Charles boarded at Harrow School, which he found somewhat traumatising for incidents of bullying on account of his religion.

He went to Rothschild's Bank every morning; despite all his interest in science and in natural history, he never missed a day.

Like his zoologist brother Walter, Charles devoted much of his energies to entomology and natural history collecting.

[7][8] During his lifetime he built and managed his Ashton Wold estate[9] in Northamptonshire to maximise its suitability for wildlife, especially butterflies.

[14] She was born in 1870 at Nagyvárad, Hungary (now the Romanian city of Oradea), the daughter of a retired army officer, Baron Alfred Edler von Wertheimstein.

Rothschild, who worked in the family's banking business, was a dedicated naturalist in his spare time: the young couple had met on a butterfly-collecting trip in the Carpathian Mountains.