Rothschild

Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836) arrived in Manchester from Frankfurt in 1798 as a young textile merchant and moved to London in 1808, founding NM Rothschild & Sons at New Court in the City. Within fifteen years he had become the single most consequential figure in European sovereign debt: he personally financed Wellington's Peninsular Campaign through bills of exchange on his brother James in Paris, organised the British government's payments to its continental allies through the Napoleonic Wars, and received the news of the British victory at Waterloo in June 1815 ahead of the official courier through his own express dispatch system, trading the London bond market on the strength of advance information.

His son Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879) was elected MP for the City of London five times between 1847 and 1858 but was unable to take his seat because the parliamentary oath of office included the words 'on the true faith of a Christian'. The Jewish Relief Act of 1858, which Lionel's continued election helped force, removed the obstacle; he took his seat as the first practising Jewish member of the House of Commons. The 1875 British government purchase of the Suez Canal shares was arranged by Lionel personally as an overnight loan to Disraeli, £4 million sterling at 2.5% interest, the security being the British government itself.

Lionel's son Nathan Mayer Rothschild was created the 1st Baron Rothschild in 1885, the first Jewish member of the House of Lords. The English Rothschilds built a string of great country houses across Buckinghamshire (Waddesdon Manor, Mentmore Towers, Halton House, Tring Park, Ascott House) that became known collectively as 'the Rothschild row in the Vale of Aylesbury'. Through the late Victorian and Edwardian periods the bank financed empire infrastructure on a scale no other private institution matched: sovereign loans to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Egypt and the new Italian state; mining in southern Africa (De Beers, with Cecil Rhodes) and at Rio Tinto.

NM Rothschild & Sons continues today, now Rothschild & Co, as one of the largest independent investment banks in the world, the firm still controlled by the descendants of Mayer Amschel through interlocking French and English shareholdings. The current Lord Rothschild's RIT Capital Partners is one of the largest investment trusts in Britain. The English Rothschild family is consistently among the wealthiest non-royal families in the country.