The Rothschilds by Frederic Morton

Author:Frederic Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626813946
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

(c) Country Squires

Lionel’s house at 148 Piccadilly was not the only Rothschild residence in the neighborhood where a prime minister could get a good dinner. At 143 Piccadilly, Ferdinand Rothschild had his Louis XVI palais with an exquisite white ballroom. His sister lived magnificently at 142. At 107 Mayer moved into the pioneer West End mansion that Nathan, the founder, had taken. Nearby, Nathan’s middle son, Anthony, maintained a ducal household at Grosvenor Place. Not much more than a diamond’s throw away, at Seamore Place and Hamilton Place, Lionel’s boys began to erect their great establishments. Before long the region was tagged “Rothschild Row”—a fairy-tale re-creation of Frankfurt’s Jew Street.

But a Rothschild Grove also came into being as an enclave in greenest Buckinghamshire. It was started by Mrs. Nathan. Like a good Jewish mother, she thought her boys were overworking themselves in the soot of the city. Consequently, she bought some hunting country in the Vale of Aylesbury. Mayer, the youngest, soon caught the bucolic spirit and hired the same Joseph Paxton who had created Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace at the London Exhibition. Paxton built for Mayer an Anglo-Norman supervilla called Mentmore Towers, which he filled with several museums’ worth of inlaid furniture, tapestries, vases, carpets and objets; surrounded it with gardens, parks, pastures, racing stables and a stud farm; and caused Lady Eastlake to exclaim that “the Medicis were never lodged so in the height of their glory.”

Thus Mayer, out of devotion to a worried mother, became not a pale pavement-bound clerk but the huntingest, shootingest, ridingest, merriest baron in England. One of the most hospitable, as well. At Mentmore Towers, Delane, the editor of The London Times, would volley brilliant dialectics at the above-quoted Lady Eastlake, a famous bluestocking who would volley right back. Prime Minister Gladstone would moderate, Matthew Arnold make measured interjections, and William Makepeace Thackeray sit by silently and politely, as writers will, and occasionally venture a mot juste. One of these was so juste that it entered public domain and became associated with Talleyrand, who is supposed to have delivered it at a French Rothschild dinner. But it was Thackeray’s utterance, and it occurred during one of Lady Eastlake’s tirades on fashion.

“Female dress,” said Thackeray, “is often like a winter’s day. It begins too late and ends too soon.”

Another Rothschild country house filled Thackeray with a more tender inspiration. Mayer’s elder brother, Baron Anthony, had developed an estate at Aston Clinton (just outside Aylesbury), as lush and more tasteful than Mayer’s. Its long house parties would attract Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone and Disraeli (the two prime ministers who kept succeeding each other), as well as Matthew Arnold and Thackeray. Baron Anthony’s little daughters could take a survey course in nineteenth-century English political and literary history by just walking through their father’s drawing room.

To return to the tender inspiration. Heine’s infatuation with Baroness James de Rothschild in Paris was no stronger than Thackeray’s with Baroness Anthony at Aston Clinton. He sketched this touching portrait

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