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224 THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
THE ROTHSCHILD FORMULA 225
load of war debt, and the little people paid the bill with hardly a
grumble because they hadn't the slightest knowledge it was being
charged to their account. Wilson concludes the story:
The bankers won. Louis XVIII was restored by British arms and
British diplomacy to the throne of his ancestors. Loans were placed at
his disposal, though Napoleon had left a France which enjoyed a credit
balance.
A year later the man whom every King and every banker in
Europe called "usurper" won back his throne with 800 men and
without the firing of a single shot. On this occasion he had no option
but to raise a loan for the defense of France. The City of London
[banking district] accommodated him with £5,000,000. With this sum
he equipped the army which Wellington defeated at Waterloo.
GOLD FOR THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON
One of the most fascinating and revealing episodes to be
recorded by Rothschild biographers concerns the smuggling of a
large shipment of gold to finance the Duke of Wellington who was
attempting to feed and equip an army in Portugal and in the
Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France.
It was not at all certain that Wellington would be able to defeat
Napoleon in the coming battle, and the Duke was hard pressed to
convince bankers and merchants in Portugal and Spain to accept
his written promises-to-pay, even though they were officially
guaranteed by the British government These notes were deeply
discounted, and Wellington was desperate for gold coin. It was at
this point that Nathan Rothschild offered the services of himself
and his brothers. With an efficient smuggling apparatus already
functioning throughout Europe, he was able to offer Wellington
much better terms while still making a magnificent profit. But, to
accomplish this, the gold had to pass right under Napoleon's nose.
Frederic Morton describes the scene:
There was only one way to route the cash: through the very France
England's army was fighting. Of course, the Rothschild
blockade-running machine already had superb cogs whirring all over
Germany, Scandinavia and England, even in Spain and Southern
France. But a very foxy new wheel was needed in Napoleon's capital
itself. Enter Jacob—henceforth called James—the youngest of Mayer's
sons.
1. R. McNair Wilson, p. 83.
2. Morton, p. 46.
James was only nineteen years old but was well trained by his
father in the art of deception. He arrived in Paris with a dual
mission. First, he was to provide the French authorities with a false
report about the British gold movement, with just enough truth in it
lo sound convincing. He presented the government with falsified
letters indicating that the English were desperate to halt the flow of
their gold into France. The ploy paid off when the French authorities
then actually encouraged the financial community to accept
British gold and to convert it into commercially sound banknotes.
Second, James was to serve as a vital link in a financial chain
stretching between London and the Pyrenees. He was to coordinate
the receipt of the gold into France, the conversion of that gold into
Spanish banknotes, and the movement of those notes out of the
country on their way to Wellington. All of this he did with amazing
dexterity, especially considering his youth. Morton concludes:
In the space of a few hundred hours Mayer's youngest had not
only gotten the English gold rolling through France, but conjured a
fiscal mirage that took in Napoleon himself. A teen-age Rothschild
tricked the imperial government into sanctioning the very process that
helped to ruin it...
The family machine began to hum. Nathan sent big shipments of
British guineas, Portuguese gold ounces, French napoleons d'or (often
freshly minted in London) across the Channel. From the coast James
saw them to Paris and secretly transmuted the metal into bills on
certain Spanish bankers. South of the capital, Kalmann [another of
Mayer's sons] materialized, took over the bills, blurred into a
thousand shadowed canyons along the Pyrenees—and reappeared,
with Wellington's receipts in hand. Salomon [another son] was
everywhere, trouble-shooting, making sure the transit points were
diffuse and obscure enough not to disturb either the French delusion
or the British guinea rate. Amschel stayed in Frankfurt and helped
father Mayer to staff headquarters.
The French did catch a few whiffs of the
truth. Sometimes the
suspicious could be prosperously purged of their suspicion. The police
chief of Calais, for example, suddenly was able to live in such
distracting luxury that he found it difficult to patrol the shoreline
thoroughly....
While Napoleon struggled his might away in the Russian Winter,
there passed through France itself a gold vein to the army staving in
the Empire's back door.
I Morton, p. 47.