The Canadian Patriot Review

The Rothschilds and the Bank of England: Contractors, Not Controllers

mattehret

By Michael King

One of the most persistent conspiracy theories in modern history holds that the Rothschild family secretly took control of the Bank of England.

The story usually begins at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Nathan Mayer Rothschild is said to have learned of Wellington’s victory before anyone else in London, tricked the London Stock Exchange into a panic, and made a fortune buying government stock at rock-bottom prices. From that single coup, as the story goes, the family gained the money and leverage to dominate the City of London, capture the Bank of England, and eventually buy power over the British Crown itself.

Each step of that story depends on the one before it.

If the Waterloo coup did not happen, the fortune it supposedly produced did not exist.

If the Bank of England was never captured, the leap to control of the Crown has nothing to stand on. Testing the theory therefore means testing each link in the chain against the historical record.

That record tells a very different story, and it is best understood in the order events actually happened. The Bank of England was more than a century old before any Rothschild did business in London. The Waterloo legend was not reported in 1815 at all; it was invented by a French pamphleteer in 1846, ten years after Nathan’s death. In between those two facts lies a long paper trail of accounts, letters and ledgers.

That paper trail points to one theme above all others. At every stage of their rise, the Rothschilds worked inside a framework they did not control. First they served a German prince. Then they served the British Treasury and its officials. Later they served the Bank of England as a client and supplier. They moved enormous sums of money, but the money belonged to and was directed by others, and the Rothschilds rendered accounts for it. They were answerable to the aristocratic and bureaucratic establishment of the City of London, and they thrived precisely because that establishment trusted them to answer.

This article follows that story from the founding of the Bank in 1694 to the latest versions of the myth in 2020.

The Bank Before the Rothschilds (1688–1720)

To claim that someone “took over” the Bank of England, one first has to understand what the Bank was and who ran it. Its origins lie in the political upheaval of the late seventeenth century, long before the Rothschild name meant anything outside Frankfurt, Germany.

In 1688–1689, the Glorious Revolution replaced the Stuart King James II with William of Orange and Mary II. The new regime was soon fighting an expensive war against Louis XIV’s France, the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The Crown’s traditional ways of raising money could not keep up with the costs of this massive war. Short-term loans from goldsmith-bankers and ordinary tax revenue fell well short of the cost, especially once the navy needed rebuilding after the defeat at Beachy Head in 1690.

English defeat at Beachy Head in 1690.

By 1694 the government needed about £1.2 million. The Scottish merchant William Paterson proposed a solution. A joint-stock company would raise the money from private subscribers and lend it permanently to the state at 8 percent interest. In return, the subscribers would be incorporated by royal charter as “The Governor and Company of the Bank of England.” The charter gave them the right to issue notes, deal in bullion and act as the government’s banker. Parliament authorised the scheme through the Tonnage Act of 1694, and the charter was sealed on 27 July 1694.

The public response shows who stood behind the new Bank. Subscriptions opened at Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside and filled in about twelve days. A total of 1,268 subscribers raised the full £1.2 million, with a quarter paid in cash at once. The king and queen subscribed the maximum individual amount of £10,000. The other early subscribers included senior Treasury figures, City merchants, aristocrats, professionals, tradesmen and a sizable group of Huguenot refugees. Jewish participation was minimal, amounting to a handful of people who contributed a few thousand pounds between them. Most of the capital came from London and the surrounding counties, and foreign subscriptions made up less than 2 percent.

The Bank’s governing structure matters for everything that follows, because any genuine takeover would have had to capture it. The Bank was a private joint-stock corporation with limited liability, the first on this scale in England. Its shareholders formed the Court of Proprietors, which met periodically to elect directors and approve dividends. The Court of Directors, made up of a Governor, a Deputy Governor and 24 directors, ran the Bank. Each office required a large personal holding of Bank stock: £4,000 for the Governor, £3,000 for the Deputy Governor and £2,000 for a director. Control of the Bank therefore meant control of its proprietors and its directors, and both were drawn from the established merchant and landed classes of England.

The Bank soon became woven into the life of the state. Its notes and sealed bills circulated as a trusted medium, and it held a practical monopoly on joint-stock banking in England and Wales until 1826. It managed government debt, supplied liquidity and survived the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Over the eighteenth century it took on more and more of the functions of a central bank, while remaining a private company that paid dividends to its shareholders. It stayed in private hands until 1946, and throughout that time its shareholder base broadened while remaining dominated by British merchants, landowners, institutions and private individuals.

By the time the Rothschilds appeared in London in 1798, then, the Bank was a mature institution with more than a century of history, a settled system of governance and deep ties to the Treasury and Parliament. Whatever the Rothschilds later achieved, they achieved in relation to this institution. They did not build it, and the rest of this story shows that they never came to own it.

Mayer Amschel and the Hessian Court (1744–1810)

The Rothschild story begins far from London, and its beginning sets the pattern for everything that came after. From the very start, the family’s business consisted of serving powerful patrons and managing their money on their behalf.

Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1744 in the Judengasse, the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt. After an apprenticeship with the Oppenheimer banking house in Hanover, he returned to Frankfurt and dealt in rare coins, medals and antiquities. That trade brought him to the court of Hesse-Hanau and to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, later Landgrave Wilhelm IX and Elector Wilhelm I. Wilhelm was one of the richest princes in Europe, largely from hiring out Hessian soldiers to foreign powers, including Britain.

The Elector of Hesse Entrusting Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1743–1812), with His Treasure
Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882)

In 1769 Mayer Amschel was named Court Agent (Hoffaktor) to the Hessian court. The title is revealing. A court agent was a servant of the prince, and his standing depended entirely on the prince’s continued favour. Over the following decades Mayer Amschel’s work grew from coin and medal commissions to placing loans and managing remittances. By the early 1800s, working alongside the Hessian treasury official Carl Friedrich Buderus, he had become one of the Elector’s principal bankers.

The relationship was tested when French forces occupied Hesse-Kassel in 1806 and the Elector fled into exile. Mayer Amschel continued to manage much of the electoral fortune. He safeguarded records and assets and invested funds, some of them through his son Nathan in London. The money remained the Elector’s, and the Rothschilds held it in trust for him. Their reputation for handling it faithfully was the foundation of their later credit with other governments. Mayer Amschel also received appointments from the Habsburg court, and in 1810 he reorganised the Frankfurt business as M. A. Rothschild und Söhne, a partnership with his sons.

This early chapter establishes the model that Nathan would carry to London. The Rothschilds grew rich by being trusted with other people’s money, and they kept that trust by accounting for it.

Nathan Rothschild and the Herries Accounts (1798–1815)

Nathan’s career in England shows the same model operating inside the British state. To understand it, one has to picture the City of London of the Napoleonic era. Finance there ran through a web of established institutions and personal relationships: the Treasury and its officials, the Bank of England and its directors, Parliament, and the great merchant and landed families who sat in all of them. Nathan arrived as a young foreign-born Jewish trader with none of those connections. Everything he later achieved depended on earning the trust of the people who did have them.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Mayer Amschel’s third son, went to England around 1798–1799 to work as a textile merchant in Manchester. Between 1804 and 1809 he moved into finance and founded N. M. Rothschild at New Court, St. Swithin’s Lane, in the City of London. Hessian capital placed temporarily in London let him expand into bullion, foreign exchange and securities.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild

His decisive relationship was with John Charles Herries, a career official of exactly the bureaucratic establishment described above. Herries was the son of a London merchant. He entered the Treasury as a clerk, served as private secretary to successive ministers, and in October 1811 became Commissary-in-Chief. His task was to pay and supply the British army on the Continent at a time when Napoleon’s Continental System blocked the usual channels of trade and credit. He turned to Rothschild for one practical reason: Rothschild could deliver coin where others could not.

John Charles Herries (1778 – 1855)

From 1811 onward, Nathan became the government’s main private agent for moving gold coin and subsidies to Wellington’s army and to Britain’s allies. He did this through his brothers’ houses across the Channel. It is important to be clear about what this arrangement was. The money being moved was the British government’s money. Herries decided what was to be sent, where, and when. Nathan executed those instructions and was paid a commission on the sums he delivered. He was a contractor in the service of the state, and the same network later handled large postwar subsidy payments on the same terms.

The surviving paperwork shows just how closely Nathan answered to his official employer. The British Library’s Herries Papers contain volumes of accounts between Herries and Nathan for 1814–1821. They include detailed statements for the purchase of silver bars and specie, duplicate accounts shared among Nathan and his brothers James and Salomon, and running tallies of sums advanced or remitted. The Rothschild Archive in London holds the other half of the record. It contains more than a hundred letters from Nathan in 1814, and several hundred in 1815, to his brothers and agents in Amsterdam, Hamburg and elsewhere. These letters refer to “instructions from Herries,” to advice of remittances, and to bullion shipped for the British government. Again and again, the brothers stress the need for accurate accounts and for keeping the relevant British and continental institutions informed.

Taken together, the two archives show a firm that logged every major movement of metal or bills, reported it to the responsible Treasury official, and settled it against government authority. This is the conduct of a business that knew exactly whom it worked for.

The law of the period reinforced that relationship. The Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act 1795 made it high treason to intend the death or deposition of the King, to strip him of his royal title, to levy war against him to force a change of policy, or to invite a foreign invasion. Expressing such an intention in print, in writing or by an overt act was enough for a conviction. Sedition law also punished writing or speech that stirred up hatred or contempt of the sovereign or the government. The Act was renewed and remained a live instrument into the nineteenth century, and the Treason Felony Act 1848 later adjusted the penalties for some political offences while keeping the underlying prohibitions. A foreign-born banking house in the City had no immunity from these laws and no means of resisting the state if it chose to act. The same government that hired Nathan to move its gold could have seized his assets and imprisoned him.

Waterloo (1815)

This brings the story to the moment on which the entire conspiracy theory rests. Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. According to the legend, this was the day Nathan stopped being a servant of the British state and began to become its master.

The documentary record of 1815 shows something quite different.

That year Nathan was writing several hundred letters about the government’s bullion business, much of it carried out on instructions from Herries. He was at the height of his work as a contractor, deeply embedded in an official system that required him to report and account for every large transaction. The record from that year contains no trace of the market coup the legend describes.

The legend did not appear in 1815, or in the years immediately after. It appeared three decades later, and its origins are discussed below in their proper place in the timeline. Before turning to it, the next section looks at what Nathan actually did with his position after Waterloo, and how his relationship with the Bank of England actually worked.

After Waterloo and the 1825 Crisis (1815–1836)

Nathan’s influence did grow after 1815, and it is important to be honest about that. In the years after Waterloo he became a dominant figure in the London markets for government securities and bullion, and his own brothers spoke of his commanding position on the exchange. That influence was real, and it was earned through capital, fast information and skilled execution. The family’s houses in Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna and Naples worked as one coordinated partnership. This gave them an unmatched ability to move metal and news across borders, which made them valuable partners to governments and to the Bank of England. By the 1820s Nathan was one of the leading merchant bankers in the City and a major issuer of sovereign loans.

Influence in the market is a very different thing from control of an institution, however. The framework within which Nathan operated stayed firmly in place. His old employer Herries, for example, continued to rise through the state. He served as Auditor of the Civil List, Joint Secretary of the Treasury (1823–1827), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1827–1828), Master of the Mint and later President of the Board of Control. The official to whom Nathan had rendered his wartime accounts went on to head the Treasury itself. His son’s memoir and his Dictionary of National Biography entry both describe the working relationship with Rothschild, and neither suggests that Rothschild directed policy or gained control of any institution.

The clearest test of the relationship came in 1825. If the Rothschilds had captured the Bank of England after Waterloo, a financial crisis ten years later is exactly where that control should have shown itself. Late in 1825, a panic drained the Bank’s gold reserves to dangerous levels. Nathan responded by opening a special account for the Bank at N. M. Rothschild & Sons, recorded in the firm’s books as “Account H”. On 22 December 1825 the Bank deposited 891 silver bars worth about £170,000. Rothschild shipped them to Paris, sold them for gold and credited the coin back for the Bank’s use. Direct deliveries of gold sovereigns followed, starting at around £300,000, and cumulative gold movements over the following year ran into several million pounds.

Every part of this arrangement placed the Bank in the position of client and Rothschild in the position of supplier. The Bank owned the silver and the resulting gold. The Bank paid for the gold delivered or had it credited, and the arrangement was settled in the ordinary course of business. Both sides kept full records, preserved in the firm’s bullion ledgers and in the Bank’s own books. The Bank’s own note issues, discounting and coordination with the government did most of the work of ending the panic. Rothschild’s contribution was valuable, but it was a service performed for the Bank and accounted for to the Bank. Through all of it, the Bank’s ownership and governance remained exactly as they had been.

Nathan’s answerability extended to Parliament as well. In 1832 he gave evidence as a witness to the parliamentary Committee of Secrecy on the renewal of the Bank’s charter. A man who secretly controlled the Bank would hardly have been summoned to explain banking matters to the committee deciding its future. He appeared, like other City figures, to give testimony to the body that held authority over the Bank.

Nathan died in 1836, and his son Lionel de Rothschild took over the London house. At his death, the Bank of England was still governed by its proprietors and directors under a charter renewed by Parliament, exactly as it had been when he arrived in England.

The Birth of the Myth (1846)

If the record of Nathan’s lifetime shows a contractor answering to his clients, the obvious question is where the story of a Waterloo coup came from. The answer is that it was invented after his death, for reasons that had nothing to do with Waterloo.

In 1846, a 36-page pamphlet titled Histoire édifiante et curieuse de Rothschild Ier, Roi des Juifs (“Edifying and Curious History of Rothschild the First, King of the Jews”) was published in Paris under the pseudonym “Satan.” Its author was the French journalist Mathieu Georges Dairnvaell (1818–1854). The immediate trigger was a deadly accident on a French railway line in which Nathan’s brother James de Rothschild was a major investor. Dairnvaell exploited public anger over the accident, mixing current anti-Rothschild invective with an invented episode set thirty years earlier at Waterloo.

James de Rothschild

In Dairnvaell’s version, Nathan watched the battle in person in Belgium, bribed sailors to carry him across the Channel in a storm, and reached London a full day ahead of the official news. He then supposedly made 20 million francs in a single operation on the Stock Exchange, and the family’s profits for the year reached 135 million.

James de Rothschild answered the same year with a satirical counter-pamphlet. The “Satan” text was nonetheless translated and reprinted across Europe. Its commercial success and its usefulness to antisemites kept it in circulation long after anyone could check its claims against living memory.

The most thorough modern examination, by the journalist Brian Cathcart, shows every dramatic element of the story to be false. Nathan was never in Belgium or at Waterloo. There was no relevant storm in the Channel. The surviving record shows no market collapse engineered by him, and the profit claimed is fantastical when set against surviving price data and the firm’s own records.

Later retellings built the full conspiracy theory on top of Dairnvaell’s invention. In its classic form, Nathan sold British government securities (consols) heavily to create the impression that Napoleon had won, bought them back at the bottom, and made a fortune when the truth came out. From that one coup, the family supposedly gained the power to dominate the City, take over the Bank of England and finally control the British Crown. This is why the Waterloo story matters so much to the larger theory. It supplies the founding event, the single moment of hidden power that everything else is built on. Once it is shown to be a fiction written in 1846, the rest of the chain loses its starting point, and the official records, parliamentary inquiries, Bank minutes and Rothschild ledgers support none of the later links either.

The Only Rothschild Director (1868–1889)

The closest any Rothschild ever came to the governance of the Bank of England arrived more than fifty years after Waterloo, and it shows once again how the family fitted inside the City’s establishment rather than standing above it.

Alfred Charles de Rothschild (1842–1918)

Alfred Charles de Rothschild (1842–1918), Lionel’s second son, became a director of the Bank of England in 1868 at the age of 26. He was the first Jewish director. Contemporary accounts suggest the Governor wanted the appointment partly to keep in close contact with the Rothschild firm. In other words, the seat came to Alfred through the Bank’s own leadership, which judged it useful to have a line to an important client.

Alfred was one of roughly two dozen directors, and he never served as Governor or Deputy Governor. Policy remained a collective matter for the Court and the Governor, with growing oversight from the Treasury and Parliament. He left in 1889 after an internal controversy over his having looked into a customer’s account in connection with a private art transaction. The episode shows that he was subject to the same standards and scrutiny as any other director. No other Jewish director sat on the Court for more than fifty years afterward. The seat gave Alfred access and prestige, while command of the Bank’s policy and reserves stayed with the Court as a whole.

Diversification and Decline (1870s–1938)

The later history of the family business offers another kind of evidence. A family that controlled the central bank of the world’s leading financial power would be expected to grow ever more dominant. The Rothschilds instead followed the path of an ordinary, if very successful, private bank: they diversified, and their relative position gradually slipped.

Under Lionel and later partners, the London house stayed a leading issuer of sovereign loans for much of the nineteenth century. In 1875 it financed the British government’s purchase of Egypt’s stake in the Suez Canal, once again acting as banker to the state on a specific transaction. The family also spread into industry and natural resources, which reduced its dependence on government bonds and bullion. From the 1870s the London and Paris houses took part in restructuring the Rio Tinto copper mines in Spain and eventually held a large minority interest. They became major shareholders in De Beers and backed Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Leopold de Rothschild later helped administer Rhodes’s estate and set up the Rhodes Scholarships. James had pioneered railway finance in France, and the family pursued it on both sides of the Channel. The Alliance Assurance Company, founded at New Court under Nathan in 1824, remained a significant associated interest.

Leopold de Rothschild portrayed himself as the Duc de Sully during the famous Devonshire House Fancy Dress Ball in 1897

The family’s combined capital stayed very large, and one estimate puts it above £41 million around 1899. Its relative position, however, was already eroding. Large joint-stock banks and rival merchant banks grew, governments learned to place loans directly or through syndicates, and after the First World War, the center of world finance moved toward New York. The partnership ties among the five houses loosened. The Vienna house was destroyed after the Anschluss in 1938, and the Paris house was badly disrupted under the German occupation. Only the London house carried on without a break.

By the early twentieth century N. M. Rothschild & Sons was a respected and well-capitalised firm, but it had lost the commanding position Nathan held in the 1820s. Its business shifted toward advisory work, selective underwriting and the management of family and client capital. This is the trajectory of a firm competing in a changing market, and it is hard to reconcile with the idea of a family that secretly controlled the Bank of England.

The Myth Spreads and the Bank Is Nationalised (1880s–1946)

While the real family business was adapting to a changing world, the myth was growing on its own track. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Waterloo legend made its way into respectable reference works in a toned-down form. Certain editions of the Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopædia Britannica repeated versions of the story that Nathan profited from early news of the battle. Their authority gave Dairnvaell’s invention a respectability it had never earned.

The legend then received its most systematic and sinister treatment. In 1940 the Nazi regime released the propaganda film Die Rothschilds, later re-released as Die Rothschilds. Aktien auf Waterloo. It was directed by Erich Waschneck under the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The film shows Nathan spreading false rumours of defeat to crash the market, buying at the bottom, and laying the foundation of Jewish-British financial domination. It was released in the same year as Jud Süß and Der ewige Jude, as part of a deliberate campaign to prepare public opinion for persecution. A fabrication from a Paris pamphlet had become state propaganda.

Six years later, the Bank of England’s own history reached a turning point that settles the ownership question directly.

In 1946 the Bank was nationalised. At that time it had about 17,000 shareholders, and two-thirds of them held less than £1,000 of stock. Compensation went to the existing proprietors on standard terms, and nothing in the record singles out a Rothschild controlling interest. Across the whole private era, from 1694 to 1946, the share registers, Court minutes, Treasury papers and parliamentary inquiries show a dispersed ownership in which no single family or foreign house ever held control. The Rothschilds appear in those records as major clients, occasional bullion suppliers and, for twenty-one years, one director among many.

Modern Variants (1945–2020)

Even after the Bank passed into public ownership, the myth kept evolving. After the war, the same motifs moved into antisemitic literature, Liberty Lobby publications and eventually internet forums, where they reached new audiences who had never heard of Dairnvaell.

One recent offshoot shows how far the story has drifted from any factual base. It comes from Joseph Gregory Hallett, a conspiracy author based in New Zealand who calls himself “King John III” and attracted a following in QAnon-adjacent circles around 2020. Hallett claims that the Rothschilds used their Napoleonic-war financing to buy “breeding rights” to the British royal family for a fixed term beginning around 1819–1840. In his telling, this makes every later monarch an illegitimate “flat-lie royal” and leaves Hallett himself as the true king. He cites no archival document, royal warrant or financial instrument from the period. His version simply carries the old market legend one step further, from a supposed takeover of the Bank to a supposed purchase of the Crown.

Why the Takeover Could Not Have Happened

With the full timeline laid out, the case against the takeover theory can be stated plainly. It rests on three kinds of evidence: the Bank’s governance, the paper trail of the Rothschilds’ own business, and the legal and political framework in which they operated.

The first is governance. A takeover of the Bank of England would have required a change in its ownership or in the people who ran it, and the record shows that neither changed. The 1694 charter framework, with its Court of Proprietors and Court of Directors, kept operating until nationalisation in 1946. The Rothschilds never acquired a block of stock large enough to sway the proprietors, and the only family member to hold a seat was Alfred, as one director out of about two dozen, invited in by the Bank’s own leadership.

The second is the paper trail, and it is the strongest evidence of all. A covert takeover would leave suppressed ledgers, unreported transfers, a habit of avoiding official counterparties, and a quiet build-up of stock and directorships. The actual record shows the reverse at every stage. In the 1800s the family held the Elector of Hesse’s fortune in trust and accounted for it. During the Napoleonic Wars Nathan moved the British government’s gold on instructions from Herries and rendered meticulous accounts to him. In 1825 the Bank of England held a formal account at N. M. Rothschild & Sons, deposited its own silver there, and received gold in return, with both sides keeping full records. In 1832 Nathan gave evidence to Parliament on the Bank’s charter. These records survive in duplicate, in the family archive and in the British state’s collections. The trust that allowed the Rothschilds to move unprecedented amounts of gold also made concealment impossible, because every large transaction was visible to officials of the very institutions they were supposedly capturing.

The third is the framework of power around them. The Rothschilds operated in a City of London governed by an aristocratic and bureaucratic establishment: Treasury officials such as Herries, the proprietors and directors of the Bank, and a Parliament that renewed the Bank’s charter. The family’s wealth gave them influence within that world, but it did not place them above it. The state that hired Nathan to move gold for Wellington kept the full power of treason and sedition law, along with prosecution, imprisonment and asset seizure. Had the firm engaged in the fraud or plotting the conspiracy literature describes, the accounting channels described above would have exposed it to enormous risk. The family instead kept receiving government business and was never prosecuted, which fits the documentary record of a trusted contractor.

Conclusion

The Rothschilds were exceptionally effective private bankers. They supplied gold to the British state, moved markets and grew very rich in the process. Their rise was real and rapid, and it rested on court connections in Hesse, wartime logistics, and an international network that no competitor could match. Throughout that rise, however, they were working for others. They served a prince, then a Treasury, then a central bank, and in every case they answered to their clients with accounts, letters and settled balances.

The leap from that record to ownership of the Bank of England, and from there to ownership of the Crown, is the point where documentation ends and invention begins. That invention has a traceable lineage. It runs from Dairnvaell’s pamphlet in 1846, through respectable reference books and Nazi cinema in 1940, to Hallett’s claims in 2020 and nearly every conspiracy trope built up during the Cold War to the present. Against that lineage stands the archival record of contracts, accounts, official correspondence and the unchanged governance of the Bank of England.

Sources

Founding, ownership and governance of the Bank of England

Rothschild family history

Herries and the wartime accounts

The 1825 crisis

Law of treason and sedition

The Waterloo myth and its spread

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