MR AND MRS HALL
The husband was 21 wife 42 when they married – he had fifteen thousand a year her fortune 3000, – she very plain & not accomplished he tall agreeable & handsome & violently in love with her – they are first cousins – she took him to his father when borne – she is now 67 & he 42 & one of the happiest couples in the world – he being quite devoted to her they have no children.1
If this were a fiction, here is where the story might end, resting on the image of a childless couple, she older than he and less accomplished, happy in spite, or because, of it all. By the end of 1868 both Disraeli and Mary Anne have left their youthful selves far behind. The bullied Jewish schoolboy has become Prime Minister; the sailor’s daughter is a viscountess – ‘in her own right’, her tombstone will tell us. But in real life endings are sadder and slower than they are in make-believe. They are also more interesting.
The story of Mr and Mrs Hall comes from Mary Anne’s archive, where it appears on a single sheet of loose leaf. There is nothing in her account to indicate when she heard it or wrote it down, or if she ever retold it. Of the particular circumstances of the Halls’ marriage she says little and on the fabric of their existence she is silent. Mary Anne was throughout her life a collector of stories, swapping snippets of the lives of others with her most intimate correspondents, clipping tales of human drama from the newspapers. Among her papers are reports of adultery hearings, frauds perpetrated by servants, women living into extreme old age, and family feuds, and her annotations suggest that such narratives touched her. But we cannot know whether she made her note on the Halls in sorrow or in joy, whether it was inspired by Disraeli’s love or a period of mutual alienation. It is tempting to assume that she accorded it importance because it told her something of her own life. Yet all we can be sure of is that it spoke to her and that through her it might also speak to us of her and her world.
* * *
‘Mr Disraeli has provided a new sensation for a jaded public’, announced the Saturday Review on 9 April 1870. ‘The English mind was startled when a retired novelist became Prime Minister. It has been not less surprised at the announcement that a retired Prime Minister is about again to become a novelist.’2 In the autumn of 1869 Disraeli began a new novel, his first for over twenty years. Mary Anne and Corry were the only people to know he was writing again, and even after the news broke they were among the only people to know the new novel’s subject: the power of the Catholic Church in England. Disraeli took inspiration for Lothair from his struggles with the Irish Church in 1868 and from the sensational conversion to Catholicism of the Marquis of Bute in the same year. Its hero is a young man of immense wealth and the novel tells the story of the struggles of Anglicanism, Catholicism and the Italian liberation movement to win his allegiance and his money. Each faction is personified by a woman of beauty and intelligence, and the eventual triumph of the Anglican Church over Lothair’s soul is represented by his marriage to the heroine, Corisande. The novel replicates the features of Disraeli’s earlier fiction, padded as it is with scenes of fabulous wealth, thinly disguised caricatures of prominent figures and a creaky plot made subservient to political ideology. Today it is notable chiefly for the storm of interest it generated. In the weeks before its publication the newspapers were thick with discussion about its likely subject. ‘Seldom has a literary announcement been welcomed by so general a flutter of excitement, or excited speculation so various’,3 read The Times. The Standard continued the theme, dwelling on Disraeli’s continued capacity to surprise. ‘There have been men of rich and varied genius before this among the leaders of party; but which of them was equal to such a feat as “Lothair,” after more than thirty years of hard and incessant Parliamentary work – of such work as was needed to advance the landless, and unaristocratic youth, Benjamin Disraeli, to the chief place in the councils of England.’4
Lothair’s appearance prompted new suspicion within his party about Disraeli’s commitment to the Conservative cause. There were mutterings that it proved the former Prime Minister to be a political dilettante, and the reviews gave a mixed verdict on its quality. But no one could deny it was the publishing event of the year. The first edition sold out within two days, and one newspaper reported the sale of 52,000 copies in the United States in the six weeks following publication. A street in Wandsworth was renamed ‘Lothair’, as was a ship in harbour at Portsmouth; several racehorses were named Corisande after its heroine. A London perfumier created a ‘Lothair’ scent and sent two presentation bottles to Mary Anne in a black casket with silver clasps and a key. The Prince of Wales requested a copy of the novel and friends wrote in congratulation. In her letter John Manners’s wife Janetta referred to Lothair as Mary Anne’s ‘adopted son’. ‘I have poured over two reviews of him, and feel how desperately I should have fallen in love with such a person.’5 One New York publishing firm attempted to have the whole novel telegraphed from London to New York over a forty-eight-hour period in order to steal a march on its rivals. The Associated Cable Company put a stop to the plan on the grounds, the Observer reported, that ‘the transmission of the contents of a three volume novel might interfere with regular business’. ‘We cannot help regretting’, the paper continued, ‘that Mr Disraeli has been debarred from the honour of being the first author whose work was sent complete through the 3,000 miles of Atlantic cable.’6
Lothair is not one of Disraeli’s best works, but it is a novel of experience and is particularly entertaining in its invective against those who crossed him during his tenure at 10 Downing Street. Shortly after completing it he began another novel, inspired by the period of his own political apprenticeship. Again he and Mary Anne told no one that he was writing but a few friends guessed the truth. ‘We half suspect’, Charlotte de Rothschild wrote to her son in September 1871, ‘that Dizzy is also composing a romance.’ ‘This is, of course, a secret.’7
Lothair was a financial success for both Disraeli and his publishers, who, inspired by its reception, decided to reissue his earlier novels. Longman’s Collected Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli appeared in September 1870 and was well received by the press. Read together the novels had their fair share of ‘affectation, hyperbole, paradox, and sham-sentiment’, thought the Daily News, which nevertheless found them irresistible. ‘Like the author himself they have made their own way, and conquered their own place. Like him they have compelled even opponents to listen; and English literature could no more afford to lose Disraeli’s novels than the House of Commons could afford to lose Disraeli.’8 Disraeli wrote a preface to the Collected Edition in which he sketched in his autobiography and the circumstances that had given rise to the various stages of his novelistic career. Of Henrietta Temple and Venetia he wrote that they were not political works but instead commemorated ‘feelings more enduring than public passions’, and of the lack of interest that greeted Contarini Fleming he expressed the hope that younger writers inclined to despair might ‘learn also from my example not to be precipitate in [their] resolves’. Only with Vivian Grey did he concede embarrassment. ‘Books written by boys, which pretend to give a picture of manners and to deal in knowledge of human nature, must be affected. They can be, at the best, but the results of imagination acting on knowledge not acquired by experience.’9
* * *
In Parliament in the sessions following his resignation Disraeli cut an uncharacteristically quiet figure. Restive backbenchers blamed him for their ejection from government, and the leadership of the House of Lords was thrown into confusion by the death in October 1869 of Lord Derby. The general election had handed Gladstone’s Liberals a commanding majority and Disraeli knew there was little prospect of unseating them through crafty political manoeuvring. Not until the beginning of 1872 did he reassert his control over the members of his party, who, despite his withdrawal, could find no one more able to lead them. He knew his personal popularity in the country to be high and by February 1872 was freely prophesying he would be Prime Minister again. But in the years between 1869 and 1871 he appears to have taken pleasure in a retreat to novel-writing and Mary Anne’s drawing room. 1869 stands out as a contented year for them both, during which they held a series of dinner parties, enjoyed the company of one another and their friends and appeared in society together, something the pressures of office had during the previous year made impossible. Their round of country house visits passed off easily and they resumed their habit of spending Sunday evenings together at the Rothschilds, dining alone with the family.
At about this time the classical scholar Richard Claverhouse Jebb saw them at a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s. ‘One of the figures which I was amused in observing was Mr Disraeli’s’, he wrote. ‘He was clad in a garment which, I believe, he greatly affects – a long white coat, designed, possibly, to assist the curious eye in its search for him. He was paying his wife, Lady Beaconsfield, a degree of attention so unusual in public, and so very unusual in church, as to suggest to the cynical observer that it could scarcely always be maintained in the same perfection under the accomplished gentleman’s roof.’ Here the editor of the periodical in which this account appeared interjected: ‘Dizzy’s devotion to his wife was perfectly genuine – Ed.’ ‘Truly in this land of precedence a statesman profits by being fashionable’, Jebb continued. ‘Fashionable for his novels, or his eccentricity, or his impudence … For every opera-glass which was bent on Gladstone to-day at St Paul’s, I am sure that a dozen were turned on Dizzy.’10
When he was at the House of Commons Disraeli sent Mary Anne notes; if something of interest happened and he was unable to write, Corry or John Manners would do so on his behalf. ‘The Irish Ch. Bill is settled’, reads one message from him from July 1869. ‘It may be known soon after this reaches you, but it will be prudent not to send the news to anyone.’ Mary Anne relied on these dispatches. ‘I have seen no one to day – I long to know, how you spoke.’11 Her concern was as much for Disraeli’s health as the measure of his success, as Corry understood. ‘He is just down, after speaking for 1 hour and 35 minutes – a most powerful and effective speech, excellently well delivered, intently listened to and heartily applauded’, he wrote in February 1870. ‘As Mr Gladstone is up to reply, I have had no opportunity of seeing him, but all is well, I am sure, as he spoke to the end with the ire and energy of complete health.’12 Corry himself was by this point central to the lives of both the Disraelis. In his letters to Disraeli he always sends ‘love’ to Lady Beaconsfield, and an undated letter from Hughenden underlines his importance as a member of their family and a third host. ‘Lady B says you must not engage yourself anywhere at present as the chances are that people will be coming here a good deal the next fortnight & you are wanted.’13
To many observers Mary Anne appeared as active as ever. There were no grand parties at Grosvenor Gate, but dinners took place there each month, and in the autumns Hughenden was filled with visitors. She accompanied Disraeli to Windsor in November 1869 and her conversation could still shock. ‘She delighted Fortesque by telling him that she had heard him very much praised’, Disraeli reported to Corry. ‘He pressed her very much when & where – She replied “It was in bed.”’14 In 1871 she became fascinated by the Tichborne Trial (which revolved around the mysterious reappearance of a missing heir and accusations that he was an imposter), exchanging notes with her husband about its progress and visiting the court to witness its dramas in person. With Disraeli she attended the wedding of one of the Queen’s daughters, and throughout 1871 she accompanied him on visits to various parts of the country.
In September 1871 Charlotte de Rothschild recorded the details of a visit to Hughenden for the benefit of her son. She was met at High Wycombe by Mary Anne ‘in youthful muslins, profusely decorated with blue and yellow ribbons’. ‘The Viscountess overwhelmed me with kisses and congratulations’, she continued, ‘and ere very long we found ourselves at Hughenden, where Mr Disraeli, wearing a suit of pearl grey, a soft hat, a new set of teeth and a new collection of curls, had done all in his power to keep the double headed monster – if I may so express myself – time, with the vicissitudes of the world, and personal old age at bay.’ It was a perfect late summer’s day and Hughenden appeared mellow and beautiful. ‘Without any effort or exaggeration I could praise & admire all I saw. – Both husband & wife seemed delighted with their home.’ ‘The illustrious man’, Charlotte thought, ‘ought always to be seen at Hughenden, where he is neither politically severe & spiteful as becomes a great party leader, nor grandly mysterious.’ The Disraelis were full of the village flower show, the harvest home and the forthcoming visit of the Bishop of Oxford. ‘I do not know whether I was hungry, but the luncheon appeared to be superexcellent & the fruit delicious.’ After lunch Charlotte and Mary Anne retired to gossip about the engagement of one of Disraeli’s ‘most enthusiastic admirers … [a] spinster of mature age’. Charlotte’s account supports the impression given elsewhere in the Disraelis’ papers that the period between 1869 and 1872 was their Indian summer, when, freed from the burdens of office, they took renewed pleasure in each other, their houses and the company of their friends. The other story of these years appears only in archival glimmers. Letters from friends dating from the August of 1870 make tactful references to Mary Anne’s suffering, a hand other than hers records lists of visitors in her account book, and it is Disraeli, not Mary Anne, who gives warning in 1871 to a disobliging butcher.
* * *
Disraeli’s determination to assert his control over his party in 1872 took him and Mary Anne in April to Manchester for a massed Conservative meeting. The visit was designed to demonstrate his popularity and the existence of Conservative support in the industrial north. Inexorably British politics was moving towards a system in which electoral rather than parliamentary politics shaped governments, and Disraeli knew that regional party organisations needed to be strengthened if he was to return to power. At the meeting nearly 200 local associations presented addresses in front of a 20,000-strong crowd. The cheers that greeted the Disraelis were so prolonged that both the National Anthem and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ were drowned out. As the association representatives filed past to shake Disraeli’s hand, Mary Anne rose too to add her congratulations, an action commended by many of the newspapers. Disraeli closed the meeting with a short speech of thanks in which he celebrated the loyalty of the Manchester Conservatives as ‘the precursor of a triumphant future’.15 During their journey home on 6 April, crowds of supporters lined the station platforms at Manchester, Stockport, Macclesfield and Stoke, determined to catch a glimpse of the former Prime Minister and his Viscountess.
The Manchester visit represented Mary Anne’s final act of electioneering. On their return she appears to have suffered a uterine haemorrhage, which some of her friends subsequently believed she kept secret even from Disraeli. At the end of April Disraeli wrote of his unwillingness to leave her alone at Grosvenor Gate and in May of his regret that the doctor had given her permission to go to Court. ‘I don’t think he allows enough for her extreme weakness’, he told Corry. ‘Howr. I shall be with her today, last night she was alone and, I think, fearful.’ The visit was not a success. ‘She was suffering as she went, & was taken so unwell there, that we had to retreat precipitately.’ ‘Nothing encouraging at home’, he wrote on 14 May. ‘To see her every day weaker & weaker is heartrending – I have had, like all of us, some sorrows of this kind – but in every case, the fatal illness has been apparently sudden, & comparatively short … to witness this gradual death of one, who has shared so long, & so completely, my life, entirely unmans me.’16
Mary Anne was determined not to give in. ‘For herself she still makes an effort to enter society’, Disraeli confided to Corry. ‘It is impossible the effort can be maintained.’17 He took her to Hughenden, hoping that a break from London would mark the end of her social commitments, and there Mary Anne appeared at peace even though the journey taxed her strength. She was pushed through the walks and groves in a bath chair and took pleasure in the song of a nightingale. ‘She thinks “whistling” a capital term for bird noises.’18 They returned to London, where their marriage settlement was revised and updated in preparation for Disraeli’s life alone. In July Mary Anne attended a dinner party but was forced to retire midway through the evening, and in August she and Disraeli paid a quiet morning call on Virginia Edger but otherwise went out no more. Friends wrote to him of her heroism in the face of pain, and to her exhorting her to eat. The Prince of Wales sent game in the hope it would reawaken her appetite and the Rothschilds’ cook kept Grosvenor Gate supplied with a stream of delicacies calculated to tempt her. ‘You must try & think that every thing you take goes to make you strong & well again’, wrote the Countess of Loudoun from Scotland. ‘That is really the kindest thing you can do for the husband you love so well.’ The Countess recommended drinking a glass of wine before eating, ‘then the things wont seem so nasty’.19 But cancer had spread to Mary Anne’s stomach and it was impossible for her to follow these well-meant instructions. In notes to Disraeli dating from July she reassured him that her appetite was good, a sustaining fiction for both of them. ‘I miss you sadly, & feel so grateful for your constant tender love & kindness. I certainly feel better this Eveng & have eat a very nice dinner.’ And then again: ‘The Eveng is got so cold I have sent a light great coat for you – I feel rather hungry, just going to dinner.’20 His last dated note to her was written in July from the House of Commons:
My dearest darling, I have nothing to tell you, except that I love you, which, I fear, you will think rather dull. Mr Butt, in my opinion, was not equal to the occasion, tho’ his speech lasted more than two hours. His voice is husky; he has no fascinating flow; & his papers were always out of order; so that he hummed & hawed to gain time, while he was finding his place.
Natty was very affectionate about you, & wanted me to come home & dine with him; quite alone; but I told him, that you were the only person now, whom I could dine with; & only relinquished you tonight for my country.
My country, I fear, will be very late; but I hope to find you in a sweet sleep.
Your own, D.21
* * *
Repeating the May journey to Hughenden was more than Mary Anne’s strength could bear, and they were forced to remain in London over the summer. But rather than stay inside, they drove all over the city, travelling, Mary Anne thought, over 200 miles in short excursions in August and September. They went to Highbury and Westbourne and Hampstead and Lambeth; Putney and Pimlico, Kilburn and Barnes. They were staggered by the reach of London, which had grown like no other city in the world over the course of the half-century throughout which Mary Anne had lived there. ‘We never went into our quarter of the town’, Disraeli wrote in notes of that summer, possibly intended as a draft of a letter to the Queen. ‘What miles of villas! & all sorts of architecture! What beautiful churches! What gorgeous palaces of Geneva!’ One day they came across a French castle in Camden; in the kingdom of ‘Cockaigne’ in the east they found a city quite unlike that in which they lived. It was, Disraeli remarked, ‘our first summer in London’.22 Friends wrote of their sorrow at the news that they were prevented from reaching Hughenden and letters arrived at Grosvenor Gate every day asking for news. From Raby Castle the Duchess of Cleveland sought to keep Disraeli’s spirits up by reminding him of ‘one privilege you have which is not granted to all. No two people surely can look back upon a life of such loving & perfect companionship.’ She recalled her son Lord Rosebery asking Mary Anne from where she derived her youthful energy and his supposition that it was the result of sheer force of character. ‘No’, was the reply. ‘It is not that. It is that my life has been such a happy one – I have had so much affection, & no troubles no contradictions: – that is what has kept me so young & well.’23
‘Yes, we have been here the whole summer’, Disraeli wrote to Dorothy Nevill on 26 September. ‘It tells our sad tale, but I rejoice to tell you also that absolutely this morning we are going to Hughenden. There has been of late a decided improvement in my wife’s health, and she now fancies that change of air will greatly benefit her. I am sorry we are to make the experiment in the fall of the leaf in a sylvan country, but we could go nowhere else.’24 Mary Anne noted their departure in her account book in her own hand, and once she was in the country she rallied. Her pain receded and she was able to eat a little more. The Rothschilds visited for the day and there was even talk of Disraeli going to Glasgow in December. But on 13 October Disraeli wrote urgently to Corry, asking him to visit. ‘All is changed … Things here very bad.’25 Then there was another rally; Corry left, and on 13 November Disraeli was able to write that although her appetite was again non-existent, Mary Anne was free of pain and enjoying life. To distract her he organised a small house party consisting of their old friends John and Janetta Manners and two younger men, William Harcourt and Lord Ronald Gower, both of whom could be relied upon to pay their hostess courtly attention. Gower wrote an account of his visit and was the last person apart from Corry to leave a record of the Disraelis together at Hughenden. He was greeted by Disraeli alone, who looked ‘quite boyish’ in a double-breasted tailless jacket and who was anxious for news and gossip from London. ‘We had little or none, the last scandal of a certain runaway couple not being new to him. “To think,” he said, “of her running away with an elderly roué who was one of the most notorious dandies even when I was a boy!”’
Gower met Mary Anne in the library before dinner and thought her ‘sadly altered in looks since London – death written on her face – but, as usual, gorgeously dressed’. He sat next to her at dinner and so had the opportunity of observing his host. ‘Mr Disraeli was evidently very anxious about her, and although occasionally flashing out into conversation, with all his curious play of arms and shrugging of the shoulders, he was evidently much depressed at her state. His attention to her was quite touching and “Mary Ann,” as he sometimes called her, was constantly appealed to.’
To Gower’s young eye the interiors of Hughenden looked gaudy and shabby. There was an empty space over the fireplace in the drawing room crying out for a painting, and when Gower asked Disraeli why nothing hung there he was told the space was intended for Mary Anne. ‘But she has never sat for her portrait, except to Ross for a miniature; but some day I shall have that copied life-size, and placed in that frame.’ The next day Mary Anne did not appear until luncheon and Disraeli did the honours of the house alone, showing his guests around the walks and gardens. When she did emerge from her room she talked ceaselessly about her horses and the peacocks adorning the gardens. That evening, Gower recalled, ‘Mr Disraeli spoke to me very despondingly about his wife’s state of health. “She suffers,” he groaned, “so dreadfully at times. We have been married thirty-three years, and she has never given me a dull moment.”’ Gower was struck by the strain etched on Disraeli’s usually impassive face, still present the next day after a bad night for Mary Anne. ‘He, however, seemed much the most distressed of the two, for she was wonderfully brisk and lively, and had her breakfast brought into the library, where we were sitting.’ It was a pattern Disraeli had witnessed throughout 1872, where Mary Anne attempted to outface her pain in the company of others, hiding all manifestations of her illness with iron pride. It was raining when the visitors left, and this, Gower wrote, ‘seemed to add to the melancholy feeling one had that we should probably never again see poor old Lady Beaconsfield, who, with many oddities as to dress and manners, is certainly a most devoted wife and companion. Both our host and hostess came to the front door to see us drive away to the station.’26
On 5 December Mary Anne contracted pneumonia. Corry rushed back to Hughenden and for ten days he kept a vigil with Disraeli. He told Philip Rose that she was ‘very changed in looks and very weak, but voice and manners like herself’.27 She refused to go to bed and so spent her last days in an armchair in her bedroom, in a state of exhaustion and delirium. Disraeli could not leave her, summoning Corry instead by note. ‘She says she must see you. Calm, but the delusions stronger than ever – She will not let me go out to fetch you – Come – D.’28 The newspapers printed daily bulletins and letters and telegrams poured in, prominent among them messages from the Queen asking for news. It was Corry who answered the demands of friends, royalty and press men while Disraeli remained upstairs, oblivious to everything except Mary Anne. She died on 15 December 1872.
* * *
Four days later she was buried in the vault adjoining the east wall of Hughenden church, next to James Disraeli and Mrs Brydges Willyams. Shops shut as far away as Ely as a mark of respect and many prominent men asked permission to attend her funeral. All were denied. The only mourners were Disraeli, Corry, Philip Rose, Mary Anne’s doctor, and a small group of representatives from the Hughenden staff and tenantry. ‘Almost all the paraphernalia of mourning – hearse, mourning carriages, plumes, scarves, and flowing hatbands – were absent from a ceremony which differed little from a humble village funeral, and was touching in its simplicity’, reported The Times. The path from the house to the church was saturated by days of rain but the journalists watching the scene thought the sight of the funeral procession wending its way down to the church ‘on one of the wettest and murkiest days of the year’ added to the solemnity of the occasion.29 They also remarked that Disraeli had aged visibly since his last appearance in London. With no Mary Anne to dye his hair he had gone grey and his figure was stooped. After the service the procession moved outside to the vault, where Disraeli stood bareheaded in the rain, watching the burial. The Times was restrained in its description of Disraeli’s grief; the reports printed in various regional newspapers less so. The villagers had covered Mary Anne’s coffin with flowers, and as Disraeli stopped to look at the tributes he was seen by one reporter to lean sideways on his pew rail where ‘it was perceptible by his attempts, as it were, to choke his grief in repressed sobs, that he was suffering the most intense anguish and sorrow’.30
Telegrams and letters started to arrive on the day Mary Anne died, the first brought directly by royal messenger. The Queen dwelt on Mary Anne’s devotion to Disraeli, reminding him too of her own long widowhood. The Prince and Princess of Wales telegraphed their sympathy and then wrote, and the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Jane Ely enclosed her own letter in the royal package. The new Lord Derby told Corry he could not bring himself to write directly to Disraeli, so intolerable was his loss, but Robert Dawson wrote at length on Mary Anne’s great qualities. ‘It is now more than 45 years since I first knew and loved her, she has always been to me the kindest of friends and I never failed to consult her when in any difficulty, or whenever I required the assistance of a sound and safe judgment.’31 Gladstone’s letter reminded Disraeli that they had been married in the same year, and Lord Rosebery, who had fallen for Mary Anne as an adolescent, wrote that she had simply been always ‘the kindest and best of friends’.32 On the day before the funeral John Manners told Corry that he had no heart for business since all his thoughts were at Hughenden. ‘God help him through tomorrow.’33 And Charlotte de Rothschild, Mary Anne’s most loyal friend, said that words failed her as she attempted to express her sympathy. Instead she recalled Mary Anne and ‘the rare qualities that adorned a most admirable wife’. ‘Cheerful in health & brave in sickness she never knew the meaning of egotism much less the reality of it. – The affection of her generous heart never narrowed never changed; it surrounded you at every moment of the day and in the great political world it followed you with eager enthusiasm; and if your triumphs as an orator, a statesman and a minister of the crown were the pride & the joy of dear Lady Beaconsfield’s existence, your gentle & unvarying kindness was the treasure she valued most truly.’ It seemed presumptuous, Charlotte wrote, to speak of her own loss while Disraeli’s was so insupportable, yet ‘while you are mourning I too am painfully aware that the most indulgent of friends will never smile again upon me & mine’.34
Many of those who sent sympathy followed Charlotte’s example and focused on the striking happiness of the Disraelis’ marriage. A stranger wrote that Disraeli must derive consolation from ‘the reflection that of all happy lives Lady Beaconsfield’s has been the one which a nation holds up for admiration & example’; a friend that he ‘had the blessing of a union so perfect as to have become famous in a land where happy unions are common’. A ‘fellow widower’ described how he ‘always read with delight your delicate & chivalrous mention of the great worth Lady Beaconsfield was to you both in private life & especially amid your overwhelming duties as the leading Conservative Statesmen of our great Country’. ‘The union’, he continued, ‘seemed to be happily unique.’35 Old friends wrote, but so did political enemies. There were also anonymous letters, and odd ones from those who felt their pain was greater than his.
There was even a missive from Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who had long ago sworn herself the Disraelis’ enemy. Rosina’s letter opened conventionally enough with apologies for intruding on Disraeli’s suffering. ‘I am perhaps the only person now living, who has the inalienable right of “long ago” to do so.’ When she thought of Mary Anne, she wrote, she could feel and remember only one thing: ‘how kind to me as a girl, and long after’. ‘Since I heard of her dangerous state, oh! how fervently I have prayed night and day for her; for she “had her good things in this world,” and was as crucially tried, by happiness, success, pleasure and wealth; as I have been by brutal persecution, bitter injustice, hate, and exceptional ingratitude, and sordid poverty.’ Mary Anne’s abandonment of her she would try to forget, remembering instead only what was good in her. ‘What great things you both did for each other, not in the sense the world estimates them of an exchange of temporal advantages; but the sincere, devoted, and self abnegating love she had for you … [and] the generous unstinted gratitude, with which you repaid her.’ She knew that but for Mary Anne’s wealth Disraeli would never have married her but was sure he would have behaved well had she lost the thing that made her eligible. As the letter progressed, it became more difficult for Rosina to hide her animus. ‘She always had great hero worship, more especially for political celebrities, which made her the best help meet in the world for you.’ She regretted that Disraeli had been seduced by ‘the Sodom called Society’ and the ‘slippery arena of Politics’ but wrote that she knew the cause was his association with Bulwer Lytton, ‘no body’s friend, not even his own’. In her peroration she did her best to rise above reproach, writing that in spite of Disraeli’s faults, ‘I do from my heart feel for your bereavement.’ ‘God who had given you so much, give you more by now comforting you.’36
In its news report, The Times thought that it was not just Mary Anne’s particular qualities and the happiness of her marriage that made her death a national event. ‘Something more seems due to the memory of a mutual devotion which has not merely been the private stay of a statesman’s life, but in no slight measure the ornament of his public character.’ The Times held Mary Anne responsible for Disraeli’s career and remarked on the strangeness of this. Thirty-five years ago, it noted, ‘society would have been as little likely to single out the widow of Mr Wyndham Lewis as destined to play an important part in life as the politicians of the day would have been inclined to see in Mr Disraeli the future leader of the Tory party’. The Disraelis’ private history, concluded the report, ‘will be remembered as a beautiful episode in political life’.37
The elision between public and private was also remarked upon in Mary Anne’s obituaries. The longest of these first appeared in The Times and then was much reprinted elsewhere. It depicted Mary Anne as an ideal woman standing unobtrusively in the shadow of her husband, and it framed her story with Disraeli’s career. Mary Anne’s antecedents were burnished into smartness, The Times claiming that her fortune derived from the estates of her uncle Sir James Viney rather than from the Lewises. And although it acknowledged that Disraeli married for money, it also claimed that no marriage had ever proved more of a love match than his. ‘It was a pretty sight, that of the remorseless Parliamentary gladiator, who neither gave quarter nor asked it … it was a pretty sight to see him in the soft sunshine of domestic life.’ And while it was an unavoidable truth that Mary Anne talked too fast and too freely, The Times noted that she was never indiscreet about the things that mattered to Disraeli. Taken alone it thought Mary Anne unimportant. ‘It was not in her to make his salons a centre of society, to gather within the range of his influence eminent Englishmen and influential foreigners, or to sway by the reputation of brilliant réunions the easy opinions of liberal-minded politicians … But perhaps her husband will lose the more that society will lose the less.’ In its final reckoning The Times thought Mary Anne a heroic figure: unselfish, brave and absorbed in the fortunes of others. And for Disraeli himself it had only sympathy. ‘Yet to a veteran in public life there must be comfort in the thought that the public you have served is feeling with you; that England, irrespective of party, deplores even the timely termination of an essentially English union.’38
In death Mary Anne was fictionalised, by both her obituary writers and the many strangers who wrote of her to Disraeli. The things about her that were problematic – her background and her refusal to make her conversation or person conform – were smoothed away as she was finally reinvented, in Disraeli’s phrase, as a perfect wife, the wife the established order wanted her to be. In the 1840s periodicals had mocked the suggestion that she could ever fit this role. Now she became emblematic of an English ideal, a myth born when she fell seriously ill in 1867 and given its first public expression as the press responded to her peerage in 1869. Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House hovers over Mary Anne’s story, revealing for the most part the way she refused the expectations of her sex. Yet in her final years she was increasingly figured as that angel: self-effacing, absorbed in her husband, concerned only with making a happy home. After her death she became her completely. Any sense that she had an emotional existence of her own or that the happiness attributed to her might be more complicated than appeared was subsumed into a vision of Victorian womanhood. In 1872 the first signs of a new epoch made it convenient to celebrate Mary Anne as the epitome of wifeliness. Women’s colleges opened in Cambridge in 1869 and 1871, and in 1870 Parliament passed the Married Women’s Property Act, which acknowledged for the first time that a married woman could have a legal existence independent of her husband. The Angel in the House probably never really existed, but she was a powerful cultural construct and in the early 1870s she was threatened as never before. And so in her final transformation Mary Anne became that angel: a symbol of a woman she had never been, and a heroine for a dying age.
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At Hughenden in his first weeks alone, Disraeli’s sorrow was absolute. He told the Prince of Wales that he was unprepared for the loss, ‘wh: seems to me overwhelming’.39 And to Dorothy Nevill he wrote that life seemed empty. ‘I cannot in any degree subdue the anguish of my heart. I leave this now, my only home, on Monday next for the scene of my old labours. I have made an attempt to disentangle myself from them, but have failed. I feel quite incapable of the duties, but my friends will be indulgent to a broken spirit, and my successor will in time appear.’40 Corry stayed with him over Christmas, answering letters, making plans and arranging for removal from Grosvenor Gate. The house had only ever been Mary Anne’s for her lifetime, and now the Lewises demanded it back with indecent haste.
At the end of December Disraeli and Corry left Hughenden to oversee the dismantling of the London home that had been Disraeli’s for thirty-four years. Friends rushed to offer hospitality, and for a short time Disraeli stayed with the Rothschilds in their house at Gunnersbury before taking rooms at a hotel. It was all, he told Ralph Disraeli in January, ‘an awful change’.41 For the rest of his life he wrote his letters on black-edged mourning paper, and it was years before he acquired a permanent London home of his own.
Disraeli was sixty-eight when Mary Anne died and worn down by her final months. When he wrote to Dorothy Nevill, he believed his political career to be over. Yet his greatest moments were still to come. He remained the leader of his party and in 1873 rejoined the political fray. In 1874 he became Prime Minister again, this time on the basis of a general election victory. In his second term his government enacted significant social reforms centred on improving housing and public health, protecting women and children from exploitation in factories, and establishing the position of the emergent trades union movement. He involved Britain in the tangle of issues and conflicts that became known as the ‘Eastern Question’ and his government sent soldiers to fight against Afghans and Zulus. After he was made Lord Beaconsfield in 1876, ‘Beaconsfieldism’ became synonymous for his opponents with imperial aggression and colonial expansion. He made the Queen Empress of India and returned in triumph from the Congress of Berlin. ‘The old Jew, that is the Man’, said Bismarck as he surveyed the Europe he and Disraeli had made.
Disraeli returned to Endymion, the novel begun in 1870. It told the story of his political coming-of-age and earned him a £10,000 advance, then the largest sum ever paid for a three-volume work. Commenting on the qualities of Disraeli and Gladstone, the Pall Mall Gazette found Endymion agreeably symptomatic of its author. ‘It is quite characteristic of the two chiefs of the great political parties that one of them should have hastened to employ his leisure after his fall from power in thunders against the Vatican … and that the other in the same circumstances should have betaken himself to the writing of a novel of society.’42
His passions became once more all-consuming. He fell in love again, and the object of his affections, Lady Bradford, took on the role of most valued correspondent, receiving many brilliant letters over the course of the 1870s. He contemplated marrying Lady Bradford’s sister in order to be nearer to his beloved, but his putative bride would not oblige. His courtly wooing of the Queen became the stuff of legend as he refashioned himself as the conduit between the monarch and her people. His relationship with Ralph remained scratchy although he did make his nephew, the strategically named Coningsby, his heir. At his side throughout was Corry, to whom he was ‘My Loved Chief’ and who fulfilled many of the functions of a spouse during the second Premiership. Corry became Disraeli’s proxy, meeting the Queen on his behalf and standing in for him as age and infirmity made it increasingly difficult to fulfil the demands of power. When the Conservatives were turned out of office in the general election of 1880, Disraeli asked the Queen to make Corry a peer, and so the secretary became Lord Rowton and the history of Mary Anne’s elevation repeated itself.
A year later, on 19 April 1881, Corry was with Disraeli when he died of bronchitis, aged seventy-six. Princes attended his funeral and there was talk of a grand ceremony in Westminster Abbey, but in his will Disraeli left clear instructions to the contrary. ‘I desire and direct that I may be buried in the same Vault in the Churchyard of Hughenden in which the remains of my late dear Wife Mary Anne Disraeli created in her own right Viscountess Beaconsfield were placed and that my Funeral may be conducted with the same simplicity as hers was.’ His wishes were obeyed and he too was buried at Hughenden in the churchyard vault. Afterwards the Queen travelled to Hughenden to visit his grave and took tea in the drawing room, mourning her lost Prime Minister.
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After the parliamentary session of 1873 was over, Disraeli returned to Hughenden alone. ‘I have been here nearly two months’, he told Charlotte de Rothschild in September. ‘I have neither seen, nor spoken to, a human being. It is a dreary life, but I find society drearier. I have never been out of my own grounds, & can realise something of the feeling of a prisoner of state of high consideration; the fellow in the iron masque & that sort of thing. One has parks & gardens, & libraries & pictures, & tolerable food, but the human face & voice divine are wanting, & without being miserable it is impossible not to be melancholy.’43 A formidable task awaited him that summer, to sort through Mary Anne’s papers. For a while he avoided it, but by the beginning of August he was ready to begin, allotting two to three hours a day to the process. As he delved into the boxes, he discovered something astonishing. ‘She does not appear to have destroyed a single scrap I ever wrote to her, before or after marriage’, he told Corry, ‘& never to have cut my hair, wh she did every two or three weeks for 33 years, without garnering the harvest.’44 Initially it was a heartbreaking process. ‘She had died for me a 100 times.’45 But as he moved from Mary Anne’s personal correspondence to the wider reaches of her collection, he was struck by an even more extraordinary realisation. She had not just kept letters from him but also every letter he had received of which she was aware. ‘All that we have seen, or I have told you, of the correspondence, is nothing to what has since transpired. I am amazed! I should think at least 5000 letters in addition to all I had examined – & apparently, more important & interesting than any.’ ‘Nothing’, he wrote, ‘seems to have escaped her.’ He found a hundred letters each from Bulwer and Stanley, enough from George Smythe to fill three volumes, the whole of his correspondence with Lady Londonderry. In another box were letters from European men of state he had known: Metternich, Thiers and Brougham. In September he came across the last letter from Count D’Orsay, ‘written in pencil, just before his death, on hearing I was C of E and leader of the H of C’. And there next to it was the last letter too from Lady Blessington, ‘a most interesting one’.46
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Thus, as autumn came, Disraeli found himself surrounded by papers that revealed the story of his life. There were missives from the vanished world of his youth, where he acted the dandy with Bulwer and D’Orsay and took refuge from debt and disease in Lady Blessington’s drawing room, writing tales of Shelley and Byron. There were others that evoked a period when he stood far outside circles of power, building links with European politicians to compensate for his lack of influence at home. And then there were those that told of how a relationship that began as provisional and inauthentic was transformed, over the course of three decades, into something rich and strange. Disraeli never wrote an autobiography, but in Endymion he drew on the memories awakened by Mary Anne’s papers to fashion a narrative based on his own life. ‘I did not marry for love’, acknowledges the novel’s heroine. ‘Though love came, and I brought happiness to one who made me happy.’47 Tolstoy famously suggested that happy families are all alike, and happiness is not a phenomenon of which poets usually sing. But in the story related in the papers Mary Anne collected, there is a hero and a heroine, and elements of fairy tale, and poetry to be found in the everyday romance of ordinary and extraordinary lives. This, finally, was what struck the anonymous author of Mary Anne’s Times obituary as, in contemplating her history, he permitted himself a moment of reflection. ‘We are glad to believe’, he wrote of her marriage, ‘that the romance of real life often begins at the point where it invariably ends in fiction.’