His ancestors had been behind some of the Continent’s most momentous events, providing the finance that helped the British and their European allies defeat Napoleon.

They were instrumental in ending the slave trade by loaning the government money to compensate slave traders, and even had a hand in the acquisition of the Suez Canal.

Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who has died aged 91, may not have brought back that golden era but under his stewardship NM Rothschild & Sons (NMR), the British branch of the banking family established in the 18th century in Frankfurt, withstood the onslaught of the investment banking juggernauts; he kept it small but independent and profitable.

Evelyn Robert Adrian de Rothschild was the son of Anthony de Rothschild and Yvonne Cahen d’Anvers, who came from another prominent banking family, the Bischoffsheim. Named after an uncle who had died in the First World War, he had two sisters, Anne and Renée.

Brought up in Ascott House, the family’s home set in a 3,200-acre estate in Buckinghamshire, he developed a love of horses, and as a child wanted to be a cowboy. Instead he attended Harrow School and, when the time came to be shipped abroad to escape the Second World War, he was sent to prairie-less New York.

There, however, he was able to indulge in his other passion, chocolate. A self-confessed chocoholic, he got a job “behind a soda fountain in a drug store –where I could eat as much chocolate as I liked”. He had attained a child’s nirvana.

Back in the UK after three years, he returned to his studies, following Harrow with Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied history. Unlike his father, who achieved a double first, Rothschild failed to graduate and for years lived the life of a playboy, indulging his love of polo, fast cars and, of course, horses – in later life he would own Epsom, Sandown and Kempton racecourses.

However, when his father stepped down due to ill health, he joined the family firm NMR. For 27 years he managed what was, compared to other massive institutions, a boutique operation with just 600 employees and £4.6 billion in assets, concentrating on corporate finance.

He ruled in an autocratic way although, as he was keen to point out, staff turnover was minimum so he can’t have been that bad. In 1976 his determination that the bank should remain family-controlled put him on a collision course with his cousin Jacob, who had negotiated a merger with rival merchant bank SG Warburg.

Evelyn prevailed and Jacob left, taking with him his Rothschild Investment Trust (RIT) Capital. It was a serious rift for a firm that had started as a financial family dynasty centuries earlier, as symbolised by the five arrows in the family crest, referencing the five sons of patriarch Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

One of the things that remained constant in Evelyn de Rothschild’s life was his close connection with the monarchy — he had been an usher at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and acted as her financial adviser.

She knighted him in 1989. In 1986 he was invited by the Duke of Edinburgh to co-found with King Hussein of Jordan an interfaith group for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Essentially, he maintained the family’s strong ties with the British government and helped prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major to implement their privatisation policy, negotiating the sale of state-owned industries.

Although not an intellectual, Rothschild respected intellect and the freedom of the media, nowhere more so than at The Economist magazine, where during his 17 years as a chairman he never tried to tinker with its independence.

He may not have been terribly good with boring detail but he kept sight of the big picture. So he urged the magazine’s management to “get out of printing” long before Rupert Murdoch did so and helped it break the American market.

He also tried to turn his chocolate obsession into a going business in 2009 by opening a small chain of luxury chocolate shops, originally in partnership with award-winning chocolatier William Curley. Unfortunately, these temples to chocolate failed to gain enough customers to make them profitable.

Rothschild was married three times, first to Jeannette Bishop, a model, from 1966 to 1971. His second wife was Victoria Lou Schott, the daughter of an American property developer, whom he married in 1973; they had three children, Jessica, Anthony and David, but the marriage ended in 2000.

Two years earlier, at an annual conference to foster dialogue between Europe and the US, he met Lynn Forester, an American lawyer and businesswoman. They married in 2000 and famously spent part of their honeymoon at the White House at the invitation of the Clintons.

The new Lady de Rothschild was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency and was credited with softening up Rothschild’s political views.

An animal lover his whole life, Rothschild had a passion for Asian elephants, whom he thought more intelligent than humans. In 2002, together with Mark Shand, the Queen Consort’s late brother, he set up the conservation charity Elephant Family.

Animals were not the only recipients of his generosity. His Eranda Rothschild Foundation (an acronym of his and his sisters’ names) donates to medical research, education and the arts.

In 2004 he and his wife funded an orphanage in Tamil Nadu, India, although it would later close after some controversy.

After his fall-out with his cousin Jacob, Rothschild tried to re-establish some sort of family unity by setting up Rothschilds Continuation Holdings, which had stakes in Rothschild companies in Europe and abroad. He was the company’s chairman from 1982 to 2003 when he retired.

His retirement, though, didn’t mean he lost interest in the banking industry; as an old-fashioned banker he was no fan of hedge funds, derivatives and the like but he particularly loathed off-shore tax havens.

Talking to Canadian magazine Maclean’s in 1998, he railed against what he called “offshore casinos”. Taking as an example the Cayman Islands with their hundreds of banks, he said: “You get all these people offshore paying no taxes…and speculating against some poor country.”

Tighter international regulations were necessary, he felt, but he concluded, palpably frustrated, that nobody seemed to know how to do it, when “you can be clobbered by a 16-year-old in a garage moving $5 billion from one account to another”.

Not quite the way the venerable house of Rothschild had been used to operating.

Sir Evelyn de Rothschild is survived by his third wife, Lynn, and his three children from his second marriage, Jessica, Anthony and David.

Sir Evelyn de Rothschild: born 29 August, 1931, died 7 November, 2022