Nathan Mayer Rothschild: Wellington's Paymaster and the Waterloo Myth

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Nathan Mayer Rothschild was born in Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto in 1777, the third of five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Gutle Schnapper. In 1798, at 21, he moved to Manchester to trade textiles, then in 1804 shifted to London, where he dealt in foreign bills of exchange on the Stock Exchange and set up a bank in 1805. In 1802 he joined the Emulation Lodge of Freemasons, a step above the lodges most Ashkenazi Jews joined. From 1809 he traded gold bullion, and in 1811 he agreed with Commissary General John Charles Herries to get cash to the Duke of Wellington's army in Spain and Portugal, using his brothers and agents to buy local coin on British credit. He later carried British subsidies to Prussia, Russia and Austria.

The tale that carrier pigeons let him fake a panic and profit at Waterloo comes from an 1846 pamphlet by a French socialist writing as Satan. Brian Cathcart found Wellington's messenger reached the War Secretary on June 21, and Nathan's couriers used riders and boats; the sudden peace actually hurt his war-oriented positions. He made his fortune by buying British consols and selling near the top in late 1817. In 1822 Austria made the brothers barons. In 1825 he brought gold from Paris to rescue the Bank of England, and in 1835 he won the Almadén mercury mines. He died in Frankfurt of an infected abscess on July 28, 1836, after attending his son Lionel's wedding.

• Observers described him leaning on a pillar at the Exchange with a blank face whose eyes flashed like a drawn sword.
• At his death his wealth equaled about 0.62 percent of British national income.
• With brother-in-law Moses Montefiore he lent the government 15 million pounds to compensate slave owners, a debt fully repaid in 2015.
• UCL records show he claimed 2,571 pounds through a mortgage on an Antigua plantation with 158 enslaved people.
• Heinrich Heine grouped him with Richelieu and Robespierre as names that spelled the end of the old aristocracy.