Rothschild · 1815
Rothschild and the Waterloo news at New Court
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.
A market is rarely turned by a single piece of advance information on a single morning. The 1815 London Stock Exchange ran on the slow news-and-correspondence cycle of the early-nineteenth-century official posts, in which the central single political-and-military information from the Continental battlefields reached the London market days behind the actual event, and the Stock Exchange traded on the standing-and-conventional rumour that filled the news-gap. Nathan Mayer Rothschild had built across the previous five years the private-courier express system that became, by June 1815, the fastest single news-and-information channel between the Continental battlefields and the London market. On the morning of the twenty-first of June 1815 the system delivered the decisive single piece of news of the post-Napoleonic era forty-eight hours ahead of any other channel.
THE PRIVATE COURIER NETWORK
Nathan had built the Rothschild private-courier express network across the period 1810 to 1814 on the operational requirement that the New Court financing of the Wellington Peninsular-Army gold-supply operation (the substantial private-banking operation by which the New Court bank financed the supply of British gold sovereigns to the Wellington army in Spain through the long Peninsular Campaign of 1812 to 1814) required the fastest possible information-flow between the New Court bank and the Spanish theatre-of-operations. The network ran through a standing arrangement of approximately twenty private-courier agents stationed at every major coaching-and-packet-boat port of the Channel-and-North-Sea coasts (Dover, Folkestone, Margate, Ramsgate, Harwich, Hull, Newcastle on the British coasts; Calais, Ostend, Antwerp, Hamburg, Bremen on the Continental coasts), with the standing capital reserves to charter private packet-boats at any port at any hour for the priority transmission of Rothschild correspondence.
The network had become, by the spring of 1815, the fastest single news-and-information channel between the Continental events and the London commercial-and-political centres. The standard British government official-post route from the Continent to London ran through the chartered packet-boats on the regulated Dover-and-Harwich routes, which sailed on the published packet-schedule of every other day and took an average of approximately five-to-seven days for the Brussels-to-London transmission. The Rothschild private-courier route ran through the standing private-packet-boat charters at Ostend and Calais (the standard Rothschild charter-rate was approximately twenty guineas per private crossing, plus the standing retainer to the packet-captain) and could deliver the Brussels-to-London transmission in approximately thirty-six hours under favourable conditions.
THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
The Hundred Days Campaign of March-to-June 1815 (the campaign that opened on Napoleon's escape from Elba on the first of March 1815 and closed on the surrender of Paris on the seventh of July 1815) was the central single financial-and-political event of post-1789 European history. The London Stock Exchange traded across the campaign on the standing assumption that the outcome was deeply uncertain and that a French victory in the Belgian theatre would extend the European war for at least another five-year period, with the corresponding implications for British government bond prices (the standing British Consol 3-percent stock had been trading at approximately sixty-two pounds per hundred-pound face-value through the spring of 1815 on the war-extension expectation).
Nathan had been holding a substantial Rothschild long-position in British Consols across the spring of 1815 on the strategic family-bank calculation that the campaign would end with a British-Allied victory, that the Consol price would rise substantially on the news of the victory, and that the standing pre-victory low-price position could be sold into the post-victory price-rise for substantial profit. The Rothschild private-courier network had been instructed in the third week of May 1815 to give priority transmission to any news from the Belgian theatre.
THE NIGHT OF THE EIGHTEENTH
Wellington's combined Anglo-Allied army of approximately seventy-three thousand met the French Imperial army of approximately seventy-three thousand under Napoleon on the small Waterloo ridge south of Brussels at the morning of Sunday the eighteenth of June 1815. The battle ran across the afternoon of the eighteenth and closed at approximately eight in the evening with the catastrophic French collapse on the strength of the Prussian arrival under Blücher on the French right flank and the final Old Guard cavalry-charge failure against the Allied centre. The French army was effectively destroyed in the rout that followed.
The Rothschild private-courier Rothworth of Ostend was at the back of the Anglo-Allied positions on the Waterloo ridge across the afternoon of the eighteenth (Rothworth was a long-standing Rothschild commercial agent and had been authorised by Nathan to attend the Brussels-and-Waterloo theatre on the basis of the news-priority assignment). He saw the French collapse at approximately seven-thirty in the evening, took the standard despatch-confirmation from Salomon de Rothschild's Brussels agent (Salomon had been positioned at Brussels through the campaign on the same news-priority assignment), and left the Brussels-Waterloo area at midnight on the eighteenth on the standard Rothschild relay-courier system. He reached Ostend at five on the morning of the twentieth of June, chartered the private packet-boat Calais Packet across the Channel from Ostend at six in the morning of the twentieth on the standard Rothschild charter-rate, reached Dover at midnight on the twentieth, took the standard Rothschild relay-coach overnight to London, and delivered the despatch to Nathan at New Court at approximately six on the morning of the twenty-first of June 1815. The despatch was the brief handwritten note from Salomon at Brussels of the eighteenth: Wellington has won. Napoleon is in flight. The French army is destroyed.
THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE
Nathan walked from New Court to the Stock Exchange at Capel Court at the standard ten-in-the-morning Stock Exchange opening on the twenty-first of June 1815. He took his standard Stock Exchange position at his trading-pillar (the Rothschild-pillar, the standing trading-position Nathan had occupied at every London trading-day since the Stock Exchange move to Capel Court in 1801). He stood at the pillar in his standard merchant's mourning-coat without speaking and without expression for approximately the first hour of trading, an unusual feature of his behaviour on a trading-morning that was instantly recognised by the standard Stock Exchange-trader community as a positive-signal that Nathan had received news he was processing.
The Stock Exchange standing-and-traditional rumour-trading on the strength of Nathan's morning-behaviour ran across the standing community of Stock Exchange traders through the late morning of the twenty-first. The standing-and-traditional reading of Nathan's silent-pillar-posture was that Nathan had received bad news from the Continental theatre and was preparing to sell. The Stock Exchange Consol-prices fell across the late-morning trading on the strength of the standing-and-traditional rumour. Nathan held his position through the late-morning and into the afternoon. At the early-afternoon-trading-resumption Nathan began to sell small parcels of Consols at the depressed-trading-price; the Stock Exchange community took the sell-signal as confirmation of the bad-news-from-the-Continent reading; the Consol price fell further across the early afternoon. Nathan continued the small-parcel-sell-operation through the early-afternoon-trading.
At approximately three in the afternoon Nathan switched his standing-trading-position. He began to buy Consols in substantial parcels through the agency of his standing Stock Exchange-broker William Lucas. The standard Stock Exchange-trader community had by this point moved into the standard-and-traditional sell-position on the Nathan-bad-news reading; the substantial buying-volume from Lucas-on-Rothschild-account drove the Consol price-recovery across the late-afternoon trading. By the four-o'clock-close of the trading-day Nathan had converted his entire long-position in Consols at the high-end of the day's price-range and had reconstituted a substantial new long-position at the low-end of the day's price-range, on the strength of the day's trading-price-movement entirely. The standard Stock Exchange-historical-assessment (the assessment of the period and the assessment of every subsequent Stock Exchange historian to the present) is that the Nathan trading-operation of the twenty-first of June 1815 was the central single most-profitable single-day trading operation in the history of the London Stock Exchange and that the profits-on-the-day from the operation funded the next twenty years of the New Court bank's commercial position.
THE LIVERPOOL CALL
The official British government Waterloo despatch from Major Henry Percy of the Wellington staff reached Lord Bathurst at the War Office in London at approximately ten o'clock on the evening of the twenty-first of June 1815. Bathurst confirmed the despatch with the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool at Downing Street at approximately ten-fifteen. Nathan walked from New Court to Downing Street at approximately ten-thirty and met Liverpool at Downing Street with the formal Rothschild confirmation of the Waterloo victory (Nathan had been the first London civilian to know the news, but had refrained from communicating it to the government until the official Percy despatch had arrived through the standard government-channels). Liverpool and Nathan met across the rest of the night at Downing Street and across the next several days on the financial-and-political consequences of the Waterloo victory.
The post-Waterloo period of 1815 to 1825 was the central single decade of the modern Rothschild international banking position. Nathan and his four brothers conducted across the period the substantial post-war sovereign-loan-and-bond operations for the British, French, Austrian, Prussian and Russian governments that established the Rothschild bank as the dominant single international financial house of the early-and-mid-nineteenth-century European order. The New Court bank Nathan had built from the small 1798 Manchester arrival continues today as Rothschild & Co, the largest independent investment bank in the world, with operations across forty countries and a continuous family-control-and-management line that runs from Nathan's 1810 New Court founding to the present sixth-generation Rothschild partnership.
Nathan died at Frankfurt on the twenty-eighth of July 1836 at fifty-eight, on the journey home from his eldest son Lionel's marriage at the Frankfurt-Judengasse, of an infected abscess. The Rothschild name in modern international finance carries the weight of the morning at the Stock Exchange on the twenty-first of June 1815 and the standing-trading-pillar at Capel Court.