Rothschild

In the third week of October 1798, on the wet autumn evening of the eighteenth of October, the twenty-one-year-old Frankfurt-Judengasse textile-trader Nathan Mayer Rothschild, third son of the Frankfurt court-banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, alighted from the coach from Hull on the cobbled forecourt of the Bridgewater Arms coaching-inn in High Street, Manchester, with a small leather travelling-trunk, a banker's draft for the equivalent of approximately twenty thousand pounds in his coat pocket, the small private cipher his father had instructed him to use in correspondence between himself and the family bank at the Judengasse, and instructions from his father to establish a small cotton-and-textile export business at Manchester on the family's behalf. He spoke at the moment of arrival a few sentences of English (the language he had been taught by a private tutor at Frankfurt across the previous six months under his father's instruction), no Lancashire-dialect Manchester English (which he would acquire across the next eighteen months on the warehouse floor), no contemporary contacts among the Manchester cotton-merchant establishment (the small but powerful community of Manchester-Quaker and Manchester-Nonconformist cotton-merchant houses that controlled the spinning-and-weaving export trade), and the personal direction that he was to settle into the Manchester cotton trade as a junior independent merchant on the family's capital and develop the business across the next several years. He set up the small cotton-trading office at 25 Brown Street in the central Manchester warehouse district within three weeks of arrival, took the first wholesale cotton-purchase order at the Manchester Royal Exchange on the eighth of November 1798, and across the next decade built from the small Brown Street office the largest single textile-export business in the north of England, the foundation of the modern Rothschild international business that he would relocate to London in 1809 to establish NM Rothschild & Sons at New Court.

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At approximately six o'clock on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-first of June 1815, at the small London commercial counting-house of NM Rothschild & Sons at New Court in St Swithin's Lane in the City of London, the thirty-seven-year-old Frankfurt-born financier Nathan Mayer Rothschild received from his private express-courier Rothworth of Ostend the brief handwritten note from his Brussels agent Salomon de Rothschild that the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-Allied army had decisively defeated the French Imperial army of Napoleon Bonaparte at the small village of Waterloo south of Brussels on the afternoon of the eighteenth of June 1815. The Rothschild private-courier despatch had been carried by Rothworth from the Waterloo battlefield to Brussels on the night of the eighteenth, from Brussels to Ostend on the morning of the nineteenth, from Ostend to Dover on the small chartered packet-boat Calais Packet on the afternoon of the nineteenth, from Dover to London by Rothschild private courier-coach across the twenty-day-and-night turnpike-route along the Dover Road, and was delivered to Nathan's hand at New Court at approximately six on the morning of the twenty-first of June 1815, almost forty-eight hours ahead of the official British government Waterloo despatch from Major Henry Percy of the Wellington staff, which reached Lord Bathurst at the War Office in London at approximately ten o'clock on the evening of the twenty-first. Nathan walked from the New Court counting-house to the Stock Exchange at Capel Court at ten in the morning, took the standard merchant's position at his Stock Exchange-trading pillar, conducted across the next several hours the careful sequence of trading-and-bond-selling operations on the strength of his advance Waterloo information that have been the foundation of every subsequent legend about the New Court trading-day of the twenty-first of June 1815, and from the closing of the day's trading-and-currency operations had consolidated the family's position as the central single financial house of the post-Waterloo European order. He carried the official Waterloo confirmation personally to the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool at Downing Street at ten on the evening of the twenty-first, ten minutes after the official Percy despatch had reached the War Office, and met Liverpool on the strength of the Percy confirmation across the rest of the night.

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