances with the boys to parley further with Nathan as they clattered on.
Soon after, Rothschild met privately with Wellington, appealing to the Duke, "God has given your Grace power to do good -- I would entreat you to do something for the Jews." The Duke, whose prayers had often been answered by Nathan, replied that although God bestowed benefits in moderation, he would at least read over the petition. Finally, Wellington allowed the motion to provide an alternative oath to be presented in the House of Commons that April by Robert Grant, M.P. for Norwich, and to be debated. It narrowly lost. Even had it succeeded, it would have been overwhelmingly defeated in the hidebound Lords. The next year, Montefiore persisted and went with his wife, Judith, Hannah's sister, to visit Nathan for discussion of further strategies. N. M., according to Montefiore's diary, "said he would shortly go to the Lord Chancellor and consult him on the matter. Hannah said that if he did not, she would." Although Lord Brougham would have spurned an audience with a woman, the episode reflected Hannah's activist impulses. The oath was a stumbling block to Jewish acceptance by England's democracy that would become a major challenge for Lionel.
At a meeting of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on April 16, 1829, N. M. appeared by invitation and reported that he had consulted with Wellington and the Lord Chancellor "and other influential persons...concerning the [legal] disabilities under which Jews labour, and recommended that a petition praying for relief should be prepared, in readiness to be presented to the House of Lords whenever it may be thought right." But Nathan advised that it would be politic that only English-born Jews should sign, which excluded him. The deputies asked two not of their number to add their signatures, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid and young Lionel, who was barely of age. The appeal would fail, but the episode was an introduction to an issue that would have an impact on Lionel's life for the next three tumultuous decades.
Nathan Mayer's usual brash manner, described as "a licence allowed to his wealth," was often toned down by secretaries to whom he dictated letters, but his impatient exchanges with his brothers in Frankfurt and Vienna remained uncensored. One of his agents, Meyer Davidson, Hannah's brother-in-law, a connection which permitted him some courage, once wrote to Nathan, "I have to confess, dear Mr. Rothschild, that I was embarrassed for your own brother [Salomon], when I found these big insults in your letters. Really, you call your brothers nothing but asses and stupid boys....It makes your brothers quite confused and sad." Nothing would change.
After Garcia's efforts at schooling, N. M. employed an English tutor, John Darby, who remained with Lionel until he was eighteen. In 1827 he took Lionel and Anthony on a tour of central Europe, from Frankfurt (where their cousin Charlotte was a child) through Prague and Vienna, and home via Baden, Strasbourg, and Hanover. En route they attended lectures at Heidelberg and Gottingen and in Weimar met gaunt old Goethe. Anthony then returned to Strasbourg to study in company with his brother Nat, who was two years younger, while Lionel assumed his hereditary vocation in London. His mother Hannah was already thinking of a proper match for her son. Lionel's older sister, another Charlotte, had recently married Anselm, Salomon von Rothschild's eldest son. Their uncle James, the first to marry within the family, at thirty-two in 1824, had wed his sophisticated nineteen-year-old niece Betty, Salomon's only daughter.
The other family practice, begun with Anselm, was to initiate a son in his home Rothschild bank (in his case, Vienna), send him to apprentice at a brother's branch, and then test him on a foreign mission (Anselm's was Berlin, the Prussian capital) before settling him down in one of the five houses. When Lionel's educational tour ended, he returned to St. Swithin's Lane to take temporary command -- "Lieutenant General," quipped Uncle James -- when Nathan Mayer left for Frankfurt, to a partnership conclave of the brothers. Possibly the first suggestions for a shiddach -- Yiddish for "marital match" -- between Lionel and Charlotte arose then, although neither party would know of it. Lionel was eighteen; Charlotte only eight. "You are the General now all on your own," James then wrote encouragingly from Paris before departing by carriage himself, "and you will no doubt attend to business very nicely." A few days later he wrote again to persuade Lionel to "make some nice business deals" while his father and mother were away, to validate that he was becoming "a clever and good businessman."
Learning the counting-house routine was insufficient for Lionel's energies. Like his younger brothers, he loved to ride, and in 1828, despite a regulation which made Jews ineligible, Lionel applied to serve in the London and Westminster Light Horse Volunteers. By a considerable majority the regiment voted that August to repeal the Christians-only rule, and Lionel's name appears next to last (probably the order of admission) on the original roll of the Volunteers. Reversing religious bias could be accomplished, he learned, but the next time, the effort would take much longer.
From Frankfurt that August, Hannah wrote to Lionel while "Papa and his brothers with Anselm" were deliberating the renewal of the "perfectly secret" partnership contract "in the Tower in the Garden" at Amschel's home. Sending both professional and personal guidance, she announced her satisfaction (and his father's) with Lionel's handling of "the important concerns of the Counting House," but counseled that he was to drive home from the bank "in a close carriage as open ones are very liable at any time to give [one a] cold, particularly so when the atmosphere is wet and changeable." The unwelcome motherly advice was curiously at odds with his expectations to ride -- in whatever weather -- with the Volunteers.
The London Rothschilds were the chief benefactors of the Jews' Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields, near Bishopsgate in the City. At Hannah's instructions, Lionel was to order their supplier ("as usual") to have school uniforms made for the children at her expense before she returned ("I cannot say when we shall"). With her were Anthony and Nat, on leave from their studies. Nat, she reported, was "very much grown and is the exact height of Papa." After both boys accompanied their parents back to London, Anthony would return for an apprenticeship in the Frankfurt firm, something spared Lionel. Hannah went on to talk of tea at the home of his Aunt Adelheid -- Lionel's future mother-in-law -- and of Adelheid's sister and her daughters, one "a pretty little girl." There was not a word about Adelheid's own Charlotte.
A daughter of the London banker Levi Bare...
"[I] have to thank you for my fair bride," Lionel Rothschild wrote to his mother, Hannah, from Frankfurt on May 15, 1836. Charlotte was clever, beautiful, and sixteen. Lionel, the eldest of Nathan Mayer's four sons, was already twenty-seven. Although they were first cousins, Charlotte hardly knew him. There weren't many alternatives for the world's wealthiest Jews if they wished to marry within their faith and maintain their status. Lionel might have been surprised by his own reaction, since theirs was an arranged marriage that could easily have failed to please either of the pair.
The betrothal was no surprise to the shrewd and formidable Hannah Cohen Rothschild, wife of the richest man in London. She had arranged it with the elegant, society-focused Adelheid Herz von Rothschild, spouse of Nathan Mayer's brother Carl (or Charles), head of the Naples branch of the banking octopus. Their primary home was in Frankfurt, where Adelheid stylishly entertained many of the prominent non-Jewish families, who seldom if ever reciprocated the invitations.
Adelheid knew a good, even a grand, match when she saw one. Yet she wanted no wedding before her daughter, however precocious, was seventeen. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, dreamy and inexperienced, Charlotte had learned about life largely from books and had been protected from other suitors.
The family had been prominent for just two generations. There were nineteen grandchildren of the founding father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfurt. Eight would marry one another. Five others married within the family but across the generations. Two never married. Only four (all daughters) "married out."
The family patriarch, Lionel and Charlotte's grandfather, had begun his startling career as a teenage money changer and coin dealer in the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt, and gone on to create one of history's greatest banking dynasties. Mayer Amschel had died a very rich man in 1812. His venerable wife, Gutle, now in her eighties, exhibited her rejection of every vanity by stubbornly refusing to leave the old Jewish ghetto, the narrow, grimy Frankfurt Judengasse. Much of her life had been spent in the Stammhaus "zum grunen Schild," where the family firm had first thrived. The unpretentious house "of the green shield" hints at how the family got its name. In the 1560s a predecessor named Isak lived in a house in the ghetto identified as "zum roten Schild" from the symbol on his door. After legal surnames were mandated, the identification survived changes of address in the Judengasse, even new doorway symbols of a Hinterpfann (warming pan) and, finally, the green shield. Charlotte's father, the most handsome of Mayer Amschel's sons, had relocated, once anti-Semitic laws eased, to a mansion and a country house befitting his income and style. (He had another home in Naples.)
Four of Mayer's five sons had prefixed to "Rothschild" the posh German von or the French de, thanks to baronies granted by the Austrian Emperor in 1822. Only Nathan Mayer, in London, ignored the title, taking public pride in being simply "Mr. Rothschild." But in 1825, harboring private second thoughts about the cachet of the barony in class-conscious England, N. M. applied to the Royal College of Arms to register it. Since he had only "denizen" (permanent residence) status and was not a citizen, he was denied use of a foreign honorific. Such technicalities were ignored by Hannah, Nathan's wife, who called herself Baroness de Rothschild although she knew she had no legal basis for it. N. M. made a virtue of being an unpolished but acknowledged gentleman, a condition which money could buy.
With or without the aristocratic prefix, Lionel would inevitably succeed as head of the nearly mythic English branch of the firm at New Court, St. Swithin's Lane, notable for having bankrolled the Duke of Wellington's armies which defeated Napoleon. (Nathan had, perhaps too hastily, turned down a knighthood in August 1815 which recognized his achievements.) Born on November 22, 1808, in rooms above Nathan Mayer's offices at 2 New Court, Lionel was the second oldest of seven children, and the oldest of four boys. The family lived among so much bullion stored in the living area of the building that, according to an obituary decades later, "the family literally walked on gold." According to malicious gossip, Nathan kept pistols under his pillow to secure his person and his fortune. He never did, but it was useful not to deny the rumor. Below their apartments, Nathan, having become a financial magnate, was alleged to have received an unnamed prospective client whose self-importance it was necessary, for business reasons, to diminish. Since the great dispenser of state loans was still busy, he advised, at first kindly, "Take a chair."
"But I am -- " interposed the visitor.
"Take two chairs, then," said Rothschild.
Lionel grew up in the years after the Napoleonic wars that had prompted the large state expenditures for which, across Europe, the Rothschild brothers were relied upon for their efficiency and their probity. Yet wealth and status opened no public school doors for Nathan's four sons in England. But for boy cousins in Europe, and his younger brothers at home, Lionel had no companions in London and grew up shy and withdrawn in a household of strong-minded parents. Lionel's and his brother Anthony's first tutor, in 1815, when they were seven and five, was a Pole who strode about their home schoolroom in a tall hat and with a cane stuck into one of his tall boots. When he failed to work out, Nathan replaced him with a mentor named Garcia, apparently a Sephardic Jew, once a bookkeeper, who was subsidized to set up an academy at Peckham, where the boys became his first charges.
At home the stocky, balding Nathan Mayer offered himself as an implicit model. Already able to purchase whatever material pleasures life offered, his sons in their early teens needed, Nathan thought, the spur of competition and risk, and the sense of joy in hard work. That was how one maintained success in business and made it grow. "It takes ten times more cunning to preserve a fortune," he preached, "than it does to make it, and the task requires sacrificing body and soul, heart and mind."
Admonishing the young Nathan Mayer for the untidy state of his accounting books, his father in Frankfurt had once warned that "lack of order will turn a millionaire into a beggar." Everything that Nathan now did was brusque and efficient. There was no small talk, even with his four brothers. The Prussian ambassador, Alexander von Humboldt, took sardonic delight "in the combination of bad manners, sharp wit and lack of deference which Nathan brought to polite society." N. M. (as he preferred to be known) considered deference as akin to insignificance, and skill in dealing as akin to nerve. Although not as insensitive as he preferred to be characterized, he once told the music master of one of his daughters, as he jangled the coins in his pocket, "That's my music."
In the ruthless mercantile world of the City, where financiers were segregated into interest groups, each was allocated a pillar area on the trading floor of the Royal Exchange. Jews received the remote right-hand corner column. Nathan did not intend to be that obscure. In the bullion crisis of 1825, the Rothschilds maintained the solvency of the Bank of England. Without "old Rothschild," the Duke of Wellington conceded, "the Bank must have stopped payment." Later, in 1835, Nathan made possible the end of slavery in the British West Indies by raising, together with his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore, #15 million. It was a riskily immense sum, one that enabled the government to compensate slave owners for freeing their chattels. Nathan's faith in the stability of the government proved justified when the former slave owners bought government bonds with their payments, and the public's imagination was again fired by the Rothschild house's interest, whatever its profits, in the public good.
While Wellington had long been in Nathan Mayer's debt for services rendered, both civil and military, his friendship had its political limits in an age of open discrimination against Jews. As prime minister, he was urged to follow parliamentary emancipation for Catholics with legislation permitting Jews to sit in the House of Commons. Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, who, with Moses Montefiore, led the Jewish Association for Obtaining Civil Rights and Privileges, tried to persuade Rothschild to join in an appeal to the great duke for alteration of the oath. (To sit in Parliament, one then swore "upon the true faith of a Christian.") When Montefiore reached Rothschild on the road from Stoke Newington on January 29, 1830, N. M. was in a carriage with Lionel and Anthony. Montefiore explained his mission and then changed conveyances with the boys to parley further with Nathan as they clattered on.
Soon after, Rothschild met privately with Wellington, appealing to the Duke, "God has given your Grace power to do good -- I would entreat you to do something for the Jews." The Duke, whose prayers had often been answered by Nathan, replied that although God bestowed benefits in moderation, he would at least read over the petition. Finally, Wellington allowed the motion to provide an alternative oath to be presented in the House of Commons that April by Robert Grant, M.P. for Norwich, and to be debated. It narrowly lost. Even had it succeeded, it would have been overwhelmingly defeated in the hidebound Lords. The next year, Montefiore persisted and went with his wife, Judith, Hannah's sister, to visit Nathan for discussion of further strategies. N. M., according to Montefiore's diary, "said he would shortly go to the Lord Chancellor and consult him on the matter. Hannah said that if he did not, she would." Although Lord Brougham would have spurned an audience with a woman, the episode reflected Hannah's activist impulses. The oath was a stumbling block to Jewish acceptance by England's democracy that would become a major challenge for Lionel.
At a meeting of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on April 16, 1829, N. M. appeared by invitation and reported that he had consulted with Wellington and the Lord Chancellor "and other influential persons...concerning the [legal] disabilities under which Jews labour, and recommended that a petition praying for relief should be prepared, in readiness to be presented to the House of Lords whenever it may be thought right." But Nathan advised that it would be politic that only English-born Jews should sign, which excluded him. The deputies asked two not of their number to add their signatures, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid and young Lionel, who was barely of age. The appeal would fail, but the episode was an introduction to an issue that would have an impact on Lionel's life for the next three tumultuous decades.
Nathan Mayer's usual brash manner, described as "a licence allowed to his wealth," was often toned down by secretaries to whom he dictated letters, but his impatient exchanges with his brothers in Frankfurt and Vienna remained uncensored. One of his agents, Meyer Davidson, Hannah's brother-in-law, a connection which permitted him some courage, once wrote to Nathan, "I have to confess, dear Mr. Rothschild, that I was embarrassed for your own brother [Salomon], when I found these big insults in your letters. Really, you call your brothers nothing but asses and stupid boys....It makes your brothers quite confused and sad." Nothing would change.
After Garcia's efforts at schooling, N. M. employed an English tutor, John Darby, who remained with Lionel until he was eighteen. In 1827 he took Lionel and Anthony on a tour of central Europe, from Frankfurt (where their cousin Charlotte was a child) through Prague and Vienna, and home via Baden, Strasbourg, and Hanover. En route they attended lectures at Heidelberg and Gottingen and in Weimar met gaunt old Goethe. Anthony then returned to Strasbourg to study in company with his brother Nat, who was two years younger, while Lionel assumed his hereditary vocation in London. His mother Hannah was already thinking of a proper match for her son. Lionel's older sister, another Charlotte, had recently married Anselm, Salomon von Rothschild's eldest son. Their uncle James, the first to marry within the family, at thirty-two in 1824, had wed his sophisticated nineteen-year-old niece Betty, Salomon's only daughter.
The other family practice, begun with Anselm, was to initiate a son in his home Rothschild bank (in his case, Vienna), send him to apprentice at a brother's branch, and then test him on a foreign mission (Anselm's was Berlin, the Prussian capital) before settling him down in one of the five houses. When Lionel's educational tour ended, he returned to St. Swithin's Lane to take temporary command -- "Lieutenant General," quipped Uncle James -- when Nathan Mayer left for Frankfurt, to a partnership conclave of the brothers. Possibly the first suggestions for a shiddach -- Yiddish for "marital match" -- between Lionel and Charlotte arose then, although neither party would know of it. Lionel was eighteen; Charlotte only eight. "You are the General now all on your own," James then wrote encouragingly from Paris before departing by carriage himself, "and you will no doubt attend to business very nicely." A few days later he wrote again to persuade Lionel to "make some nice business deals" while his father and mother were away, to validate that he was becoming "a clever and good businessman."
Learning the counting-house routine was insufficient for Lionel's energies. Like his younger brothers, he loved to ride, and in 1828, despite a regulation which made Jews ineligible, Lionel applied to serve in the London and Westminster Light Horse Volunteers. By a considerable majority the regiment voted that August to repeal the Christians-only rule, and Lionel's name appears next to last (probably the order of admission) on the original roll of the Volunteers. Reversing religious bias could be accomplished, he learned, but the next time, the effort would take much longer.
From Frankfurt that August, Hannah wrote to Lionel while "Papa and his brothers with Anselm" were deliberating the renewal of the "perfectly secret" partnership contract "in the Tower in the Garden" at Amschel's home. Sending both professional and personal guidance, she announced her satisfaction (and his father's) with Lionel's handling of "the important concerns of the Counting House," but counseled that he was to drive home from the bank "in a close carriage as open ones are very liable at any time to give [one a] cold, particularly so when the atmosphere is wet and changeable." The unwelcome motherly advice was curiously at odds with his expectations to ride -- in whatever weather -- with the Volunteers.
The London Rothschilds were the chief benefactors of the Jews' Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields, near Bishopsgate in the City. At Hannah's instructions, Lionel was to order their supplier ("as usual") to have school uniforms made for the children at her expense before she returned ("I cannot say when we shall"). With her were Anthony and Nat, on leave from their studies. Nat, she reported, was "very much grown and is the exact height of Papa." After both boys accompanied their parents back to London, Anthony would return for an apprenticeship in the Frankfurt firm, something spared Lionel. Hannah went on to talk of tea at the home of his Aunt Adelheid -- Lionel's future mother-in-law -- and of Adelheid's sister and her daughters, one "a pretty little girl." There was not a word about Adelheid's own Charlotte.
A daughter of the London banker Levi Bare...
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- PublisherFree Press
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0743219910
- ISBN 13 9780743219914
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