Baron Edmond de Rothschild was one of the richest and best-connected men in Europe. However, his lifelong hobby of looking for autographs of famous people was more like that of a young man who admires idols.
Ninety years after his death, more than 220 letters he collected over 60 years have been discovered at Waddesdon House, the former Rothschild family home now owned by the National Trust.
The list includes documents signed by Queen Elizabeth I, Nelson, Byron, Benjamin Franklin, Victor Hugo, Peter Paul Rubens, Madame de Pompadour, as well as manuscripts of Mozart's sheet music and invoices from rival Salieri. Includes several points. “This is a really interesting find,” said Pom Harrington, managing director of rare book and manuscript company Peter Harrington. “He clearly took pleasure in receiving signatures and letters from some of the most important people in the world.”
But why would a man who was himself famous and came from one of the richest families in Europe want to collect them? In his 1931 memoirs, he briefly described his hobbies. 1856, and asked me to sign my little album. Back then, as now, it was fashionable to ask famous people for autographs. ”
Rothschild's collection of letters was passed on to his son James, who immigrated to England from France after World War I. On his death in 1957 it was given to his widow Dorothy and left in the Waddesdon archives in the 1980s. Amazingly, no one had opened the box until a French antiquarian came to Waddesdon last summer. “We then realized what was inside and have been cataloging it ever since,” Waddesdon's head of archives Catherine Taylor said.
The oldest are two French letters from Elizabeth I. The first letter was written in 1588 to King Henry IV of France. She called him “my dear brother, the most Christian king.” “The gist of her letter was to warn Henry to be careful of the Spaniards,” Taylor said.
The second letter, written in 1583, is addressed to Grand Duke Valentinova, in which the queen expresses her gratitude for some horses. Both letters include her stylish signature. Elizabeth's letter is valued at around £100,000, but Waddesdon has made it clear that it is not for sale.
Nelson's letter to his pastor, thanking him for the gift of “game” (possibly a deer or bird), dates from 1802, five years after he lost his right arm. The National Maritime Museum suggests that after he learned to write with his left hand, it became more difficult to do so than with his previously clumsy right hand. He is signed “Nelson Bronte'' because he was created a duke of Bronte after his victory in the Battle of Sicily.
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Byron was as famous for his love life as he was for his poetry, writing to James Wedderburn Webster, the husband of one of his mistresses, Lady Frances Webster. There are two letters from Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, one of the most famous mistresses in the world.
In another letter, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, long considered a lover of James I, is asked by a senior French official about negotiating a marriage between Princess Henrietta Maria and James I's son Charles, heir to the throne. He writes a letter to Cardinal Richelieu, a priest.
There is a letter from the great Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini in which he says, “I would be happy to play for Baroness Betty,'' a reference to Edmund's mother.
Perhaps the most important item is a letter from the American polymath Benjamin Franklin to the Dutch scientist Jan Ingenhuush. Franklin wrote of filling balloons “with flammable air” and “trying to ignite them with electricity” and “coordinating them to natural lightning.” In a letter dated September 2, 1783, Franklin, who was the U.S. ambassador to France, wrote: [the Treaty of Paris] This will establish peace between Europe and America for the time being… Goodbye, thank you. ”
“These letters are a window into an insatiable curiosity,” says Dame Hannah Rothschild, chair of the Rothschild Foundation. “Names jump out from the pages of stories from the past and stories that have been waiting to be told.”
