In Europe their judgement was just as acute. They lent money to Louis XVIII and Talleyrand. Months after trundling back into Paris, Louis sacked Talleyrand and failed to restrain a purge of Bonapartists. In Marseilles, 300 of Napoleon’s Mamluks were slaughtered in their barracks. After the assassination of the king’s nephew, thousands were prosecuted for supporting Napoleon – inspiring the story of Dumas’s novel
In London, Nathan backed an urbane German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who, after spending time at the courts of Napoleon and Alexander, pulled off his marriage to the British heiress Princess Charlotte. But in 1817 she died after giving birth to a stillborn child. Leopold had no prospects, yet Salomon advised Nathan, ‘We should show even more friendship towards a man who fell on hard times than before.’ The death of Charlotte meant that the British succession now passed to one of the prince regent’s despicable brothers, the duke of Kent, who, marrying late, managed to father a girl, Victoria. But both the bets on Louis Philippe and Leopold would pay off.
In London, Nathan was trusted by all players from George IV (as the prince regent became in 1820)* to Lord Liverpool and Wellington, the apex of the new nexus of finance, power and society, his standing enhanced when he helped rescue the Bank of England. But the Rothschilds’ success did not make them loved. They were the vanguard of newly emancipated Jews who, once hidden in the Judengasse counting houses, now thrived in a strange brash world of stock markets, factories, newspapers and bourgeois values, social-climbing their way into aristocratic drawing rooms and Christian families. The success spawned new strains of medieval anti-Jewish racism, partly jealousy at parvenu wealth, partly suspicion of power, encompassing both nationalist fervour and conservative fear.
Jews still faced discriminatory laws across Europe: they were increasingly persecuted in Russia, and even in Britain they could not be elected to Parliament, attend university or hold office. Nathan and his brother-in-law, Montefiore, campaigned for Jewish rights. However Olympian their social lives and however palatial their mansions, they were still family-minded observant Jews: of Nathan’s seven children, four married Rothschilds, one a Montefiore, another a cousin, and only one married out. But in 1827 Montefiore embarked on a dangerous visit to Jerusalem, now a half-deserted monumental village neglected by voracious Ottoman pashas, and there embraced a religious belief in the traditional Jewish dream of a return to Zion that dovetailed with a new Christian interest in the Holy City.
On 5 May 1821 while Metternich presided over the balance of power in Europe, a sickly retired soldier died in a damp house on the forsaken Atlantic island of St Helena and no one cared. ‘Not an event,’ quipped Talleyrand. ‘Just news.’ As the fifty-one-year-old Bonaparte succumbed to stomach cancer, three conquerors – south, east and north – were founding new African empires.
SHAKA ZULU, MOSHOESHOE AND DONA FRANCISCA: THE
In 1816, Shaka bewitched his father,
He was the unplanned, perhaps unwanted, eldest son of King Senzangakona, and a chief’s daughter, Nandi – Sweet. When Senzangakona succeeded to the throne, he married many times and fathered eighteen sons, resenting his first son. Nandi and Shaka fled, protected by the king’s sister, Mnkabayi, a shrewd power broker who became arbiter of the kingdom in a culture where female power was respected. Nandi remarried, while Shaka, bitter and alienated, returned to his father’s household. When it was clear he was going to make trouble the father decided to kill him.
