The House of Rothschild (75 page)

After the Liberal election victory in 1880, Alfred offered Disraeli a suite of rooms in his house at 1 Seamore Place, while Natty continued to furnish the latest news of Liberal infighting—though one suspects that the aim now was more to cheer an old man than to kindle the fires of effective Opposition. When
Endymion
was published, containing yet another fictionalised version of the Rothschilds in the form of the “Neuchatels,” Natty was fulsome in his praise (perhaps recognising that one of the differences between Sidonia and Adrian Neuchatel was the difference in social standing between himself and his father):

It was, he declared, a “magnificent addition to British literature.” The venerable author continued to stay with Alfred—“the best and kindest host in the world”—until January 1881, when he moved into the house at 19 Curzon Street which he had bought with the proceeds of
Endymion;
and Alfred was one of the guests when he entertained there for the first and last time on March 10, 1881. When Disraeli died in the early hours of April 19, it fell to Natty to carry out his last wishes that he be buried alongside his wife at Hughenden and that his funeral “be conducted with the same simplicity as hers.” This meant politely declining the public funeral which Gladstone (through gritted teeth) proposed.

Disraeli had been, as Alphonse said, “the best and the truest friend of our Family.” But it was not just this friendship which lured the Rothschilds away from the Liberal party. Of equal importance were ideological differences between Gladstonian Liberals—some of them distinctly Radical—and more conservatively inclined Whigs. These manifested themselves most obviously at elections.

When the Rothschilds had first begun to establish themselves as a political force in Buckinghamshire during the 1850s, elements of the established Whig leadership in and around Aylesbury had been quite hostile. Lord Carrington referred to them caustically as the “Red Sea” while Acton Tindal talked of resisting the “circumcision” of the Aylesbury party. In 1865 Natty was returned unopposed for the seat, but there remained obvious differences with Tindal (for example over the abolition of Church rates). Three years later, however, it was the Rothschilds who all at once seemed to be on the right of the party. The Radical League secretary George Howell was more or less foisted upon them in Aylesbury, ending the cosy arrangement whereby a Rothschild and a Tory had been returned unopposed for the two-member constituency. In the City, Lionel found himself embarrassed by association with the Liberal candidate in Tower Hamlets, a convert from Judaism named Joseph d‘Aguilar Samuda. This may have been one of the reasons that he lost his seat—an unusual defeat in an election which saw an increase in the Liberal vote overall. Six years later, Lionel lost again. This time, however, the reason was the rift which had opened up between him and Gladstone on fiscal policy. As The Times later recalled, Lionel pointed out (“at perhaps the only great election meeting which he attended”),

That advocating higher taxes can have negative electoral consequences is no modern discovery. Lionel was nevertheless vindicated by Northcote’s budget of 1874, which retained the income tax, albeit with a higher threshold and lower effective rate for incomes below £400 a year.

The party political tensions between the Rothschilds and Gladstone came to a head in 1876, when Disraeli’s elevation to the Lords necessitated a by-election in his Buckinghamshire constituency at the very height of Gladstone’s “atrocitarian” campaign. Gladstone was eager for a Liberal victory and evidently saw the Bulgarian question as a means to that end: he sent the Liberal candidate Rupert Carington “250 little ones” (copies of his pamphlet) and followed the campaign with keen interest. When a friend of Granville’s sounded out Lionel five days before the ballot, he found him

This proved an accurate forecast.

Two years later, the rift widened still further when the second Aylesbury seat was won by the Liberal candidate George W E. Russell—the nephew of Lord John. In a good example of the anti-Semitic undertone of the campaign against “Beaconsfieldism,” Russell had, as Granville admitted to Gladstone, “attacked Dizzy as a Jew, a Jingo & something else beginning with a J” (the other word was “Juggler”). When this was reported in the local Conservative
Buckinghamshire Herald
(despite Russell’s attempts to retract the word “Jew”) Natty was furious and took “the first opportunity of throwing dirt” at Russell when he next saw Gladstone. That leading Liberals were willing to act in this way makes it difficult to claim that the Rothschilds’ gravitation toward Disraeli was governed purely by differences with Gladstone over foreign policy.

Diplomatic factors were undoubtedly important in their own right. It was a matter of “regret” in the eyes of the French Rothschilds when the Liberals won in 1880 because they regarded Conservative governments as more likely to “maintain the prestige and the influence of old England”; and “Mr Gladstone’s disregard for foreign policy” was the main reason they fervently wished Salisbury to remain in power at the end of 1885. It is true that, when Ferdinand decided to enter politics in 1885, he insisted that he wished to stand as a Liberal. But he intimated to the radically inclined Dilke that he had qualms about the party’s foreign policy and implied that his political allegiance might be conditional on the Liberals sticking to an imperialist line. This letter deserves to be quoted at length as an illustration of the Rothschilds’ political ambivalence in this period:

The significance of this letter becomes apparent when it is remembered that Ferdinand became a parliamentary candidate for the new single-member constituency of Mid-Buckinghamshire only because his cousin Natty had been made a peer. It has already been suggested that one reason Gladstone chose to elevate Natty at the end of his second ministry was to replace him in the House of Commons at the impending election; and it should by now be intelligible why he might have wished to do so. On October 29, 1884, Hartington’s secretary Reginald Brett wrote a letter on the subject to Lord Richard Grosvenor, the Liberal Chief Whip and patronage secretary, which illuminates this point. Brett began by suggesting “that some special civility should paid by you or Mr Gladstone to Natty Rothschild. He is not a very robust Liberal, but I suppose there is not much object in letting him drift, and still less in driving him over to the Tories.” This was an oblique suggestion that the idea of a Rothschild peerage be resuscitated. But he then went on to warn Grosvenor that replacing Natty in the Commons with Ferdinand would be unlikely to have the effect the Liberal leadership desired:

Ferdinand’s letter to Dilke more than confirmed that diagnosis: if he was to take Natty’s place, the Rothschild line on foreign policy would remain the same. As its recipient sourly commented, “F. Rothschild wants to get into Parliament and I told him that he is a Tory and ought to stand as a Tory ... He will never get in as a Liberal nowadays, I’m sure.” This proved more or less correct: although Ferdinand initially stood as a Liberal (even expressing support for temperance in pursuit of the Non-conformist vote), by 1890 he was describing himself in the House as “a drastic and ardent supporter of the [Salisbury] government.”

The visitors book Ferdinand kept at Waddesdon provides a fascinating insight into the ambiguity of his politics. A survey of the more regular political visitors between 1881 and 1898 gives a slight predominance to the Liberals: Edward Hamilton leads the field with no fewer than fifty-two visits, followed by the Liberal leader Hartington (ten visits), the Liberal Home Secretary and Chancellor Harcourt (nine), Rosebery (nine) and Dilke (two). Other Liberal visitors included Gladstone, Reginald Brett, the historian Lord Acton, his colleague James Bryce (later Chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster and President of Board of Trade), the future leader of the party Herbert Asquith, Lord Carrington (who became Governor of New South Wales) and the Earl of Dalhousie (who became Secretary of State for Scotland). However, two of the most regular visitors were Liberal Unionists: the Attorney General Henry James, who visited seventeen times, and Joseph Chamberlain, who was a guest at Waddesdon on twelve occasions, often accompanied by his son Austen. And there were almost as many Tory visitors as Liberals: Harry Chaplin (President of the Boards of Agriculture and later Local Government) who stayed at Waddesdon twenty-six times; Lord Salisbury’s nephew and successor Arthur Balfour (eight visits); George Curzon, Salisbury’s Assistant Private Secretary and Under-Secretary of State for India (also eight); the President of the Board of Agriculture Walter Long (five); Lord Randolph Churchill (twice); the Under-Secretary of State for War Earl Brownlow (also twice); and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir James Fergusson.
⁴

As Ferdinand’s letter to Dilke indicated, it was not just imperial issues which were shifting the Rothschilds away from Liberalism. Of increasing importance was their suspicion of the social policies advocated by radical urban-based Liberals like Chamberlain and Dilke himself. “[I]f I do not call myself a radical,” Ferdinand explained,

Even Chamberlain’s talk of compulsory purchases of land by local authorities to provide allotments for the working class alarmed Natty. The Rothschilds’ drift away from Gladstonian Liberalism reflected not only discontent with his lukewarm imperialism, but also mistrust of his party’s domestic political tendencies. One reason why the Irish question came to play such a decisive role in the politics of the 1880s and 1890s was precisely that proposals to improve the lot of Irish tenants awakened fears for the security of landed property in the minds of English landowners like the Rothschilds.

Although some contemporaries tended to think of it as the first of England’s colonies, Ireland had been an integral part of the United Kingdom since the seventeenth century, with Irish MPs sitting in the Westminster House of Commons since 1800. It was not a place the Rothschilds knew well. They had no economic interests there; indeed, few members of the family had even set foot there. Anthony holidayed there with his daughters in 1865 and was favourably impressed by the natural beauty of some of the estates he visited. Ferdinand, who went there three years later, was less keen on the “extremely wild” landscape but found the people “most hospitable” —though he was bemused to be mistaken for a Catholic in Dublin. For most Rothschilds, however, it was
terra incognita.
Writing in 1865, Charlotte made it sound as remote and alien as the furthest-flung colony: a country of endemic “mismanagement,” of uncouth manners, rampant drunkenness and senseless violence. If Natty ever went there, no record of his visit appears to have survived.