MISS SCOTT
When Miss Scott decided to disappear, she left her acquaintances in no doubt as to the seriousness of her intent. To her particular friends she wrote letters warning that they would never again hear from her; a year and a half after she vanished, her lawyer had no idea what had become of her. Suicide might seem an obvious possibility, but Miss Scott did not disappear alone. She took with her her maid, a nameless Frenchwoman, and together they appear in the historical record only as they vanish, the circumstances of their lives unknown. Of the maid we know nothing except her nationality; of Miss Scott we know only her surname and that she was an unmarried woman of means, the possessor of both a lady’s maid and a lawyer. We know too that something in her life convinced her of the need to erase herself from her world. Did she part company from her maid and seek oblivion on her own? Or did they together make new lives far away from home, framed by new identities and concocted histories? Were they in fact found, their recovery kept secret by scandal-scarred relatives? In death as in life they elude discovery, fading into the past at the moment Miss Scott asserts her right to control her own destiny, and her maid – we presume – follows her.
* * *
It was Sarah Disraeli who reported Miss Scott’s story to Mary Anne, in a letter dating from the autumn of 1859. Sarah was drawn to tales of domestic mystery, such as the saga of the runaway bridegroom she related in 1855. She existed in the shadows, spending much of the year quietly in her rented house in Twickenham, kept company by her maid and her dog. Her brothers came and went, visiting when they needed sympathy or the comfort of familial rituals, writing to her to complain about each other when squabbles suspended direct contact. On her sitting-room wall hung portraits of her parents and a sketch of the library at Bradenham, the space in which she had been her father’s eyes and scribe. Each autumn she left her home to visit the houses of others, passing several weeks with friends in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Wales, and at Hughenden. In these houses she effaced herself in spare beds and strange drawing rooms, slipping into the rhythms of her hosts’ days. In the 1850s the ideal of the selfless woman bound up in her home and her husband assumed new power following the publication of Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House. It gained further momentum as the quiet heroines of Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities were embraced by a Dickens-hungry public. In contrast to these figures, and in keeping with other women whose stories intersect with Mary Anne’s in the 1850s, Sarah had no husband and no permanent home of her own. ‘You know the line “most women have no character at all”’, she wrote to Mary Anne in 1853. ‘That is certainly not your case.’1 It was not her case either, but she lived as if it were, taking care to erase herself from the homes and thoughts of others whenever she believed her presence to be becoming inconvenient.
* * *
In February 1852 Disraeli’s star grew suddenly more luminous when Russell’s ministry fell and the Queen once more invited Stanley (now elevated following his father’s death to the title of Earl of Derby) to form a government. This time there was no possibility that the Conservatives would decline office. Derby managed to put a Cabinet together, although its paucity of experience and talent was so apparent it became known as the ‘Who? Who?’ Cabinet, a nickname derived from the deaf Duke of Wellington’s incredulous reaction to the announcement of appointments in the House of Lords. As had happened the year before, Derby offered Disraeli the position of Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer: when Disraeli demurred on the basis that he had no knowledge of the economy, Derby is reputed to have replied, ‘they give you the figures’.2
Disraeli went to Buckingham Palace to be sworn in as a member of the Privy Council alongside sixteen other appointees also new to government office. ‘I had to grant perpetual audiences yesterday to people who want something’, Sarah told Mary Anne as news of the appointment became public. Her postman asked her to arrange a transfer for him in ‘a very tremulous voice which impressed me strangely with a sense of my extraordinary power’; a friend implored her to persuade Disraeli to read a pamphlet on the state of the currency; a stranger wrote asking for a government job for her husband. Mary Anne herself scribbled a note to the ‘Right Honble The Chancellor of the Exchequer’, suggesting that in success the memory of earlier misery faded. ‘Bless you my darling, your own happy devoted wife, wishes you joy & hopes, you will make as good a Chancellor of the Exchr – as you have been a husband to your affectionate Mary Anne.’3
At Grosvenor Gate dozens of letters arrived congratulating Mary Anne on Disraeli’s success. ‘May you long enjoy your present high position’, ran Dolly Whitmore Jones’s letter from Chastleton, just a hint of mockery underlying her good wishes.4 ‘I can no longer refrain from congratulating you on the present happy event, I hope it is all that Mr Disraeli can wish’, wrote Dorothy Nevill from her new home in the country before adding that her brother needed a job – could Disraeli oblige?5 Charlotte de Rothschild arrived home from Paris and immediately sent a note to say she sympathised with all Mary Anne felt; her sister-in-law Louisa had written of Mary Anne two years earlier that ‘it must be intoxicating to see one we love achieve great things, forcing the unwilling world to give him fame & applause’.6 Even a spurned lover forgot his animus against the ‘Tory novelist’ amid the prospect of a government sinecure. ‘My dear Lady’, wrote Augustus Berkeley, ‘let me heartily congratulate you on the high position you are destined to attain through the brilliant talents of your Husband.’ He did not write for form’s sake, he insisted, but because ‘I must ever feel the deepest interest in all that concerns you.’ Incidentally, ‘if anything should offer to suit a man of moderate fortune & but of moderate intellect’ perhaps she would put in a good word for an old friend? ‘I do not mean exactly now, but something might turn up.’7
The manner in which Mary Anne wore her triumph irritated some among her acquaintance. The Queen met her properly for the first time at a dinner at Court in April 1852 and thought her ‘very vulgar, not so much in appearance, as in her way of speaking’. (After subsequent meetings she softened her position, writing that Mrs Disraeli was ‘wonderful – telling me her husband was “so fond of children & flowers”, & that children were so fond of him & all call him Dizzy!!!’)8 In March Charlotte Guest (who had met her husband John through Mary Anne) wrote that her old friend was making herself ridiculous. ‘They say Mrs Disraeli’s absurdities are beyond everything’, she recorded in a private meditation on the Derby ministry. ‘She called herself “the Prima Donna” of the affair, says she gave away all the appointments herself and that now they all come to her to write their election addresses!’9 If Mary Anne noticed or was hurt by the sneers, she left no record of it. Instead she sent her servants into 11 Downing Street to measure the drawing rooms and loaned Disraeli £479 (to be reimbursed by the Board of Works) for the redecoration and furnishing of his official residence. Mary Anne believed that she and Disraeli would both move to Downing Street once the refurbishments were complete, and in March wrote to Dorothy Nevill of their imminent departure from Grosvenor Gate. But Disraeli resisted relocation, knowing that Derby’s ministry was far from secure and valuing the refuge from Whitehall afforded by Grosvenor Gate. Deprived of a move to administrate, Mary Anne collected poems in praise of the new Chancellor, undaunted by stanzas more concerned with taxation than poetic merit. ‘If Benjamin, can but devise / An equitable Rate, / In Fame unsullied, he will rise, / Main Pillar of the State.’10
Disraeli was dealing with a volume of work that left him little time to do anything but sleep. ‘I am very well’, he told Sarah, ‘but I literally have not time to take my meals.’11 But he was finally in government, in charge of one of the great departments of state, right-hand man to the Prime Minister and at last a nationally important figure. It was his responsibility as Leader of the House of Commons to send reports of its business to the Queen, and for his sovereign he painted the actions of his political opponents with the eye of a novelist. A ‘dull debate’ in April was enlivened by a speech by Russell, ‘statesmanlike, argumentative, terse & playful’.12 His dispatches were partisan (‘the discomfiture of the opposition is complete’), but Victoria was charmed. Her hostility to Disraeli lessened as he wooed her in letters that were courtly, chivalrous, ornately respectful and often funny. ‘Mr Disraeli (alias Dizzy) writes very curious reports to me of the House of Commons proceedings – much in the style of his books’, she told her uncle the King of the Belgians.13 Meanwhile Disraeli entered into Prince Albert’s plans to transform South Kensington into a site of scientific and artistic discovery, and stayed for the first time at Windsor Castle as a Privy Councillor and guest of the Queen.
He no longer had any time to take part in the social season, but Mary Anne flung herself into its balls and visiting rituals, knowing that she was acting as his emissary and husbanding the connections vital to his political success. ‘MAnne however is very gay and ubiquitous’, he told Sarah three weeks after his appointment.14 And in June, ‘MA keeps you au fait to her brilliant campaign in wh: I share very little: sitting 14 or 15 hours a day in H. of C. almost continuously, besides having the cares and labor of govt.’15 That Mary Anne took her responsibilities as wife of the Chancellor seriously is evident in a letter to her from Viscountess Ponsonby. ‘I have just seen a Person who I believe to be the best authority – a Ministers Wife certainly ought to go to every Drawing room – & I was quite right in saying not in the same dress – I write these few lines for fear any thing I might have said yesterday might make you decide on not going.’16 So Mary Anne appeared at Court in dresses of crimson and white satin; in blue skirts and gold lace petticoats almost as wide as she was tall; with feathers, flowers and diamonds in her hair.
To recover a semblance of the Disraelis’ emotional existence during this period of activity and excitement we have to listen closely to the rhythms of their letters and to throwaway remarks. ‘MA. I suppose keeps you a little au fait to our, or rather to her life,’ writes Disraeli to Sarah in June, the balance of his sentence registering the gulf between the spheres of husband and wife. ‘Mine you know by the newspapers. I go nowhere.’17 And then a week later he writes again. ‘I have half promised M.A. to go with her to a ball in the evening at Lady Wiltons. Yr. letters to D.S. are sometimes sent to G. G. None have miscarried – but it is better, if anything important, to send them under cover to T. P. Courtenay Esqr 11. D.S.’18 Here in the things not said are the old moments of tension and hints of marital distance: a promise of company, reluctantly given; a warning about the fallibility of a secret postal system; a reassurance that no letter has been seen by anyone for whom it was not intended; advice about how to ensure communications reach only their recipient. But in October he writes again to Mary Anne in the old style. ‘A very busy morning … I only write this line to tell you I love you.’19 Mary Anne gives no indication of her feelings in her account book, her most intimate record of household affairs, but from the diary of Charlotte Guest we learn that her position in Conservative circles was still isolated even when she appeared within the citadel of Grosvenor Gate, a hostess apparently able to command the company of London. ‘To a wonderful crowd at Mrs Disraeli’s. Everybody was there, especially all the high Tories, but it was really shameful how they turned the poor woman into ridicule in her own house, and almost within her own hearing.’20
Mary Anne is silent too on the entrance into her story of a new object of Disraeli’s affections. Lord Henry Lennox was the second son of the Duke of Richmond, MP for Chichester and, at Disraeli’s instigation, a Lord of the Treasury. He was young, emotional, witty and quite prepared to be Disraeli’s disciple. He gained Disraeli’s confidence and then became the recipient of some strikingly intimate letters. From Hughenden in August Disraeli wrote to Lennox as ‘my beloved’, lamenting their parting. ‘I think very often of my young companion, and miss him sadly, for his presence to me is always a charm, and often a consolation.’21 By the beginning of September stylised regret had given way to expressions of devotion. ‘I cannot let another day close without thanking you for your letter, but I am so tired that I can only tell you that I love you.’22 Two weeks later, the same again: ‘Adieu, my dear Henry, and write to me whenever you can and like: even a line is pleasant from those we love.’23 It would be easy, reading these letters, to overlook the extent to which men in the mid nineteenth century expressed mutual friendship and admiration in language we might now more commonly expect to find in the letters of lovers. Nevertheless it is notable that it was Lennox who received many of the most personal letters Disraeli wrote over the course of 1852 and it was Lennox whose company he sought when he came to London to see his Treasury staff that autumn. ‘I shall be in D. S. tomorrow by two o’clock’, he wrote in mid August. ‘I apprehend that my morning will be very much engaged, but I hope we may dine together, alone.’24
At the end of September Lennox made a ten-day visit to Hughenden, arriving two days after the departure of Lord Stanley, Derby’s son and an undersecretary in Foreign Affairs. The new Lord Stanley was another young man drawn to Disraeli and another recipient of affectionate letters. Derby looked on his heir’s admiration for Disraeli with disquiet, believing that it indicated a lack of familial loyalty as well as the insidious nature of the influence Disraeli wielded over younger members of the government. Derby still did not trust Disraeli, and Disraeli found Derby’s aristocratic withdrawal from political discussions at the end of the parliamentary session an irritant. At Knowsley in Lancashire Derby was the master of a great estate before he was Prime Minister, more occupied in his sporting acres than in his study. ‘Statesmen’, Disraeli wrote to a friend, ‘do not much meddle with politics in September, & my despatches from Knowsley have only taken the shape of haunches of venison.’25 Although his affection for Hughenden was undiminished and he and Mary Anne had discovered a degree of emotional equilibrium there, he nevertheless found the business of Budget preparations more arduous while immured in his woods. ‘I shall be in D. S. on Tuesday morning’, he told Stanley with some relief. ‘Dear D. S. The country is only fit for boys & girls, sportsmen & poets – not for men.’26
Parliament reopened on 4 November, and on 3 December Disraeli presented his Budget to the House of Commons. He was recovering from a bout of influenza and so Mary Anne took him in her carriage to the Palace of Westminster. It was probably on this drive that an incident occurred that was afterwards held up as an example of Mary Anne’s devotion. She is reputed to have trapped her hand in the carriage door and badly injured her fingers but to have kept her injury a secret until Disraeli had left the carriage, in order not to distract him from his speech. The Chancellor was undisturbed, the Budget was presented and Mary Anne’s friends wrote to congratulate her on her husband’s genius. But Disraeli knew that the passage of the Budget through Parliament was fraught with difficulty. The debate opened on 10 December; three days later Disraeli told the Queen that the result was ‘very doubtful.’27 On the final night of the Debate, 16 December, Gladstone rose to attack the Budget and the Chancellor in a speech of brutal brilliance. Gladstone had remained loyal to Peel after the Conservative schism of 1846 and had no love for the Protectionist government. He was Disraeli’s equal in the House of Commons in age, intellect and oratorical power, and in the long term his Budget speech of 1852 marked the beginning of an open rivalry between the two men unlike any political joust before or since. In the short term it sealed the Government’s defeat. The Budget was rejected by the House of Commons, and three days later the Derby ministry resigned. Disraeli returned his seals of office and wrote to the Queen to thank her for her ‘gracious & indulgent kindness’ during ‘an unequal contest’,28 and he and Mary Anne held a dinner party at Grosvenor Gate to console their particular friends, ‘a very few disconsolate ex-officials or partizans’.29 On Gladstone, the new occupant of 11 Downing Street, Disraeli took revenge by refusing to hand over the Chancellor’s robes first worn by Pitt and still on display today at Hughenden. He also dunned Gladstone for repayment for the furniture at Downing Street, ensuring that a dispute that started in the House of Commons quickly became personal. From Twickenham Sarah wrote to Mary Anne. ‘The End! – You had led me to expect, but there is consolation even in defeat – I am told that never was Dis more triumphant never more completely flayed his enemies.’30 Louisa Rothschild, watching like Sarah from the sidelines, wrote in her diary that she pitied Mary Anne. ‘Poor Mrs Disraeli, I feel grieved when I think of what her feelings must be today – But where there is triumph, fame & glory there must sometimes be blights & shadows it is only the obscure who know not the pangs of wounded ambition.’ Yet writing a month later Louisa could not help feeling that there was a lesson to be learnt from the Disraelis’ dejection. Disraeli ‘looked perfectly wretched’ and Mary Anne ‘was also much out of spirits’. ‘Had Disraeli ever wished to carry out any great triumph’, she wrote, ‘or to bring forward some truly useful measures, he would not be so cast down; he would feel that in or out of office he had high, noble duties to perform and that his talents need never be unused – but his own elevation having been his only aim he has nothing now to sweeten the bitter cup of ill success.’31
* * *
For the next seven years the Conservatives remained in opposition. They came close to forming a government in 1855, but Derby declined office (to Disraeli’s chagrin), believing that Palmerston was the only man the people would accept as their leader. The great developments in foreign affairs of the 1850s are therefore tangential to the Disraelis’ story. He had little power in negotiations over the management of the Crimean War between 1853 and 1856, or in shaping an official response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. His political position was never fixed and in the long years of opposition he minded more about returning the Conservatives to power than about pursuing a particular political programme. But he was only Derby’s deputy, and at times he struggled to convince his chief to adopt his strategies for unseating the government. He was increasingly impatient for office but as second-in-command of the Opposition had relatively few outlets through which to channel his energy. He occupied himself in trying to strengthen the position of the Conservative Party by founding a sympathetic newspaper, The Press, to counteract a perceived anti-Conservative bias in the pages of rival papers. He wrote many unsigned articles for The Press but was not its editor, and although he was instrumental in its establishment he deliberately kept news of his involvement as quiet as possible to minimise suggestions that it was merely a Conservative propaganda sheet. His relationship with Derby came under further strain as his influence over Stanley increased and Derby began to doubt his suitability for the role of Leader of the Opposition. Disraeli clung on to his position, knowing as he did that he lacked the support of both his chief and his party. For his part he was sceptical about Derby’s political intelligence. Visiting Knowsley in December 1853, he described it to Mary Anne as ‘a wretched house’ and mourned their parting. ‘I feel separation very much, & am in rather low spirits.’32
Throughout the autumn and winter of 1853–4 Mary Anne was struck by multiple bouts of influenza. At Grosvenor Gate Disraeli coaxed her into seeing a doctor, and once they arrived at Hughenden she seemed to recover, throwing herself into work on the house and garden. But she became ill again, suffering from what Disraeli termed ‘a state of nervous debility’, a phrase that in his letters usually suggests a period of emotional volatility. He felt the lack of her active presence. ‘As she is the soul of my house, managing all my domestic affairs, it is, irrespective of all other considerations, a complete revolution in my life’, he told Lord Londonderry. ‘Everything seems to me to be anarchy. She has not left her sofa for a fortnight, & I have been obliged, almost at the last moment, to put off those friends, whom we hoped to receive here, because she would not credit the necessity of so doing.’33 Over time Mary Anne recovered her health and her equilibrium, but she was sixty-one in 1853, and the physical and emotional effects of serious influenza were no longer setbacks she could easily conquer. In October Disraeli described her as ‘a great invalid’;34 the following January he reported to Lord Londonderry that ‘at one moment, the physicians hardly gave me a hope’.35 She was still unwell in April, but Disraeli was able to write that she did appear to be improving, although he reported that a prevailing east wind made progress slow.36 By the summer she was herself again, but the illnesses left their mark, confronting him with the realisation of how much he needed her and forcing her to acknowledge the reality of the twelve-year gap between them. Two years later, after more winters dominated by illness, she wrote Disraeli a letter to be opened after her death. ‘And now God bless you, and comfort you, my kindest dearest – you have been a perfect husband to me, be put by my side in the same grave. And now farewell my dear Dizzy, do not live alone dearest, someone I earnestly hope you may find as attached to you as your devoted Mary Anne.’37
As Mary Anne grew older she became a more demanding employer, and the progress of staff through both Hughenden and Grosvenor Gate was rapid. A new cook-housekeeper was given a trial in June 1854 but dismissed as ‘very bad’; an under-butler was discharged ‘for improper conduct about 2 women’. A potential coachman failed to secure his position because he had ‘disagreeable manners, & he wanted a new great coat as well as new morn’g suits’. Even if staff did nothing wrong they could still be sent on their way. Mrs Rowles left Mary Anne’s service in 1858 ‘for no fault only she is too young to be competent for housekeeping sweet tempered & dresses beautifully, perfectly honest’.38 Sometimes domestic trouble was sufficiently serious to require the intervention of the nominal master of the house. During one of their absences from Grosvenor Gate the coachman’s wife was arrested for stealing a diamond ring from a neighbour: ‘All this, tho’ not very serious, was very disagreeable’, Disraeli told a friend.39 The affair was both serious and disagreeable for the coachman and his wife: she was sentenced to three months’ hard labour and he was dismissed from Mary Anne’s service ‘for no fault’, she recorded, ‘but from his wife’s misconduct’.40
With friends too Mary Anne’s relationships occasionally became irascible. Edward Bulwer Lytton (the order of his name changed after his mother died in 1843, according to the inheritance arrangements set out in her will) spent an afternoon in the drawing room at Grosvenor Gate in the summer of 1852 lamenting the behaviour of his estranged wife Rosina and raising the question of whether Rosina would live through the winter, since her health was known to be fragile. Several months later he wrote to reprimand Mary Anne for misreporting him in conversations with others. He had not suggested ‘that Lady L’s death was daily expected’, he protested, and she had no right to tell her friends he had. He claimed to have Rosina’s best interests at heart, arguing that if she knew he was aware of her illness ‘it might produce a state of mind at war with the least chance of better emotions left to the mother of my only surviving child’. Could Mary Anne therefore kindly keep their conversations private in future? He thought it ‘impossible’ that she had deliberately sought to make mischief between him and Rosina, but nevertheless demanded that there be no ‘further misrepresentations’ on her part.41
From subsequent letters by Bulwer it is evident that Disraeli issued an invitation to Hughenden as a peace offering that Bulwer first accepted and then declined. Yet although Mary Anne is silent on the subject of Bulwer and his marriage, it is possible in this phase of her life to glean a sense of her independently of Disraeli through two relationships charted in her papers. The first was with a twenty-three-year-old novelist called Elizabeth Sheppard, who sent Disraeli the manuscript of her novel Charles Auchester in May 1853, asking him to help place it with a publisher. Charles Auchester was inspired by Contarini Fleming, and Mary Anne took up Sheppard’s cause, sending the novel to Henry Colburn and then effectively acting as her agent when Colburn proposed an agreement with the firm of Hurst and Blackett. She negotiated more favourable terms for Sheppard, gave her permission to dedicate the novel to Disraeli and dispensed advice about the title. Correspondence from Sheppard herself as well as from Hurst and Blackett demonstrates Mary Anne’s financial acumen and her command of the detail of business agreements throughout the episode. Sheppard’s gratitude was expressed in her letters to Mary Anne from 1853, and Mary Anne’s letters from her friends were full of praise for Charles Auchester, suggesting they understood the pride she took in the work of her latest protégée.
In 1854 Sheppard brought out a second novel, entitled Counterparts, this time dedicated to Mary Anne herself. Shortly afterwards she became convinced that Mary Anne disapproved of her changing publishers. She wrote a frantic letter to Sarah (whom she believed lived with the Disraelis) demanding to know why Mary Anne had not acknowledged her most recent communication. Sarah was taken aback by the letter but consulted Mary Anne and wrote to Sheppard reassuring her of Mary Anne’s approval while warning her against allowing ‘your too susceptible imagination to conjure up shadowy evils’.42 Sheppard failed to heed this warning and instead took to loitering on the street outside Grosvenor Gate in the hope of meeting her patroness. When this failed, she wrote directly imploring Mary Anne to see her. ‘May I ask you not to tell Miss Disraeli that I have asked permission to see you for she will think me actually insane.’43 More agitated letters followed in September 1854 as Sheppard became convinced that Mary Anne was offended by the unauthorised dedication to Counterparts: she wrote, she insisted, not ‘to renew any communication with you’, but in ‘self-defence’.44 Mary Anne was made sufficiently angry by this to instruct one of her servants to send a reply protesting the insinuations of Sheppard’s ‘very extraordinary letter’ and to keep a copy of her reprimand.45 It was the last communication between them.
A second relationship documented in letters dating from the 1850s paints a different picture of Mary Anne. Her correspondent was Sarah Brydges Willyams, a rich widow of Jewish descent who began an epistolary relationship with Disraeli at some point before 1851. In the memorandum Disraeli’s lawyer Philip Rose wrote on Mrs Brydges Willyams after Disraeli’s death he described her as ‘a lady of advanced age [and] of moderate fortune, inherited from her own family, but of great intelligence, and considerable intellectual powers, and … an enthusiastic pride in the race from which she sprung’. This, Rose explained, ‘was the tie that first attracted her to Mr Disraeli, and secured her devoted attachment to him’.46 The correspondence started sporadically, Mrs Brydges Willyams writing to Disraeli of her family history; he responding with copies of his novels. In 1851 she wrote asking him to act as her executor and offering in exchange to make him heir to her estate. In his memorandum Rose described the Disraelis making early visits to Torquay to meet their benefactress, and then how these visits led to friendship between the three and resulted in Mrs Brydges Willyams making a new will in Disraeli’s favour in 1857. Christmas visits to Torquay became a feature of the Disraelis’ year and a ceremony they appear to have anticipated with pleasure. They would stay in a hotel but spend their days with Mrs Brydges Willyams, taking her for drives in Mary Anne’s carriage and dining at her house in the evening.
Throughout his life Disraeli needed sympathetic female correspondents to whom he could write of politics and his thinking without fear of repercussion: Sarah was one such correspondent, as, during the 1830s, were Lady Londonderry and Lady Blessington. From 1851 Sarah Brydges Willyams fulfilled this role and was the recipient of some of Disraeli’s most frank accounts of his activities, his duels with the government and the state of the Conservative Party. Philip Rose was exaggerating when he described their correspondence as ‘a brilliant specimen of social and political gossip written in the freedom of private friendship – such as has been rarely equalled’ (he was not privy to Disraeli’s correspondence with Sarah), but he was right that something about Mrs Brydges Willyams made Disraeli feel he could depend upon her discretion and write of public affairs to her with confidence.
Disraeli’s letters to Sarah Brydges Willyams have received a great deal of attention from his biographers. More rarely commented on are the sixty-three letters Mary Anne sent to Torquay between 1851 and 1863. These letters are unique among her papers because they reveal her epistolary voice over a period of years in letters written to someone other than her husband. They allow us to see her in her own words at parties, at Grosvenor Gate and at Hughenden. Her letters usually focus on the exploits of her husband, the subject most likely to interest Mrs Brydges Willyams, but rather than limit her pen, this focus suggests that Mary Anne was grateful to have the ear of another woman who participated in her devotion to Disraeli but whose age (Mrs Brydges Willyams was in her eighties) lessened the possibility that she might compete successfully for his attentions. Mary Anne oversaw the posting of game from Hughenden and newspapers from London and was quick to thank Mrs Brydges Willyams for the flowers that arrived week after week to adorn her dressing table and scent Disraeli’s dispatch box. ‘Your constant kind & affectionate thoughts of him adds much to the happiness of our lives’,47 she wrote in February 1855. In May she related news of a third invitation to a ball at Court, ‘which proves we are in favour does it not’.48 Two weeks later, in the midst of a frenetic social season, she reported ruefully that ‘my time is employ’d in dressing & undressing’.49 She described preparations for a grand breakfast at Grosvenor Gate and delighted in conveying news of the extremity of new fashions. ‘The dresses this season are so vast & grand looking, such an immense quantity of trimming.’ Mary Anne’s ability to skid between subjects is particularly evident as a sentence describing enormous dresses transmutes into a tale of domestic woe: ‘it is almost impossible to get footmen they are all on the Rail Roads or the army a general complaint Lady Londonderry has only one in her house & cannot get any nor can we’. Evident too in this letter is her complete identification with the Conservative cause. Lady Derby and the Duke of Northumberland were giving weekly parties, presumably, she argued, because ‘they think there is a chance of our coming into office’.50
In August 1856 the Disraelis escaped Conservative Party squabbles and slipped across the Channel to Spa in Belgium, informing no one of their departure. Disraeli told Mrs Brydges Willyams that they deliberately left no forwarding address at Grosvenor Gate so that no letters could follow them. ‘This complete breaking of the perpetual chain of public circumstances & the cares & trouble of business, has perhaps done me as much good, as the waters.’51 Mary Anne also wrote to Mrs Brydges Willyams dwelling on things Disraeli chose not to convey. ‘Dizzy takes these wonderful tonic walks & baths with great perseverance & benefit, I am rejoiced we came here’, she wrote on 20 August. ‘The place is full of gaily dress’d ladies & cavaliers of all nations … The second night after our arrival we were awoke by a blaze of light & beautiful music – a Serenade, with torches, in honour of Dizzy.’52 At the end of the year they travelled abroad for a second time to spend December and January in Paris, where Mary Anne reported that they dined out ‘almost every day, with celebrated people’. The Disraelis themselves were among the celebrated. Disraeli received much ‘homage’,53 according to Mary Anne, while he told his brother James that at dinner at the Tuileries they were accorded a signal distinction. ‘Mary Anne had the honor of sitting on the right hand of our Imperial host, & I the scarcely less distinguished post of being next to the Empress, who was very agreeable, & sparkled almost as much as her necklace of colossal emeralds & diamonds – as large as the precious stones in Aladdin’s cave.’54 Mary Anne took the opportunity to remind the French Emperor of the scolding she had given him on the Thames two decades earlier, and the Empress, hearing the sorry result of her husband’s overconfidence, remarked, ‘just like him’.55
* * *
In February 1853 Mary Anne wrote to a Miss Richardson in Dublin. Miss Richardson claimed to be able to discern character through handwriting, and Mary Anne sent samples of her script and Disraeli’s to put her to the test. Miss Richardson thought that Mary Anne’s slanting hieroglyphics were a product of ‘an ardent quick & versatile mind … little restrained by rule method or discipline’, ‘intuitive insight’, and a nature that was ‘generous & warm-hearted but impulsive hot & excitable’. Their author, she concluded, had ‘more of elastic buoyancy & cleverness than steadiness in pursuit much active energy, much shrewd & quick though careless perception’. The sample of Disraeli’s handwriting, meanwhile, demonstrated ‘a marked individuality’. ‘The mind is aspiring elevated & of disinterested views, & speculative & of many ideas, earnest though vivid impressions what is once grasped here is rarely lost or forgotten.’ Miss Richardson also deduced ‘a generous spirit & by no means an easy temper – can be courteous bland & conciliatory – but is naturally irritable if not obstinate has a resolute will’.56
All the Disraeli siblings were struck by the accuracy of the readings (the possibility that Miss Richardson knew of Disraeli and Mary Anne by repute and saw through Mary Anne’s cloak of anonymity appears to have escaped them). Ralph called at Grosvenor Gate to make copies of the reports for Sarah, and Sarah herself wrote that she felt ‘as if I had been in communication with a witch’.57 ‘I should like to send for mine’, she wrote in a separate letter, ‘but fear if as true as yours it will not be flattering to my self-love.’ It was in this letter that Sarah suggested that Mary Anne made nonsense of the theory that ‘most women have no character at all’ and she was pleased that Miss Richardson recognised this. ‘The lady evidently delights in your hand-writing; it must be a treat when she receives one full of originality among all the common place penmanship of characterless persons.’58
Sarah and Mary Anne shared a fascination with coincidences, disappearances and the uncanny, and the exchange of anecdotes focused on these themes drew them closer together over the course of the 1850s. Disraeli still wrote privately to Sarah, but the pace of his letters had slowed and she was no longer his most important correspondent. Instead the bulk of communication between Twickenham and Grosvenor Gate was carried out via Mary Anne. But while they were fond of each other, the contrast between the two women was absolute. ‘Thank you for your pleasant history of all your gaieties’, Sarah wrote to her sister-in-law in July 1854. ‘I think I enjoy [them] as much as you do, & without any fatigue which I fear you must suffer from – how many costumes you must have put on last Monday!’59 While Mary Anne shone in diamonds and silk dresses, her strength of character noted by strangers and her eccentricities recorded by friends, Sarah’s life continued to be characterised by stillness. Her letters to Mary Anne suggest she was not unhappy, although she felt vulnerable to isolation during the occasional absences of her maid and entirely cut off from her brother’s world of politics and bustle. Yet they also suggest she was self-conscious about her invisibility. When she caught a bad throat infection she was at least able to write that ‘living all by oneself has at least the advantage of curing this complaint – I am already better from not speaking a word from morning till night’.60 After the excitement of Disraeli becoming Chancellor in 1852, meanwhile, she described herself falling ‘from the excess of light into such profound darkness & repose, that I am bewildered’.61
As had been the case for Mary Anne in the 1830s, gossip was one of the ways Sarah sought to bolster her position. It gave her something to say and increased her visibility. The stock gossips of the nineteenth-century novel are often single women with no secure place in their communities, such as Miss Bates in Emma. Such women invest in the narratives of others because their own lives are accorded little social importance. Sarah’s retellings of the stories of the disappeared – Miss Scott, for example, or the runaway bridegroom in Gloucestershire – reflect her experience of being a bit-part player in the lives of others. She appears in her letters as a woman of charisma, wit and intelligence, a rock for her brothers and a foil for her volatile sister-in-law. Her existence is isolated, yet it is also independent, and she remains, at all times, her own mistress. But after the death of her parents, she is turned by her world into Princess Nobody, a woman who operates outside the structures of bourgeois family life and who is therefore rendered invisible by a society that calibrates the value of women according to their domestic position. Princess Nobody is the heroine of Andrew Lang’s 1884 fairy story based on Richard Doyle’s illustrations in Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World (1870). It is composed of fragmentary narratives structured around Doyle’s illustrations, which Lang cut, rearranged and coloured to suit the threads of his fiction. It owes its figuring of Nobody in part to the moment in Little Dorrit when Amy Dorrit tells Maggy the story of the woman who sits alone in her house, tending the shadow of Nobody, an inversion of the Somebody who has passed from her life. Lang’s heroine is a fairy princess who vanishes from her parents’ arms in order to escape marriage to a hideous dwarf. She can only be recovered by a prince, but even to him her real name must remain unknowable. ‘Let us offer to give our daughter for a wife, to any Prince who will only find her and bring her home’, proclaim the distraught fairy king and queen.62 Prince Charming does eventually find Princess Nobody and her tale ends with a quotation from Twelfth Night: ‘Journeys end in lovers meetings, and so do Stories.’63 Lang’s work offers an intriguing lens through which to see the cases (as represented in letters and other sources) of Mary Anne and the Princess Nobodies in her history; women whose biographies do not end in lovers’ meetings like Princess Nobody and the marriage plot of the nineteenth-century novel, but in the more absolute form of erasure experienced by the shadow and the heroine of Amy Dorrit’s fairy tale.
One such woman was another Mrs Disraeli. On 14 August 1856 James Disraeli wrote to Mary Anne to announce his engagement to Isabella Cave, a lady from Gloucestershire with a fortune of £1,000 a year. Isabella was twenty-eight in 1856; James forty-three. ‘You must please tell all to Dis’, he directed Mary Anne. ‘I only came to Town yesterday intending to come to you directly, but my courage failed me.’64 James had good reason to fear his elder brother’s disapproval of the match, since although Miss Cave was from a good family and promised to make a charming wife, James did not promise to make a good husband. In the year of his engagement his housekeeper Mrs Bassett (the ‘Mrs’ an honorific title) gave birth to a daughter, Annie, whom James acknowledged as his. Mrs Bassett went on to have a second daughter by James and lived openly as his mistress.
Sarah, who was unaware of the nature of James’s relationship to Annie and with Mrs Bassett, was hurt by Disraeli’s silent refusal to give his blessing to the marriage to Isabella. She threw herself into arrangements for the wedding, making friends with Isabella and her family and negotiating on James’s behalf the delicate arrangements caused by the Caves’ decision to marry off two of their daughters on the same day. Disraeli and Mary Anne chose not to attend the wedding and left Sarah to placate fellow guests by concocting excuses for their absence. She tried to provoke a response from Disraeli to the news of the engagement and marriage, asking for his views on the match and, when that produced no answer, to effect introductions to smooth the path of the newly married couple. When that request too was ignored she wrote her only surviving angry letter to Disraeli, reprimanding him for the pain his silence caused. ‘A few words of recognition from your pen to James – or at least some kind message to them both through me – would have more than satisfied all’, she insisted. ‘But you have totally ignored our existence in a manner that must lower us in the eyes of those with whom we have been necessarily thrown into contact.’ For James’s bride she had nothing but praise. ‘I feel so strongly her merits, & the advantages which must arise from her judicious character, & her refinement of habits & feelings that perhaps I may be usually sensitive, but I think under any circumstances we should have been surprised as well as grieved at your being the only person from whom we heard not a word of kindness.’65
From Isabella herself there is only one surviving letter, written to Mary Anne in January 1857. ‘I wish I could give you a more favourable answer to your kind inquiries after my health but it seems that Bronchitis is no easy tenant to get rid of when it has once taken up its quarters.’66 Isabella’s complaint was not bronchitis but consumption, or tuberculosis. She became pregnant immediately after her wedding and the strain of the pregnancy caused her health to deteriorate. By the beginning of March she was bedridden and Sarah oversaw the process of moving her from London to St Leonards on the south coast, where it was hoped sea air would restore her. Six weeks later Isabella delivered a premature daughter, who lived only for a day, and on 20 June she herself died, looked after until the end by her sister-in-law. ‘Yesterday was a most oppressive day here, all day an impending thunder-storm’, Sarah wrote of the day of Isabella’s death. ‘She seemed gradually to sink under the weight of the atmosphere – Poor dear James is at this moment quite overwhelmed.’67 Further familial disunity threatened when an incorrect rumour reached Sarah and James that Mary Anne and Disraeli had been seen dancing at a ball five days after Isabella’s death.
Two months after Isabella was buried, Sarah wrote again to Disraeli, asking for advice about the correct wording for the dead woman’s tombstone. ‘Will you please to tell me if the word Marriage … is English? – would not wedded life be too pedantic?… I hope these queries will not trouble you much, but I have to decide, as the words are waited for, & have no head & no one to consult.’68 It was Sarah, not James or the Cave family, who organised Isabella’s tombstone, just as it was Sarah who took on the exhausting task of her care. ‘“Marriage” is a state of union, as well as the act of being united, & good English in the sense you use it’, Disraeli replied. ‘It is preferable to “wedded life”: indeed, it is quite unobjectionable, & the right word.’69
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In 1857 the new Duke of Portland called in the Hughenden loan. Disraeli was out of office and so had no salary; Mrs Brydges Willyams’s promised bequest offered security only for the future. In January Disraeli drew up a confidential schedule of Mary Anne’s income for a moneylender called Henry Padwick, who was instructed not to communicate with Grosvenor Gate ‘except in person’.70 For Padwick he also itemised debts still amounting to over £25,000 in addition to the Hughenden mortgage. Mary Anne’s investments continued to yield an income of about £5,000 a year, and rent from the Hughenden farms brought in an additional £1,200, but for Disraeli the financial necessity of returning to government was acute, particularly since he needed to serve as Chancellor for only a few more months to be awarded a pension of £2,000 a year in perpetuity. His efforts to reform the Conservative Party and make it once again a serious electoral force therefore had personal as well as political impetus. When Palmerston’s government was defeated on a measure in February 1858, both Derby and Disraeli knew they had to accept the task of leading a minority government or risk presenting their party as perpetually unfit for office.
Disraeli returned to the Treasury, able once more to claim a government salary, and in June Edward Bulwer Lytton was offered the Cabinet position of Colonial Secretary. Ministers of State had to stand for re-election when they accepted government office. This was usually a formality, but Rosina Bulwer Lytton, harassed by spies employed by her husband, was determined to disrupt his progress to high office. Rosina’s life in the years following her break with Mary Anne was very hard. Her daughter died and in death became yet another weapon deployed by husband and wife against each other. Rosina was poor but had no way of forcing Bulwer to pay her an allowance, and her animosity towards him consumed her and poisoned her relationships with others. She wrote several novels attacking Bulwer, which he tried to have suppressed, and periodically sought to embarrass him by deluging his house, Parliament and his clubs with letters addressed to ‘Sir Liar Coward Bulwer Lytton’. She and Bulwer were locked into their marriage by mutual antipathy, since although obtaining a divorce became easier after the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857, it was only granted if one party was an innocent victim, and both Rosina and Bulwer had spent too many years blackening each other’s reputations for either to convince the court of their innocence. Bulwer also dreaded the additional publicity divorce would bring. Rosina, in contrast, thrived on drawing attention to his sins. On the day of his re-election she travelled to Hertford from the Taunton hotel where she lived, having arranged in advance for the town to be plastered with placards warning of her arrival. As Bulwer reached the end of his hustings speech, concluding with what one newspaper described as ‘a fervent tribute of admiration to the womanly beauty exhibited in the long line of open carriages’, Rosina pushed her way through the crowds claiming she had come to expose the wrongs perpetrated against her. ‘Recognised as soon as observed’, ran one press report, ‘her voice was nearly drowned out by the shouts of Sir Edward’s supporters, but Sir Edward’s eye caught hers, and his face paled.’ Bulwer turned his back on his wife and disappeared below the hustings platform, leaving Rosina to lecture the gathering on his cowardliness. During her speech she announced she would confront her husband every time he appeared in public, and demanded the use of the town hall to make a public statement on his sins. This was denied and she retired to Taunton, triggering ‘the greatest possible excitement in Hertfordshire’.71
Two weeks after the Hertford election (in which Bulwer was returned unopposed), Rosina came to London for a meeting to discuss her allowance. Waiting for her at the house of Bulwer’s intermediary were the keeper of a lunatic asylum, two nurses and two policemen. Press reports drawn from the testimony of Rosina’s friend Rebecca Ryves, who was with her at the time, reported that Rosina caught a glimpse of Bulwer himself as she was shown a ‘certificate’ of her insanity and constrained to enter the asylum keeper’s carriage. She was taken to a private asylum in Brentford, Essex. ‘The pre arranged programme, evidently is that my statements, are not even to be listened to, much less investigated’, she wrote to Rebecca Ryves in a letter passed by the asylum’s censor. ‘With every other person in the kingdom, – before they can be kidnapped, and incarcerated numerous witnesses are examined where they are well known and have lived as to their conduct, character and capability of marrying their affairs, and the truth or falsehood of the allegations which have made their known enemy, and oppressor vote them insane!!’72
Bulwer aimed to make Rosina vanish from public consciousness by simultaneously halting her campaign of embarrassment and humiliation and removing her as an obstacle to his political career. But although he was able to effect her physical disappearance to a place where she had no rights and no recourse to the law, his actions rebounded against him. Rosina’s circle of female friends went to work on her behalf, advertising her incarceration and ensuring that it was reported widely in the newspapers. The people of Taunton designated themselves her defenders and formed a committee to work for her freedom. ‘There is a firm belief that Lady Lytton is the subject of a horrible and appalling injustice and wrong’, read a long article in the Morning Chronicle. ‘While perfectly sane, she has been shut up in a lunatic asylum merely in order that a woman, who has, no doubt, been a constant cause of annoyance to her husband, may be prevented for ever from giving him similar trouble, or in any way again molesting him.’73 ‘Publicity, is the soul of justice’, Rosina wrote to a friend, quoting Jeremy Bentham.74 Three weeks after entering the asylum, she was released on condition she would go abroad with her son, and to this demand she acceded.
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In one of the press reports of Rosina’s incarceration, there is an indication that Bulwer’s actions had a specific motivation. Her ‘morbid resentments’ were not directed against Bulwer alone, the Manchester Times reported. ‘It is because of the recent development of these against other persons, political as well as private friends of Sir Edward’s, that restraint has been deemed necessary.’75 The political and private friend was Disraeli; Rosina’s allegation was that he and Bulwer had together committed sodomy. ‘It would appear that the tack these wretches are on, is something I said of Disraeli’, she told Rebecca Ryves, ‘which was something as told me by Sir Liar himself.’76 In June, as Rosina’s letter-writing campaign against Bulwer escalated in the run-up to the Hertford election, Disraeli wrote to his friend complaining of her conduct:
I thought you had tamed the tigress of Taunton – but, unhappily, this is not the case.
She is writing letters to your colleagues, & friends, of an atrocious description, such as, I thought, no woman could have penned, accusing you of nameless crimes, at least wh: only can be named by her, & threatening aggravated hostilities.
This is not very pleasant to your friends: I should think, hardly, to yourself.
What can be the explanation? Is it possible, that your agent has been so negligent, or so imprudent, as to leave her allowance in arrear?77
It has been suggested by some commentators that this letter contains in its last paragraph an instruction that Bulwer should buy Rosina’s silence; a supposition supported, runs this line of argument, by an episode in 1864 when both Bulwer and Disraeli attempted to purchase various letters relating to Rosina from a third party.78 That Rosina’s allegations were an embarrassment to Disraeli is without question. She wrote to Queen Victoria outlining her theories, and in December 1858 to Lord Derby. ‘Indeed if you would study the propensities of your loathsome Colonial Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer’, ran her letter to Derby, ‘you would make one King of Sodom, and the other King of Gomorrah, they having run the gauntlet of every vice.’79
The suggestion that Disraeli’s letter of June 1858 contains a veiled instruction to Bulwer to silence Rosina with money is not borne out by its timing. The letter dates from two weeks before the Hertford election and several weeks before coded references to Rosina’s accusation of Disraeli began to appear in the press. Nevertheless the episode raises a question about Disraeli’s relationships with men. The allegations arose during a period when Disraeli was surrounded at Downing Street by young male acolytes, including Henry Lennox, Lord Stanley, and his new secretary Ralph Earle. The admiration of these young men was evidently important to him, even if it complicated his cultivated public persona of domesticated master of the house. But evidence of emotional attachments to young men is not evidence of sexual relationships with them. Moreover, Disraeli’s reliance on the men who were his aides and political supporters was born of circumstance. He led the Conservatives but was still not of them, and he knew he did not have their loyalty. ‘My friendships, tho’ I have to deal with many men, are rare’, he told Stanley in 1857, after the younger man had disappointed him by refusing an invitation. ‘I counted yours among my chief & most enduring possessions, & notwithstanding the many circumstances, public & private, wh: might, for the moment, modify, or diminish, our intimacy, I had such confidence in the depth & stability of your character, that I have ever looked forward to our mutual relations as furnishing, during the remaining years of my life, one of my chief sources of interest in existence.’80
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The social season of 1858 began with festivities to mark the marriage of the Queen’s eldest daughter Princess Victoria to Prince Frederick of Prussia, and ended with the ‘Great Stink’, when hot weather combined with overflowing open sewers to suffocate London in a miasma of malodorous gases. At a ball to celebrate her wedding, Princess Victoria was seen in tears at the prospect of leaving her home; at the Palace of Westminster that summer parliamentarians draped lime-soaked curtains across the windows to protect themselves from the smell. The pressures of office meant that the Disraelis were at Hughenden less than usual and Mary Anne ended the year planting and pruning by torchlight, refusing to let early evenings and dark days interfere with her work. While the style of her dresses and conversations was much criticised, no one disputed Mary Anne’s taste as a gardener, and visitors to Hughenden spoke with one voice in praise of a garden created with passion and skill. In keeping with the ideals of nineteenth-century garden design, she cultivated geometric blocks of colour in her planting, relishing bright patterns and striking effects. Disraeli loved the garden and made a point of displaying the results of Mary Anne’s horticultural talents to his friends. Letters from her to him are rare for this period, but his to her are affectionate, intimate and uncomplicated, a continuation of shared conversations. ‘You gave me the most delicious sandwich I ever tasted – I think I know what it was’, ran one note from Downing Street to Grosvenor Gate. ‘I hope you have had a fine day’s campaign, & will tell me many tales, when we meet, of yr exploits.’81 When he travelled alone to London that autumn to see his staff, her memory accompanied him. ‘As I came in the Cab thro’ all the Hyde Park Streets & squares, I thought of my dear companion in days of trouble & incognito – always faithful & always fond.’82 They spent Christmas in Torquay with Mrs Brydges Willyams and then in January Disraeli went alone to Windsor to dine with the Queen and stay for two days. ‘My dearest Wife’, he wrote in some consternation from the castle, ‘I have not got my right dress. Give James, breeches, drawers, silk stockings & shoes. This is the only time you have tripped since our marriage – &, therefore, I send you, as punishment, only one kiss.’83
In Parliament, the great subject in the session of 1859 was Reform. In February Disraeli commended a Conservative Reform Bill to the House of Commons; in April the measure was defeated. Parliament was dissolved, a general election called and the result left the Conservatives still short of a Commons majority. In June a coalition of Whigs, Liberals, Peelites and Radicals met at Willis’s Rooms on St James’s and there Palmerston and Russell announced their willingness to work with each other and to cease competing for votes and the Premiership. Out of that meeting grew the Liberal Party, a group with more MPs and more power than Derby and Disraeli could hope to muster. In June the government was defeated on a foreign policy bill and the ministry resigned. Disraeli was less disconsolate at being ejected from office than in 1852. He had his pension, and his efforts to reform the Conservative Party had produced a more unified body than that which had taken power the year before. He and Mary Anne retreated to Hughenden and for once he was content to accept the desultory political pace of his social superiors. He sent grouse to Mrs Brydges Willyams and in an accompanying letter wrote that Hughenden offered ‘a most wonderful contrast, after the late scenes of our life – so green, so still, so sweet!’ ‘There is no news’, he continued, ‘the world is so well-bred, that nothing happens when Parliament is not sitting – only, now & then, a revolution or so; perhaps a congress; perhaps a war?’84
At the end of October the Disraelis made their way north to Knowsley to stay with the Earl and Countess of Derby. Disraeli and Derby were due to speak at a great Conservative banquet in Liverpool and Disraeli and Mary Anne were invited to sleep at Knowsley the night before, Mary Anne for the first time. At dinner Derby became impatient with Mary Anne and humiliated her in front of the assembled company. In an account of the incident in his Rambling Recollections, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff described an unnamed Conservative magnate passing the evening ‘in what is called chaffing Mrs Disraeli, for the amusement of his guests, but much to her distress. An eye-witness told me that Mr Disraeli sat perfectly still, and apparently without emotion; but the next day he made the use of some pretext to leave the house, and never returned, though frequently invited, and though he was working in the closest and most continuous manner with the politician in question.’85 Disraeli never again visited Knowsley, even when circumstance would have made it convenient to do so, and the incident was a sign of his loyalty to Mary Anne, a moment when personal loyalty triumphed over political allegiance. But it was a sign too of Mary Anne’s continued struggle to win acceptance among political elites and in the great country houses of England. Stories of her offending starched hostesses abounded and usually focused on her frank references to Disraeli in his bed or in his bath. Such anecdotes categorised her as silly and insignificant and smoothed over the complications of her character and position, rendering her true self invisible despite her apparent visibility. One commentator summarised the view of her held by parts of her acquaintance when he credited Disraeli with carrying into ‘the charmed circle this uncultivated and graceless woman’. Mary Anne’s existence in that circle was never straightforward. The Knowsley episode suggests she was hurt by the disdain with which she was sometimes treated – and that Disraeli would brook no impudence to or about her in his presence.86
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Among the Disraelis’ visitors at Hughenden in the late summer of 1859 was Sarah, who arrived on 24 August and left to visit friends in Wales on 13 September. Earlier that year she had given up her house in Twickenham and moved back to London to take up residence with her brother Ralph at his house in Gloucester Place. She kept up a steady correspondence with Mary Anne and helped with preparations for large Grosvenor Gate dinner parties by drawing up lists of guests and sending out invitations. Autumn travels to the houses of others remained a feature of her life, but in 1859, the year of her fifty-seventh birthday, she felt the strain of her journeying. In September Mary Anne described her as ‘delicate’;87 in October Sarah herself told Mary Anne that she had been very unwell for the past three weeks and that it was a ‘bad end to three months’ health seeking’.88 Winter came on suddenly and from Gloucester Place in November Sarah wrote to Mary Anne that the fog was so dense it was as thick inside the house as out. On 3 December she wrote again inviting Mary Anne and Disraeli to dinner.89 Two days later Disraeli told Mrs Brydges Willyams that Sarah was seriously unwell and Mary Anne was with her; the next day Ralph told Mary Anne that the doctor thought their dinner party should be postponed. Sarah’s symptoms were severe bowel pain and constipation; two days after the cancelled dinner party another doctor suggested that only surgery would save her, and a day later, on 9 December, she made a will leaving all she possessed to be divided equally between her three brothers.
Cancer of the bowel is one possible diagnosis for Sarah’s illness; another is an abscess that burst, triggering infection.90 ‘I have had a sleepless night, & so have you’, Disraeli wrote to Ralph as the seriousness of Sarah’s condition became apparent. ‘Language cannot describe what this sudden, & by me never contemplated, catastrophe has produced on me.’ Sarah was still alive but Disraeli acknowledged that her case was hopeless, speaking of her in the past tense. ‘She was the harbor of refuge in all the storms of my life, & I had hoped she wd. have closed my eyes!’91 By 17 December Sarah was in a terrible state of delirium and agitation, although the sound of Ralph’s voice seemed to calm her. Mary Anne, worn down by long days and nights at her sister-in-law’s bedside, was seized with neuralgia and ordered home by the doctors. Throughout 18 and 19 December both Disraeli and Ralph sent bulletins from Gloucester Place – Sarah was sleeping, had rallied a little and seemed calmer. Disraeli went home to rest for a few hours and Ralph sent another note to Grosvenor Gate. ‘Our dear Sister died this morning a little after 3. She seemed to be in no pain.’92
Disraeli described Sarah to Lady Londonderry as his ‘nearest & dearest relative’. ‘She was a person of great intelligence & charm – one of those persons, who are the soul of a house & the angelic spirit of a family.’93 In 1853 he had described Mary Anne in the same terms to Lord Londonderry, but while the phrase was recycled, his grief was fresh and bitter. ‘She was my first, & ever faithful, friend, & I am quite overwhelmed’, he wrote at the end of the year.94 Mary Anne remained housebound on the orders of her doctor, anxious for the welfare of her husband and brothers-in-law. Ralph had carried the strain of Sarah’s final hours and for him Mary Anne was particularly concerned. Sarah’s funeral took place before Christmas, and on Boxing Day Ralph told Mary Anne that he and James were preparing to walk to the cemetery to visit her grave. Sarah was ‘the soul of the house’ but she had no permanent house of her own; she was the ‘angelic spirit of a family’ but her family gathered about her only at her death. While their loss was raw, her brothers tended her tombstone; today no record of that grave survives and the site of her burial has been lost.
The final letter from Sarah in the Disraelis’ papers is to Mary Anne and dates from the first part of 1859. ‘I hope you will not think this is a great intrusion on your privacy, nor grudge a few moments from your sweet fresh air – I can’t say I have any news to offer as an excuse.’ She had been visited the day before by the wife of a new Conservative MP and so had a snippet of gossip to relate that she knew would please her sister-in-law. Her visitor, she reported, ‘said the Party were in the greatest spirits & that the Chancellor of the Excheqrs speech was the finest thing in the world & surpassed even the expectations of his new followers – My love & thoughts are with you both. God bless you dear Mary Anne and Dis. Your ever affec SD.’95