The Old Jew, 1859–1881
For anyone wishing to see Disraeli’s life as a Jewish life, the years between 1858 and 1874 offer barren ground. Those seeking expressions of his “Jewishness” quickly move on from his role in the completion of Jewish emancipation to his record during the great ministry he led in 1874–80. This was when he became responsible for Britain’s purchase of a major shareholding in the Suez Canal Company, with the assistance of the Rothschilds, a step that drew Britain more tightly into the Middle East. Was this the fulfilment of the dreamy conversation Disraeli had with Edward Stanley in 1851? Cecil Roth also detects the inspiration of Jewish humanistic values in the social legislation passed by the Conservative government under Disraeli’s overall direction. Finally, during the prolonged foreign crisis of 1876–78 Disraeli was subjected to an unprecedented degree of vituperation from Gladstone and the liberal press, both of whom routinely attributed his policy to his Jewish roots and sympathies.1
However, much of this interpretation depends on “back shadowing,” that is, reading back into events outcomes that could not have been known or foreseen at the time actions were taken. Contemporary sources on Disraeli’s intentions suggest quite different explanations for his conduct. Although Otto von Bismarck referred to him as “der alte Jude” (the old Jew), do the perceptions of Disraeli as a Jew, by friends or foes, make him one in any meaningful sense?
Disraeli was far more preoccupied by the changing economic, social, and political scene. From the early 1850s Britain emerged from depression and embarked on two decades of economic growth. The standard of living rose steadily, although social problems, especially in the cities, remained acute. In response to these ills, the growing influence of Protestant Nonconformists and Evangelicals conjoined with the rise of a scientific, statistical approach to push central government into a more interventionist role. By the 1860s the modern state was emerging at the same time as the vestiges of old England were disappearing. When Disraeli held high office again, the rural population he cherished as its backbone had declined to a fraction of the nation. For all his attachment to the landed interest, he confronted a country typified by organised workers, a large and assertive middle class, rapid mass transport, and a public opinion articulated through new techniques of mass communication. During these years the Conservative Party continued to rebuild, but the great fracture over protection persisted to the benefit of the Whig–Liberals, while the influence of personality disrupted the possibility of stable government based on a single party.2
Between 1860 and 1864 Disraeli played a waiting game. Instead of destabilizing Palmerston’s government he was content to let the premier, who was no lover of parliamentary reform, block the radicals in his own ranks. Meanwhile, Disraeli sought to consolidate his grip on the Tory Party, many of whose members still resented his commanding position. Charles Greville recorded in his diary that “the hatred and distrust of Disraeli is greater than ever in the Conservative ranks.” In a Quarterly Review article in April 1860 Lord Robert Cecil accused Disraeli of lacking the capacity to unite the party for more than the occasional raid into enemy territory. He could topple a premier but not function as one. Most damagingly, he echoed the charge that Disraeli was an unprincipled opportunist, “so flexible, so shameless.”3
These attacks stung, especially because he was leading the party in the House of Commons almost single-handedly. In June 1860 he complained to a senior Tory MP that the party was, in the words of a Liberal journal, in “chronic revolt and unceasing conspiracy.” A year later he protested to Sir Thomas Pakington, one of the whips, that so many of the rank and file defected to the government side or simply failed to turn up that the party repeatedly lost crucial votes. Unless they took their marching orders from him and acted as a body there was no hope. “Somebody must lead,” he groaned. It might have been more appropriate to say that somebody must follow. Too many Tories could not take him seriously or disliked him. Even his protégé and friend Stanley could not conceal his doubts about Disraeli. In February 1858 he had weighed up the odds of a Conservative government surviving in office and the desirability of joining it. One negative factor was that “the character of Disraeli, who must lead the Commons, does not command general confidence, either in parliament or among the public.” Four years later he mused over the equally unappealing prospects of serving under either his father, Lord Derby, or his friend, Disraeli. After surveying the lackluster alternatives for the leadership, he concluded, “The only other possible chief is Disraeli.” “I admire his persistence not less than his talent,” he wrote in his diary, but “how can I help seeing that glory and power, rather than the public good, have been his objects? He has at least the merit in this last respect, of being no hypocrite.”4
Disraeli did, however, enjoy the confidence of the party leader. His relationship with Lord Derby developed into a solid combination, even if it lacked personal warmth. They inaugurated discussion about seizing the initiative on parliamentary reform and began the delicate task of crafting proposals that would meet the demand for change to the electoral system and benefit the Conservatives at the same time. When Lord John Russell introduced a Reform Bill that was not to their taste, Disraeli mounted a highly effective resistance and contributed to its collapse. At the end of a session spent sniping at the government, he snickered to Mrs Brydges Willyams that “it beat fox-hunting.”5
Partly for tactical reasons, to outflank and embarrass Gladstone, Disraeli took a leading position on religious issues and cast himself as a champion of the Anglican Church. This was a risky manoeuvre given his origins and exposed his religiosity to a level of scrutiny it did not always bear. Stanley found his leader’s posture absurd, even repulsive: “How can I reconcile his open ridicule, in private, of all religions, with his preaching up of a new church—and state agitation?” Yet Disraeli believed religion was essential as a social cement. He was genuinely offended by the efforts of Protestant Nonconformists to dismantle the privileges of the Church of England and irritated by progressive-thinking Anglican clergy who, in his eyes, hollowed it out from within by adopting the critical thinking that was fashionable on the Continent. In order to thwart both he began to meet regularly with Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford and a rock of orthodoxy. Together they planned a number of meetings at which Disraeli addressed large gatherings of churchmen. In parliament he successfully defended the rates that supported the Church and in a series of speeches decried the “Higher Criticism” and Darwinian science.6
It might seem strange that Disraeli would rally to the cause of the Church only a few years after its bishops had so stoutly resisted the entry of professing Jews into parliament, a cause many Dissenters supported thanks to their own experience of exclusion. However, earlier than many in the Jewish community itself Disraeli perceived that their Nonconformist friends were a curse as much as a blessing. Throughout the 1860s the growing influence of nonconformity impinged on Jewish interests, notably in the demands for Sunday observance and temperance and the resistance to state-funded religious schools. By comparison, the Church of England appeared a bastion of moderation and tolerance.7
This was the context for Disraeli’s celebrated speech in Oxford extolling faith and decrying science. Disraeli lambasted the Higher Criticism that laid bare the human origins of sacred texts. Man, he contended, “is a being born to believe.” If churches did not exist, men would erect temples and worship idols. Furthermore, religion was a formative element of the national character on which the future of the country and the empire depended. Hence the danger posed by Darwinian theory, which undermined the biblical story of creation and so led to indifference and atheism. If he were asked to choose between the notions that humankind was descended from apes or from angels, he averred, “I am on the side of the angels.” He did not thereby mean to denigrate science as such, but he aligned himself unequivocally with the opponents of Darwinism.8
Throughout this period foreign affairs took centre stage. In his response to the Queen’s Speech in 1860 he set out the Conservative policy of noninterference in the business of other nations unless British interests were directly at stake. He criticised Lord Russell for yoking together “Protestantism and Free Trade” and deprecated the government’s penchant for boosting insurgents, no matter what regime they were kicking against. The activity of nationalists in Italy and Poland merely deepened his belief that secret societies were at work across the Continent subverting established authority. Running through his foreign policy utterances was a contempt for popular movements and democracy.9
By early 1861 Disraeli detected signs that the government was weakening while the Tories were gaining strength. But Palmerston, despite his age, had lost none of his vigour or cunning. Disraeli had to settle for prolonged opposition and contemplated giving up politics altogether. He was kept afloat partly by Queen Victoria’s affection. In June 1860 she invited him and Mary Anne to a ball at Buckingham Palace. Early the following year they were both guests at Windsor Castle, a rare treat for the wife of an ex-minister and the leader of the opposition. Indeed, Victoria and Albert went out of their way to confer with Disraeli. Albert’s death in 1861 thus came as a double blow. It deprived him of a potential ally at court and removed Victoria from public life. In the long run, though, the death of Prince Albert drew him closer to Victoria and laid the groundwork for a relationship that projected the crown more actively into politics than had been the case for three decades. Victoria was deeply affected by Disraeli’s eulogy to Albert in the House of Commons. He sustained her affection with regular letters and active support for a memorial to the prince. In April 1863 he was rewarded with a personal audience with Victoria, the first granted to him and one of few allowed to any politician since Albert’s demise.10
Disraeli was becoming respectable. Lord Palmerston invited him to become a trustee of the British Museum—a delectable honour in view of his father’s partiality for the reading room and the many hours he spent there. He was also increasingly popular. In June 1863, on the occasion of a visit to Oxford to deliver a speech, dozens of undergraduates lined his path crying out, “Three cheers for Dizzy.”11
While he basked in royal favour and public esteem, his finances also improved. A Yorkshire landowner and ex-Tory MP named Andrew Montagu, who wanted to assist the party, took over the entire amount owed by Disraeli, including the mortgage on Hughendon, at an annual interest of just 3 percent. This immediately lifted his income by £4,000. But the sums involved were so staggering that Disraeli needed a “second friend.” This was Lionel de Rothschild. How much Rothschild gave him is unclear, but it was no less than £20,000 in addition to the £35,000 provided by Montagu.12 Just when this deal was finalised Mrs Brydges Willyams died, leaving him £40,000, “in testimony of her affection and the approval and admiration of his efforts to vindicate the race of Israel.” As promised, he arranged for her interment in the church at Hughendon.13
The part played by Rothschild in his financial salvation was another marker of their mutually beneficial friendship. Disraeli almost certainly plied the banker with inside information from Westminster, and he, in turn, received foreign intelligence supplied by their agents abroad.14 He and Mary Anne were frequent guests of the Rothschilds at Mentmore and Gunnersbury Park, while members of the Rothschild families stayed at Hughendon. Disraeli became very fond of their children, growing especially close to Nathaniel, Alfred, and Constance. And yet there remained a gulf between them. The Rothschilds were comfortable with their Jewish origins, affiliations, and involvements in a way that was simply unavailable to Disraeli. He was insensitive or insensible to a range of Jewish issues that animated them.15
One of these was the case of Edgar Mortara. Only a few weeks after he was installed in the House of Commons, Lionel de Rothschild joined the international campaign to rescue this Jewish boy who had been spirited away from his family in Bologna to the Vatican to be raised as a Christian. In August 1858 Lionel wrote to the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, pleading for the abduction of Mortara to be investigated and for any injustices to be rectified. The following year Sir Moses Montefiore (Lionel’s uncle by marriage), travelled to Rome to intercede personally, but without success. Mortara’s case was taken up by the main Protestant organisations in England, which lobbied Lord Malmesbury, the Conservative foreign secretary, to lean on the Vatican to release the boy. Malmesbury was reluctant to put a Conservative government at the head of an antipapal campaign but did what he could to assist Jewish rescue efforts. Russell, his successor, had no inhibitions about banging the anti-Catholic drum and welcomed a petition to the Foreign Office from an alliance of militant Protestant organisations demanding the boy’s return. But Disraeli was silent on the matter, as he had been during the Damascus affair.16
Jews were also exercised by the Higher Criticism, but for reasons different from Disraeli’s. Scholars like Ernst Renan who read the Bible as historical record and myth rather than as a sacred text derived from it an essentialist, often negative picture of the Jews. Hence when Disraeli recommended to Charlotte that she read Renan’s Life of Jesus he received a scorching reply. While Disraeli was enthused by Renan’s depiction of Jesus as a Jew, Charlotte observed the writer’s prejudiced appraisal of Jewish life in antiquity. She excoriated Renan for painting Jews “in colours so dark and so repelling.” Whereas Disraeli commended the book, she hoped it would never find an audience in England.17
Indeed, Charlotte perceived something rather dark in Disraeli’s attempt to refashion his origins. When she pointed out to him that he might be related to other Jews, including a branch of the Rothschild family, he blanched. She told her son Leopold, “Never shall I forget Mr Disraeli’s look of blank astonishment when I ventured to suggest that through the Montefiores, Mocattas, and Lindos, Lady [Louisa] de Rothschild had the delightful honour of being his cousin; but heaven descended is what Mr Disraeli affects to be, though London is full of his relations, whose existence he completely ignores.”18
His racial obsession had not abated one bit, and it came to inform his response to foreign affairs. Rather confusingly, while he sometimes used the term race as a synonym for nation, he differentiated between nationalism and racial pride. The latter earned his warm approval, but he despised national fervour (unless it was expressed by Englishmen). In Disraeli’s mind, secret societies were behind every manifestation of political or nationalist disorder, waging an unceasing struggle against the established order. He conjured up a world in which shadowy forces at both ends of the political spectrum were locked in combat. During the Polish uprising in 1863 he wrote to Mrs Brydges Willyams, “At present, the peace of the world has been preserved not by statesmen, but by capitalists. For the last three months it has been a struggle between the secret-societies and the European millionaires. Rothschild, hitherto, has won.”19
In the general election of July 1865 Palmerston’s popularity helped the government to a handsome victory. Disraeli was returned unopposed for Buckinghamshire and had the joy of seeing Gladstone defeated in Oxford, but the Conservatives won only 290 seats overall. Once more there were rumblings of discontent with his leadership, and, again, he came near to despair. Then, just when it seemed Palmerston had a new lease on political power, he died.20
Lord Russell succeeded as prime minister and soon ran into trouble over his determination to carry through further parliamentary reform. Whig MPs accused him of breaching his promise never to introduce another measure to change the constitution, while Liberals expected a radical step that would enlarge the electorate. When Gladstone (who had reentered parliament as an MP for South Lancashire) brought forward a reform bill in March 1866, his party split. In the knowledge that he could draw on some support from discontented Whigs, Disraeli mounted a ferocious opposition to the bill and defeated the government several times. Finally, on 18 June 1866, the Conservatives, joined by forty-two dissidents from the opposite side, won a vote of no-confidence. The government fell.21
Disraeli urged Derby to seize the opportunity even though the Conservatives would be in a minority and dependant on disaffected Whigs to remain in office. Derby accepted the challenge. Operating in tandem, they selected a cabinet, and this time, unlike 1858, they had a pool of men with government experience to draw on as well as a crop of fresh, energetic young MPs.22
Only a few weeks after the Conservative government was in place, with Derby as prime minister and Disraeli as chancellor of the exchequer, the country was shaken by riots in London and the provinces. The disturbances, dubbed the Reform Riots, signalled the pent-up aspirations for further constitutional change. Disraeli recognised that the government would have to do something and found that Derby was hearing the same thing from the queen. Yet they did not want to appear as if they were reacting in panic and so delayed any moves on reform until the end of the year.23
During the winter Disraeli, Derby, and other members of the government thrashed out the main elements of a bill that would meet public demand for widening the franchise while protecting the interests of the propertied classes generally and the Conservative Party specifically. The serpentine progress of the Reform Bill that Disraeli ultimately brought to the House of Commons is not pertinent here. What emerged was incomparably more radical and far-reaching than he and his cabinet colleagues had originally envisaged. This was a consequence of tactical opportunism and desperate improvisation, not the embodiment of a long-held aspiration to create a mass-based Conservative Party, or “Tory democracy.” Still less was it inspired by “Mosaic ideals.” While the majority of his colleagues preferred limited reform, the Commons drove him in the other direction. Despite the cost of three cabinet resignations, Derby and Disraeli persuaded their party that it was worth going further than intended if the prize was remaining in office and shedding the reputation for reaction and exclusion.24
On 15 August 1867 the Reform Bill passed its final stage. It was Disraeli’s greatest parliamentary triumph and won him the adoration of the party. Any question of his leadership was now muted, and he escaped to Hughendon with Mary Anne to rest from his exertions. However, he had made new enemies and confirmed in the minds of those who disliked him their worst suspicions about his character. Viscount Cranborne (previously Lord Robert Cecil) declared that in “recklessness,” “venality,” and “cynicism” Disraeli exceeded any parliamentary villain before him. He was responsible for a policy of “surrender.” Sir John Skelton connected Disraeli’s origins with his willingness to transform politics, writing, “England is the Israel of the imagination.” In a more crude and traditional vein, the Tory poet Coventry Patmore declared in verse that 1867 was
The year of the great crime,
When the false English Nobles, and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong.
Such doggerel revealed the endurance of prejudice against Disraeli on the grounds of his origins and the tendency to interpret his actions on any matter of state according to his heritage rather than to contemporary political considerations.25
The passage of the Reform Act made a general election inevitable once the new electoral roll was drawn up. Derby, however, was old and increasingly incapacitated by illness. He concluded that it would be impossible for him to lead the party into a strenuous campaign and proposed that Disraeli should now succeed him as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister. He assured Queen Victoria that “only he could command the support, en masse, of his present colleagues.”26
Disraeli travelled to the queen’s residence at Osborne on the Isle of Wight on 27 February 1868 to kiss hands and take the seals of office. It was an extraordinary occasion for both of them, captured in a letter Victoria addressed to her new first minister in regal style using the third person: “It must be a proud moment to feel that his own talent and successful labours in the service of his Sovereign and country have earned for him the high and influential position in which he is now placed. The Queen has ever found Mr Disraeli most zealous in her service, and most ready to meet her wishes, and she only wishes her beloved husband were here now to assist him.” In other words, he had not inherited the land, riches, or title that commonly propelled Englishmen to the front rank of political life. He had to work for this success. And part of that work had been on the queen herself and the relationship he had established with her and Albert. Ability and personality had at long last taken Disraeli, the Jewish-born grandson of Italian immigrants, to the top of the “greasy pole.”27
Disraeli’s appointment as prime minister invited universal observation and comment. Much of it was stereotypical, revealing the extent of bigotry against Jews that persisted in English society, through all strata. But Disraeli could hardly have avoided being categorized or perceived as a Jew; after all, he had repeatedly drawn attention to his origins in his autobiographical statements, by pontificating on Jewish subjects in his novels, and, less voluntarily, through his interventions concerning Jewish civil disabilities. What was questionable about the commentary on him that adverted to his Jewish roots was the tendency to attribute his actions to his origins, to explain his conduct in terms of his “race.” Yet even here Disraeli was being repaid in his own coin. After all, it was he who had declared that all human activity, individual and collective, could be reduced to race.
The hostility, prejudice, and stereotyping that afflicted him did not correlate neatly with religion, class, or politics. Lord Derby, a devout Christian who had consistently opposed the entry of Jews into parliament, wrote to him, “You have fairly and most honourably won your way to the highest round of the political ladder.” But, reflecting the disdain that others felt, he assured him that he would “as far as I can, urge upon our friends to extend to you, separately, the same generous confidence which, for twenty years, they have reposed in us jointly.” Indeed, Derby’s support would be essential in the years to come. John Bright, the Radical MP, noted in his diary that Disraeli’s elevation was “a triumph of intellect and courage and patience and unscrupulousness employed in the service of a party full of prejudices and selfishness and wanting in brains. The Tories have hired Disraeli, and he has his reward from them.” There was “no great enthusiasm for Disraeli” amongst the Conservative rank and file in parliament. Indeed, there is evidence that Lord Derby shoehorned him into office in such a way as to forestall consultation. Even the Conservative-inclined Pall Mall Gazette expressed the sense that with Disraeli in 10 Downing Street the country had suffered a moral decline. How could he be premier and not Gladstone? “That the writer of frivolous stories about Vivian Grey and Coningsby should grasp the sceptre before the writer of beautiful and serious things about Ecce Homo—the man who is enigmatic, flashy, arrogant, before the man who never perpetrated an epigram in his life . . . is this not enough to make an honest man rend his mantle and shave his head?” The journal gave its club-land readers a grotesque description of Disraeli in action, “his eyes, speaking in an Oriental manner, stand out with fatness, he speaketh loftily, and pride compasseth him about as a chain.” A few weeks later Lord Clarendon wrote in his journal, “Confidence in Gladstone seems on the increase throughout the country, though it remains feeble and stationary in the House of Commons. On the other hand a demoralized nation admires the audacity, the tricks, and the success of the Jew.”28
On 26 March 1868 Disraeli and Mary Anne hosted a great celebration for everyone they knew and everyone who mattered. The party was held in the new Foreign Office building, courtesy of the secretary of state, Lord Stanley. Disraeli had little time to savour his triumph, though: the government was already under attack from Gladstone. In late April the Conservatives suffered a series of defeats, and Disraeli concluded grimly that he would have to ask the queen for a dissolution. In any case, given the passage of the Reform Act, he could not legitimately hang on longer than it took to register the new voters. On the last day of July parliament was prorogued, and the country braced itself for an election under the new dispensation, the effect of which was anybody’s guess.29
Disraeli had expected that the Conservative Party would be rewarded for the Reform Act, but instead it had vastly expanded the electorate of low-church, Protestant Nonconformists who were the backbone of the Liberal Party. The Liberals, led by Gladstone, had organised well to meet the challenge of a swollen electorate and fought an effective campaign. Disraeli completely misjudged the mood of the country and the new voters: the Liberals doubled their majority.30
Rather than wait to be defeated on the Queen’s Speech as was customary, Disraeli resolved to resign before the new parliament met. This was a welcome precedent and added to the dignity of constitutional procedure. But many people were scandalized by the title he obtained for Mary Anne in the resignation honours. At the age of seventy-six and now in poor health, she became the Viscountess Beaconsfield. It was a fine romantic gesture by a devoted husband and one that Victoria appreciated—even if many in the political class regarded it as an act of supreme vulgarity by someone whose nature was fundamentally foreign to the English spirit.31
There was little Disraeli could usefully do as leader of the opposition in the face of such a large government majority. He spent much of 1869 in seclusion at Hughendon writing a new novel. This was a secret project, and to many in the Conservative Party it looked as if he was simply idling. His inactivity, the scale of the election defeat, and the misjudgements it revealed rekindled doubts about his capabilities as leader. The tactics he adopted to pass the Reform Act had given new life to charges that he was a great betrayer of men and causes. Robert Cecil, now Lord Salisbury, articulated these sentiments in the Quarterly Review. He assailed the “dishonest man” who operated like a “mere political gangster” to win office. Without actually naming Disraeli he accused him of “baseness” and “perpetual political mendacity.”32
Disraeli did not help things with his new book, Lothair, published in May 1870. To Tory grandees, writing fiction appeared a supreme act of frivolity when the party cried out for reconstruction and revivification. In February 1872 several party magnates and managers gathered at Burghley House, the Cecils’ ancestral home in Lincolnshire, to broach the question of finding a new leader. When Disraeli heard about the meeting he threatened to retire. Fortuitously, at just this moment there were signs of his burgeoning popularity amongst the public, while in parliament he raised his game and began to benefit from a growing fatigue with Gladstone’s hyperactive ministry.33
Lothair may have dismayed politicians, but it delighted the public and enhanced Disraeli’s reputation at large. The advance was one of the biggest ever paid for a novel, but Longman’s gamble paid off handsomely. It ran through five printings in almost as many weeks and sold eighty thousand copies in the United States alone. In many respects it is a standard Disraelian effort. The central character is a handsome, clever but impressionable and rather vacuous young man longing to find a meaning in life. He encounters a series of male figures and attractive women who each represent a different outlook on life and set of values. However, Disraeli was now less interested in personal psychology or even politics than in the bigger questions about religion and the meaning of human existence. To this extent Lothair is a novel of ideas.34
Lothair falls under the influence of his Roman Catholic guardian and his pious circle, who articulate Disraeli’s belief in the importance of religion as moral guidance and a source of social stability. But he also encounters two professional revolutionaries involved in the struggle to end papal influence in Italy. On a visit to Oxford he meets a professor who nurses ambitions to reform the university by getting “rid of the religion.” This don was transparently modelled on the liberal historian Goldwin Smith. The author describes him as lacking any originality, though possessed of a “restless vanity and overflowing conceit”; “like sedentary men of extreme opinions, he was a social parasite.” Smith would later exact his revenge for this portrayal.35
Lothair also encounters an artist, Phoebus, who expounds the virtues of the Aryan race. Phoebus is one of Disraeli’s most extraordinary creations: a Nazi before his time. He deploys an entire theory of society and aesthetics based on supposed Aryan principles, culminating in the advocacy of eugenics. The artist explains to Lothair that Aryan principles entail “the art of design in a country inhabited by a first rate race, and where the law, the manners, the customs, are calculated to maintain the health and beauty of a first rate race.” The Aryans, he claims, had ruled the world for centuries until the advent of the Semites. “Semitism,” he laments, “began to prevail and ultimately triumphed. Semitism has destroyed art; it has taught man to despise his own body, and the essence of art is to know the human frame.” He goes on to expound an agenda for government on Aryan principles: “It is the first duty of the state to attend to the frame and health of the subject.” Accordingly, he approves of the Spartans, who ordered the killing of feeble babies. His frightening peroration uncannily anticipates the rhetoric of National Socialism: “The fate of the nation will ultimately depend upon the strength and health of the population. . . . Laws should be passed to secure all this, and some day they will be. But nothing can be done until the Aryan races are extricated from Semitism.”36
Lothair’s reaction to Phoebus indicates to the reader that Disraeli does not approve of Aryanism. But this does not mean he had abandoned his belief in the importance of race in human history. On the contrary, Lothair accepts the notion that Aryans and Semites exist as distinct racial entities; he challenges only the idea that they are in conflict. Repeating his trick of blurring Jews and Christians, Disraeli attempts to meld the two. Later in the novel a Syrian holy man called Paraclete tells him, “God works by races, and one was appointed in due season and after many developments to reveal and expound in this land the spiritual nature of man. The Aryans and the Semites are of the same blood and origin, but when they quitted their central land they were ordained to follow opposite courses. Each division of the great race has developed one portion of the double nature of humanity. Hellenes and the Hebrews brought together the treasures of their accumulated wisdom and secured the civilisation of man.”37
In this sense Lothair is Disraeli’s reply to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Arnold was greatly inspired by Disraeli’s racial thinking and his claim that Hebrew ideals underlay both Christianity at large and, specifically, English society. In Culture and Anarchy, written in response to the Reform Riots and debates about the Reform Bill, Arnold argued that modern society was torn between the values of a primitive, stern Hebraism and the “sweetness and light” exemplified by Hellenic ideals. According to Arnold, “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference.” While the Philistine values of Hebraism might be right for constitutional reform, only culture inspired by Hellenism could provide the values essential to bind a mass society ruled by the ballot box. This dichotomy posed a challenge to Disraeli that he could not ignore, any more than he felt he could sidestep Darwinism or nationalism. His retort was to blur them and to drive Hellenism alone, in its Aryan guise, to a ridiculous extreme, transforming sweetness and light into an ascetic dystopia.38
Lothair travels to Italy, where he joins nationalist insurgents seeking to liberate Rome and unite their country. He is wounded and nursed back to health by émigré English Catholics in the Eternal City. In fact they are plotting his conversion to Catholicism, and Lothair realizes he is in effect a prisoner of the Vatican. These sequences set in Rome may be a deliberate or subliminal reference to the fate of Edgar Mortara, echoing the way that, in Tancred, Disraeli referred retrospectively to the Damascus affair. It certainly marked the end of his flirtation with Roman Catholicism. Lothair escapes to Malta, where he chances upon Phoebus in proud possession of a steam-yacht, clearly based on memories of Clay’s boat, The Susan, on which they sailed to Palestine in 1831. Disraeli’s characters now follow that route again. Phoebus has a commission from the Imperial Russian court to paint landscapes of Jerusalem for their edification and takes Lothair with him to Jaffa and then inland to the Holy City. Once more Disraeli drew on the memories of his brief stay in Jerusalem to depict the city for a new generation of readers. He had definitely done additional research this time because he describes the Russian Compound—a complex northeast of the walled Old City containing a church and a hostel for Russian pilgrims—which was not constructed until the early 1860s. The novel ends with his return and marriage to a solidly Anglican aristocrat, marking the genteel triumph of the English middle way.
Lothair contains some of Disraeli’s strangest ideas about race, but also some of his most lucid commentary on religion and science. It makes a passionate case for what would later be dubbed intelligent design and warns that without religion there can be no moral order: “Ethics with atheism are impossible; and without ethics, no human order can be strong or permanent.” It also contains one of his most peculiar characters: Mr Pinto. He is “a little oily Portuguese, middle aged, corpulent and somewhat bald, with dark eyes of sympathy not unmixed with humour. No one knew who he was, and in a country the most scrutinising as to personal details, no one enquired or cared to know.” There is more than a hint of the young Disraeli in the description of this foreigner, who was much desired as a party guest, who had “the art of viewing common things in a fanciful light, and the rare gift of raillery which flattered the self-love of those it seemed sportively not to spare.” He was unctuous, a good mimic, with “a sweet voice, a soft hand, and a disposition both soft and sweet.”39
The young Disraeli only dreamed of enjoying such success with a novel. Although the critics were uncomplimentary, the public lapped it up and the royalties flowed in. Book sales, though, could not purchase the respect of his peers. Many of them looked dimly on an ex–prime minister writing stories. He engendered further irritation with the general preface to the collected edition of his novels that was astutely published by Longman in conjunction with Lothair. Here he gave an autobiographical sketch (largely fictional) and a contentious account of his development as both a writer and a politician.40
He maintained that in the Young England trilogy he set out his critique of the Whig usurpation. He accused the Liberals of denigrating the great national institutions that united the people, corroding the nexus between property and duty that should have animated the territorial aristocracy, and stripping away the divinity that ought to enfold government. The moral and physical decline of the population precipitated by Liberalism could be reversed only by a “generous aristocracy,” with the Church acting as the “trainer of the nation.” It was the Conservatives’ task to “emancipate the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies,” improve the condition of the people, regulate the relations between capital and labour, and replace the rule of “abstract ideas” with the use of “ancient forms.” These, he asserted, had been his goals since the 1830s when he was a lone voice, without connections to press or party. He claimed with more plausibility that it was only with Young England in the 1840s that he found a constituency who understood his original thinking and appreciated the value he placed on the imagination in politics—as against the utilitarian spirit of the times. His concern with the role of the Church in turn led him to “consider the portion of those who had been the founders of Christianity. Some of the great truths of ethnology were necessarily involved in such discussions.” This accounted for his discourse on the Jews and “the universal influence of race on human action” that was now “being universally recognized as the key of history.” The elevation of race was not simply the device of a provocative novelist; it was bound into the political credo of the parliamentary vanguard he led: “In asserting the doctrine of race, they were entirely opposed to the equality of man, and similar abstract dogmas, which have destroyed ancient society without creating a satisfactory alternative.” He rounded off with an onslaught on the Higher Criticism (which he attributed to “the Teutonic rebellion of this century against the divine truths entrusted to the Semites”) and the “recent discoveries of science,” which detracted from belief in the “divinity of Semitic literature” and drove a wedge between the creator and humankind, his creation.41
Lest anyone might be tempted to dismiss his thoughts on race as a fad confined to the realm of belles lettres, Disraeli reiterated his racial nostrums in a speech when he was installed as rector of Glasgow University in November 1873. He told the assembled dons and students that if a people lost touch with its ancient values or with religion, materialism would be its downfall. He couched this process in apocalyptic, racial terms: “A people who recognize no higher aim than physical enjoyment must become selfish and enervated. Under such circumstances, the supremacy of race, which is the key of history, will assert itself. Some human progeny, distinguished by their bodily vigour or their masculine intelligence, or by both qualities, will assert their superiority and conquer a world which deserves to be enslaved.”42
Sadly, bodily vigour was no longer a personal attribute to which he could lay claim. Since the late 1860s both he and Mary Anne had suffered bouts of serious ill-health. In November 1867 she was so gravely ill that Disraeli thought she would die and absented himself from the cabinet for several days. She recovered but remained weak. In July 1872 she developed cancer. She died on 15 December, leaving Disraeli stricken and alone. Throughout the final stages of the illness the Rothschilds were solicitous and kind to a fault. After she was gone, Victoria sent him a moving note of condolence. The effect of his wife’s death was not only physical and emotional; it also reduced his income and deprived him of 1 Grosvenor Gate. Once more Andrew Montagu stepped into the financial breach and boosted Disraeli’s revenue by lowering to a mere 2 percent the interest on the debt owed to him. In the meantime Disraeli had recourse to Edward’s Hotel in Hanover Square until he could find a permanent home for when he was in town.43
Disraeli could not bear solitude. He relied on his attentive young secretary, Montagu Corry, for company much of the time, but Corry had a life of his own. The Rothschilds rallied round, and soon he was dining with them almost every Sunday while parliament was in session. He had grown even closer to Lionel during his period in Downing Street, but this did not mean that members of the family suspended their doubts about Dizzy. In March 1868 Lionel wrote to his wife, “I fancy he has no fixed ideas, and like the Reform Bill, will be guided by circumstances.” A few days later he told her, “There is no knowing what Dis will do to keep on the top of the tree.” Still, they all liked him. After Mary Anne died he was touched to be included in their inner circle, “whom I look upon as family,” he proudly told Corry.44
Hungry for company, emotional support, and appreciation, he turned to Lady Selina Bradford and Lady Anne Chesterfield, the daughters of Lord Forster, whom he had known socially since the mid-1830s. Anne was fifty-five years old in 1873 and married; Selina was a widow of seventy. They both began to receive a torrent of letters from Disraeli, written no matter how busy he was and often couched in excruciatingly romantic terms. Yet both sisters humoured him, and their correspondence is a goldmine of insider gossip, political intelligence, and insights into foreign affairs.45
During 1870–72 the pendulum began to swing back to the Conservatives, and Disraeli seemed to waken from his torpor. In February 1872 crowds cheered his coach outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and a few weeks later during a visit to Manchester he was greeted by hundreds of members of Conservative associations, including large numbers of workingmen. He gave a three-and-a-half-hour speech at the Free Trade Hall condemning Gladstone’s government and setting up the Conservatives as the party that would bring social improvement to the people. Popular approbation seemed to infuse him with energy that he in turn transmitted to the party faithful. At the Crystal Palace in June he delivered an inspirational oration to the National Union of Conservative Associations in which he set out his vision for the party and the country. The Conservatives, he declaimed, were the guardians of the national institutions that preserved the spirit and wisdom of the ages. The people recognised this because they were instinctively conservative; they loved the empire and understood intuitively that it was held together by time-honoured structures. Central to his vision was a belief that only the Conservatives could tackle social problems, improving the homes of the people, their sanitation, and food. Unlike the Liberals, who were dominated by the manufacturing interest and the pursuit of profit, the Conservatives could tackle the relations between capital and labour disinterestedly—for the benefit of nation and empire.46
After five years of almost incessant legislation, the Liberals were running out of steam. In January 1874 Gladstone, himself now flagging, decided he had to seek a fresh mandate from the electorate. The queen granted his request for a dissolution, and Disraeli hurriedly composed a manifesto for the Conservative Party. While it was hastily written, it caught the mood of the country well. Disraeli asserted that the time had come for a change, “a little more energy in our foreign policy and a little less in our domestic legislation.” He painted the Liberal Party as prisoner of ferocious radicals who sought to wreck the great national institutions, the Church and even the empire. The general election resulted in dramatic gains for the Conservatives, who ended the day with 350 MPs as against 245 Liberals and 57 Irish MPs. On 17 February he was invited to the queen to kiss hands.47
Disraeli was now able to form a truly strong Conservative government. He could call on men with talent and experience, including old and trusted friends as well as others who owed their promotion to him. He possessed a resounding popular mandate, could rely on a loyal and united party, and had the backing of Queen Victoria—who did not hide her pleasure that Disraeli had replaced Gladstone. (In letters he now referred to Victoria as “the Faery” in imitation of Edmund Spenser’s poem “The Faery Queen”.) The Rothschilds, despite being Liberals, were also delighted. To mark the state opening of parliament on 19 March 1874 they sent him strawberries and Alsatian paté.48
During the 1874–75 session Disraeli moved slowly. He was plagued by ill health and depression, and, in any case, the country had voted as much for peace and quiet as for the Conservatives. His promise of social improvement began to take concrete form in the following session, when a raft of measures were successfully steered through parliament. These included the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, the Friendly Societies Act, the Employers and Working Men’s Act, the Agricultural Holdings Act, the Public Health Act, the Factory Act Amendment, the Rivers Pollution Act, and the Merchant Shipping Act.49
Disraeli depicted these new laws as the fulfilment of his long-standing aspiration to improve the conditions of ordinary working people, and he certainly took pride in them. But they were hardly his initiative, and he had precious little to do with either the drafting or argumentation in the House. He showed little interest in the detail and was often observed nodding off during cabinet discussion. One thing, though, that did always hold his focus was the main political chance. Rather than vague and spurious “Mosaic ideals,” cold-blooded political calculation lay behind the Conservative social reforms. He wrote to Lady Bradford that “the Artisans’ Dwellings Bill is the second measure of social improvement that, I think, we now shall certainly pass. It is important because they indicate a policy round which the country can rally.” In other words, the legislation was as much about creating a progovernment consensus. He told her that the Employers’ and Working Men’s Act was “one of those measures that root and consolidate a party. We have settled the long and vexatious contest between Capital and Labour.” Whether or not social strife had been solved would remain to be seen, but Disraeli certainly believed that a perception of the Conservatives as the party that befriended the workers would stand them in good electoral stead. He boasted to Lady Anne: “This is the greatest measure since the Short Time Act and will gain and retain for the Tories the lasting affection of the working-classes.”50
Something else that kindled his interest was the fate of the Suez Canal. In the late 1850s, when Ferdinand de Lesseps embarked on the visionary construction project, Disraeli had inveighed against any British involvement. But since the canal’s opening the volume of British shipping passing through it had grown enormously, and he grasped that it had become a vital artery for trade and communication with British India. Moreover, since the expansion of the tsarist empire into central Asia brought Russian troops within striking distance of the Raj, the canal assumed a heightened significance for reasons of imperial defence. None of this had anything to do with the fact that as a young man Disraeli had travelled around the Levant or was “a Prime Minister of oriental extraction and imagination.” Since the late 1860s the military had been surveying Palestine in connection with the defence of the canal. Its importance was dawning on anyone with an atlas and an interest in foreign affairs.51
The immediate future of the canal became an issue because of de Lesseps’s inept management of the company that ran it. In order to cover the maintenance and running costs, in 1874 he proposed to ramp up the duties on shipping and threatened to halt traffic if users did not pay. Unsurprisingly, the government of Egypt, the Khedive (which was formally under Ottoman Turkish sovereignty), was alarmed at the danger to its portion of the income and threatened to terminate his role. The British government was concerned, too. Disraeli wrote to Derby, the foreign secretary, stating that any obstruction was intolerable and suggesting that he take advantage of de Lesseps’s financial predicament to enable Britain to buy into the canal. They subsequently used Nathaniel de Rothschild as a back channel to de Lesseps, offering to purchase his shares. But de Lesseps refused to sell.52
The situation was transformed in September 1875, when the fiscal tribulations of the Ottoman government in Constantinople pitched the Khedive into bankruptcy. Derby heard from a journalist, who had picked up the information from a banker, that the desperate Khedive was ready to sell his holding of 177,000 out of the 400,000 shares in the canal company. On 17 November the cabinet agreed that efforts should be made to buy him out. The British government had already been asked by the Egyptians to help manage their debt and reform their finances, so such an intervention was not at all extraordinary. Over the next few days the cabinet monitored the negotiations and approved in principle the purchase of the shares for £4 million. It now had to arrange payment, and it was here that ministers faced a ticklish situation: Parliament was in recess, but there was no time to recall MPs to approve a money bill. Sir Stafford Northcote, the chancellor of the exchequer, was not sure that the Bank of England had a legal right to engage in such activity and felt that its board would need to be consulted. Disraeli feared any delay or any publicity, so he advocated making the purchase with a loan from the Rothschild bank in London. Derby and Northcote were doubtful about the legality of such a manouevre and worried that it was taking a huge financial gamble. Disraeli insisted it was worth the risk. At this juncture it may be that his nerve-wracking experiences with moneylenders had some positive value: he could keep a steady hand, especially when other peoples’ money was at stake, and had no compunction about taking a punt. On 24 November Montagu Corry had a secret meeting with Lionel de Rothschild and agreed the terms. That day Disraeli wrote to Victoria the now-famous note, “It is settled; you have it madam.” Next day, British and Egyptian representatives signed a contract for the purchase and the share certificates were handed over.53
Disraeli had carried off a remarkable coup. After he visited Windsor to regale the queen with what had transpired, he reported to Lady Bradford, “The Faery was most excited.” Unfortunately, Gladstone was not amused. He regarded the cabinet’s action as high-handed and chancy. What if Egypt and the canal went bankrupt? There was also criticism of what looked like a sweetheart deal between a Jewish premier and the premier Jewish bank: the Rothschilds earned between £100,000 and £200,000 in commission and interest on the transaction. However, as Niall Ferguson has shown, the London Rothschilds had taken a serious risk. They could not act in concert with other branches of the family lest their French cousins, who always demonstrated a primary loyalty to the French government, betrayed the secret. So they had to mobilise the funds at short notice by themselves, tying up almost all the capital available to the London branch. On the other hand, without the intervention of the Foreign Office in the first place they might not have carried the day. It was not simply a commercial exercise in a free market. All the same, what they finally earned on the deal was quite normal and showed no sign of profiteering. This did nothing to prevent the emergence and proliferation of a myth that the coup was facilitated by a covert Jewish network, and it is not hard to see why. Disraeli had written the script for those who wanted to see the purchase as a demonstration of Jewish power and Jewish conspiracy.54
In fact, Disraeli had become more intimate with the Rothschilds as they aged together. He had frequent recourse to Lionel’s house at 148 Piccadilly, for, he confided to Lady Chesterfield, “I cannot endure my solitary dinners and evenings.” Lionel continued to ply him with political intelligence (as well as gifts of pies), while the family’s growing disenchantment with Gladstone and the Liberals meant that he was remarkably free with information about the internal affairs of the opposition. There was still a touch of envy in these encounters. After a dinner with Ferdinand de Rothschild at Mentmore Disraeli could not help remarking to Lady Anne that he was struck with admiration for the new marble staircase his host had installed at a cost of £20,000.55
The Rothschilds may have finessed the purchase of the shareholding in the Suez Canal, but Disraeli saw the opportunity through the prism of imperial trade and defence. A stake in the canal would help to protect British interests in India and draw distant parts of the empire closer together. This was one motive for his desire to make Queen Victoria the empress of India. Explicitly establishing the British monarch as the sovereign over India would signal to the Indians that they were firmly within the British orbit and subject to the benign attention of the throne. It would also signal to the Russians that any encroachment on the borderlands of British India would constitute a trespass on the metropolitan homeland. So it was not the mere fancy of an “oriental” besotted with display, ostentation, and theatre that prompted Disraeli to push through the Royal Titles Bill against considerable resistance. As always with Disraeli, the act had a calculated domestic function, too. As he expounded to Victoria in February 1876, “It is only by the amplification of titles that you can often touch and satisfy the imagination of nations; and that is an element which governments must not despise.” He wanted to foster in the population, especially the working classes, an awareness of empire and pride in being part of an imperial nation, a self-image that was more easily reflected by the Conservatives than by the Liberals. It was hardly unexpected, then, that Gladstone should fling himself against the bill, accusing Disraeli of tampering with the royal prerogative. His fulminations caused the prime minister to expostulate in return that Gladstone “is quite mad.”56
Disraeli’s health was now so poor that the queen insisted he leave the hurly-burly of the House of Commons to his younger colleagues. On 12 August 1876 Buckingham Palace announced that he was created Earl of Beaconsfield. From then on he led the government from the House of Lords.57
The ruckus over the Royal Titles Bill was a storm in a teacup compared to the tempest that was about to blow in from the East. In mid-August 1875 Disraeli received intelligence from the Balkans, where the Christian population of the semiautonomous frontier provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina had risen up against Ottoman Turkish rule. He feared that the debilitated Turkish Empire might struggle to put down the insurrection, though he advised the foreign secretary, Derby, to let the Turks deal with the matter.58
Disraeli and Derby automatically implemented the traditional British policy of maintaining the internal stability and integrity of the Ottoman Empire as a check against Russian expansion. Unfortunately, the defeat of France by Germany in 1870 had upset the balance of power in Europe that had enabled Britain to accomplish this by the usual diplomatic means. Instead, Disraeli feared that the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarians, and Imperial Germany, which in 1872 had signed a defensive alliance creating the Three Emperors League, were planning to act without any reference to Britain, compelling the Turks to grant full autonomy to the rebellious provinces.59
Subsequently the Eastern crisis went through several distinct phases, each of which strained Disraeli’s relations with his colleagues and transformed how he was perceived in cabinet, in parliament, and by the public. From November 1875 until 1876 his main concern was to prevent Britain being sidelined and to assert British prestige, in the tradition of Palmerston. Insisting on the integrity of the Ottoman Empire at the same time as demanding proper treatment for its Christian population and internal reforms was as much a vehicle for this end as an end in itself. Disraeli and Derby were in accord on this. The cabinet rejected the Berlin Memorandum, jointly formulated by Bismarck, the German chancellor, Gyula Andrássy, the prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Alexander Gorchakoff, the Russian chancellor, which proposed to chop up Turkish territory in Europe. To show that Britain was no longer prepared to be ignored, the government ordered a Royal Navy squadron to Besika Bay, an anchorage just south of the Dardanelles. Disraeli wanted the other powers in the region to know that Britain was prepared to back up its interests with force. He also believed that an early demonstration of power would avert the sort of muddle that led to the Crimean War.60
At the end of June, Serbia and Montenegro, virtually Russian client states, declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Disraeli anticipated that the Turkish army would win a decisive victory, as a result of which it would be possible to engineer a “tolerable settlement” for the Christians while at the same time restoring the empire’s borders. However, unrest had spread to Turkey’s Christian subjects in Eastern Rumelia (part of present-day Bulgaria), who also launched an uprising against Muslim rule. The overstretched regime in Constantinople responded by sending in irregular troops and militias. The result was a number of massacres, in Batak and Philippopolis in particular, and a wave of atrocities against the Christian population. Sir Henry Elliot, the British ambassador in Constantinople, failed to register the importance of these terrible events or to adequately inform the Foreign Office. The first the government knew about the horrific repression was on 23 June 1876, when the liberal Daily News published graphic accounts of the suffering inflicted upon Bulgarian Christians by Bashi-Bazouk and Circassian irregulars.61
Disraeli was habitually inclined to dismiss newspaper stories about atrocities in foreign lands. When he made a statement about the massacres in the House of Commons on 10 July, he came across as supercilious, declaring that “wars of insurrection are always atrocious.” He continued, “I cannot doubt that atrocities have been committed in Bulgaria” but to his knowledge the Turks rarely tortured people to death and preferred to despatch them in more summary style. It was, he advised sonorously, unhelpful to exaggerate. His intention in adopting this tone is clarified by a letter he sent to Lady Bradford a few days later (by which time he had been hammered in the liberal press): “The Faery telegraphs this morning about the continued ‘horrors’ reported in the Daily News of today. They appear in that journal alone, which is the real Opposition journal and I believe are, to a great degree, inventions. But their object is to create a cry against the Government.” During a further debate, on 31 July, he professed in the same dangerously flippant tones that he had “never adopted that coffee-house babble brought by a Bulgarian to a Vice-Consul as authentic information which we ought to receive.”62
Too late he realised his error. A storm of obloquy descended on the government. A gamut of High Church and Evangelical organisations called protest meetings while letters flowed into the press, especially the Church newspapers, averring sympathy for the violated, tortured, martyred Christians. Downing Street was accused of abandoning the Bulgarians to the murderous Turks. Disraeli was attacked personally for his apparent indifference to the suffering Christians, and in many quarters his policy of noninterference was attributed to his Jewish sympathies. It was alleged that he acted as he did because he was an Oriental or even a crypto-Jew. For example, following Disraeli’s admittedly lamentable parliamentary performance on 10 July, the Daily News commented, “The levity, to use no stronger word, of [Disraeli’s] language and demeanour when speaking of the atrocities which he could not deny, has shocked the public sentiment in England by a certainly unfounded, but nevertheless unfortunate suggestion of an almost Oriental indifference to cruelty.”63
However, Disraeli was not alone in treating the horror stories with a dose of salt. Derby did not remark upon the agitation in the press and public meetings until well into July 1876, when he remarked, “The English newspapers are beginning to take sides.” He then observed that the section of the press condemning “Muselman atrocities” was largely Liberal-oriented. There was genuine outrage at the ill-treatment of Christians, but much of “the Bulgarian business” could be put down to Liberal Party opportunism. The cabinet shared his general perception of events, and none thought that Jews or Jewish interests had anything to do with the crisis. Moreover, they were agreed on the need to compel the Turks to make concessions to subject nationalities and were willing to carve off chunks of Ottoman territory as long as these excisions did not prejudice British interests.64
Gladstone now sensed that he had found the perfect stick with which to beat Disraeli. At first he too had not reacted with especial interest to the news from the Balkans. But when he noticed how agitated public opinion was becoming, especially in voter groups that were important to the Liberals, he was dynamized. On 6 September 1876 he published a pamphlet entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East that drew on some of the most gruesome reportage to demonstrate how heinous the policy of the government had become. The Turks had committed the “fell Satanic orgies”—but Lord Beaconsfield also bore responsibility for the abominations. Within a few weeks the pamphlet had sold two hundred thousand copies. Gladstone ensured that it was distributed to every MP, including the prime minister.65
With a mixture of anger and incredulity, as he recounted to Lady Bradford, Disraeli read the copy “which he had the impudence to send to me.” A few days afterwards Gladstone addressed a mass rally of ten thousand at Blackheath. Disraeli was outraged that in so doing the leader of the opposition was giving comfort to all those forces antipathetic to the Turks, sabotaging the government’s diplomatic offensive to restore stability in the region and protect the status quo. Nevertheless, he instructed his cabinet colleagues to sit tight until the agitation had blown itself out. For the next two months the British followed a two-track policy of preventing outside interference while encouraging the Turks to settle the dispute on reasonable terms. The Foreign Office proposed peace talks and welcomed the armistice between Serbia and the Turks that was engineered by the new sultan, Abdul Hamid II.66
The government’s position was further eased when, in late September 1876, the Russian government proposed that its forces should occupy Bulgaria. Having revealed its hand, Russia turned a Balkan squabble into a global crisis and raised the spectre of a head-on clash between Britain and the Russian Empire. The crisis now entered a second phase. Russia’s announcement unlocked the latent Russophobia in parts of British society, which rapidly began to mount as a counterbalance to the anti-Turkish agitation. On the other hand, the fear of war was equally potent. The activists who had accused Disraeli of disowning the downtrodden Christians now added warmongering to their charges against him. A Christian crusade melded into an antiwar movement.
Disraeli told the cabinet in forceful terms that Britain should now warn Russia that its forces would occupy Constantinople to preempt them from doing so. This was too bellicose for most of his colleagues. Derby in particular warned against sabre rattling. It was an ominous divergence. For the moment, though, the government was united in rejecting Russian aggrandisement and working for peace talks. After a few tense days the two-track policy appeared to succeed. Then the ceasefire broke down, and the Turkish army resumed its progress towards the Serb capital. To Disraeli’s relief, at the end of October 1876, with their armies largely successful, the Turks accepted a renewed ceasefire and a Russian proposal for peace talks in Constantinople.67
For several days it had looked to Disraeli like a toss-up between war and peace. He was livid with Gladstone’s antics, complaining to Lady Chesterfield that the government’s “difficulties [were] immensely aggravated by the treasonable conduct of that wicked maniac Gladstone.” He considered him to be utterly deluded, unable to see that the Russians didn’t really care about the Christian population of the Balkans and just wanted to get their hands on Constantinople and the straits. The entire trouble could be traced to “a conspiracy of Russia.”68
Gladstone, meanwhile, detected another sort of conspiracy: an alliance of feeling and interest between Disraeli and the Jewish world. Ever since the first news of the unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina reached Britain the Anglo-Jewish community had sided with the Ottoman Empire. Its reasons were straightforward: wherever independent states or autonomous provinces with a predominantly Christian population had emerged from the Ottoman Empire, their Jewish inhabitants had been subject to exclusion, discrimination, and violence. This pattern of anti-Jewish activity was monitored by the Jewish communities in the United States, and in western and central Europe, who now had the confidence and the means to lobby on behalf of their coreligionists. In May 1867 Lord Stanley, then foreign secretary, had received a Jewish deputation protesting against anti-Jewish riots in Jassy, Romania. Lionel de Rothschild personally addressed him on the matter. In early 1868 Sir Moses Montefiore made representations to Derby on behalf of persecuted Serbian Jews. Concern about the treatment of Jews in the East was one of the things that distinguished the first intake of Jewish MPs from their gentile peers. Francis Goldsmid, for example, raised the matter in parliament in 1867 and again in 1872. So did Serjeant Simon MP. Both of them were Liberals.69
In December 1868 the Jewish Chronicle, an independent publication and an accurate representation of mainstream Anglo-Jewish opinion, stated, “As matters now stand, the Turks are the real protectors of the Jews in the East.” So, when the Christians rebelled again in 1875, Abraham Benisch, the editor, courageously, if somewhat clumsily, steered the paper into the howling gale of anti-Turkish agitation. In July 1876 he opined, “The horrors committed upon the Bulgars are merely incidental to the mode of warfare in those regions.” English people should understand that massacre and slavery were common in that part of the world. “We are not apologizing for Mohametan atrocities,” he assured readers, “We wish only for matters to be placed in the proper light.” A month later he was compelled to admit, “It is not pleasant to go against the stream. But we have a duty to perform to the thousands of brethren-in-faith scattered all over the dominions of the Crescent.” It was not much of a stretch for Gladstone to deduce from these expressions of solidarity between Jews in England and their coreligionists in the East that Disraeli was in some degree motivated by his Jewish connections. After all, in his various publications over the years he had proclaimed them loud and clear.70
Indeed, in September 1876 Gladstone wrote to Arthur Gordon about Disraeli that “I have watched very closely his strange and at first sight inexplicable proceedings on this Eastern Question and I believe their fountainhead to be race antipathy, that aversion which the Jews, with a few honourable exceptions, are showing so vindictively towards the Eastern Christians. Though he has been baptised, his Jew feelings are the most radical and the most real, and so far respectable, portion of his profoundly falsified nature.” The secret behind Disraeli’s policy was his “Judaic feeling.” In early 1877 he told Lord Granville, “I have a strong suspicion that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with his policy. The Jews of the east bitterly hate the Christians; who have not always used them well.” Nor did he feel compelled to keep these opinions to himself.71
When a Jewish Conservative supporter, Leopold Gluckstein, sent Gladstone the draft of a pamphlet called The Eastern Question and the Jews, a defence of the Jewish position, he replied in forthright terms and made no objection to his letter being published in the Jewish Chronicle: “I have always had occasion to admire the conduct of the English Jews in the discharge of their civic duties; but I deeply deplore the manner in which, what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism, are now acting on the question of the East, while I am aware that as regards the Jews themselves, there may be much to account for it.” Gladstone hoped that the Jews would be granted civic equality throughout the Balkans, but he anticipated that this would flow from English efforts to see justice done. He pointedly omitted any reference to the government.72
Gladstone’s suspicions were echoed in more vulgar and violent terms by sections of press (mainly Liberal-aligned). The notion that an Oriental premier was somehow at odds with authentic Englishmen became a common currency of political debate. The Spectator remarked upon this trend (to which it contributed): “There is a tone of suspicion and even of active dislike in all comments on Mr Disraeli which is novel, and which exercises an ever increasing effect on his position. The old tolerance has become slightly contemptuous, the old distrust has deepened to hostility, the old smile at his vagaries has broadened into a sneer. The country papers, always first to indicate a change, have begun to doubt if Englishmen ought not to be ashamed of such rulers.” Punch frequently carried vicious caricatures of Disraeli, depicting him expressing indifference towards the plight of Balkan Christians and as an alien twisting innocent Britons to his own ends. In Punch and elsewhere cartoonists endowed him with exaggerated Jewish features or drew on long-established Jewish tropes such as the old clothes man and Shylock. He was often characterised as a magician or a mystery man who had seduced the monarch and bewitched the nation. Disraeli made no explicit response to these insinuations. It would have been awkward to rebut them. As the historian Edgar Feuchtwanger observed, “What Disraeli had written in the past about Judaism, Christianity, Muslims and the Orient came back to haunt him.”73
The third phase was more of a pause, while the Constantinople Conference sought a peaceful resolution to the conflict. However, in his speech at Guildhall in November 1876 Disraeli once again asserted that British interests would not permit Russian expansion in the Balkans. The “independence and integrity” of the Ottoman Empire was a British strategic desideratum. Having clearly implied that Britain would employ military means if necessary, the cabinet sent Lord Salisbury, the secretary for India, to the peace talks. At the same time, Disraeli commissioned the secretary for war and the first lord of the admiralty to report on the possibilities of advancing naval forces through the Dardanelles to thwart the Russians. Derby felt extremely uneasy about Disraeli’s penchant for waving a big stick. He now detected a “breach between us,” and the tone of his remarks about his old friend and mentor began to change markedly. “To the Premier,” he noted in his diary, “the main thing is to please and surprise the public by bold strokes and unexpected moves; he would rather run serious national risks than hear his policy called feeble or commonplace.” Despite these privately expressed misgivings, at this point Derby stood shoulder to shoulder with his chief in cabinet against Lord Carnarvon, the colonial secretary, and Lord Cairns, the lord chancellor, who emerged at the head of the “peace party.”74
During the first months of 1877 it looked as though the Turks had been persuaded to make enough concessions to achieve peace with its rebellious dominions, placate its neighbours, and appease the Russians. But Russia began to escalate its demands, while the Turks became more obdurate. Turkish resilience was partly a consequence of ambivalent signals from London in the Queen’s Speech at the opening of parliament on 8 February 1877, which reiterated that Britain would defend its interests in the region. Behind the ceremonial proceedings Victoria, whose Russophobia was quite extreme, backed Disraeli to the hilt.75
Disraeli needed every ounce of encouragement from the throne. He was very poorly and struggled to attend to business. In March, Count Nicholas Ignatieff, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, visited London touting the latest Russian proposals. Despite his infirmity Disraeli dined with him and reported to the queen the next day. She was appalled by the terms of the Russian démarche, but the British reluctantly signed up to the London Protocol at the end of March 1877. The protocol sealed the peace between Turkey, Serbia, and Montenegro; it also proposed the demobilization of the Turkish army and improved rights for the Christian population. Disraeli had little faith that it would stick, and he was right. The Ottoman government refused to disarm. On 21 April 1877 Russian armies invaded Ottoman territory in the Balkans and the Caucasus.76
The crisis now entered a far more dangerous stage: if Britain was to prevent Russian aggrandisement, it would require a major diplomatic coup or military intervention or both. Disraeli believed that none of the great powers would take Britain seriously unless the government ordered preparations for war. But Derby, in concurrence with several other cabinet members, expressed apprehension that escalation could have the opposite effect and lead to armed confrontation with the Russian Empire. Relations between the prime minister and the foreign secretary became increasingly acrimonious. Meanwhile, Victoria was transmogrified from the Faery into something more akin to Bodicea, the legendary warrior queen. She repeatedly instructed Disraeli that the Russians could not be permitted to take Constantinople or threaten Egypt and reproved the cabinet for its “feebleness and vacillation.” She enjoined him to tell them, “It is not a question of upholding Turkey; it is the question of Russian or British supremacy in the world.” When Victoria learned from Disraeli which ministers were prevaricating, she recommended that he sack them. This was treading on sensitive constitutional ground, but Disraeli never once protested against such interference by the sovereign.77
In mid-August Turkish success in a defensive battle around the fortress of Plevna bought the rattled ministry much-needed breathing space. Yet during the lull nothing was resolved and little was achieved. Discussions in cabinet went round and round in circles, while Disraeli was so unwell he was advised to spend several weeks in Brighton to recuperate. Public opinion divided between those who believed it was necessary to defend the empire by checking the Russians and, perforce, supporting the Ottoman Empire, as against those who perceived the Russians as Christian liberators. The latter focussed relentlessly on the prime minister and ascribed his policy to his Jewish loyalties. Even Disraeli’s closest colleagues began to explain his behaviour in terms of his origins.78
Disraeli had pinned his hopes on a suspension of military operations until the following spring, but the Russians launched an autumn offensive and soon the Ottoman forces were reeling back towards Constantinople. Sensing an opportunity, Serbia renewed war on Turkey. The crisis now reached its climax. Disraeli tried to get the cabinet to agree that Constantinople marked a red line and that the Russians had to be warned that overstepping it would have fateful consequences. He proposed to reconvene parliament in order to vote money for enlarging the country’s military capability. Instead of falling into line, Derby and Carnarvon resisted anything that smacked of an ultimatum to Russia or sabre rattling. In order to demonstrate her sympathies following another deadlocked cabinet meeting, on 15 December Victoria ostentatiously travelled to Hughendon to have lunch with her prime minister. It was only the second time in memory that a monarch had paid such a visit to a premier. Fortified by the knowledge that the Faery was behind him, Disraeli made another effort. Appealing to the prestige of the empire, he called on the cabinet to summon parliament for a vote that would enhance the military and put muscle behind a British offer of mediation. Derby and others objected that what he proposed would be perceived as preparation for war. To Derby, prestige counted for little. After two and a half hours of inconclusive debate, Disraeli let slip that he was considering resignation.79
The next day he met early with Derby to seek a compromise. He reassured him he did not want war, but unless Britain showed strength its voice would be ignored. Derby was unimpressed. He later noted, “He sees things in a way that is not intelligible to me.” Disraeli felt that if the Turks and Russians made peace without reference to Britain it would be a disgrace. “This,” commented Derby, for the first time alluding to Disraeli’s personality and origins, “is the foreign view which treats prestige as the one thing needful in politics.” He didn’t disbelieve his leader when he avowed peaceful intentions, but he considered him incapable of resisting the temptation to make the grand gesture. Nevertheless, their residual friendship seems to have carried them through the day. When the cabinet met, it consented to recall parliament for a vote of money on 17 January 1878.80
Eighteen seventy-seven thus ended with the government still in one piece though under enormous strain. It had approved the first tentative steps towards a more militant posture intended to deter Russia and prevent a wider war, at a price. For Derby, who had known Disraeli for thirty years, it was a passage of disillusionment.
On 23 December he wrote to Lord Salisbury a “warning letter” highlighting the perils for the coming year. “I mentioned my old and sincere friendship with the Premier, and said that I should always be willing to make personal sacrifices in order to support him: but I feared his love of prestige which he would quite honestly think it worthwhile to make war to support and I knew the pressure which was being put upon him by the Queen.” In his review of the year and his gloomy prognostications for 1878, Derby distanced himself from his old mentor. Disraeli, he believed, “does not desire a war, but he fears above all things the reproach of a weak or commonplace policy: he lives among people not of the wisest sort, who lead him to believe the public feeling much more warlike than it really is: and the idea of compromising the future of the country by reckless finance, or indeed of distant results of any kind, is one which his mind is not fittest to entertain: in all matters, foreign and domestic, he has shown the same peculiarity: great acuteness to see what is most convenient for the moment, combined with apparent indifference to what is to come of it in the long run.”81
The discord of the old year was carried into the new: during January the government came close to disintegration. Disraeli clashed repeatedly with Carnarvon and Derby in cabinet. He demanded agreement to getting war credits from parliament and sending the fleet through the Dardanelles to deter the Russians, coupled with a clear warning to Russia that an assault on Constantinople would constitute a casus belli. Carnarvon and Derby resisted, threatening resignation. Their exchanges became ever more caustic. As Russian armies converged on the straits, however, public opinion and feeling in the cabinet tipped dramatically towards Disraeli’s perspective.82 Queen Victoria was more agitated than ever by the government’s failure to take decisive steps. She declared to the prime minister that “she is utterly ashamed of the Cabinet” and despatched a memorandum demanding action. To Disraeli, sandwiched between the queen and Derby even as Russian troops marched towards the Bosphorus, the outlook was dire. “The confusion is so great it seems the end of the world,” he exclaimed to Lady Bradford.83
As panic gripped the country at the thought of the Russians getting to the straits before the British and blocking passage for good, the peace party in the cabinet evaporated. Carnarvon was the first to go. Derby agonised, submitting his resignation one day, retracting it the next. Meanwhile, the fleet was ordered to sail up the Dardanelles.84
Then, just when it looked as if Britain was on a collision course with Russia, the Turks capitulated. The fleet was recalled. This reprieve offered Disraeli and Derby an opportunity to avoid a potentially fatal bust up. Regardless of their narrow escape, Derby now saw the prime minister in a new and lurid light. “Disraeli and I shall never be on the same terms again,” he wrote; “his way of looking at politics is always a personal one, and it is not easy for him to understand objections founded solely on public considerations.” After three decades of working closely with his chief, Derby had reached the view that many others had arrived at before him. Disraeli was an egoist who was principled only insofar as his interests coincided with those of a specific person, party, or cause. When he could identify himself wholly with a leader, a faction, or an ideal, he was formidable. When he felt his interests diverge or when he sensed support for himself ebbing, he had no compunction at all about moving on. Derby came to the distressing conclusion that Disraeli lacked true public spirit. He never related this explicitly to his ethnicity, but he implicitly distinguished himself from his leader in terms of a native sense of duty and a devotion to principle above and beyond the self.85
The crisis now entered its final phase. London was shocked once the full terms of the proposed peace treaty between Turkey and Russia became known. The Russians were intent on creating a “Big Bulgaria” with a coastline on both the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea. Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania were to be freed of Turkish suzerainty and Bosnia and Herzegovina given autonomy. The Ottoman Empire would be almost entirely squeezed out of Europe. The Turks would also have to pay a huge war indemnity to Russia and grant Russian shipping rights in the straits. If this was not bad enough there were reports that Russian forces were still advancing. Fear of war gripped the capital, and stocks fell in the City. But at last Britain was no longer isolated. The Austrians were no less alarmed by Russia’s ambitions and intimated that they would support a British call for an international conference to discuss the crisis. Bismarck agreed to host it in Berlin.86
The public mood was equally transformed. During February 1878 a tsunami of Russophobia swept the country, much as the Bulgarian agitation had done a year earlier. There were brawls between anti-Turk and anti-Russian demonstrators in Hyde Park. A mob attacked Gladstone’s London house, throwing stones and breaking windowpanes. Disraeli was emboldened by the new atmosphere. Derby noted that the premier was “excited and inclined to swagger.” With more than a hint of disgust he described “his reckless way of talking and evident enjoyment of an exciting episode of history, with which his name was to be joined.” To his alarm the cabinet now considered seizing islands or territory in the eastern Mediterranean as a forward base for military operations.87
Disraeli took the country closer to war than ever before. On the surface, the cause of his militancy was the treaty that Russia compelled the Turks to sign at San Stefano. Almost all his ministers concurred with him that the terms were unacceptable to British interests. Austria-Hungary joined with Britain to demand an international congress of all the powers that had previously been assigned rights in Turkish affairs to examine and only then to ratify the treaty. Believing it was necessary to go still further, Disraeli resolved to buttress Britain’s ultimatum with a show of force. Derby was dismayed: “I cannot even conjecture with any probability whether he wishes for a war, whether he talks in a warlike strain, and makes ostentatious preparations, with a view to avert the necessity of action or whether he is merely ready to accept any course which seems likely to be popular. . . . Possibly he himself does not know what he wants and is satisfied to have done so far what the public seemed to expect.”88
Details of the treaty published in the press sparked an even more intense wave of Russophobia, leading to another assault on Gladstone’s residence. Disraeli warned the cabinet that the empire was in danger and peace hung in the balance. Moderation had not worked: it resembled weakness. There was a liability of drift. Russia, by contrast, was now weakened by months of fighting, which offered an opportunity to restore the balance of power in the region. Accordingly, he asked the cabinet to sanction the deployment of Indian troops in the Mediterranean, mobilization of the reserves at home, and occupation of bases in the Levant. Derby, isolated and unable to find common ground with his colleagues, handed in his resignation. It was accepted.89
The news that Britain was readying for war sobered the Russian government. The new foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, followed up with a circular insisting on revision of the Treaty of San Stefano. Constantinople had to be made safe and a glacis of Ottoman territory preserved in Europe. The Christian population in the areas that had fought for freedom would be granted extensive autonomy, but there would be no Big Bulgaria. Russia would get to keep only Bessarabia and land it had wrested from Turkey in the Caucasus. The British also offered a face-saving device for the Russians, to pull back its fleet if the Russian army withdrew from the vicinity of Constantinople. Russia backed down. “This,” Disraeli crowed to Lady Bradford, “is a great triumph for England.”90
Russia gave up the idea of a Big Bulgaria and settled for autonomy for the Christians in northern Bulgaria and self-government for those in the south. It retained its conquests in the Caucasus. Four days later British diplomats sealed a convention with the Turks. Britain guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and in return the government in Constantinople agreed to undertake reforms, including guarantees of the rights of Christians. Britain’s real payoff was the island of Cyprus, which the Turks ceded to British rule. Disraeli exultantly told Victoria that “Cyprus is the key of Western Asia.”91
When these agreements emerged, the world discovered that Disraeli had accomplished everything he had set out to achieve without a shot being fired, and more. To some, the outcome of the crisis proved his statesmanship and patriotism; to others, it confirmed he was a political adventurer, an unscrupulous, if successful, gambler who was willing to risk men’s lives and the public purse for an alien cause.
On 1 June 1878 the cabinet appointed Disraeli and Salisbury to represent Britain at the Congress of Berlin at which the great powers would settle the Balkan question. Disraeli set off a week later, accompanied by Monty Corry. He was barely installed at the Kaiserhoff Hotel when a message arrived from Bismarck requesting a conversation the same evening. Bismarck had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of der alte Jude, whom he had long admired and respected from a distance. Now he was keen to sit with him to determine the conference agenda and begin steering the proceedings to the desired outcome.92
The congress opened formally on 13 June, when Disraeli delivered an address making it clear that the purpose of the gathering was to put Russia in its place and restore, as far as was feasible, the status quo in the Balkans. The Russian delegation doggedly defended the gains made in the war until, on 21 June, Disraeli staged a coup de theatre to break the deadlock. He ordered his train to be readied and went for a stroll with Corry along the Unter den Linden, as if to take his leave of Berlin. Bismarck then ensured that the Russians were left in no doubt that unless they conceded to British demands the congress would collapse and the exhausted, depleted Russian armies would have to contend with the British Empire. The Russians gave way. The next day Disraeli sent a message to the queen: “Russia is surrendered, accepts all English scheme for the European frontier of the [Ottoman] Empire and its military and political rule by the Sultan.”93
Disraeli was in his element, playing out a role he had written fifty-six years earlier in Contarini Fleming. On 28 June the talks moved on to the future of Serbia. At this point the rights of religious minorities came into the frame. During the earlier Constantinople Conference, Sir Moses Montefiore had written to Derby asking that the rights of Jews be brought to the consideration of the delegates. Baron Henry de Worms, the president of the Anglo-Jewish Association and a future Conservative MP, also presented Derby with the resolutions of a conference of Jews in Paris, asking that the rights of Jews as well as Christians be taken into account in determining the future of the disputed Turkish provinces. The Constantinople discussion had been a dead end, but Jewish campaigners did not give up. At the end of May 1878, with a new congress on the horizon, Lionel de Rothschild wrote to Disraeli transmitting the views of the main international Jewish organisations, the Alliance Israelite Universal, the Anglo-Jewish Association, and the Board of Deputies. He raised the matter again with Salisbury before the foreign secretary and the prime minister left for Berlin.94
Rothschild was not acting alone. Adolphe Crémieux and the Alliance Israelite Universal lobbied the French Foreign Ministry with the same suggestion. William Waddington, the French foreign minister, did all that could have been expected to fulfil these pleas. On 24 June he proposed that an article guaranteeing religious equality to all its citizens, including the nine thousand Jews in the population, should be included in the treaty covering Bulgaria. This served as a precedent for Salisbury when the congress moved on to discuss Serbia. The Russian delegation objected to the imposition of religious equality on the new country, but Waddington and Bismarck backed him up. Consequently, a clause guaranteeing freedom of religion was included in the document covering Serbia. On 1 July, again at Waddington’s prompting, equality of rights for all faith groups was imposed on the Romanian representatives. Article 44 of the final treaty consolidated all these individual measures.95
Disraeli was subsequently celebrated for helping to achieve this apparent breakthrough in the fight for Jewish rights in Europe. He was amongst those fêted at a banquet thrown by the German financier Gerson Bleichröder, Bismarck’s personal banker and economic adviser, to mark the victory. When Disraeli returned to London he was greeted at Charing Cross station by, amongst many others, the nonagenarian Montefiore. It seemed as if at one stroke he had achieved what Sir Moses had failed to accomplish over several decades. In an interview with the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums during the congress, Disraeli himself claimed a degree of credit for Article 44. He told the newspaper, “We are engaged in bringing the Romanian Jewish question by way of the path of humanity and freedom from prejudice to a harmonious conclusion.”96
Such claims were spurious. Disraeli was largely ignorant about the Jewish communities of the Balkans and at Berlin paid little attention to the discussion of Jewish religious rights. Bleichröder was the driving force behind the effort to improve the treatment of Jews in southeast Europe. It was he who prodded the German chancellor to take an interest in Jewish issues. During the congress Bleichröder’s office became the address for Jewish organisations in various countries lobbying for Jewish equality. He made sure that members of the Alliance Israelite Universal had an audience with the German foreign minister, Bernhard von Bülow. Bismarck then used his position as host and chair to make sure that religious freedom for Jews as well as Christians was on the agenda and to squash Russian efforts to get it sidelined. If anyone deserved praise for Article 44, it was Bleichröder.97
Disraeli seems not to have had any private contact with Bismarck’s banker. He could not help but notice him, though. In a despatch to London on 3 July he described him as formerly one of Rothschild’s agents and expatiated about his palatial residence. He wrote to Lady Bradford that Bleichröder was “the Rothschild of Berlin, who lives in a palace more sumptuous than you can well conceive.” Ironically, this seems to have been the extent of Disraeli’s engagement with the Jewish question in Berlin: envy of Jewish wealth.98
On 13 July 1878 the Treaty of Berlin was signed. The existence of the Anglo-Turkish Convention was leaked to the press at the same time, adding to the impression that Disraeli had pulled off a stunning triumph. He had bloodlessly thwarted Russian expansion into the Balkans and simultaneously managed to defend the integrity of the Ottoman Empire while walking away with one of its possessions, Cyprus. Disraeli, though, was too ill to attend the closing gala and left the next day. In London cheering crowds lined the route from Charing Cross station to 10 Downing Street, where he appeared briefly at a window to receive the adulation of the joyful throng below. He was so unwell he was not even able to visit the queen to receive the mark of esteem and honour she now wished to bestow on him: the Garter.99
The outcome of the crisis was so unexpected and the relief that war had been unnecessary was so great that euphoria initially blocked any criticism of the prime minister. MPs, peers, and commentators on all sides treated Disraeli as a wonderworker. The Spectator caught the mood perfectly: “If the shrewdest political thinker in England had been told thirty years ago that the bizarre and flashy novelist, who had just given the world Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, would within a generation be not only ruling England, but ruling England on the lines of ideas set forth in that very extraordinary series of political primers . . . [we] would have treated such a prophecy as the raving of a lunatic. Yet this is exactly what happened . . . he must have been conscious that he had really achieved miracles.”100
Eventually, though, Disraeli’s critics regrouped. There were many who regarded him more as a dangerous illusionist than a benign miracle-worker. Petitions were presented to parliament accusing him of giving away too much in return for peace. The more common complaint was that he had acted in a high-handed fashion, spurned consultation with parliament, and behaved like a dictator. He had taken his country to the brink of war in an unjust cause, moving around troops as if he was the only authority. He then arbitrarily acquired new territories peacefully but without any prior sanction. So-called Foreign Affairs Committees in Keighly and Manchester demanded Disraeli’s impeachment for treason. In the draft of a letter he planned to write to the Nineteenth Century, Gladstone inveighed against “that alien” whose evil purpose was “to annexe England to his native East and make it the appendage of an Asiatic Empire.” He pulled back from a public airing of such blunt sentiments, but by now political discourse had been irreparably coarsened. The stop-the-war movement had routinely abused Disraeli, indulged in ad hominem attacks, and blamed his policy on his purported Jewish allegiances. Gladstone had set the tone for others who were less scrupulous and, more important, gave them legitimacy. His personal files from the late 1870s bulged with crude, anti-Semitic attacks on the premier which he seems to have enjoyed reading and which he never once condemned.101
Gladstone’s invective was not diminished by the success of Disraeli’s eastern policy. He was especially critical towards the acquisition of Cyprus, which he regarded as a useless burden. At a meeting of the Southwark Liberal Association he declared that the Anglo-Turkish Convention was “an insane covenant.” This imprecation led to Disraeli’s most celebrated retort, describing Gladstone as “a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”102
Disraeli never replied to Gladstone’s aspersions concerning Jewish attitudes and behaviour in relation to the crisis. He may not have felt they applied to him or held them unworthy of his attention. Nevertheless they had far-reaching effects that did not escape responsible members of the Jewish community. In May 1877 Abraham Benisch, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, requested a second interview with Gladstone in the hope of persuading him to qualify his animadversions on the Jews in general and his specific imputations against the prime minister. Their meeting offered no comfort to Benisch. Gladstone cleaved to his earlier line: “I cannot disguise from myself the fact that of the Jews, apparently a large majority are among supporters of Turkey and the opponents of effectual relief to Christians. The Christians will be delivered and at no very distant date. . . . If I am alive and in politics, I shall strongly plead for their allowing free equality of civil rights to the Jews. But I cannot do this upon the grounds that the conduct of the Jews has deserved that gratitude.”103
There was a menacing quality to Gladstone’s remarks. He seemed to be blaming pro-Turkish sentiment on Jewish religious affinities and holding all Jews responsible for a foreign policy that was traceable to the government and, ultimately, to Disraeli. Behind Gladstone marched others who were less restrained. An anti-Jewish atmosphere had built up in certain quarters, going through several phases of intensity and having different points of friction. Disraeli was both a cause and a victim of this animus. Amongst many intellectuals, the “chattering class” of the late nineteenth century, and to a degree in the popular imagination, Disraeli came to be understood as a Jewish figure in a way that never obtained before. His novels, in which he dilated on Jewish themes, had reached only the literate and at least moderately affluent section of the population. His interventions on behalf of Lionel de Rothschild were largely of interest to the Jewish community and those within metropolitan political circles. But the arguments associated with the Bulgarian agitation and the movement to stop Britain going to war against Russia touched millions of the population the length and breadth of the country. Disraeli was central to the controversy, and his alleged Jewish connections were made central to debates about his foreign policy. Disraeli, who had begun life as a Jew, ended it as “the Jew.”
Between July and December 1876 Jews had come in for criticism because they were considered, quite reasonably, to be pro-Turkish and, much less justly, careless about Christian suffering. To many outraged by the Bulgarian atrocities, Disraeli’s lackadaisical statements about the massacres epitomised Jewish attitudes more generally. In this sense, attacks on Disraeli for being callous keyed with a wider annoyance about Jewish responses. After Russia invaded Turkey in April 1877 the accent of polemics changed markedly. Jews were depicted as anti-Russian as well as pro-Turkish. They were accused of favouring an active alliance with Turkey and making war on Russia, both to defend Muslims, with whom they sympathised, and to wreak revenge on Christians, especially Slavic Christians, whom they supposedly hated. Disraeli’s militancy was interpreted not as a defence of British interests but as an expression of this bias. Perversely, although he had no conventional Jewish sensibility, his bellicose stance was taken to validate a broader set of false assumptions about Jewish beliefs and behaviour. Intemperance towards Disraeli and towards the Jews, with Disraeli constructed as a sort of mega-“Jew,” reached its peak from January 1878 until well after his return from Berlin. Attempts were made to delegitimize his premiership by suggesting he was pursuing an alien agenda, and, necessarily since he was now classed as a “Jew” amongst Jews, to pour doubt on the patriotism of all British Jews.104
One of Disraeli’s most persistent, acerbic, and influential critics was the historical writer Edward Augustus Freeman. Freeman’s expertise was the Norman conquest of England, and although he did not hold an academic position he had recently published a book on the Saracens, which gave him some authority on the Ottoman Empire and its Christian subjects. More pertinently, he was a Gladstonian Liberal and contributed frequently to the Daily News as well as to more weighty journals of opinion. His animosity towards the prime minister initially derived from his contempt for Islam, “a violent religion,” and the Ottoman Empire, which he regarded as backward, degenerate, and brutal. He scorned the notion that the defence of India required the defence of the Turkish territory occupied by suffering Christians and expressed these views so forcefully that Queen Victoria wanted him arrested for sedition.105
During 1877 he developed his critique in articles in the Contemporary Review and in a book, The Ottoman Power in Europe. Here he argued that the Muslim Turks were racially and religiously alien to the Aryans of Christian Europe. Turkish rule over Christians was inevitably repressive and violent: “As long as the Turk rules, there will always be revolts, there will always be massacres. Europe cannot endure this state of things for ever.” But only Russia seemed prepared to help free the Christian population: “Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby have brought things to such a pass that there is no hope but in Russia.”106
Derby’s fault was his passivity, but he was just one misguided individual. Disraeli represented the more profound threat because he was acting in concert with a great conspiracy: “There is another power against which England and Europe ought to be yet more carefully on their guard. It is no use mincing matters. The time has come to speak out plainly. No well-disposed person would reproach another either with his nationality or his religion, unless that nationality or that religion leads to some direct mischief. No one wishes to place the Jew, whether Jew by birth or by religion, under any disability as compared with the European Christian. But it will not do to have the policy of England, the welfare of Europe, sacrificed to Hebrew sentiment.” The mischief was coming from Disraeli, and it was because he was born Jewish: “The danger is no imaginary one. Everyone must have marked that the one subject on which Lord Beaconsfield, through his whole career, has been in earnest has been whatever has touched his own people. A mocker about everything else, he has been thoroughly serious about this. His national sympathies led him to the most honourable action of his life, when he forsook his party for the sake of his nation. . . . His zeal for his own people is really the best feature in Lord Beaconsfield’s career.”107
Freeman ignored Disraeli’s inconsistency in Jewish matters and instead took his role in Jewish emancipation as emblematic of his entire career. This in itself would not have been objectionable, but he explained Disraeli’s alleged motives in national and racial terms. He thus implied that a member of one nation was ruling another. Furthermore, while characterizing the Jews as a nation, Freeman counterposed to them the Aryan race: “We cannot sacrifice our people, the people of Aryan and Christian Europe, to the most genuine belief in an Asian mystery. We cannot have England or Europe governed by a Hebrew policy. While Lord Derby simply wishes to do nothing one way or another, Lord Beaconsfield is the active friend of the Turk.” This supposed amity stemmed from the benign treatment of the Jews under Turkish rule in previous centuries: “Blood is stronger than water, and Hebrew rule, is sure to lead to a Hebrew policy. Throughout Europe, the most fiercely Turkish part of the press is largely in Jewish hands. It may be assumed everywhere, with the smallest class of exceptions, that the Jew is the friend of the Turk and the enemy of the Christian.”108
The full range of modern, racially structured Jew-hatred appears in Freeman’s tirade. He attributes vast power to Jews. Through their wealth and control of the press they manipulate public opinion. Jews act conspiratorially, across national borders, in pursuit of their own ends, which includes revenge on Christianity for the centuries of persecution they suffered. Hence Freeman was an anti-Semite before the term was coined by Wilhelm Marr in Germany two years later. Disraeli was the trigger for this detonation, but he was more than just that. There are some disturbing similarities between the racial worldview that each adopted. Freeman had absorbed a great deal of the contemporary racial thinking—especially when applied to understanding history—to which Disraeli had been exposed. In a phrase strikingly reminiscent of Disraeli’s own style, he argued, “In its origin Semitic and Asiatic, Christianity became in its history preeminently European and Aryan.” So, Disraeli may bear a double responsibility for this race-based vituperation. He supplied both the stimulus and the vocabulary. In doing the latter, he may even have given it a bogus respectability.109
A little under a year after Freeman’s onslaught, Goldwin Smith published the first of two articles impugning the loyalty of Jews and, by inference, of the prime minister. Smith had been Regius Professor of History in Oxford from 1858 to 1866, when he moved to Cornell University. It will be recalled that he supplied the model for the Oxford history professor who in 1870 received a glancing blow from Disraeli in Lothair. Now based in Toronto, he settled the score. In “England’s Abandonment of the Protectorate of Turkey,” which appeared in Contemporary Review in February 1878, Smith announced that people in the West were becoming aware that Judaism harboured political tendencies. If Britain had gone to war with Russia, it would have been in fulfilment of Jewish aims. The prospect of a war for the Jews revealed that emancipation had been an error. The Jews were not like other religious nonconformists. Judaism was a primitive religion, “a religion of race,” in which faith comingled with tribal exclusivity and racial identity. Like Freeman, he believed that Christianity had a shared origin amongst the Semitic people, but the “nobler part” had become Christians while the worst “wandered the earth.” This degraded portion excelled at making money and used its prosperity to take control of newspapers. Jews also manipulated opinion by exploiting the guilt Christians felt because of the persecution they had visited on Jews through the ages. This was the true reason for their having granted the Jews full equality. Yet recent events had shown that the Jews could not be patriots: “Their country is their race; which is one with their religion.” Furthermore, Judaism preached hatred of Christianity. Their politics was the politics of hate and moneygrubbing.110
Smith’s calumnies elicited an anguished response from British Jews. Hermann Adler, the son of the chief rabbi and himself a university-trained Jewish cleric, wrote a retort that appeared in Nineteenth Century the following April. He attempted to refute every point, demonstrating that Judaism had evolved into a universal creed and illustrating the devotion of Jews to the nations in which they dwelled. This simply provoked Smith to publish an even shriller version of his original broadside. Entitled “Can Jews Be Patriots?” it maintained that from being a universal religion, Judaism was a narrow, tribal dogma. Exclusive membership was maintained through endogamy and circumcision, which enabled Jews to recognise their own kind. Consequently, a Jew could not be an Englishman or Frenchman “holding particular theological tenets: he is a Jew with a special deity for his own race. The rest of mankind are to him not merely people holding a different creed, but aliens in blood.”111
Like Freeman, Smith derived a political warning from this alleged apartness. The Jews had a separate identity, their own political ambitions, and the money-power to press for their gratification. At the time he composed his essay it seemed as if England might end up fighting Russia over Constantinople. Whereas the queen, Disraeli, and most of the cabinet saw this as an imperial and national exigency, Smith blamed the war scare on the Jews: “When we see that England is being drawn into a war, which many of us think would be calamitous, and that Jewish influence is working in that direction . . . we note the presence of a political danger.” He concluded, without mentioning the premier, that “the ruling motives of the Jewish community are not exclusively those which activate a patriotic Englishman, but specially Jewish and plutopolitan.”112
All these threads were drawn together in a biography of Lord Beaconsfield by the liberal journalist Thomas Powers O’Connor, published in 1879. O’Connor was an Irish nationalist who had moved to England and achieved a considerable reputation writing for the Daily Telegraph. A radical in his politics who tended to favour the underdog, his political orientation set him against Disraeli. Yet nothing he had previously written prepared his readers for the vehemence of his six-hundred-page tome or the racial thinking that underpinned it. O’Connor’s biography of the premier is important for understanding how contemporary perceptions of Disraeli shifted in the light of his premiership and the Eastern crisis. It demonstrates how a new, “Jewish Disraeli” was constructed and why this image endured. Unlike Freeman and Smith, who focused on the events of the 1870s, O’Connor reviewed Disraeli’s entire life, his novels, and his political career. He gave them a retrospective unity and driving narrative logic. It now seemed possible to understand why Disraeli had acted as he had done throughout his odyssey as a politician, including episodes in the 1830s and 1840s that were long forgotten or unknown to most people. Everything, it seemed, tended in one direction: towards “Hebrew rule” by a Jewish premier.113
O’Connor began with an account of Disraeli’s childhood and education, benefiting from the early archival work by the Anglo-Jewish historian James Picciotto. The evidence that Disraeli fabricated the story of his origins immediately creates the impression of a slippery character, an imposter, someone who could not be trusted. O’Connor then takes the early novels, especially Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming, as autobiographical and programmatic. In particular, he regards Vivian Grey as a sort of Machiavellian tract. It announced the arrival of a political aspirant who thought nothing of manipulating other men for his own ends. Contarini Fleming showed that Disraeli did not feel he truly belonged in England and therefore had no compunction about exploiting his fellow citizens. O’Connor concluded that despite his conversion to Christianity, Disraeli continued to identify with Jews. The proof was in Alroy: “In this work, more so even than in “Tancred,” we have the clearest view of the Hebrew side of Lord Beaconsfield’s character. It is one long eulogium of the glories of the Jewish race, and one long aspiration for the revival of its power and fame.”114
The dominant motif running through O’Connor’s overview of Disraeli’s early political career is inconsistency. He uses Vivian Grey to explain his relationship with the mentors, patrons, and politicians he encountered during his rise and the sharp methods that were necessitated by his outsider status: “How came it that this young man, the son of a Jewish litterateur, made himself the friend of a Lord Chancellor, a great political chief?” The answer was that Disraeli fastened onto Lord Lyndhurst and manipulated him just as Grey had toyed with the Marquess of Carabas: “The great principle and the great secret of Lord Beaconsfield’s success has been to play on the meaner passions of men.” Later he did the same to Lord George Bentinck. He fawned on politicians, insinuated himself into their company, and then discarded them when he attained his goal.115
Whereas some of Disraeli’s most bitter enemies, including Gladstone and Freeman, found something to admire in his championing of Jewish emancipation, O’Connor saw only another glaring example of inconsistency and hypocrisy. He praised Bentinck for resigning in 1848 rather than remaining at the head of a party distinguished by bigotry and wondered how on earth Disraeli could have remained when he had so much more, and personally, at stake. Although O’Connor claimed he could not fathom Disraeli’s arguments in the debates on the bills for the relief of Jewish disabilities, set out also in chapter 25 of the biography of Lord George, he actually came up with a credible explanation for his rhetoric and saw it as a key to understanding his approach to other controversies: “One of the stratagems which may be traced in all his writings and speeches from the very commencement of his career . . . is to so mix up opposing principles as to make them appear identical. In his youth he tried to prove that Radicalism and Toryism were the same thing. . . . and here, in religion, we have seen how the belief that Christ was an impostor, and the belief that He is God, form exactly the same faith.”116
When O’Connor finally arrived at Disraeli’s great ministry he entitled the chapter “Dictator.” He maintained that the prime minister had systematically circumvented parliament and fulfilled a long-held desire to escape the trammels of democracy. He summoned up quotes from the early novels, particularly Coningsby and Sybil, to show that Disraeli was impatient with the popular will. But the chief thrust of the chapter was to prove that Disraeli’s policy during the Eastern crisis was motivated by his Jewish roots, affiliations, and predilections. It was not hard to understand why: Muslims had treated the Jews well, whereas Christians had oppressed them. The tsarist empire was a Jewish hell. From this insight it was a short step to explaining the prime minister: “I think I shall be able to prove that Mr. Disraeli treated this whole question from the stand point of the Jew. I find in several of his works these feelings of kinsmanship between the Mussulman and the Jew distinctly laid down.” And, of course, it was not hard to source quotations in which the young Disraeli had suggested that Jews and Muslims or Jews and Arabs shared a common Semitic ancestry and belief system.117
Disraeli had thereby written the script for his actions as premier when the Eastern question ignited. As a lover of Turks and a hater of Christians, this manipulator of men was in his element. “Would not the shame of Israel be indeed blotted out,” O’Connor continued,
and its glory reach a sublimer height than it had ever touched even in its stupendous past, if in the nineteenth century of Christendom—this nineteenth century of Jewish persecution, Jewish degradation, Jewish humiliation by Christians, a single Jew could mould the whole policy of Christendom to Jewish aims,—could make it friendly to the friends and hostile to the foes of Judaea! And would not this magnificent triumph be the sublimer to the mind of Lord Beaconsfield if it could be carried out under the guise of serving the interest of the Christians themselves? . . . To deceive mankind, to make them his game, to play upon their passions without feeling them, to trifle with their most sacred interests so as to advance his own—this was the sublime goal which he set for himself in his youth. And thus his position as English Premier in this Russo-Turkish war offered to him an opportunity for attaining a more sublime triumph for his sympathies and antipathies as a Jew, and his longings as a man, than had ever yet presented itself, even in his singularly prosperous and distinguished career.
Disraeli’s career was a story of “imposture” and the tricks, hypocrisy, and mendaciousness that flowed from it. The root of that imposture was his Jewishness and his foreignness.118
The construction of Disraeli as a “Jew” carrying out a “Hebrew policy” was the enduring legacy of his last period in office, at least insofar as his image and his place in history are concerned. It is difficult to revision his early life without this knowledge and to resist the temptation to read it back into his novels. But to do so is to concede the case at the outset. While there are wonderful coincidences and endless possibilities of foreshadowing, nothing was preordained. If Disraeli had died in May 1876—as he might well have done given the range and gravity of his ailments—he might have gone down in British political history as a remarkable figure who had surmounted numerous obstacles to achieve the highest office and done much good out of love for his country and his queen. It is unlikely he would have been written down as a “Jewish” figure. His early writings would have been taken as youthful excrescences that testified to his state of mind at the time they were composed, which is how he himself came to regard them when he drafted the “General Preface.” They would not have been treated as signposts on the way to the making of “Hebrew policy.”
However, he ended his days buffeted by a tempest of anti-Jewish vitriol, and this makes his a Jewish life of sorts. Paradoxically, although the identification of Disraeli as a Jew and the interpretation of his actions as motivated by Jewish sentiments may have been a fantasy, it may have actually precluded him from making a grand gesture on behalf of the Jewish people. In January 1879 Laurence Oliphant contacted the government seeking assistance for his pet project to restore the Jews to Palestine. Oliphant was a Christian Zionist who also hoped to extend British influence in the Middle East. The Foreign Office was not unsympathetic and provided him with letters of introduction but did little more. Stanley Weintraub speculates that Disraeli may have been inhibited from urging it to go further for fear of confirming the allegations about his “Judaic sympathies.”119
Hatred certainly drove Disraeli closer to the Rothschilds just as the rabid utterances of many so-called liberals drove the Rothschilds away from the Liberal Party. Disraeli’s “Jewish” premiership and its negative consequences began the historic realignment of Anglo-Jewish political attachments that saw increasing numbers of Jewish Conservative MPs and the emergence of solid support for the Tories in sections of the Jewish community.120
Disraeli met frequently with Lionel de Rothschild throughout the period and tapped him for insights into the mood of the City. Lionel sent him messages of support at difficult moments, cheering his “patriotic and just policy.” The family also opened informal channels of communication between London and Vienna. The cabinet could have been left in no doubt about this closeness: Disraeli delayed one meeting in March 1878 so that he could give away Hannah, the daughter of Mayer de Rothschild, in marriage to Lord Rosebery. By 1878 Lionel and Nathaniel were so alienated by Gladstone that they started voting with the government. Natty now referred to Gladstone as the archfiend. Disraeli was stricken when Lionel died, but his sons, Nathaniel, Alfred, and Leopold, rallied to their father’s old friend. When Disraeli was evicted from 10 Downing Street after the disastrous general election in 1880, Alfred provided him with a refuge. Alfred was amongst the guests at the last dinner Disraeli gave, while Nathaniel was one of his executors. In the last years of his life Disraeli had truly acquired a surrogate Jewish family.121
Disraeli had considered holding a snap general election in August 1878, cashing in on his personal popularity and appreciation for the government’s achievements. But he was advised to wait until he could reduce expenditure, which had risen to meet the foreign policy crisis, and lower taxes. It was a bad decision. The economy had been depressed for some time, and the farming sector was badly hit by a run of poor harvests.122
On top of that, the government drifted into a series of overseas embroilments, in Afghanistan and South Africa, that all ended badly. The combined disasters wrecked Conservative hopes of an easy election victory. The truth was that Disraeli—old and enfeebled—had lost his grip on affairs. He allowed subordinates to make ill-judged decisions, for which he paid the price and which he no longer had the energy or intellectual agility to rationalise before parliament and the public.123
Disraeli eventually went to the polls in March 1880. Once the hustings were under way, Conservative Central Office proved to be a rusty machine. The Tories were outfought across the country. In the northwest they were harmed by the absence of Lord Derby, who had resigned from the party after some ill-considered remarks by Disraeli on the reasons the ex–foreign secretary had left the government. In the general run of things, though, this made only a minor contribution to the drubbing. The Conservatives lost 108 seats, dropping to 243 MPs, while the Liberals rose from 250 to 349 members.124
Disraeli now had the melancholy task of winding up the government. On 25 April 1880 he moved out of 10 Downing Street and would have been homeless if not for Alfred de Rothschild, who put at his disposal a self-contained suite of rooms at his house in Seamore Place. When he was at last able to retire to Hughendon, Disraeli remarked to Lady Chesterfield, with wonder and some pathos, that due to the structure of the parliamentary year he had never in six decades spent the spring season in Buckinghamshire.125
He continued as Conservative leader. He attended debates in the House of Lords and tried to rally opposition to Gladstone’s policies. But he was worn out, and his health continued to deteriorate. He made his final appearance in the upper house on 15 March 1881, when he offered condolences to the queen on the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It was an ironic coda to his career in view of the havoc this event would unleash on the Jews of Russia and the epoch-making consequences of Jewish emigration from eastern Europe that would ensue from it.126
The ex-premier mainly occupied his time writing a new novel. Such was his international fame that Corry had negotiated a record-breaking advance of £10,000 for the work. Endymion was an Olympian review of Disraeli’s life and times. It told the story of English society and politics from the 1830s to the 1860s from the vantage point of Endymion Ferrars, the son of a Whig MP whose career had fallen on hard times and whose family fortune had diminished. It had a long cast of characters as well as walk-on parts for historical personalities, including Canning, Lyndhurst, Grey, Wellington, and Peel. The plot charts the political ascent of Endymion from a clerk in the Treasury, via a secretaryship to a Whig peer, through his entry into parliament, and a succession of posts until he becomes prime minister. On the way, he is exposed to diverse political ideologies, parties, and personalities. But first he has to grasp his ambition and find his own voice. Like all Disraeli’s central characters, Endymion as a young man has a vague longing to control men. “I should like to be a public man,” he muses aloud. “I should like to have power.” The account of Endymion’s start in politics and his early parliamentary success clearly evoked Disraeli’s own rite of passage.127
Endymion’s tutor in the ways of politics is a foreign aristocrat, Baron Sergius, who fulfils the same function as Sidonia in Coningsby. Sergius warns Endymion that “Europe is honeycombed with secret societies.” Real power is in the hands not of famous men but of those who operate behind the scenes, who are unaccountable: “The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.” Sergius, like Sidonia, is a believer in race, and through him Disraeli makes his last and in some ways most extreme and ominous statements on that subject. Understanding race, according to Sergius, is vital to any political practice: “No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key of history, and why history is often so confused is that it has been written by men who were ignorant of this principle and all the knowledge it involves.”128
Having established the principle of race, Sergius discusses the merits of different racial groups: Teutons, Slavs, and Celts. He continues, “There is another great race which influences the world, the Semites. . . . The Semites are unquestionably a great race, for among the few things in this world which appear to be certain, nothing is more sure than that they invented our alphabet. But the Semites now exercise a vast influence over affairs by their smallest though most peculiar family, the Jews. There is no race gifted with so much tenacity, and such skill in organisation. These qualities have given them an unprecedented hold over property and illimitable credit. As you advance in life, and get experience in affairs, the Jews will cross you everywhere. They have long been stealing into our secret diplomacy, which they have almost appropriated; in another quarter of a century they will claim their share of open government.” These words could have been written by a classic anti-Semite, and they may have contributed to forming anti-Semitic discourse. Disraeli even strays into racial–biological territory with additional remarks about blood and race. Sergius asserts, “Language and religion do not make a race—there is only one thing which makes a race, and that is blood.”129
In April 1881 Disraeli caught a chill during a visit to Windsor Castle. It aggravated his chest complaints, and his condition worsened. He died on 19 April. The mourners at his funeral, which took place a week later, included the Prince of Wales, Phillip Rose (now Lord Rowton, thanks to Disraeli’s resignation honours), Lord Rosebery and Nathaniel de Rothschild, several ambassadors and former cabinet members, Derby amongst them. He was buried in the church at Hughendon, next to Mary Anne and Mrs Brydges Willyams. Four days later Queen Victoria paid a private visit to the vault and laid a wreath on his tombstone, from “his grateful Sovereign and Friend, Victoria R.I.”130
His executors, unlike those who handled his financial affairs in his lifetime, had an easy job of it. Thanks to the income from the last two novels, in addition to the bequest from Mrs Brydges Willyams, he had built up a considerable holding of government bonds. Over the years he had also enlarged the Hughendon estate and increased its rental value. Although he never paid off the £57,000 owed to Andrew Montagu, his will was proved at £84,000, so he finally and conclusively met his debts. He was even able to pass on a handsome amount to his nephew, Ralph’s son, Coningsby. The son of a modestly welloff Jewish writer born in the heart of London ended his days as a well-to-do English landowner nested in the rolling countryside of the Home Counties.131