Nathan Mayer Rothschild(1777–1836)

Nathan Mayer Rothschild was born on the sixteenth of September 1777 in the Judengasse of Frankfurt-am-Main, third of the five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a coin and antique dealer who served the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel from the family house at the sign of the red shield. The father had built a modest banking business serving the Hessian court; he sent his five sons, on a deliberate plan, to the five great financial cities of Europe. Nathan, the most forceful of them, was sent in 1798 to England.

He arrived at Manchester with a starting capital of twenty thousand pounds and an instruction to buy Lancashire cottons and ship them home for sale through his brothers. Within two years he had outflanked the established Manchester houses by combining the three trades the local merchants kept separate, the buying of the raw cotton, the contracting of the spinning, and the financing of the bill of exchange. By 1803 he was the largest textile exporter in the north of England. In 1808 he moved his operation south to London, took a counting-house at New Court in St Swithin's Lane in the City, and within the year had refocused the business from cotton on to capital.

The defining work of his life began in 1814. The British government had been smuggling gold sovereigns across France for two years to pay Wellington's army in the Peninsula, the route ruinously inefficient and the price punitive. The Treasury asked Nathan whether he could do it better. He could and did: through a network of his four brothers in Frankfurt, Paris, Naples and Vienna he assembled gold across the continent, moved it through the lines under the noses of the French authorities, and delivered Wellington's coin where and when it was needed, on a margin no other house in Europe could match. He did the same for the British subsidies to Austria, Prussia and Russia. By Waterloo, NM Rothschild was the central organiser of British war finance.

His express-courier network, faster than the government's official posts, brought him news of Wellington's victory at Waterloo on the night of the twentieth of June 1815, forty-eight hours ahead of the Cabinet's official despatch from Major Henry Percy. He carried the news to Lord Liverpool the next morning, and over the following week organised the largest single bond placement in the history of the London market, restoring the British Consol price and re-establishing London as the financial centre of the post-war world. Through the late 1810s and 1820s he placed the great post-war sovereign loans for France, Prussia, Austria, Russia and Naples on the London market, and made New Court the indispensable address for European sovereign finance.

He died of an infected abscess at Frankfurt on the twenty-eighth of July 1836, in his fifty-ninth year, attending the wedding of his eldest son Lionel. The London bank passed to his sons and continued in unbroken family management through the next two centuries. Lionel took his seat in 1858 as the first practising Jewish member of the House of Commons, having forced the change in the parliamentary oath that admitted him; his son Nathan Mayer the second became in 1885 the first Jewish member of the House of Lords. Rothschild & Co continues today as one of the largest independent investment banks in the world, the firm still controlled by the descendants of Mayer Amschel through the interlocking French and English shareholdings the founder set up. The New Court address, rebuilt three times on the same City lane, has been the seat of the bank without break since 1809.