Lionel de Rothschild
Lionel de Rothschild lent the British government four million pounds over a weekend to buy the Suez Canal shares, and had spent eleven years before that trying to take a seat in the House of Commons that he had won four times. He was born in London in 1808, the eldest son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who had built the English house of the family bank, and he took it over on his father's death in 1836. Under him the London house financed the Irish famine relief loan of 1847, the Crimean War, and railways and governments across Europe, and remained what his father had made it, the bank a British government went to when it needed money faster than Parliament could vote it. The City of London elected him to Parliament in 1847, and he could not sit, because the oath of a member was sworn on the true faith of a Christian. He was re-elected in 1849, 1852 and 1857, each time declining the oath at the table and each time seeing the Commons pass a relief bill that the Lords threw out, until in 1858 the two houses agreed that each might settle its own oath and he took his seat, the first practising Jew to do so. He never made a speech there. In November 1875 the Khedive of Egypt, bankrupt, offered his shares in the Suez Canal Company for sale, and Disraeli, who had known Lionel for thirty years and dined with him that week, sent his secretary Montagu Corry to New Court while Parliament was not sitting; asked what the security was, Corry said the British government, and Rothschild said they should have it. The purchase made Britain the largest single shareholder in the canal and began the entanglement that ended in the occupation of Egypt in 1882. He died in 1879. His son Nathan became the first Jewish peer; his grandson Walter, the zoologist, was the Lord Rothschild to whom the Balfour Declaration was addressed, and is the other Rothschild in this corpus.
- Lived: 1808 CE – 1879 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: banker, politician
