MRS KENT
In 1833 the peace of Bradenham was disturbed by passion below stairs. The villain of the story was the lady’s maid Mrs Kent, who won Tita’s heart and then abused his devotion. ‘Kent’, as she was known, already had a husband from whom she was estranged, and a son (or a daughter) on whose behalf she planned to entrap Tita into paternal care. To this end she threw herself at him and did her best to persuade him that together they should leave the family’s employment. The D’Israelis rallied round to protect their charge, an innocent giant apparently quite unable to defend himself against the wiles of women. They took him to London, hoping to distract him with a holiday and sightseeing, and dismissed another servant who dared to taunt him. Kent, faced with insuperable opposition from her employers and separated by them from the object of her affections, announced her intention of leaving Bradenham for good. Its inhabitants breathed a collective sigh of relief, and Tita was saved.
* * *
This was the version of the story that Sarah told Disraeli, in a letter written to prepare him for the arrival in London of Tita, Isaac and Maria. To leave Bradenham with Kent ‘would be his ruin’, she insisted. ‘Besides we want him to stay.’1 When Kent handed in her resignation, Sarah was dismissive of her motivation: ‘Of course to be in town with him.’ No one had any interest in Kent’s version of events or in her future as a single woman with a dependent child and no reference. History as related by the D’Israeli family cannot confirm the sex of Kent’s child, or where that child lived while its mother slept in servants’ quarters at Bradenham. The D’Israelis were generous, liberal employers, more interested than many of their contemporaries in the welfare of their staff, but there was no place in their household for an adventuress determined upon the pursuit of a good man. No one had any doubt that Tita was the innocent party or that it was their responsibility to ‘take care’ of him. A man who had faced imprisonment and exile in his years with Byron was cosseted and comforted. A woman who dared to assert her right to an independent emotional existence and to pursue that existence despite the ridicule of others was left to face the world alone.
* * *
In the first weeks of 1837, stories of Byron and Shelley occupied Disraeli’s every moment. An influenza epidemic swept London at the beginning of the year, and in an attempt to escape it Disraeli sought refuge with Byron’s friend and biographer Lady Blessington at Kensington Gore, then slightly removed from the city. ‘People die here by dozens’, he told Sarah from the comfort of Lady Blessington’s drawing room. ‘D’Orsay and myself however defy the disorder with a first rate cook, a generous diet and medicated vapour baths.’2 A first-rate cook and a generous diet were expensive commodities, and Lady Blessington spent her days writing furiously, generating as much income as possible from her pen. Inspired by her example, Disraeli began a new novel entitled Venetia, a fantasy in which the heroes of second-generation Romanticism survive into middle age. His 1834 letter to Lady Blessington enquiring about the identity of Byron’s mistress suggests he had been contemplating a novel about Byron for some time, and proximity to Lady Blessington herself appears to have given him the necessary focus. He lingered at Kensington Gore until mid February, spending the mornings at leisure, the afternoons at work and the evenings engrossed in conversation with his hostess on all things Romantic. When he returned to Bradenham in March, these conversations continued by letter. Surrounded once more by his family, he could not help but compare his father’s painstaking progress with monumental works of scholarship (in this case a history of English literature) with his own endeavours. Work of Isaac’s calibre, he told Lady Blessington, was ‘hewn out of the granite with slow and elaborate strokes. Mine are but plaster of Paris casts, or rather statues of snow that melt as soon as they are fashioned.’3
There is some truth in Disraeli’s characterisation of his fictions, but Venetia stands apart from the other novels of the 1830s, in large part because of the complexity of its engagement with Romanticism. Its heroine Venetia Herbert is a cipher, her story a vehicle for extended portraits of a reimagined Byron and Shelley. Byron is represented in the novel as Lord Cadurcis: a man of genius, celebrated and then spurned by society, a keeper of a bear, a lover of wild Whig women and a suitor of Venetia. Venetia is the daughter of Marmion Herbert, another man of genius with a story based on that of Shelley as well as Byron, who has abandoned his wife and daughter in order to fight against the British in the American Revolution. Venetia’s mother knows from her own history that genius is incompatible with domestic felicity and is determined not to let her daughter repeat her mistakes. She whisks Venetia away to Italy, where, in one of the plot’s many improbable turns, they bump into Marmion Herbert, now living a life of sobriety and virtue. The reunited family move to the Gulf of Spezia, where they find their own version of domestic bliss. Domestic bliss is now possible for the Herberts because Marmion has grown up, repenting of youthful folly to become a respectable man. Disraeli’s image of the reformed Romantic is derived from Lady Blessington’s portrait of Byron, and suggests that he thought the virtuous Byron might be rather a bore. ‘It is perhaps scarcely necessary to remark’, he notes, his narrative voice tinged with regret, ‘that Herbert avoided with the most scrupulous vigilance the slightest allusion to any of those peculiar opinions for which he was, unhappily, too celebrated.’4
Into this model of respectability enter Lord Cadurcis and his heir, dependable cousin George, who sail into the Gulf of Spezia one sunny day on their way back from Greece. Everything is now set for a happy ending. Herbert and Cadurcis become friends, a plot development about the friendship between men that mirrors the conventional romantic plot of Venetia and Cadurcis’s story earlier in the novel. They have long conversations about love, just as Shelley and Byron did at Lake Geneva, and having seen that even poets can reform, Venetia’s mother makes no objection when Cadurcis and Venetia renew their vows. But their location in the Gulf of Spezia is against them. On a hot and ominously calm day, Herbert and Cadurcis take their boat out to sea and, like Shelley before them, are drowned in a sudden storm. With their death, Disraeli’s vision of a mature, responsible Romanticism is cut short. Venetia has to make do with cousin George, even though he is no radical poet. The ending of the novel is a coda, a disappointing finale to a tale of Romanticism reborn. ‘Perhaps the reader’, runs its muted conclusion, ‘will not be surprised that, within a few months, the hands of George, Lord Cadurcis, and Venetia Herbert were joined in the chapel at Cherbury … Peace be with them.’5
The critical consensus about Venetia says that Disraeli kills off his Romantic poets and their associated trails of destruction and misery in order to allow the respectable family unit to triumph. In this analysis, the marriage between Venetia and George Cadurcis represents the triumph of Victorian over Romantic values and is symptomatic of Disraeli’s incipient conservatism. But this reading of the novel ignores the fact that its final marriage plot is a practical afterthought, a consolation rather than the ending of a tale of passion. And the portrait Disraeli paints of the mature Marmion Herbert, a domesticated hybrid of Shelley and Byron, is that of a wrecked man who is compelled to suppress his radical idealism in order to keep his wife happy. Venetia suggests that domestic happiness arises only when genius succumbs to its fate in the Gulf of Spezia, and that this is a poor compromise. Writing to his friend Lady Caroline Maxse at the end of 1837, Disraeli reiterated his unwillingness to exchange his visions of greatness for conjugal joy. ‘I am not married, but any old, ugly and ill-tempered woman may have me tomorrow. I care for no other qualifications. A wretched home makes us enjoy the world, and is the only certain source of general happiness.’6
In Venetia Disraeli wrote a flawed fantasy; in 1837 he lived one. At Kensington Gore D’Orsay and Lady Blessington amassed unpayable debts while pretending their position was unassailable, and while Disraeli took refuge in writing romance and dreamed of a glittering career, his own debts threatened to suffocate him. By the spring of 1837 he was facing ruin. At Bradenham in March he wrote to a creditor begging him not to have him arrested in Buckinghamshire, where he was trying to extract money from Isaac. ‘My arrest at this moment, especially in the county, will entirely put an end to this most vital affair.’7 That creditor, a Mr Collins, heeded his request: another, a Mr Davis, did not. On market day at High Wycombe the local sheriff’s officer received a warrant for Disraeli’s arrest and Mr Davis himself arrived in the town to see him taken. At least it was not magistrates day, Disraeli told his agent William Pyne. ‘I was therefore not “executing justice and maintaining truth” on our bench, where I believe the rebellious tribe of Davis anticipated nabbing me.’ The sheriff’s officer was a friend of Disraeli’s and tipped him off, and his brother James signed a bail bond, averting disaster. ‘What is to be done?’ Disraeli asked Pyne. His debts were so mountainous he could no longer keep track of what he owed, and the threat of Isaac discovering the truth was too much to be borne. Not only would he never help if he knew the full extent of his son’s disgrace, Disraeli insisted, ‘I really believe he never wd. forgive me. Indeed I do not think my family cd. hold up their heads under the infliction.’8
Somehow, Disraeli stumbled through this crisis. Isaac advanced money, Disraeli borrowed more, the angriest of his creditors were temporarily placated. Disraeli had long wanted a seat in Parliament, but now he needed one in order to avoid prison, or at the very least, exile and permanent disgrace. (MPs were immune from arrest for debt.) Early in the morning of 20 June 1837, William IV died and nineteen-year-old Victoria was woken to be told she was Queen. For the final time in British history, the accession of a new monarch triggered a general election, and Disraeli’s hunt for a winnable seat began once more, this time driven by acute financial imperative. He was offered a seat in Devon but turned it down, thinking it not safe enough. He watched developments at Wycombe, hoping against hope that Charles Grey, his opponent from 1832, would decide not to stand. It was not however until 30 June, ten days after the King’s death, that he was able to write to Sarah with his news. ‘My darling’, read his letter. ‘The clouds have at length dispelled, and my prospects seem as bright as the day. At 6 o’ck this evening I start for Maidstone with Wyndham Lewis.’
* * *
Wyndham’s 1837 campaign was already well under way when he invited Disraeli to join him at Maidstone. Buoyed by the strength of his support, the local Conservatives decided to field a second candidate, and a deputation was assembled to travel to London and find someone suitable at the Carlton Club. Mary Anne told John that it was at her instigation that Wyndham nominated Disraeli as his second, and was full of praise for her new candidate, in her view ‘one of the greatest writers and orators of the day’.9 She glossed over the fact that Disraeli was not the campaign’s first choice. Wyndham wanted to find a man rich enough to pay his own election expenses, and local Conservatives were in favour of asking George Dawson to stand. In the end, they decided Dawson was not a sufficiently good speaker, and that their need for an inspiring orator outweighed their desire for additional funds. So in Maidstone Disraeli joined Wyndham and Mary Anne on their canvass, introducing himself to the electorate with a long speech in opposition to the new Poor Law, the legal framework passed by the Whigs in 1834 to abolish outdoor relief and drive the poor into segregated workhouses. He told Sarah that it was ‘the best speech I ever made yet’ and that it allowed him to canvass on his own merits, but he also acknowledged that Wyndham’s ‘influence and munificence is very great’.10 It was a good combination. Wyndham was known in the constituency and was rich enough to purchase support with bribes and gifts, and Disraeli’s powers of persuasion and intellect injected the campaign with promise and energy. Mary Anne adorned herself, the candidates and their carriages with purple ribbons and made friends with every voter she met, spending the canvass, she told John, in a ‘tumult of joy & bustle’. She passed her days driving about the town, ‘playing the amiable to a pitch of distraction’, and she and Disraeli shrieked with laughter when women in the street enveloped Wyndham in embraces to his visible discomfort, heaping blessings on his head as they did so.11
After Disraeli’s death in 1881, the Maidstone and Kent County Standard published the recollections of a man who witnessed the 1837 election. ‘Mr Hodges’, announced the newspaper, ‘retains a boy’s recollection of the scenes on the hustings at Maidstone.’ He remembered Disraeli as an impressive figure; a pale-faced, dark-haired maker of stirring speeches. ‘Mrs Wyndham Lewis stood on the hustings by his side, “covered in purple ribbons”’, the paper continued. ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis was also there, and the trio were familiar to everyone in Maidstone, so constantly were they together in the streets during the election.’12 Another elderly witness, a fierce radical in his youth, wrote to Disraeli in 1880 of his memory of the campaign: ‘I see you and Mr and Mrs Lewis now, as plain as I did on the day when I stood by the hustings … there is no working man in the land who entertains a higher opinion of you as a statesman, orator and writer.’ The old man, one Henry Lott, described himself as Disraeli’s ‘converted opponent and grateful admirer’ and as a ‘poor prophet in my day’, but noted correctly that ‘calling bad names was in vogue then’.13
Lott’s letter points to one aspect of the Maidstone campaign ignored in Mary Anne’s letters to John and Disraeli’s to Sarah: the anti-Semitic insults hurled at Disraeli on the hustings. The mob handed up bacon and ham and his speeches were interrupted by cries of ‘Shylock’. Supporters of his opponent, the radical Colonel Thompson, publicly queried the pronunciation of his name to draw attention to his otherness. But despite the abuse, and thanks in large part to Wyndham’s deep pockets, Disraeli won his election. Wyndham received 728 votes, Disraeli 668 and Colonel Thompson 529. As the votes were tallied, Disraeli scribbled a hasty note to Sarah, relating his triumph through a short table of election results. Two days later Mary Anne wrote John a letter that illuminates the particularly personal nature for her of this latest political success. ‘My own dearest Brother’, she began. ‘You will be delighted to hear that on Thursday the 27th of this month I was safely deliver’d of all my anxieties & produced a pair of twin members with whom I returned to town in triumph on Friday morning.’ At the end of her letter she abandoned such maternal imagery to present herself instead as a political oracle. ‘Mark what I prophecy’, she wrote. ‘Mr Disraeli will, in a very few years, be one of the greatest men of his day – his great talents back’d by his friends Lord Lyndhurst & Lord Chandos with Wyndham’s power to keep him in Parliament will insure him success – They call him my Parliamentary protégé.’14
* * *
A few weeks after the Maidstone victory, Mary Anne paid her first visit to Bradenham, in the company of Disraeli and Wyndham. She described the house and its inhabitants to John: ‘rooms 30 & 40 foot long, plenty of servants, horses dogs & a library full of the rarest books’. Sarah was ‘handsome & talented’, the two younger brothers full of praise for each other, and Isaac was ‘the most loveable perfect old gentlemen I ever met with’. Maria she did not mention. Disraeli himself (‘our political pet’) she compared to the Tory leader, describing him as ‘the finest creature next to Sir R Peel’. Disraeli’s election to Parliament shifted his relationship with Mary Anne, drawing them together in common purpose. She invited him to join her in her box at the opera; he haunted Grosvenor Gate, working on constituency business with Wyndham. To Mary Anne he wrote letters: short notes when he was in London and unable to call; longer epistles during a quiet September at Bradenham. These were letters born partly of friendship but partly from necessity. He owed Wyndham his share of the Maidstone election expenses, and when Wyndham pressed for repayment he had no way of obliging, but Mary Anne remained loyal to him and did her best to persuade Wyndham against calling in the loan.
She retained her faith in her protégé even as debts remained unpaid and his maiden speech in the House of Commons went disastrously awry. Disraeli chose to speak on Irish matters. He was shouted down by Radicals and Irish MPs and received little encouragement from his own side. In the end he was forced to sit down without finishing his speech, although his final cry – ‘I sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me’ – has since been much quoted. Veteran politicians were kind in the moment of humiliation, the Whig Richard Sheil consoling him with the fact that no one would now be unaware of him, and advising him to rebuild his reputation within the Commons with a series of short, dull statements. Disraeli took Sheil’s advice, laying aside at the same time the bright colours and gold chains of the dandy and adopting instead a darker and more statesmanlike mode of dress. After the speech he told Mary Anne that he was comforted by the cheers of Robert Peel, who had already showed some support for his new MP by inviting him to a political dinner at his house. Sarah received a proud report of the invitation: ‘The dinner to day is merely a house dinner of 14: all our great men … It has created some jealousy and surprise; but W[yndham] L[ewis] is delighted and says “Peel has taken him by the hand in the most marked way.”’15 His creditors were thwarted by parliamentary privilege, powerful men asked him to dinner, and he could write to a friend that he lived ‘amidst a tumult of politics, and can scarcely find time even to scrawl this’.16 ‘Amidst a tumult of politics’: he was where he was meant to be.
For Mary Anne too, the autumn and winter of 1837 were filled with good omens. She and Wyndham had a holiday in Paris, and George Dawson published verses in her praise in Lady Blessington’s society journal, The Book of Beauty. Disraeli’s presence in her house and her opera box gave her pleasure, as did her visit to Bradenham. In 1826 she had copied sections of Vivian Grey into her commonplace book; now she urged John to reread it, convinced he would be struck anew by its brilliance.17 In September she received news that John’s regiment was to return to England after a decade in Mauritius. John’s letters about his return were punctuated with requests for a new loan from Wyndham to enable him to purchase a lieutenant colonelcy and so command his regiment, and a secret letter to Mary Anne contained a frantic assessment of his outstanding debts in England. He owed £400 and was in danger of arrest the minute he stepped ashore. ‘For Gods sake’, he told his sister, ‘permit me to land in England with all the happiness I anticipate in seeing you and my mother once again without any burthen on my mind.’18
Mary Anne was jubilant at the thought of John in command of his regiment and went to work to put together the funds, as she had done so many times before. Meanwhile Wyndham, for so long an absent figure in her story, wrote with renewed affection when business parted him from her. Immersed in work in Wales, he complained of being uncomfortable without her, and in a separate letter, of how much he wished she was with him, ‘then I sh’d not be in such a hurry to return – my only comfort is to hear from you’. This second letter also contains an enquiry after George Beauclerk, known to Mary Anne and Wyndham as the ‘Superlative’, suggesting that either Wyndham remained in ignorance of the intensity of Beauclerk’s relationship with his wife, or that he chose not to notice it.19 At Christmas, business took him back to Wales, and he and Mary Anne agreed that she would visit the D’Israelis at Bradenham rather than make a long journey in the depths of winter. ‘I trust you are now much amus’d by the happy family by whom you are surrounded’, he wrote. Their partnership emerges with renewed clarity in these letters as affectionate, mutually supportive and respectful. At Maidstone, Wyndham arranged for beef, bread and beer to be distributed to a thousand families on Christmas Eve, bearing out the truth of Mary Anne’s later insistence that he bought relief as well as votes with his income. And on 1 January 1838 he sent a further letter, containing good wishes to the D’Israelis and an instruction for ‘Dizzy’ to return to London for the start of parliamentary business by the end of the week. For Mary Anne herself, his wife of twenty-three years, he had a particular message. ‘My own darling, I was delighted to receive your letter last night, it made the old year run out in Happiness – I now wish you a happy new year & that we may live together many more years with equal solace to each other as heretofore.’20
* * *
On 14 March 1838, Mary Anne and Wyndham were passing a quiet morning in his library at Grosvenor Gate. Mary Anne’s papers show that he settled a tradesman’s bill and she cut a lock of his hair. Wyndham, who had been feeling mildly unwell for two days, was sitting at his desk when he slumped forward and fell from his chair. A frantic Mary Anne summoned servants and doctors but he was already dead, killed by a heart attack. Friends rallied round and Mary Dawson, living next door once more, came to protect Mary Anne from curious enquiries. She could not prevent a visit from George Beauclerk, paid within two days of Wyndham’s death. Beauclerk reported Mary Anne’s state to Mary Shelley, who replied in a letter full of sympathy for a fellow widow. ‘I think of my own tragedy’, she wrote. ‘Completed so early – so disastrous in its consequences & feel the more for her – though she will not have to struggle as I have done through long years of poverty & solitude.’ Mary Shelley also told Beauclerk she was glad Mary Anne had him to rely on, but used an avowal of her faith in him to strike a note of caution about the need to treat Mary Anne with propriety. ‘I verily believe’, she wrote, perhaps more in hope than expectation, ‘in your distinterestedness.’21
In addition to Beauclerk, Mary Anne had to receive a visit from a deputation of Maidstone Conservatives, who brought her an address of sympathy signed by 1,500 people to which she made a dignified reply, subsequently published in the local newspapers. Her response, read on her behalf by George Dawson, was formal and brief, but since no letters from her have survived for the period immediately following Wyndham’s death, it is the only source we have for her own assessment of her state. (In addition to reading the statement, Dawson may well have helped her craft it.) She spoke of her ‘heavy and most unexpected affliction’ and of her gratitude on hearing praise of her ‘late dear husband’. ‘It is the greatest consolation to me to find that his virtues are justly appreciated’, she continued. ‘I can offer no greater tribute of attachment to his memory than to cherish with the fondest recollection, the sympathy which his kind friends have shewn towards me.’22 Writing to Disraeli in mid May, two months after Wyndham’s death, she made the only other surviving reference to her grief. ‘My heart is too full & anxious & at times to bear up against the misery which almost destroys me the moment I have nothing to do’, she wrote. ‘His perfect sweetness of temper & love, & now I know not where to seek for comfort. My brother, cannot love me as he did you know.’ John’s return to England was now imminent, but without Wyndham, Mary Anne feared the meeting, a fear articulated through a comparison of husbandly and brotherly love. ‘I have never been accustomed even to an impatient word’, she confessed. ‘I know not now, how to bear one, he thought me perfect, my brother must see a thousand faults.’23
On the day of Wyndham’s death Disraeli wrote one dismissive note to his money agent, triggered by the realisation that the Lewis estate would press for quick repayment of his debts, and then, recollecting himself, wrote to Sarah that the news left him ‘overwhelmed and incapable of any exertion’.24 The day after, he saw Mary Anne and wrote again to Sarah, asking her to invite Mary Anne to Bradenham and reporting the result of a snatched conversation with Mary Dawson about Wyndham’s will. The will named Mary Anne and William Price Lewis (Wyndham’s elder brother) as executors, and made William Lewis the heir, but left Mary Anne a life interest in the whole of the estate. Grosvenor Gate was hers for her lifetime, as were dividends from Wyndham’s many investments, which amounted to an income of about £5,000 a year. The house and money were hers unconditionally, including in the event of her remarriage.
William Lewis proved reluctant to run Wyndham’s estate in conjunction with his sister-in-law and she had to stand her ground in order to secure her inheritance. In April she travelled to Wales to negotiate with Lewis and view her property, and eventually reached an agreement with Lewis that she would give up various portions of her interest – chief among them Greenmeadow, which she had no wish to retain – in return for guaranteed annuities. John Guest was appointed to safeguard her interests and make sure the value of the annuity accurately reflected the value of the estate, and she was assisted too by her lawyer, Thomas Loftus. But it was she who hammered out the terms of an agreement with Lewis and she who fought for her house and income. From Bradenham Disraeli wrote with advice about how to proceed. She should not attempt to do too much after the shock and fatigue she had borne, he warned, and she should not sign anything she did not fully understand. He feared she would find his instructions ‘stupid and prosy’ but he considered that circumstances had placed her under his charge. ‘As your brother is not here, and you are a lone lamb in this world, I think it but proper to write this, even at the hazard of boring you.’25 Mary Anne did not dispute Disraeli’s characterisation of her as a ‘lone lamb’, but nor did she need advice about how to conduct her financial affairs, especially not from men – either brothers or friends – who were themselves mired in debt.
* * *
One person reacted so oddly to Wyndham’s death that it marked the end of her friendship with Mary Anne. On 5 April Rosina Lytton Bulwer wrote a letter of condolence that started promisingly: ‘My poor Darling I have been very anxious to know how you are.’ She had been unable to write earlier, she continued, because she had herself been too unhappy, following the death of her spaniel, Fairy. It was a loss, she reported, ‘that I shall not get over – for many a day – my heart literally feels torn up by the roots’.26 Mary Anne was deeply offended by Rosina’s lack of interest in her suffering and by her segue from the loss of a husband to the loss of a dog. When she received the letter, she was with Lady Charlotte Guest and her protégé from next door, Robert Dawson. They were as taken aback at its contents as she was and mentioned it to their friends; before long, gossip about Rosina’s conduct was circulating in the London clubs. When Rosina discovered she was the subject of talk, she wrote again to Mary Anne, this time in an angry letter to ‘Mrs Wyndham Lewis’, accusing her of slander and denying that she had shown more concern for her dog than for her friend’s bereavement. She had written every day to Mary Anne’s maid to ask after her, she protested, until she became so unhappy and bedridden as to be forced to deputise the task to a friend. Besides, she continued, Fairy was ‘the only faithful, true, and disinterested heart I possessed’. She also accused Mary Anne, still recently widowed, of never knowing ‘a days unhappiness, and never a day’s misfortune’.27
Mary Anne responded robustly to Rosina’s accusations. The two had met briefly in Bath when Mary Anne stopped in the city on her journey to Wales in April, and at that point, Mary Anne noted, ‘so far from being unhappy you were the gayest of the gay’. She chided Rosina for refusing to bear her company in Wales when ‘I only wanted gentleness & kindness’ and cited her long support of Rosina in her battle with Bulwer. ‘If we are not to continue as friends’, she warned, ‘remember it is by your own desire.’ But she was also conciliatory. Rosina was her oldest friend outside her family, and she should ‘take me as I do you – as I find you’. ‘We have known each other too many years for either of us to alter & we must be perfectly aware of each others respective faults & virtues.’28
Rosina would not be placated. She accused Mary Anne of blackening her name whenever she heard her praised, and maintained that her apparent gaiety in Bath was a mask assumed to hide a broken heart. And rather than being a support in her battles with Bulwer, she attested, Mary Anne was the cause of her marital misery. ‘One of his chief sources of quarrel with me, was for being so fond of and so much with you and in those days he was wont to lump you with … other disreputables.’29 At this point Mary Anne ceased the correspondence, and her eighteen-year friendship with Rosina came to an end. Rosina was not content to leave matters there. She wrote the dog incident into her 1839 novel, Cheveley, and sent Mary Anne an abusive poem, entitled ‘False Heart Beware’, in which she asked whether she had been well served for enduring Mary Anne’s ‘wayward madness’ for so long.30 When Rosina felt she had been betrayed, she never forgave. Writing to a friend in 1873, the year after Mary Anne’s death, she castigated her ignorance, asserting that when Jonathan Swift came up in conversation, Mary Anne asked if she had ever met him at Rosina’s house. She maintained that Mary Anne and Disraeli were engaged in an affair before Wyndham’s death, and that all that attracted Disraeli to her was her money, since he found her a ‘vulgar illiterate woman’. She also claimed to have arrived at Grosvenor Gate at the moment of Wyndham’s death (she was in fact absent from London at the time) to be greeted by the coroner’s men and a jubilant Mary Anne, flushed with delight at already having accepted an offer from Disraeli. In a scattergun attack she even accused Mary Anne of showing a ‘brutal want of feeling, about her poor brother’, conduct which Rosina found ‘revolting’.31
Rosina’s animus stemmed from more than a dispute about the appropriate levels of mourning for a dog. Disraeli was chief among the ranks of her enemies and was in her eyes a deviant who had engaged in immoral acts with her husband. Mary Anne’s friendship with him, after years of support for Rosina against Bulwer and his friends, represented a shift in allegiance. Despite her protestations of affection for Rosina, Mary Anne could not remain loyal to both her and Disraeli. Disraeli’s dislike of Rosina was almost as active as hers of him, although he had greater command of his pen and his emotions. In the first of her July letters Rosina had warned Mary Anne that her imminent remarriage was freely discussed, making a mockery of her pose as a grieving widow. Mary Anne reacted angrily to the suggestion, but her denial was partial. ‘In the last six weeks my house has been filled by those who have claims on me in every way – I again repeat – I have not yet been a widow five months – no one has had the indelicacy of even hinting marriage.’32 Hints of marriage might be avoided, but the same was not true of a new relationship. Rosina’s actions made it easier for Mary Anne to jettison her, but when the time came to choose between her and Disraeli, there was really no choice at all.
* * *
In the narrative of Mary Anne and Disraeli’s romance, there are two versions of what happened next. Both are fictions. The first version of the story appears in the letters they wrote to one another in the year following Wyndham’s death. This story charts the emergence of love out of mutual grief and tells of passion winning the day to allow for the union of two soulmates. It requires us to take both letter-writers at their word. In the second version of their story, apparent in an alternative reading of the letters, debt, deception, sibling loyalty and other lovers are hidden in order for a marriage of convenience – a marriage crucial for Disraeli’s survival – to take place.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Neither Mary Anne nor Disraeli could reconcile their conception of themselves or each other with the cynicism of a marriage of convenience, and it mattered to them both that they should be, and appear to be, swept up in a grand romance. That romance’s fictional quality gave them an emotional context for their courtship, endowing it with the drama denied them by circumstances. Their correspondence imitated the patterns of epistolary novels such as Frances Burney’s Evelina and Cecilia, in which Mary Anne, as a young woman in the 1800s, first witnessed a literary version of herself. For women like her with limited prospects, literary representations of possible biographical plots were particularly significant because they suggested futures in which reason and passion could be reconciled. The Bennett sisters had to confront the failure of reality to give them the chance to inhabit such plots; Mary Anne’s first marriage also involved serious emotional compromise. Disraeli offered her the chance to be wooed like the heroine of the silver-fork novels he wrote, and she responded in kind. And epistolary and silver-fork novels were not the only literary models for their romance. In their letters to each other, Mary Anne and Disraeli enacted the conventions of the marriage plot of the emergent realist novel, their relationship self-consciously mirroring the emotional arc of the form. The heroines of these novels were not usually forty-seven-year-old widows; nor were their heroes routinely thirty-five-year-old dandies. But for Mary Anne and Disraeli, who derived expressions of emotional authenticity from their reading and writing, it didn’t matter.
* * *
The tone of their letters changed within a few weeks of Wyndham’s death. In April, while Mary Anne was in Wales, Disraeli wrote from Bradenham of his great anxiety about his father’s health. His greatest wish, he confessed, was that Isaac should live to see him settled. It was a clear indication that he was thinking of marriage and that he wanted Mary Anne to know it. Her first surviving letter to him following Wyndham’s death dates from May, written while she was in Bristol helping her mother organise her financial affairs. In a postscript she implicitly chided Disraeli for spending too much time with Lady Londonderry, an old friend and a powerful social figure. He shot back a retort: he was not passing any more time with Lady Londonderry than with anyone else, and in any case, Mary Anne appeared to be so merry in Bristol as to have no time to write to him. She was outraged by the suggestion that she was enjoying herself when she spent her days immersed in a tangle of business and her evenings in a state of exhaustion. But at least while he was with Lady Londonderry – a married woman – he was less likely to think of marrying himself. ‘I hate married men, I would as soon you were dead rather selfish!’33
While Disraeli and Mary Anne staked their claims to each other’s time and loyalty, Mary Anne kept up a separate correspondence with Augustus Berkeley, one of the ‘disreputables’ (Bulwer’s word) of Lord Worcester’s set with whom she had been acquainted in the 1820s. Berkeley wrote to her as ‘Rose’, a name that usually signals a romantic alliance in her correspondence. In April he was full of self-pity as he watched Mary Anne begin a new life. ‘Free, unshackled, your imprisoned passions set loose.’ He warned her that passions could deceive and yoke her into ‘wedding misery’. He was worn down by debt and hardship, but were he ‘untrammelled like thyself, I would enter the lists, Win and wear thee’. Following the pattern set by Rosina, he threatened her with the same degree of ridicule that saw the lady’s maid Kent expelled from Bradenham for daring to follow her heart. ‘The babbling World already gives you to the Tory Novelist.’34 Berkeley wrote to Mary Anne through the summer of 1838 and she replied, but her letters have been lost. His professed disappointment at her taste erupted in a letter in which he invoked a cacophony of Shakespeare and Milton to denigrate her. ‘He who best can play the Fool to amuse the present hour becomes for that hour the God of your idolatry. Continue to play your fantastic tricks; “till Angels scorn to weep.” “To a Nunnery go” – you know the rest.’‡35 Mary Anne annotated this letter ‘Augustus Berkeley 1838’, but it did not mark the end of their acquaintance, and Berkeley still dined intermittently at Grosvenor Gate in 1839, to Disraeli’s chagrin.
Disraeli continued to write to Mary Anne throughout April and May, both before and after her return from Wales. She was on tenterhooks about John, whose arrival in England was expected every day. She nevertheless had time to have Wyndham’s watch chains reset with Disraeli’s seal. The gift was ready by the time of a grand banquet held by Lord Chandos, and Disraeli’s response acknowledged the symbolism of her offering. ‘For the first time in public, I wore your chains. I hope you are not ashamed of your slave.’36 The watch chains were the first of many objects Mary Anne and Disraeli invested with significance in order to realise a concrete expression of passion. Both of them were back in London by the end of June, when the Queen was crowned. Disraeli had planned not to attend the coronation since he did not possess Court dress but was persuaded to change his mind by his brother Ralph, and hastily assembled a borrowed outfit. He gave his coronation medal to Mary Anne. Sarah, the recipient of such objects in the past, had to make do with the reports of Tita, whom the D’Israelis sent to London to witness the coronation on their behalf.
In the weeks before the coronation, Disraeli became involved in a legal dispute relating to allegations of bribery during the Maidstone election. A petition was brought before the Houses of Parliament and the petitioners’ lawyer Charles Austin alleged that corruption at Maidstone was worse than elsewhere; that Disraeli had reneged on the sums he promised as bribes and that his election agent had made additional payments on his behalf. Maidstone was known to be a rotten constituency, and no one doubted that bribery was part of usual election practice there, but Disraeli refused to let the allegations stand. He published a letter in the Morning Post denouncing his detractors and accused Charles Austin and his fellow lawyers of taking money to circulate lies. Austin’s statement he characterised as ‘the blustering artifice of a rhetorical hireling, availing himself of the vile license of a loose-tongued lawyer, not only to make a statement which was false, but to make it with a consciousness of its falsehood’.37 He expected his letter to result in a challenge to a duel; Mary Anne feared the same and was deeply distressed. Austin elected to fight with the law rather than pistols and sued for libel. ‘I wo[ul]d have preferred a more expeditious and cheaper process of settling the business’, Disraeli told Mary Anne, ‘but at any rate it may save you some suffering.’38 Mary Anne paid handsomely for her relief when Disraeli lost his case and she settled the damages and his legal bills.
Disraeli’s sleight of hand, in impugning lawyers rather than answering the charges against him, succeeded in diverting the attention of the public from the allegations of bribery, but not everyone was so easily distracted. George Beauclerk called at Grosvenor Gate and poured poison in Mary Anne’s ear about Disraeli’s conduct. She refused to listen and afterwards Beauclerk wrote mournfully of the injustice of her anger. He had only repeated what he read in the papers, he insisted, and she was only angry because he was not – unlike her – wilfully blind to the faults of those he admired. It was not cruel to assert that Disraeli was poor, he protested, nor to point out that a poor man could hardly afford to buy his election himself. He warned her to stop defending Disraeli publicly, at least to those who were ignorant – unlike him – of the full extent of her partiality. ‘Instead of convincing the world that nothing but Mr Ds superior acquirements and the Good People of Maidstone’s true Patriotism were the Levers by which that Gentleman was forced into his Parliamentary Seat, you will but the more induce them to believe that it was nothing but Mr Wyndham Lewises Influence and money directly or indirectly which accomplished this feat.’39 Beauclerk maintained that he wrote from a position of neutrality, but his sarcasm exposed him. Like Augustus Berkeley, he watched Mary Anne’s blossoming relationship with Disraeli from the sidelines, jealous and angry at the idea of an interloper winning the widow’s fortune but unable to do anything to stop him.
* * *
The relationship between Mary Anne and Disraeli has often been described as unequal: she was too old for him, unable to give him children and far from being his intellectual equal. In this assessment he married her for her money and then repaid her for the affection and security she gave him through gallant loyalty. But the letters from the summer and autumn of 1838 give the lie to the suggestion that she was his for the taking. The Austin libel case shifted the dynamic between them by emphasising Mary Anne’s power. She chose to rescue Disraeli from his legal entanglements, just as she chose, as Wyndham’s executor, not to call in his election debts (she appears to have persuaded William Lewis to follow her lead, and the loan was never repaid). Thereafter the relationship evolved on her terms. She knew Disraeli was an adventurer even though she was ignorant of the depth of the financial precipice on which he stood, and she knew how much, of both money and emotion, she had to give. She knew too that there were other men who wanted to marry her.
By July they were sleeping together, apparently indifferent to gossip. Mary Anne’s jointure was secured to her regardless of her conduct, and she seems, for a brief period, to have let her guard down. Disraeli wrote that he wanted their life as it was to last forever; she noted in her commonplace book that ‘love-making after marriage is the best way of reconciling me to love-making before’.40 He dressed in a hurry at Grosvenor Gate, leaving his watch and seal behind, and had to write afterwards asking her to post them. Sitting in the debating chamber in the House of Commons, he wrote of romantic dreams that he experienced as a latter-day Coleridge, half wakeful. ‘I passed a dreary and tumultuous night, in which your image was never absent from my sight, though acting in distressful and harrassing scenes.’41 He insisted on their happiness, refusing to countenance the idea that it might be illusory. But he acknowledged that there was something unreal about their drama. ‘You know in how strange, and how sweet a mode my days now vanish. Your heart must be my excuse.’42 Writing in 1922, Constance de Rothschild recalled her mother’s memories of the pair at about this time: ‘the little intimate nods and smiles interchanged by the two friends sitting on opposite sides of the table, and the way they drank to one another’s health’. As a young girl her mother had viewed Disraeli as a ‘joyous, fantastic, captivating acquaintance’ while Mary Anne ‘looked and seemed very much older’.43
At the end of August Disraeli made his first determined attempt to translate their affair into a plan for a marriage. He wrote to Sarah that he would not abandon Mary Anne to come to Bradenham but would postpone his visit until she was able to travel with him. He claimed that since Mary Anne was quite alone he could not leave her in solitude; he did not say that it was Mary Anne’s male friends rather than her loneliness that he feared. In the end he went to Bradenham a few days before Mary Anne and wrote immediately to plead for her company. His family, so long his refuge during times of stress, seemed insipid after her ‘vivacious sweetness’,44 and when she arrived the next day, he marked the moment with a sonnet celebrating the sound of her step ‘in my fathers hall’ and the echo of her voice ‘within the chambers of my youth’. ‘Is there not a spell / Of rare enchantment on my raptured life?’ ‘Ah! sweet one’, the poem concluded, ‘once to sigh / That such a face might love me, was a dream / Might well become a poets fantasy; / And on me now, say, can it deign to beam?’45 More ‘poets fantasies’ followed and Mary Anne pronounced all his lines ‘perfect’. Some of his efforts were perhaps more perfect than others; one poem wished he ‘were the flea / That is biting your knee’; another mourned the fact that he was simply ‘poor Diz / With a secondrate phiz / and all I can do / Is to love you most true.’ His verses praised the sight of moonbeams alighting on Mary Anne’s brow, her presence in Bradenham’s ‘glades and sylvan bowers’ and the natural beauty of her voice in which ‘birds warble’. At one point even such stock poetic conceits deserted him and he was reduced, like a love-lorn adolescent, to writing out her name over and over again. ‘My Maryanne Mary-Anne Mary-Anne Mary-Anne Mary-Anne Mary Anne.’46
It is Disraeli’s voice that speaks from September 1838; no documents by Mary Anne for this period have survived. The notes he sent to her room each morning give some idea though of an evolving maternal theme in their relationship, in which Disraeli wrote of himself as Mary Anne’s ‘child’. ‘How is his darling?’ ran one such note. ‘And when will she come and see her child? He is up and in the little room.’47 They came to use ‘child’ interchangeably, both signing themselves in this way when they wanted to enforce a notion of emotional or physical vulnerability, and in September it was Disraeli who needed to convince Mary Anne of how much he loved her and how much he longed for the security of marriage. Writing to his money agent William Pyne at the end of the month, he was confident they would be wed early in the new year. ‘Don’t let this letter be lying about your table’, he warned.48 Marriage offered financial relief both because he believed he could use Mary Anne’s income to pay his debts and because Isaac had indicated he would settle money on him on the occasion of his marriage. In the meantime, he suggested to Pyne, perhaps he should approach his brother James, in charge of the profitable Bradenham farms, to act as security against a further loan.
Disraeli spoke too soon when he announced that the date of his wedding was fixed, and Mary Anne became angry at being pushed into a new marriage less than a year after the death of her husband. She had already settled Disraeli’s legal bills and forgiven his debt, and believed his desire for a dash to the altar to be motivated by mercenary concerns. She also became wary of being accused of impropriety. They quarrelled and she announced her intention of leaving Bradenham immediately. Disraeli was told to make her excuses to Sarah and she would not be softened by letters of apology. He tried to persuade her to stay and then, recognising defeat, asked her not to leave angry. ‘Our last hours should be passed in peace, if not in pleasantness. Pray let us meet, and look happy, even if we be not.’49
The next day Mary Anne was back in London. Disraeli wrote of his misery at her absence: ‘All is dull, silent, spiritless; the charm is broken, the magic has fled!’ He invoked Shakespearean comedy to console himself that ‘the course of true love / never did run smooth’ and tragedy to articulate his premonitions. ‘Alas! alas! mine I fear will be wild and turbulent. May it not terminate in a fatal cataract. Remember! O.’§ ‘O’ stands here for a shape that appears in this letter for the first time and then recurs again and again in their correspondence, a cross between a heart, a rose, a kiss and a root vegetable. It had a particular significance for both Disraeli and Mary Anne, expressing things otherwise unspoken, a symbol of constancy even when their language revealed their thoughts about the future to be irreconcilable. Mary Anne responded in a conciliatory but firm letter in which she instructed Disraeli to prove his love by looking after his physical health by eating properly and walking every day rather than indulging in an orgy of unhealthy self-pity, and also by putting in serious work on his new literary endeavour, a tragic play about wife-murder entitled Alarcos.
Throughout the autumn they played a shadow game, writing of their love but also of exploits calculated to inspire pity, jealousy and fear of a lonely future. From Bradenham Disraeli reported that the dahlias, symbols of their blossoming September amour, had been caught by an early frost, to Tita’s great distress. He described himself in mournful solitude, embracing Mary Anne’s letters a thousand times. Sitting in a hot courtroom on the magistrates’ bench at quarter sessions, he mused on his love and his doubts, drawing again on the dream imagery that pervades his letters to her. ‘I cannot believe, now that we are separated, that all our love is not a romantic dream.’50 Mary Anne, while less self-consciously literary, also invoked the natural world in her account of herself, writing of lying awake during lonely nights at Grosvenor Gate listening to the wind whistling. But her letters also gave every impression of a rejuvenated life in London. She recounted a merry day’s shopping with Mary Dawson, and the news that Lord Charles Churchill was suing Ethel for divorce. She told of amusing dinners at Grosvenor Gate with Augustus Berkeley, and her delight at her new friends, one Captain Neale and one Miles Stapleton. Neale took snuff, a horrid habit, but Mr Stapleton was also writing a tragedy and making excellent progress: was Disraeli doing any work on his? ‘Mr Stapleton called during my walk should he be here again tomorrow, (of course he will) I shall ask him to dine.’ But she missed Disraeli and longed ‘to see your dear kind eyes fixed on me as they always are when I sing & at all times when she is naughty.’51 This swift movement from first to third person is another recurring stylistic trick of both Mary Anne and Disraeli’s letters, and has a distancing, dramatising effect, allowing for the presentation of the self as an epistolary character as well as a living being. ‘Fortunate Berkeley, thrice happy Stapleton, cursed Neale!’ Disraeli replied. ‘What is it to you, whether he takes snuff or not?’ He dashed off a poem of passion denied: ‘Parted, can Love remain?’ ‘Visions of woe arise / Full of gloom as the skies: / I have no hope!’ He ended by drawing the O shape, their ‘mystical mark’, ‘but my hand trembles as I sketch it, and my lips grow pale’.52
Mary Anne was full of disingenuous surprise at this reaction to her news: ‘I thought you would like me to find out bad habits & to feel almost a dislike to all but yourself.’53 Disraeli was only partially consoled, although he insisted he was not jealous. ‘When the eagle leaves you, the vultures return.’54 Peace was restored, but only temporarily. Mary Anne wrote that Mr Stapleton had told her the plot of his play as a great secret. ‘I do not like him so much as I used’, she confided, ‘and I suppose he does not me, naturally – but he calls here much the same.’55 Disraeli fired a letter back, doubting her constancy and prophesying for them fading emotions and estrangement. He prayed that ‘the future may be different to what my prophetic soul paints it’; she retorted with a reproach for his cruelty. Just because she could not come to Bradenham as soon as he asked, ‘you allow the darkest doubts & unkindest thoughts of me to fill your heart’. She attacked him for writing to her in the drawing room, surrounded by his family, rather than in the privacy of his room, a betrayal that ‘unidealized’ his letters. In any case she was ill and deserving of a little sympathy, but since he no longer cared for her she would say goodbye, turning his rhetoric against him. ‘Adieu for to use your own words there can be no love where there is no confidence.’56 Realising he had gone too far, Disraeli sought to explain his actions. ‘Your assurance that there was no one there who interested you and kept you from me, seemed to my jaundiced eye, coldblooded. I conjured up Stapleton like the serpent in Paradise “Whispering in the ear of Eve, familiar toad!” reading to you his damned trajedy (damned I am sure it will be in every sense of the word); and you charmed, interested, and forgetting your captive victim.’57
Disraeli and Mary Anne spun their affair into being through dreams, prophecies and symbols. They wrote of each other and themselves as characters, beings seen externally as well as inhabited. The dramatisation of Mr Stapleton illustrated the dangers of such an approach, as the introduction into their drama of a new player, depicted by one as a confidante and the other as a villain, threatened a disunity in their fictional constructions. Mary Anne represented herself as Disraeli’s child, a lone figure grateful for the support of kind friends. Stapleton consoled her but Disraeli had her heart. Disraeli categorised himself as the victim, compelled by circumstance to stand by while interlopers ensnared his love. Mr Stapleton wrote a character of Mary Anne that implies that he resented Disraeli’s influence on her manner during the period of her courtship. ‘Naturally gifted with a warm heart and ardent disposition, she is capable of sincere affection and even of extraordinary devotion’, he wrote. ‘But from the circumstance of having been constantly in the society of (soi-disant) literary people, and adopting the language they sometimes employ, she gives to the expression of sorrow a harshness which destroys the attractive softness of one in affliction, and often diminishes the full force of a natural thought by the over-strained language in which it is clothed.’58
* * *
Disraeli returned to London in November, drawn by continuing trouble over outstanding Maidstone debts. Storms lifted tiles off the roof at Bradenham and blew in the windows at Grosvenor Gate, allowing both him and Mary Anne to colour their depictions of emotional upheaval by evoking the elements. New attempts to reach an understanding about their future failed; Mary Anne left London and ‘ruffled feelings’ marred their parting.59 She spent November and December with friends, first with the Milner Gibsons at Theberton Hall in Suffolk and then with her girlhood companion Dolly Whitmore Jones at her house in Oxfordshire. Thomas Milner Gibson was an MP who had been at school with Disraeli and, like his schoolfellow, entered Parliament as a Conservative in 1837. He was committed to free trade and by the end of 1838 found himself a marginalised figure in his party. In 1839 he resigned his seat to stand as a Liberal, and thereafter became a driving force in Liberal politics. His wife Arethusa was a notable figure, a hostess who was intimate with men of letters as well as diplomats and politicians. Thackeray was her friend, as was Dickens, who listed her among his own ideal guests, and her drawing room was the scene of some crucial Liberal power-broking in the middle decades of the century. Her friendship with Mary Anne, which appears to date from about this time, was long and loyal. Some eighty letters from her to Mary Anne survive, spanning a thirty-year period of gossip, political reports and news of her children (she had eight, but only four survived infancy, and Mary Anne was a source of support during these multiple bereavements).
The winter of 1838 saw Mary Anne’s first visit to Theberton, from where she wrote to Disraeli at the end of November, promising to behave herself. ‘On my word Dizzy not a word or look of love to me from any one.’60 The company was plentiful, with an agreeable number of unattached lords, officers and untitled gentlemen to flirt away the hours with. She rode out with Arethusa in her carriage, watched as paper fire lanterns were set off from the lawn and enjoyed the bustle of the company as they prepared for balls and tableaux. She was particularly full of praise for Mr Wombwell, an heir to a baronetcy and a fellow guest. ‘I Like Mr Wombwell better every day’, she told Disraeli, two days after her arrival. ‘He has such good useful sense, & an abundance of good humour.’61 After the Gibsons’ ball most of the company left but Mr Wombwell stayed and obligingly drove Mary Anne and a pregnant Arethusa around the surrounding countryside. ‘You have no idea how amusing I find Mr Wombwell’, Mary Anne reported in her next letter. And then, a day later, ‘I continue to find Mr Wombwell agreeable, remarkably so, he is so sweet tempered & does everything to please me.’ She was full of praise too for her host and hostess, in a manner that suggests that while Disraeli and Milner Gibson had known each other from school, they were no longer close. ‘The more you know of the Gibsons the more you will like them’, she wrote. ‘Dizzy we always agree about people dont we.’62
Wise after the Mr Stapleton affair, Disraeli did not make the mistake of attacking Mr Wombwell, but nor did he agree with such praise of a rival. He ignored all references to Mary Anne’s gaieties and wrote instead of his own illness, which struck as soon as he reached Bradenham. He took to his bed and was nursed by Maria, to whom he wrote a rare sonnet of gratitude. In letters to Mary Anne he had figured himself as his lover’s child; now he invoked his mother as his spouse. ‘As becomes a faithful wife, / Art thou a nursing parent; when we flee / The struggling world, and its tumultuous strife, / In thy fond breast a harbour from the sea / Of troubles welcomes us.’63 Maria is an all but absent figure in Disraeli’s story, and his biographers have frequently drawn the connection between his near motherlessness and his attraction to older women. Given the recurrence of images of childhood and maternity in his love letters – both those to and from Mary Anne and also those from Henrietta Sykes – there is a good deal of logic to this reading. But it is nevertheless open to question how much Disraeli experienced Maria as an absent figure. She was always there at Bradenham: not his chief correspondent or confidante, but a steadfast presence nevertheless. When he felt abandoned by Mary Anne and sank into lethargy, he turned back to her, even as he signed himself in letters as Mary Anne’s child. Mary Anne was persuaded by his suffering to arrange a visit to Bradenham, drawn by the prospect of mothering him back to health. ‘I know not why’, she wrote, ‘but I always love you better (if possible) when you are ill.’64 She returned to London, and on 7 December arrived at Maidenhead, where she was met by Disraeli, who ‘cd. not give up the delight of being with her alone at first and immediately’.65
* * *
Mary Anne was accompanied to Theberton by Eliza Gregory, her Cardiff singing pet. Eliza was nineteen or twenty in 1838 and had spent much of her adolescence in and out of Mary Anne’s house. Her position in the Grosvenor Gate household was uneasy. She was not a servant but nor was she an adopted daughter. She was a companion but she was too young and from too modest a background to be admitted into the company kept by her employer. Mary Anne told Disraeli that Eliza could share a bedroom with his mother’s maid as she prepared for a journey to Bradenham, but made clear that despite this she was not to be treated as one of the staff. ‘Eliza does not eat with the servants but her dinner is our luncheon time & she can eat her supper in the housekeepers room & sit in mine except in the evening’s when we might like her to act [or] sing.’66
After Mary Anne’s marriage to Disraeli, Eliza left her service. The two of them evidently parted in anger: a year later she wrote to Mary Anne to confess that ‘I have too strong a recollection of your early kindness to me to be quite happy till I have told you that I regret the circumstances attendant to our separation.’67 She wrote again a few years later to tell Mary Anne that she was happily married to a Mr Riches and had two children. But a decade after the Theberton visit Eliza attempted to blackmail Mary Anne by revealing details of her conduct during this period. She alleged that her employer, along with Arethusa Milner Gibson, had allowed herself to be corrupted by ‘a demoralising set of demireps’ and owed ‘the tiny remnant of respectability’ left to her to Eliza.68 Arethusa dismissed the suggestion that this diatribe was based in fact, but Eliza was one of several people – including, at times, Disraeli – who accused Mary Anne of consorting with rakish men and of damaging her own reputation in the process. When Mary Anne left Bradenham in the third week of December to travel to Chastleton in Oxfordshire, where she was to spend Christmas with the Whitmore Joneses (again in the company of Eliza), the rhetoric of Disraeli’s letters suddenly escalated. On first reading these are the letters of an adventurer attempting to snare an elusive prize, but it is also possible that he may have been more alert to Mary Anne’s equivocal reputation and the threat posed to his plans by her circle of raffish admirers than he was prepared to admit.
Mary Anne arrived at Chastleton on 19 December; three days later Disraeli had not heard from her. He wrote formally, not to ‘sweetheart’ or ‘mine own’, but to ‘dearest Mary-Anne’ to protest at her unaccountable silence. He had her ring as a talisman hung near his heart. Without it ‘I should … think that for the last ten months I had been dreaming.’69 Still he received no letter and so he wrote again, angrily this time. They had parted with love so why did she now ignore him? ‘Above all persons, you who alone occasion our painful separations, are the last who should grudge me the only solace under such circumstances.’ Given that he knew her to be writing other letters (he had received one for her, from her lawyer), her conduct was all the more extraordinary. ‘It does indeed appear to me more than unaccountable, that a person, who can have found time to write to her lawyer or her trustee, and probably to many a corpulent beau, or seedy second rate dandy, should have allowed nearly a week to elapse with[ou]t sending a line to the individual to whom she professes to be devoted.’70 Mary Anne’s reply was robust. He had expressed no anxiety to hear from her, and she would not send letters where they were not wanted. ‘I do not like to send coals to Newcastle. A woman should never be fonder of a man than he is of her except when he is ill or lonely and then you will find me devoted & affectionate.’71 She had nothing to say of the corpulent beaus or the seedy second-rate dandies. Her silence on the subject, in a letter otherwise full of her fellow guests at Chastleton, made two things clear. She was not accountable to Disraeli for her friends and nor would she be lectured by him.
In the face of her defiance he changed tack. Now he wrote once more to ‘My beloved and adored Mary Anne’, and even slid into his letter an oblique apology. He had not meant to be unkind, he insisted, but had merely written under the influence of strong feelings. Thank goodness they did not have many lovers’ quarrels. ‘Truly they are not loveable things, and should only be adopted by those, whose flagging affections require stimulus.’72 Quarrels had proved to be too dangerous for the stimulation of affection, so Disraeli relapsed into theatrical descriptions of his own state, written in a register borrowed from his tragedy Alarcos. On 29 December he wrote that he had passed one of the worst weeks of his life, spent prostrate on the sofa, ‘utterly wretched’. ‘Not a wink, no not a single wink did I sleep last night. I thought all was over between us, that you loved me no more, that I was doomed for ever to have my heart crushed. Indeed it is not exaggeration to say that this morning my life seemed on a thread.’ ‘You must love me’, he concluded. ‘My heart is too full, my head too weak to say anything but I bless and adore you.’ A postscript reinforcing this trailed off mid sentence, the phrase ‘I am so nervous I can…’ followed only by a wobbly line.73
The authenticity of this performance of emotion can be judged by the fact that on the same day Disraeli wrote an elegant and lively note to Lady Blessington, following a ‘charming’ visit by Count D’Orsay to Bradenham.74 (He told Mary Anne that the visit had been a failure, since his plight left him quite unfit to entertain guests.) Mary Anne, however, was convinced. ‘My own very dear Dizzy’, she replied, ‘your sad, kind, dear dear, letter I can only weep over & kiss – I will be with you my love as soon as possible … Your impatience to see me cannot be beyond mine to be clasp’d to your dear faithful heart again.’75 She asked him to make sure they had a sitting room at Bradenham available for their private use, and wrote of her pity for Count D’Orsay, trapped with a grieving host. But she was also puzzled by the extent of his desperation, and full of practical concerns. Her mother’s pension needed attention, and she would be bringing both her mother and Eliza to Bradenham. Also accompanying her would be her brother, now back in England and restored to the bosom of his family.
Disraeli’s reply was a triumph of high-flown eroticism: overwritten, overblown, sexualised and calculated to work Mary Anne, even before her arrival, into a peak of acquiescent anticipation:
My beloved, thrice beloved,
I am mad with love. My passion is frenzy. The prospect of our immediate meeting overwhelms and entrances me. I pass my nights and days in scenes of strange and fascinating rapture. Till I embrace you, I shall not know what calmness is. I write this to beg you to take care to have your hand ungloved, when you arrive, so that you may stand by me, and I may hold and clasp and feel your soft delicious hand, as I help your mother out of the carriage; now mind this, or I shall be insane with disappointment.76
History does not relate whether Mary Anne arrived at Bradenham gloved or ungloved, although given her love of drama and romance it seems likely that in this, at least, she did as she was asked. But when she left for London two weeks later she was still unengaged. Disraeli wrote of his misery at her absence, and his ill health following a late evening with boring visitors, but she was more concerned by her elderly mother’s actual ill health than these imaginary maladies, particularly since they were his own fault. ‘I cannot say I am sorry you have had a bad night’, she wrote at one point, ‘as it was in consequence of taking too much wine. Shame Shame, Dizzy, no human being not even your own dear self could cause me to eat or drink the least thing that disagreed with me.’77 He swallowed the reproach and continued to write of his love, insisting on its strength in every letter. He had promised not to return to London until he had finished Alarcos, but at the end of the month he announced he could no longer bear to be apart from her. She was tired by the effort of caring for her mother and worried about her brother, who lurked at Grosvenor Gate, living at her expense and pleading with her to fund another promotion. ‘I come’, Disraeli announced, ‘to console my soft and precious treasure.’78
Disraeli did not tell Mary Anne of a letter from D’Orsay that acted as the real spur for his return to London. ‘When I read in the beginning of your letter, The Trajedy is finished’, D’Orsay wrote, ‘I thought that you were married, but on reflection I supposed that if it was so, you would have said, The Comedy. How is it that you leave her in London by herself. I saw her driving alone a few days ago in Pall Mall.’79 At a dinner party at Grosvenor Gate on 3 February Disraeli met the Milner Gibsons, George Wombwell and Mr Stapleton, the presence of two of the despised demireps apparently confirming the prescience of D’Orsay’s warning. Four days later, on the 7th, matters between Mary Anne and Disraeli finally erupted. Protestations of passion, devotion and constancy were abandoned as at Grosvenor Gate they had a grand row, the worst of their affair. Disraeli marched out of the house leaving behind a distraught Mary Anne, and all seemed over.
* * *
Four letters from Disraeli to Mary Anne survive from 7 February, as do three notes from her to him. She evidently wrote more letters but these have been lost, so the testimony for that day comes overwhelmingly from him. In the morning she wrote asking him to call; he replied that he would do so as soon as he was dressed. In this first short note he denied that he had allowed his friends to influence his conduct towards her (D’Orsay’s letter notwithstanding) and dismissed the suggestion that she had enemies waiting to condemn her behaviour. They had only themselves to blame for their predicament and he was gloomy about their future. Having sent this missive ahead and given Mary Anne some indication of his state of mind, he then went to Grosvenor Gate, where the row took place. From the letters he sent afterwards, we know that it centred on her persistent refusal to fix a date for their marriage and her belief that he only wished to marry her for her money. She called him a ‘selfish bully’ and told him to get out of her house. He left; she sent a lost note speeding after him in which she appears to have asked him not to be angry and to return; he replied in a coldly furious letter. He was not angry, he insisted, only sorrowful. But he was used to disappointment and would recover from being so bitterly disappointed by her. She had every material thing she needed to make her life delightful (unlike him, ran the unspoken reproach) and would soon forget him. He deployed the dream image of earlier letters, this time to doubt her loyalty. ‘You will find life delightful and full of enjoyment, altho’ not illumined by the love of one, who will soon be to you a dream.’80
If Mary Anne replied to this letter, then that reply too has been lost. Later that evening Disraeli wrote again, either in response to a further communication from her or because he was unable to contain himself. Everyone talked of their marriage as a settled thing except her, he protested. He was placed in absurd situations, forced to turn down offers of the country seats of friends as honeymoon destinations because he did not know if a honeymoon would ever take place. Mary Anne used to talk of their marriage: did she feel she had to do so in order to keep his attention? As a woman of the world she ought to understand that her vacillation placed him in an impossible situation. ‘The continuance of the present state of affairs, could only render you disreputable; me it wo[ul]d render infamous.’ He was already talked of as ‘Mrs Wyndham Lewis’s De Novo’, a reference to a contemporary adventurer dismissed by one journal as a ‘he-prostitute’.81 In any case, did Mary Anne really think she was that much of a matrimonial prize?
I avow when I first made my advances to you, I was influenced by no romantic feelings. My father had long wished me to marry; my settling in life was the implied, tho’ not stipulated, condition of a disposition of his property, which would have been convenient to me. I myself, about to commence a practical career, wished for the solace of a home, and shrunk from all the torturing passions of intrigue. I was not blind to worldly advantages in such an alliance, but I had already proved, that my heart was not to be purchased. I found you in sorrow, and that heart was touched. I found you, as I thought, amiable, tender, and yet acute and gifted with no ordinary mind; one whom I co[ul]d look upon with pride as the partner of my life, who could sympathise with all my projects and feelings, console me in the moments of depression, share my hour of triumph, and work with me for our honor and our happiness.
Now for your fortune: I write the sheer truth. That fortune proved to be much less than I, or the world, imagined. It was, in fact, as far as I was concerned, a fortune which co[ul]d not benefit me in the slightest degree; it was merely a jointure not greater than your station required; enough to maintain yr. establishment and gratify your private tastes. To eat and to sleep in that house, and nominally to call it mine; these could be only objects for a penniless adventurer. Was this an inducement for me to sacrifice my sweet liberty, and that indefinite future, which is one of the charms of existence? No; when months ago I told you one day, that there was only one link between us, I felt that my heart was inextricably engaged to you, and but for that I would have terminated our acquainted. From that moment I devoted to you all the passion of my being. Alas! it has been poured upon the Sand!
So there Mary Anne had it, to read, reread and contemplate in solitude. The early protestations of devotion were a charade, played out for practical benefit. As he discovered her good qualities he discovered too that he had been deceived about her fortune, which was hardly big enough to merit the attentions of a fortune-hunter. And when at last he gave his heart to her she proved an unworthy recipient, quite incapable of recognising or cherishing the extent of his passion.
Having worked himself into a state of blind self-righteousness, Disraeli veered into outright disingenuousness. ‘Had we married’, he told her, ‘not one shilling of your income sho[ul]d have ever been seen by me; neither indirectly or directly, wo[ul]d I have interfered in the management of your affairs. If society justly stigmatises with infamy the hired lover, I shrink with equal disgust from being the paid husband.’ Mary Anne accused him of selfishness; how could she when he was on the point of repaying her the expenses of his libel trial? ‘By heavens, as far as worldly interests are concerned, your alliance could not benefit me.’ And in any case, ‘I wo[ul]d not condescend to be the minion of a princess; and not all the gold of Ophir sho[ul]d ever lead me to the altar. Far different are the qualities which I require in the sweet participator of my existence. My nature demands that my life sho[ul]d be perpetual love.’
If only, he continued, he had listened to the friends who had warned him to be wary in his dealings with her. ‘Coxcomb to suppose that you wo[ul]d conduct yourself to me in a manner different to that in which you have behaved to fifty others!’ Had she enjoyed sporting with his heart? ‘Was there no ignoble prey at hand, that you must degrade a bird of heaven?’ Would not Captain Neale have made a more fitting target? She had broken his spirit and poisoned his life, and he hoped she was satisfied. The world would mock him, but he would be upheld by his self-respect. Finally he concluded:
Farewell. I will not affect to wish you happiness, for it is not in your nature to obtain it. For a few years you may flutter in some frivolous circle, and trifle with some spirits perhaps as false and selfish as your own. But the time will come when you will sigh for any heart that co[ul]d be fond; and despair of one that can be faithful. Then will be the penal hour of retribution – then you will think of me with remorse, admiration and despair – then you will recall to your memory the passionate heart that you have forfeited, and the genius you have betrayed.82
Why did Disraeli write like this to a woman he had spent months wooing? He was angry, and having half convinced himself of the veracity of his feeling, he was hurt by the suggestion that his passion was somehow inauthentic. But he was also frightened. By the beginning of 1839 the Whig government of Lord Melbourne was on the point of collapse; in May Melbourne would resign, prompting the Bedchamber Crisis in which Robert Peel declined office after Queen Victoria refused to replace her Whig ladies-in-waiting. Melbourne was forced to limp on as a powerless Prime Minister, but throughout 1839 the threat of governmental collapse and parliamentary dissolution hung over the country. For Disraeli, dissolution before marriage meant the end of his career and his life in England. He could not stand for re-election with his Maidstone debts unpaid and was only protected from the bailiffs by parliamentary privilege. The moment Parliament was dissolved, he would lose that privilege and would be faced with the prospect of debtors’ prison or permanent European exile. He lied when he said he was not an adventurer and that he had no intention of touching Mary Anne’s money, but he did so because he was terrified. Theatrical passion had failed to win her. Now, intuitively, he tried to shift their dynamic once and for all, spurning her in the unkindest way in order, perversely, to demonstrate the power of his feelings.
Apparently, Mary Anne told Disraeli he was ‘cruel’; in his fourth letter of the day, written late in the evening, he flung the word back at her. ‘I wrote what I felt’, he insisted. ‘I think it must have been true; and I wrote as much for your sake as for mine.’ She had asked him to come to her; he would not, but only because he was ‘wearied, harassed, and exhausted; unfit for any converse’. Although they could never be together, she still had his affection, and he would visit her tomorrow to assure her of it. Again he returned to her accusation of cruelty; truly, he had never meant to be so. But he was full of equivocation, apparently unsure even of the contents of a letter written in the white heat of rage. ‘I am certain I never meant to write a cruel letter; but is it a true one? That is the question; and if you think, that I have expressed the truth, shun that Disraeli whom you perhaps still love.’83
Mary Anne’s response to this letter does survive. She did not write pages of reproach or self-justification; she did not continue their argument. She had none of his literary skill, none of his powers of argument or persuasion. But she wrote directly and powerfully, paving the way for reconciliation. ‘For Gods sake come to me’, she implored. ‘I am ill & almost distracted – I will answer all you wish – I never desired you to leave the house, or implied or thought a word about money I rec[eive]d a most distressing letter & you left me at the moment not knowing from the house. I have now been a widow a year & the world knows not how I was situated with him & you cannot understand my bitter s[h]ame – I often feel at the apparent impropriety of my present position. I am devoted to you.’84
The next morning he wrote that he would call that afternoon, and praised her tenderness. He would be the most unfortunate man should circumstance deprive him ‘of a heart which I believe to be unrivalled for the profundity and the pathos of its affections’.85 In return she wrote, one line only: ‘I am too ill to see any one but yourself to day, oh come.’86 Again he was moved, and the sequence of letters ends with one from him, written as if his long, vitriolic letter had never been. ‘My darling and my life, I will come to you immediately I am dressed. I found her dear note of yesterday and kissed it very much. She is the joy of my life and I wish to be her solace.’87
* * *
The events of 7 and 8 February 1839 left their mark on Disraeli and Mary Anne’s relationship. No longer did she equivocate, the threat of losing him for good having shown her how much she wanted to marry him. He understood this. Gone now were the literary invocations of passion: he had won her and did not need to keep winning her. Before he had pleaded with her; now she deferred to him and asked for expressions of reassurance and affection. His letters became more akin to those of a busy husband to his wife of long standing than those of a lover. There continued to be problems at Grosvenor Gate, where Mary Anne’s mother and brother lingered, fighting with each other and her about Disraeli’s presence in the house. He knew he was at the root of the tensions but remained aloof, secure now in the knowledge that Mary Anne would not be dissuaded from marrying him by disapproving relations. To Sarah, still his chief confidante even in matters of the heart, he described the scene. ‘The broils bet[wee]n mother, brother and dau[ghte]r rage so terribly and continuously, that I hardly know what it will end in.’ It was most inconvenient, since it prevented him from asking Ralph to dine. ‘I suppose my constant presence, tho’ not confessed, is at the bottom of it on their side … I of course never open my mouth, and am always scrupulously polite: but what avails the utmost frigidity of civilisation against a brother in hysterics, and a mother who menaces with a prayer-book!’ Others among Mary Anne’s relations preferred the interloping lover to the censorious brother, but that too caused problems. Uncle William Scrope, Mary Anne’s smartest relation, asked her to dine with Disraeli, specifically excluding John. ‘The mother’, Disraeli told Sarah, ‘is of course frenzied.’88
* * *
John Evans returned to his regiment in the spring of 1839 after a long leave of absence, and in May wrote to thank Mary Anne for purchasing his promotion to colonel. He was now forty-nine and in command of the regiment he had joined at seventeen. On 8 May he was leading his men on a march along the Cheddar Cliffs into Bristol when the young soldier carrying the regimental colour was taken ill. The march halted and John took the colour himself, telling the lines of men that it was the first time he had carried his regimental standard since the Battle of Vimiera, in which he had fought as a volunteer. It was a moment of gallantry recorded in military histories: the old soldier, a fighter from the lost world of the Napoleonic wars, relieving a young man in distress and doing so with dignity and honour. In his private life John let down those around him again and again, and he showed scant regard for Mary Anne’s feelings during decades of unstinting support. But to his fellow soldiers he was a hero and a leader of men.89 That night, after the regiment had arrived in Bristol, he fell ill and travelled to London to stay at Grosvenor Gate while he consulted a doctor. He wrote to Mary Anne to warn her of his arrival, his handwriting faint and unsteady. Eleanor Yate was also staying at Grosvenor Gate, but Mary Anne hid the presence of her ill brother from her mother, afraid that he would cause her anxiety. Two weeks later John was dead.
Disraeli told Sarah that John had been suffering from ‘brain-fever’: the most likely explanation for his sudden decline is that he had malaria, contracted in Mauritius.90 Throughout his illness Eleanor Yate remained ignorant of the fact that her son was dying in an upstairs bedroom, and even after his death Mary Anne contrived to remove her mother from London without telling her that she had been in the same house as John’s body. The strain of concealment and of watching her brother die reduced Mary Anne to a state of collapse, and she and Eleanor took refuge with one of the Clutton sisters in Bedfordshire. Disraeli moved into an empty Grosvenor Gate, dealing with servants, the distribution of John’s possessions and the arrangements for the funeral. His wedding was again postponed, but Mary Anne wrote every day to assure him of her improving health and her confidence in their shared future. With her brother dead and her mother fragile, her emotional dependence on Disraeli grew stronger. She signed herself his ‘devoted grateful Child & Wife’ and called him her ‘darling husband’. He responded calling her his ‘sweet, dear wife’ and dwelling once more on his love. He still wrote of her in the third person, but his premonitions for their life together were direct and grounded. ‘The more I think of Mary-Anne, the more I love her. Now she has gone, I feel quite lone, but I am cheered with the prospect of coming joy, and with the certainty of her admirable qualities.’91 ‘Dizzy I have the most perfect confidence in you’, she responded. ‘Your fond affection & goodness will form the future happiness of my life – My heart is bursting to prove how well I love & how highly I value you.’92
A week after their arrival in Bedfordshire, Mary Anne plucked up the courage to tell her mother the truth about John’s death. According to Mary Anne’s account, Eleanor understood that her daughter had acted out of concern for her, and said only that she was comforted by the knowledge that John had been loved and cared for at the end of his life. With her conscience unburdened, Mary Anne prepared to return to London, even as she and Disraeli continued to exchange promises of love and happy lives. ‘I hope we shall never again part’, he wrote on 11 July, in a letter containing sentiments completely unlike those of the previous winter. The bluster and the storm had gone; what was left feels, even at a historical distance, genuine. ‘I can not pretend that I love you more than I did, but absence has made me feel how necessary you are to my existence.’93 In London they paid a ceremonial call on Lady Blessington. Mary Anne had not met her before, since her company was usually barred to women, but Disraeli wanted his future wife to meet his friend and Mary Anne now acceded to his every request. He wrote to Sarah asking her to send a button from the Bradenham servants’ livery so his crest could be copied for the uniforms of the Grosvenor Gate servants, and lawyers were instructed to draw up a marriage settlement. A date for the ceremony was set: 28 August 1839.
* * *
A cluster of documents shades in the period immediately surrounding the wedding, among them the marriage settlement itself, drawn up on 23 August. As was common for women of substantial property, the settlement designated Mary Anne a ‘femme sole’, meaning that all her property remained hers and did not become Disraeli’s. All interest on the Lewis estate was to be paid to her ‘for her sole separate and peculiar use’, and could not be subject to Disraeli’s ‘debts control interference or engagement’. Importantly, she could dispose of her property as she wished, meaning that she was free to pay Disraeli’s debts if she wished to do so. The protection offered her was in this respect limited, but it did at least indemnify her against liability for his debts and it ensured that she, not he, received her income. The settlement named George Dawson and John Guest as her trustees, both of whom had known her for longer than Disraeli and whose first loyalty was to her.
The marriage settlement lists Mary Anne’s possessions in their entirety, and itemises every single object at Grosvenor Gate, down to the kitchen utensils. None of it was Disraeli’s, and the future he rejected on 7 February, in which he slept and ate in her house and nominally called it his, became on paper a reality. But Mary Anne had already shown generosity with both her house and her money, and Disraeli was in no position to quibble about the disposition of salt cellars. The settlement also lists Mary Anne’s jewellery, in a section entitled ‘Brilliants’, which runs for several pages. A few lines give a sense of its fantastic colour. ‘Brilliant tiara in two parts (weight sixty carat) one large oriental carbuncle set with sixty large brilliants – one garnet bracelet – one pair brilliant earrings emerald suit of a necklace brooch and earrings set with brilliants – One turquoise snap-mounted with brilliants – One pair diamond and turquoise earrings to correspond – one oval brooch composed of small brilliants and rubys.’94 After Wyndham’s death Mary Anne had had to pack her jewellery away, but her marriage to Disraeli allowed her to wear it once more, and for the rest of her life she sparkled in a blaze of precious stones.
That the caution of Mary Anne’s trustees demonstrated by the marriage settlement was justified is clear from a letter Disraeli wrote the day before the wedding to his agent, William Pyne. ‘During the honeymoon and travel, it is possible that letters may be occasionally read’, he warned. ‘I think it right to say that Mrs D. is aware that I am about raising a sum of money, but is ignorant of the method. There will be no harm therefore, if necessary, of your writing to me on the subject generally but avoid details as to the method of security – which are unnecessary.’95 To Mary Anne herself he wrote a poem in which he confessed that he could not rationalise the depth of his love for her. The letter to Pyne suggests this was untrue, but the poem itself reads as an attempt not to deceive but to assure Mary Anne he would make her happy. It suggests too that even while he married from mercenary motivation, he had come to appreciate the qualities others loved in her: spontaneity, a merry disposition, sound judgement and a conversational style as surprising as it was quick:
I love her since her heart is true
And knows no guile;
Her spirit high, yet tender too;
And all the while
Tho’ she may love, her judgment clear
As chrystal mines;
And quick as in the summer sphere
The lightning shines.
I love her wit that artless flows,
Her dulcet voice;
Her face that with expression glows;
I love my choice.96
No letters from Mary Anne survive for this period, but she too made wedding preparations. At Grosvenor Gate the servants were put on board wages for the month of the honeymoon, and she told Mary Dawson of her imminent remarriage. Mary Dawson replied that Mary Anne’s kindness, especially to her children, caused them all to rejoice on her behalf. ‘I have so long considered you as one of my own family’, she wrote, ‘that if you were my Sister I could not be more interested than I am in your welfare.’97
The wedding itself was a small affair. Mary Anne was given away by her uncle William Scrope and the best man was Lord Lyndhurst. The D’Israelis did not leave Bradenham to attend and there were no additional guests, probably in deference to the fact that it was Mary Anne’s second marriage and grand festivities were not appropriate. Disraeli’s journey to the church had a moment of comedy when one of Lord Lyndhurst’s horses was seized with the staggers, but a replacement was found before Mary Anne was handed into the carriage after the ceremony in front of a crowd of onlookers. During the ceremony itself Disraeli was nervous and tried to put the ring on the wrong finger, but Mary Anne was cool and collected, garbed in a ‘travelling dress of exotic brilliancy’.98 From the church they travelled to Tunbridge Wells to begin their honeymoon, and from there both wrote letters to the family at Bradenham. Disraeli sent his first letter to his mother, describing the ceremony, and Mary Anne wrote to Isaac. ‘My only & dear Papa’, ran her epistle. ‘I wish you could see your happy children – We exemplify lifes finest tale – to eat – to drink – to sleep – love & be loved.’99 In Tunbridge Wells she also put her name to a letter to a Maidstone creditor drafted for her by Disraeli, in which she maintained that Wyndham had settled all election expenses and Disraeli had no outstanding debts in the constituency. And in her account book she penned a brief memorandum of the day. ‘Married on the 28th (1839) of August. Lord Lyndhurst & Mr Scrope (my uncle) were present at the ceremony at St Georges Church Hanover Square. dear Dizzy became my Husband.’100
* * *
At Bradenham the wedding was marked with celebrations. The village church bells rang all day and the D’Israelis allowed the servants to hold a dinner and dance. ‘It was half past one the next morning’, Sarah told Disraeli, ‘before we could persuade Tita to dismiss them to their repose.’ Tita himself was overjoyed that the man who had found him an English home finally had a home of his own too. ‘I wish I could do justice to the polyglot wishes for your happiness & that of your fair lady, which Tita has entrusted to me’, wrote Sarah. ‘You well know that however unconveyable they are as sincere as any breathed at Bradenham – & what more can be said for any.’101