MRS BEAUCLERK
Mrs Beauclerk’s husband kept her existence a secret. Her wedding took place in Scotland, away from official registers, and for the first three years of her marriage she lived a double life in the house of her mother, pretending to be an unmarried woman. Only when she became a mother herself did the fiction fracture, compelling her husband to undergo a second wedding in London and thereafter to maintain her and her daughters in an establishment of his own. Captain Beauclerk claimed it was not shame of his wife that prompted his secrecy but rather the prejudices of society. Mrs Beauclerk was neither well-born nor well-off, and he would not risk the wrath of rich and ageing relations. Without their money he held little hope for the future; without his wife he stood, he believed, more chance of securing an income. Whether Mrs Beauclerk was subject to the slights and slanders foretold by her husband when she was finally revealed as his wife we do not know. Whether she was happy, as a bride in the house of her mother or as a mother in the house of her husband, is also a mystery. Her husband boasted of domestic contentment and, once the secret of his marriage was out, of his success in finding a wife who was at least fertile. Life might be monotonous, he told an old friend, but at least it was free from the excitements, mortifications and disappointments that had in the past made him wretched.
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The letter Mary Anne’s former suitor George Beauclerk wrote in 1867 to tell her of his marriage broke decades of silence between them. He wrote that he was in her debt, and sent her £20 in recompense. That this money was meant as a bribe is evident from his request that she use her influence to find him a government job. Such pleas were not unusual in Mary Anne’s correspondence by the 1860s, although few other petitioners were brazen enough to accompany their pleas with money, or to remind her of her inability to have children. Beauclerk wrote that he might have been content had he married without the hope of children, although this seemed unlikely given the bliss fatherhood brought him. Moreover, had he married a woman ‘accustomed to luxuries, carriages, sweets, flowers, and the opera and fine dressing, she never could have sat down in my humble home, content to be the wife of a man … too poor to dress her with the extreme and to me disgusting prevalence of gaiety’.1 He also wished to inform Mary Anne that he had a large packet of letters from her that would prove damaging to both her and Disraeli were they ever to be circulated. Would she care to have them back? To this Mary Anne made no answer. By 1867 her position was immeasurably stronger than that of the unfortunate Mrs Beauclerk and she would have no truck with the threats, bribes and pleas of a man who had once called her ‘Rose’. Her reply was limited to a single sentence: ‘Mrs Disraeli returns the enclosed cheque for 20£ to Capn Beauclerke, because she cannot remember any reason why it should have been sent to her.’2
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The January of 1860 was a long, hard month at Grosvenor Gate. The fog that had invaded Ralph Disraeli’s house as Sarah lay dying lingered on into the new year, and for Mary Anne and Disraeli, kept in London by the impending parliamentary session, it was of little consolation to receive reports that Hughenden was alight in rare winter sun. They gave no political dinners and saw few friends. Some of Disraeli’s critics thought his bereavement provided a useful excuse to avoid a party angry at being ejected from office, but they did not know the centrality of Sarah to his emotional existence. From his study he planned and plotted for the new session, but, he told Derby, he worked with difficulty, ‘living in perpetual fogs, to say nothing of moral vapors’.3 Relations with Derby were strained following Mary Anne’s humiliation at Knowsley, and Disraeli felt the weakness of his parliamentary support. Mary Anne’s voice too is muted during this period, recording only ‘one month no company’ in her account book and, in a letter to Lady Salisbury, that she would ever mourn Sarah’s loss.
But as the fogs receded the Disraelis picked up the threads of the public life in which Sarah had only ever played a minor part. Disraeli and Derby steered their troops through a series of parliamentary manoeuvres designed to unsettle but not unseat the government. They knew the difficulties of holding office while in a minority in the House of Commons and the dangers of political stasis to party strength and unity. The Queen and Prince Albert demanded stable government and Derby believed intuitively in the wisdom of keeping the Liberals in power while the Conservatives rebuilt their strength. Disraeli was less committed to this strategy but had neither the influence nor the will to oppose it. In May Mary Anne told Mrs Brydges Willyams that he was ‘never on better terms with his party’, a message she reiterated in June.4 It was a fiction, and in the same month Disraeli wrote to a party elder threatening to stand down. He was unable to mask his exasperation with rank-and-file MPs who failed to understand the impossibility of governing effectively with a minority of 120: dissolution had been inevitable, he insisted, and the only way to restore Conservative strength. Yet he was left alone to take the blame for a party-wide failure to hold on to power. ‘I have, however, to bear the brunt of disaster, & the measures of the Cabinet, are called my measures, & I am held as alone to blame for their production.’ Only one course was therefore available to him. ‘I must resign a Leadership, which I unwillingly accepted, & to which it is my opinion, that fourteen years of unqualified devotion have not reconciled the party.’5 The prospect of losing their most formidable political presence in the House of Commons prompted the party grandees to reassure Disraeli of their support and convince him to withdraw his resignation, but although he continued at the helm of his party he did so under sufferance, maintained in office by the absence of rivals and despite the mistrust of both troops and commanders.
The truce that Sarah’s death prompted between her brothers proved short-lived. With Ralph, Disraeli exchanged terse letters; with James he had little contact. For both he chastised Ralph. ‘We have never had a line from you since yr visit here – &, of course, we never hear from James. This is not the way to keep the family together – poor darling Sa’s last hope & prayer.’6 At moments of crisis the siblings still came together, and when James was threatened by serious illness in 1863 Disraeli and Mary Anne cut short a visit to Lord and Lady Salisbury at Hatfield in order to rush back to London. But they were uninterested in the rhythms of each other’s lives and even Ralph’s marriage prompted little comment. Ralph was the only one of the Disraeli siblings to have legitimate children of his own, and he named his son Coningsby, hoping to win support for the child from his famous uncle. Yet Disraeli and Mary Anne, who were affectionately interested in the children of their friends, showed little desire to become better acquainted with Ralph’s offspring. ‘Heaven descended is what Mr Disraeli affects to be’, Charlotte de Rothschild wrote to her son in 1866, ‘though London is full of his relations, whose existence he completely ignores.’7
Mary Anne might tell Mrs Brydges Willyams that Disraeli was secure in the affection of his party, but that she recognised the danger in which he stood is evident from the manner in which she marked her re-entry into the social season of 1860. She invited 350 guests to watch a grand review of volunteer troops in Hyde Park from her roof, which she had boarded, carpeted and furnished with chairs and sofas for the occasion. Her style of entertaining was lavish but practical: refreshments were ordered from Gunters at £1 a head and extra staff were employed to prepare and clean up. Her guests for the review of June 1860 were listed in the Morning Post and included diplomats, politicians of both parties, members of the royal family and all the smartest London hostesses. After such parties Mary Anne went through the published lists of her guests with minute attention, crossing off those who had failed to appear, recording excuses received and marking mistakes introduced by newspaper editors. Both she and Disraeli knew that political influence was socially derived, that it originated in dining rooms and on drugget-covered roof tiles as much as in the committee rooms and lobbies of the Houses of Parliament. To be able to command the presence of everyone who mattered in London to your rooftop on a Saturday afternoon in June was therefore a sign that you still held political fortune in your hands, and it acted as a warning to potential rebels of the might of the man they attempted to cross.
The underlying strength of Disraeli’s position was evident too in outward signs of royal approval. Both the Queen and Prince Albert had warmed to him over the course of the 1850s, although they continued to be sceptical about his professed desire to shore up a Liberal government. In January 1861 Mary Anne was invited to dine at Windsor Castle for the first time, to both her and Disraeli’s delight. ‘It is Mrs Disraeli’s first visit to Windsor, & is considered very marked on the part of Her Majesty to the wife of the leader of the Opposition, when many Cabinet Ministers have been asked there witht their wives’, he told Mrs Brydges Willyams.8 Various anecdotes of this evening, however, suggest that Mary Anne was snubbed by a monarch who continued to think her vulgar, and she was not invited to join Disraeli on subsequent overnight visits to Windsor and Osborne. These visits were almost the only occasions on which the Disraelis were apart now, since they came and went to Hughenden together and visited country houses exclusively in one another’s company. Disraeli’s letters during his absences at Court reveal that he shared Mary Anne’s fascination with the minutiae of royal living, and were full of details of the food he was given, the compliments he was paid and the stratagems he employed to protect himself against royal draughts. After the death of Prince Albert from typhus in 1861 plunged the Court into mourning and turned the Queen into a recluse, Disraeli consolidated his sovereign’s approval through the devotion he showed to Albert’s memory. He supported plans for a grand memorial to the Prince in South Kensington and spoke eloquently in the House of Commons about the loss the country had suffered. The Queen responded by sending Disraeli engravings of herself and the Prince, which were hung at Hughenden amongst the portraits of Isaac and Maria, Lady Blessington, D’Orsay and Tita.
Mary Anne was seventy in 1862, Disraeli fifty-eight. They embraced technological developments with the vigour of those half their age. Disraeli was photographed for the first time in 1861 and Mary Anne was an active presence during his session with the photographer, instructing him on what to wear and how to stand, and tidying and arranging the curls she dyed black every few weeks. She would never allow herself to be photographed but was proud of Disraeli’s image, sending the first copy of his photograph to Mrs Brydges Willyams. ‘It is the first & I enjoy sending it to you – his faithful friend – some more will be out in a short time, & in a few weeks the man says all over the world.’9 A few months later they were invited to witness a second portent of a shrinking world at a party hosted by Samuel Gurney, chairman of the London and Provincial District Telegraph Company. ‘Telegraph communications’, promised the invitation, ‘will be interchanged during the evening between England and Egypt, Africa, &c. Tea and Coffee at 9 o’clock. Conversation and Electric Correspondence from 10 to 12 o’clock.’ ‘I enclose you … an American card’, wrote Mary Anne to Mrs Brydges Willyams of the invitation, ‘which I think looks so American.’10
With age and fame came new kinds of scrutiny. When they drove around London in their open carriage, people pointed and waved; at the South Kensington exhibition, Mary Anne reported, Disraeli’s reception was marked. ‘You would be amused at the peoples anxiety to see him … great numbers take off their hats.’11 In March 1863 Disraeli was asked to become a Trustee of the British Museum, which, as Mary Anne noted, was ‘one of our greatest honors, as it is never given but to first rate abilities position charact[er]’.12 Disraeli accepted with an unusual degree of emotion, confessing to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, that there were few distinctions he would value more. ‘My father’, he wrote, ‘was the first man of letters who, much more than half a century ago, began to turn its MS wealth to account; in the illustration of our history; & I have been brought up in a due appreciation of its treasures, & a due reverence for its authorities.’13
Meanwhile putative biographers began to turn their gaze towards him. The first approach came in March 1860 from Francis Espinasse, author of the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, and Disraeli was sufficiently flattered to put together a memorandum of the ‘facts’ relating to the ‘mythic period’ of this history. He would do so, he told Espinasse, in spite of the fact that ‘my life, since I emerged from the crowd, has been passed in a glass-house’.14 In a subsequent letter he wrote a brief account of this ‘mythic period’: his childhood and life before he rose to political prominence. He related the history of his early election contests, the dates on which his novels appeared and the scenes of his foreign adventures. ‘In these days of rapid locomotion, my travels go for nothing’, he acknowledged, ‘but I was in Syria, Asia Minor, & ascended the Nile to Nubia.’ His election in 1847 as MP for Buckinghamshire was the public event that had brought him greatest satisfaction. His marriage, meanwhile, had brought him nothing but ‘complete domestic happiness … which has mainly sustained me in a career of considerable trial’. In contrast to Mary Anne, with her stories of milliners’ shops and factory work, Disraeli took pains to emphasise the grandeur of his wife’s lineage, stressing her connection to the Scrope family of Wiltshire and General Sir James Viney rather than her father’s relatives. Still he professed himself doubtful of the feasibility of Espinasse’s task. ‘Details in contemporary biography’, he warned, ‘can hardly be touched witht. great delicacy & reserve.’15 Later that year he received a second approach, this time from Thomas Kebbel, who would go on to publish a life of Disraeli in 1888. To Kebbel Disraeli was more uncompromising. ‘I am not an admirer of contemporary biography, and I dislike to be the subject of it.’16 Yet he nevertheless agreed to see him and became gradually convinced of the merit of controlling his biographical reputation by engaging with a supporter like Kebbel, who won the privilege of an invitation to Hughenden in 1864.
A further sign of Disraeli’s public status came in the spring of 1863, when both he and Mary Anne were invited to attend the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra of Denmark at the Chapel Royal, Windsor. They owed their invitation to Lord Palmerston, who asked the Queen to extend the honour to them as well as Lord and Lady Derby, but they did not know this. ‘The chapel being very limited, the invitations are still more so’, Disraeli told Mrs Brydges Willyams. Mary Anne’s inclusion (‘by the Queens particular command’, he insisted) prompted howls of outrage from her rivals.17 ‘There is no language, wh: can describe the rage, envy & indignation of the great world’, ran his account of the wedding. ‘The Duchess of Malboro’ went into hysterics of mortification at the sight of my wife, who was on terms of considerable intimacy with her, & said it was really shameful … & as for the Duchess of Manchester, who had been Mistress of the Robes in Lord Derby’s administration, she positively passed me for the season witht recognition.’18 Mary Anne took the honour of her invitation seriously, writing to the Marchioness of Ely for advice about the protocol of what to wear. ‘We wear no train but feathers and lappetts, not long however & not many feathers’, came the reply, which suggests that Lady Ely was anxious at the prospect of Mary Anne appearing in her usual jewelled and feathered splendour.19 The wedding itself was an occasion to remember. The Queen, still in deep mourning, sat alone high above the crowds, playing no part in the pageantry. Disraeli thought her distance added an additional layer of majesty to the proceedings. ‘The presence of the imperial & widowed mother, in her Gothic pavilion, watching everything with intense interest, seeing everything, tho’ herself almost unseen, was deeply dramatic, & even affecting.’20 The ceremony was followed by a wedding breakfast at Windsor Castle, after which there was an unedifying scramble for places on trains back to London. Ladies in diamond necklaces were mobbed at the station and in the melee the French ambassador’s wife was separated from her husband. ‘I rescued her’, Disraeli wrote, ‘& got her into a railway carriage with my wife & some other grand dames, who had lost their husbands – I think I had to sit on my wife’s lap.’21
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In Torquay Sarah Brydges Willyams devoured accounts of the royal wedding and the glittering social season that followed as the Prince of Wales and his new Princess established their own court, alleviating the gloom emanating from the Queen’s household. Mrs Brydges Willyams was ninety-three in 1863 and she lived for the Disraelis’ letters and their annual visits. As Disraeli became ever more prominent, both he and Mary Anne developed new appreciation for the peace Torquay offered. Mrs Brydges Willyams made no political demands and was disconnected from the tangled world in which friends were colleagues and everyone wanted something from somebody else. As in the 1850s, Mary Anne’s voice during this period of her life comes through strongly in the letters she sent to Torquay. A story doing the rounds in London she describes as ‘unmitigated nonsense’; a political dinner at Grosvenor Gate ‘gives me so much trouble, & makes the house so uncomfortable, as everything must be moved to make room for 40 people’. At Hughenden the ‘owls make such a noise as soon as it gets dark, you might hear them at dear Mount Braddon’. Mrs Brydges Willyams is always ‘my dear’ to Mary Anne and her desire for her company is consistently expressed. ‘How much I wish you could be here & with us’, she writes in February 1862. ‘Say yes & I will take such care of you, as much as I do of Dizzy.’22
Torquay offered one kind of respite from political conversations and the cares of housekeeping, but Hughenden offered something more – a space for peace and regeneration, even when the house itself was anything but peaceful. In 1860 Mary Anne embarked on an ambitious programme of works in the grounds, planting forests and making walks and a new Italian garden. In 1863 she turned her attention to the house, reworking its exterior and interior completely. In October 1860 she told Mrs Brydges Willyams that she was overseeing the creation of two walks and a trout stream and planting 600 evergreens; a year later she reported having ‘eight or ten navvies to superintend, my favourite occupation you know’.23 While only the garden was in chaos the Disraelis could still entertain at Hughenden, and in September 1862 Disraeli reported that they were preparing to receive fourteen overnight visitors in ten days. ‘Its as hard work as having a playhouse – or keeping an Inn.’24 When Mary Anne’s workmen invaded the house, Disraeli found even his sanctuaries of study and library difficult to maintain, but he admired the romantic aesthetic of her scheme. At the end of September 1863 he was able to write that ‘we have realised a romance we had been many years meditating: we have restored the House to what it was before the civil wars, & we have made a garden of terraces, in wh: cavaliers might roam, & saunter, with their ladye-loves!’25 He was grateful too for the pleasure the work brought Mary Anne, writing to a colleague that ‘she has been very much amused, wh: is something for your money’.26
As Hughenden underwent its transformation into the house of the Disraelis’ dreams, they settled with renewed security into the roles of country landowners they had assumed fifteen years earlier. Mary Anne hosted fetes for village children; Disraeli oversaw the building of a new school. They installed cygnets on the terrace, named Hero and Leander. They were present at harvest homes, which had become, Disraeli noted, ‘a novel feature, as now practiced, of our English country life’. He was still not quite of the country and so could observe its rituals with an anthropological interest. Instead of individual farmers holding boozy suppers for their workers to celebrate the end of the harvest, he told Mrs Brydges Willyams, all the farmers of the parish were bringing their labourers to massed tents with banners and bands before processing to the church to give thanks, each man with a stalk of corn in his buttonhole. ‘The Clergy are at the bottom of this movement: it connects the harvest with religion, & the Church. Even a dissenting farmer can scarcely refuse to walk in the procession on such an occasion. Unconsciously, all are reviving pagan rites, & restoring the Dionysian festivals.’27 After the church service marking the first harvest home, the procession marched up the hill to the manor house. Mary Anne greeted them from a window before retiring with the revellers to the tent for dinner, where toasts were drunk to the health of the royal family and Disraeli.
Secure in his role in the community around Hughenden, Disraeli finally fell in love with the house. Memories of the periods in the 1850s when it seemed to offer only bitterness, isolation and unhappiness faded as it came to symbolise the distance he had travelled from the uncertain days of the 1830s. Constance de Rothschild visited Hughenden as a child and remembered the intensity of Disraeli’s pleasure in his grounds as well as the strange incongruity of his country costume. ‘How he loved the place!’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘And how he tried to act up to the character he had imposed upon himself, that of the country gentleman! for, dressed in his velveteen coat, his leather leggings, his soft felt hat, and carrying his little hatchet, for relieving the barks of trees from the encroaching ivy, in one of those white hands, which probably hitherto had never held anything heavier than a pen, Mr Disraeli was the Squire of the Hughenden estate, the farmers’ friend and their representative in Parliament.’ She remembered too Disraeli’s insistence that all his visitors should admire Mary Anne’s work. ‘Over and over again “Dizzy” bade us pause and admire the sylvan scene, as he expressed it, evidently relishing that sweet-sounding word “sylvan.” He lingered over it and repeated it more than once. “And,” he added, “this is all owing to the cleverness of Mary Anne; she devised the walk, and she made it with the help of her two old men of the soil.”’28
For Disraeli the romance of Hughenden was immanent not just in its woods and walks but in ‘the ‘men of the soil’ who worked his land. ‘I like very much the society of woodmen’, he wrote in private reflection in 1860. ‘They are healthy – their language is picturesque, they live in the air, & nature whispers to them many of her secrets.’ To see his head woodman fell a tree was ‘a work of art’, he continued. ‘No bustle, no exertion, apparently not the slightest exercise of strength – He tickles it with his axe, & then it falls exactly where he desires it.’ The romance of woodmen could take a less mystical vein, as another story from 1860 illustrates. ‘An old, but very hale, man told me today, that he was going to be married, & that his bride would not be very much younger than himself, but he had lodged in her cottage now for more than a year, & he thought she wd. do for him.’ Disraeli reported this story to Mary Anne, who promptly sent a wedding dinner to gladden the table of the happy couple.29
Inspired by the turn to antiquity in Mary Anne’s reworked Hughenden and freed by a political lull from the demands of work, Disraeli turned to the subject of his own past, writing a series of autobiographical notes and sketches towards a memoir over the course of several Hughenden autumns. His memory took him back through the ranks of men he had known, men who led him to recall a saying of Mary Anne’s: ‘manners change even more than features’. He wrote of the ‘vigour and flexibility’ of Lord Lyndhurst’s mind; Derby’s report of the Queen angrily insisting in the early days of her widowhood that Prince Albert died ‘from want … of pluck’; the way that Peel’s voice swooped downwards so that ‘wonderful’ became ‘woounderful’ – a result, Disraeli thought, of him managing his elocution like his temper (‘neither was originally good’). He passed comment on the grim oddity of Derby’s mansions in London and at Knowsley, both furnished ‘like a second-rate lodging house … in itself essentially mean: all this not from stinginess, but from sheer want of taste’. Lady Jersey, in contrast, had succeeded in establishing in her elegant drawing rooms a salon; something no other hostess had been able to achieve. ‘It requires the acme of social position, knowledge & tact – great self-command – If a bore comes, & however importunate, you must never by your reception of him let him suspect that he is a bore, or he will go about, & tell, & prevent others coming.’30
Mary Anne too revisited her past in the early 1860s, although the manner in which she did so differed from Disraeli’s. At Hughenden she set about the creation of a monument to Isaac D’Israeli, commissioned, designed and built without Disraeli’s knowledge. The monument was to be a column on a hill on the estate, visible from the house and for miles around, but despite the difficulties of concealing news of its development, she was determined it should be a surprise for her husband. It was erected over the course of the summer of 1862, and Disraeli’s lawyer Philip Rose was employed as a go-between to coordinate its installation with both Mary Anne and the architect. Rose wrote a memorandum of the affair in which he listed the steps he took to preserve the secret, including ordering that the stone should be wrought away from the site and that its installation be fast and not reliant on the labour of local men. He also conceded that Disraeli did in fact hear news of the monument before he arrived at Hughenden but that Mary Anne never learnt the truth. From Hughenden Disraeli wrote of finding ‘a monument to my father, raised by my wife, and in my absence. It is quite finished and really, whether I consider the design, the execution or even the material – I think it one of the most beautiful things in England.’ The monument’s inscription celebrated Isaac’s connection with Buckinghamshire, a connection now continued by Disraeli, ‘Knight of this Shire’.
A year before the Hughenden monument was erected, a dispute with the Lewis estate brought Mary Anne into contact with a different chapter of her story. In March 1861 she discovered that Wyndham’s heirs were underpaying a dividend deriving from colliery shares left to her, and together with Disraeli she travelled to Wales to enquire into the matter herself. The only reference in her papers to this visit comes in a letter to Mrs Brydges Willyams, in which she denies newspaper reports that she went to meet her relations. ‘Like you, I have none.’31 Disraeli was more forthcoming about their Welsh experiences, and was particularly struck by the contrast between the Cardiff of Mary Anne’s memory, a sleepy country town with fewer than 8,000 inhabitants, and the city of 40,000 souls they beheld. From Cardiff they went to Greenmeadow, which Disraeli had never seen. He was struck by the grandeur of its setting, ‘a picturesque house, beautifully situate at the gorge of a valley of Welch mountains, richly wooded, with the river Taff raging through its wild & shaggy bottom’.32 Their pilgrimage took place three decades after Mary Anne’s last visit to Wales, and almost half a century after she became mistress of Greenmeadow.
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On 15 August 1863, Disraeli and Mary Anne were driving back to Hughenden from Wycombe Abbey, where they had been dining with Lord and Lady Carrington. It was approaching midnight and dark outside. As they entered their parkland, Mary Anne noticed sparks outside the windows of the carriage, glittering in the blackness. As the sparks grew closer, they revealed themselves as fireflies, illuminating the carriage as brightly as a single spotlight. Unable to believe their eyes, the Disraelis turned all the mirrors in the carriage inwards to cancel out the reflection from the lamps, but still the sparks grew brighter. The driveway up to the house was steep and the fireflies followed them as they pulled up the hill, lighting their progress home before vanishing in a globe of colour at the gates of the pleasure gardens. Disraeli and Mary Anne were mystified by the spectacle and vowed to take the carriage out the next night to witness it once more. But the next night it rained, and the night after, and the summer came to an end. Few of their friends believed that creatures more usually found in Mediterranean climates had illuminated their way home. But Mary Anne and Disraeli held fast to their story, their certainty of their seduction by the fireflies bolstered by the presence of the other; the magic of the scene figured and celebrated in their papers as a joint experience.
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The Rose and the Ring, William Thackeray’s Christmas book for 1854, is a comic tale of star-crossed lovers, cantankerous fairy godmothers, magical talismen and ageing monarchs. The rose and the ring of its title are objects that render their possessor irresistible to members of the opposite sex, no matter how ridiculous they are. So the King of Paflagonia is smitten with his silly Queen despite the fact that she is fond of flattery, scandal, cards and fine clothes and has grown stout with the passing years. The twists and turns of the story are only resolved when its hero and heroine are forced by circumstance to confront the fact that they love each other even when deprived of the magical assistance of the rose and the ring, and that they do so in spite of their physical faults and character flaws. ‘What care I’, says the heroine to her prince as she vanquishes her enemies, ‘if you think I am good-looking enough?’33
The Rose and the Ring combines the magical and the ordinary in ways that are both funny and touching. Characters vanish and fairies fight battles but the old King and Queen eat muffins and eggs for breakfast and squabble amiably over pocket money for their favourites. Theirs may be a marriage forged on a fiction (the Queen has entrapped her husband with the aid of the ring), but it is nevertheless a solidly affectionate relationship, at least until the malign magic of others temporarily forces them apart. A bad-tempered fairy godmother can wreak havoc with the rose and the ring but is also the possessor of much common sense, who recognises the dangers of the gifts she gives. Made wise by experience, she will give to the hero and heroine only ‘a little misfortune’ on the grounds that this is more likely than magical objects to equip them for married life.
It is this combination of the magical and the ordinary, along with its commentary on the things that do or do not make people beloved, that makes The Rose and the Ring a fitting companion text for the Disraelis’ story in the 1860s. Mary Anne’s days as ‘Rose’ were now far behind her; Disraeli too had travelled a long way from dandified suitor attempting to win the hand of his ludicrous princess. Yet both retained an allegiance to these antique versions of themselves. Writing to Mrs Brydges Willyams of the deposition of the Greek King in December 1862, Disraeli termed it ‘a privilege’ to ‘live in this age of rapid & brilliant events. What an error to consider it a Utilitarian age! It is one of infinite Romance. Thrones tumble down, & crowns are offered, like a fairy tale, & the most powerful people in the world, male & female, a few years back, were adventurers, exiles, & demireps.’ In talking of royal upstarts and political pretenders he was talking also of himself: the adventurer who stormed the citadel of power, the demirep who became a statesman of international renown and the emperor of his own domain. ‘An estate is a little Kingdom’, he wrote of Hughenden in the same letter. ‘There is almost as great a variety of interests, & characters, & parties, & passions, on these acres, as in Her Majesty’s realm.’34 And as Mary Anne grew older, her pride in the romance of her youth only increased. She kept George Beauclerk’s letter in spite of its veiled threat, just as she kept his compromising missives from the 1830s, annotating them to ensure they would not be destroyed. It was at about this time too that she began to spin fairy stories about her rags-to-riches girlhood, pointing out the mythical milliner’s shop in which she had worked to bemused companions during a visit to the south-west in 1862. And at a Rothschild dinner in 1864 she talked at such length of the thirty-two proposals she had received that she prevented the gentleman sitting next to her from eating.
Moreover, in Sarah Brydges Willyams the Disraelis acquired a fairy godmother of their own. Charlotte de Rothschild wrote during a visit to Torquay that Mrs Brydges Willyams was a fantastical creature, a ‘female Croesus’. ‘She has piercing black eyes, wears a black wig with an enormous top knot, no crinoline, is quite a miser, starves herself into a skeleton, except when her adored Disraeli is here, is ninety-seven years of age, keeps neither horses, nor carriages nor men servants – only an enormous watch-dog to protect her and her gold.’35 Charlotte exaggerated Mrs Brydges Willyams’ age but, judging by other contemporary accounts, little else.
By 1863 Disraeli’s financial situation had reached equilibrium courtesy of a Conservative supporter who bought his debts and charged only a modest rate of interest. But when news came from Torquay in November 1863 that Mrs Brydges Willyams was failing, the Disraelis and their friends knew that their hour had come. They arrived just too late to see her and were sincere in their sorrow at her passing, faithfully ensuring the granting of her final wish, to be buried at Hughenden. Mrs Brydges Willyams kept her promise to make Disraeli her heir, and her death left him better off to the tune of approximately £40,000. The legacy meant his debts could be paid and his self-presentation as a well-heeled country gentleman finally became a reality. Charlotte de Rothschild wrote of the incongruity of the Disraelis appearing in her drawing room ‘as black as crows – I mean in deepest mourning – but in joyous spirits’. To her son she wrote of the difficulty of composing a letter to Mary Anne on Mrs Brydges Willyams’s death, ‘which sincerity prevents me from making one of condolence, and which from motives of feeling & delicacy cannot be one of congratulation’.36 Disraeli was himself less bashful, writing with unusual frankness to Derby from Torquay, ‘It would hardly be frank to let yr assumption, that the business, that keeps me here is “unpleasant”, pass over in silence. I have lost a kind & faithful friend, but I have lost her in the fullness of years, & she has made me the heir to her not inconsiderable fortune.’37
It would be easy to read Sarah Brydges Willyams’s legacy as a fairy tale come true for the Disraelis, a magic charm causing a mountain of debt and a lifetime of financial anxiety to melt away. And in many respects this reading seems accurate. Mary Anne talked at length of the labours the legacy entailed, but both she and Disraeli always spoke of their benefactress with gratitude. Yet it had one unlooked-for effect on Mary Anne’s position. Her talisman or magic charm, the thing that had made Disraeli marry her, was her money. For decades it had been her income that supported their houses and financed his political career. Now the value of her jointure was proportionally less significant and her power consequently diminished. Disraeli’s position too during this period continued to be under threat from disconsolate MPs and a lack of energy and action on the political stage. With his finances secure, he had less of an imperative to campaign for a return to office and a government salary, and became a withdrawn figure. In October 1861 he described himself as ‘an actor without an audience’38 and in February 1863 he characterised the role of Leader of the Opposition as ‘at present, an office more of thought than action’.39 In the summer of 1865 he once again offered Derby his resignation, which was once again refused. But to Mary Anne he wrote that his troops remained dispirited. To keep his spirits up, he told her, ‘I think of you, wh: always sustains me, & I know we shall find many sources of happiness without politics – if it comes to that.’40
The unorthodox manner of the Disraelis’ financial liberation did little to ease a continuing sense among their landed contemporaries that there was something vulgar about them. To many, Mary Anne appeared to become more, not less, of an overdressed oddity as she grew older, and stories about her behaviour continued to circulate in drawing rooms and dining rooms. Several of these stories were collected by William Fraser in his 1891 volume Disraeli and his Day. Fraser knew both the Disraelis and complemented his own memories with the tales of those who remembered them. He was generous towards Mary Anne, writing that although she ‘had the reputation of uttering gauche sayings; and of being remarkable for the want of good sense in her remarks’, he failed to observe this. But he could not resist including one much-repeated story of her scandalising a prim country-house hostess by announcing at breakfast that the house was full of indecent pictures. ‘There is a most horrible picture in our bedroom: Disraeli says it is Venus and Adonis: I have been awake half the night trying to prevent him looking at it.’41 The journalist Henry Lucy centred his recollections on Mary Anne’s reputation in High Wycombe, where tales of her stinginess abounded. These stories were framed by an implicit assertion of Mary Anne’s fundamental failure to be an acceptable lady of the house. One such tale had her refusing to pay the band who played for a visiting dignitary to Hughenden more than half a crown: there was, Lucy wrote, ‘a pretty row about it … Mrs Disraeli wanted to fight it out in court, but Dizzy wouldn’t let her, and quietly arranged the affair’.42 And in an anecdote that had many variants, all of which undermined Mary Anne at the expense of praising Disraeli’s loyalty, the MP William Gregory related the snub earned by George Smythe when he ventured to ask Disraeli what kept him with his wife. ‘George, there is one word in the English language of which you are ignorant’, Disraeli is reputed to have replied. ‘“What is that?” asked Smythe, somewhat taken aback by his manner. “Gratitude, George” said Dizzy, in his deep, solemn voice.’43
A more generous contemporary assessment of Mary Anne came from the young Lord Rosebery (Liberal Prime Minister from 1894–5), who met her at Raby Castle in 1865. Raby was the seat of Rosebery’s stepfather, the Duke of Cleveland, and as the eighteen-year-old son of the house, Rosebery was given the task of entertaining Mary Anne at dinner. In his diary he called her a ‘half-crazy, warm-hearted woman’ and he took pains to set her conversation down as accurately as possible, feeling he had met an ‘uncommon specimen’. His account captures the pace of Mary Anne’s conversational style as well as her devotion to Disraeli. Their conversation opened with Rosebery praising Coningsby – praise Mary Anne found unsurprising for a novel ‘written by a clever man like him’. It then turned to Mary Anne’s activities at Hughenden, where, Rosebery reported, ‘she managed everything, even to ordering Dizzy’s clothes’. Mary Anne talked of her labours in the garden, describing how she stayed out all day, taking a light lunch for her and beer for her workmen. ‘Is not that very fatiguing?’ Rosebery enquired. ‘Ah, but the mind overcomes the body – and then he is so glad to see me when I come back, and he comes out and sees what I have done, when it is all finished, and says sometimes, “This is delightful, better than anything you have done yet.” And then I feel quite intoxicated for the moment, and quite rewarded.’ ‘I never allow Dizzy to come and see me while I am planting’, she continued, ‘because he would lose the coup d’oeil of seeing it when it is finished.’
Rosebery then asked Mary Anne if she cared for politics. ‘No, I have no time, I have so many books and pamphlets to read and see if there is my name in any of them! and I have everything to manage, and write his stupid letters. I am sorry when he is in office, because then I lose him altogether, and though I have many people who call themselves my friends, yet I have no friend like him. I have not been separated from him since we have been in the country, except when I have been in the woods, and I cannot lose him.’ Mary Anne’s assertion that she had no friend like Disraeli touched Rosebery; in his account she appears a lonely figure, surrounded by people yet with few real confidantes. Rosebery freely confessed to being star-struck by Disraeli, but even given his reporter’s bias, the prevalence of Disraeli in Mary Anne’s conversation is striking. ‘I am looking to see if Dizzy is sitting next any pretty woman that he would like to sit next and admire’, he recorded her saying after they had exhausted the conversational possibilities of politics.44 He took Mary Anne into dinner for the next two nights and made assiduous notes of her view of Lord Derby (who, she insisted, ‘gave hardly anything to the Conservative Election funds’); her disingenuous account of the Brydges Willyams legacy (‘The old lady at Torquay who left Mr Disraeli 40000£ never told him her intentions’) and her praise for Rosebery himself: ‘Mrs Disraeli promised to give me a set of Mr Disraeli’s studs which she said she had taken away from him to give to young men that she liked.’45
Rosebery’s diary is an illuminating source of information about Mary Anne’s preoccupations and conversational style because he did not reduce her utterances to a series of eccentric bon mots. Instead he attempted to capture the rhythm of her speech and the apparently unselfconscious manner in which it pointed to her separation from her contemporaries. He recognised too that there were things about Mary Anne that were easy to ridicule and that it was tempting to draw her into exchanges for the fun of waiting to hear what she would say. ‘I cannot help quizzing her by talking in this way’, he acknowledged after relating their conversation. But after three evenings in her company he detected a depth to her not accessible to those who listened only for her eccentric sayings. His final judgement was unambiguous. ‘I really like her.’46 Several years later Mary Anne introduced Rosebery to his bride, Hannah Rothschild, one of the great heiresses of the nineteenth century, repaying his attention during her Raby visit and solidifying his affection for both her and Disraeli.
Another person who felt great affection for Mary Anne was Charlotte de Rothschild, whose letters are a valuable source for Mary Anne’s manners, conversation and appearance during the 1860s. That Charlotte was fond of her is clear, as is the fact that she frequently found her exasperating. Charlotte referred to Disraeli as Mary Anne’s ‘illustrious husband’, a label that captured his fame while poking fun at the importance he ascribed to himself and the seriousness Mary Anne accorded him. Her letters suggest that inviting seventy-year-old Mary Anne to formal dinner parties was a risk, since she was inclined to fits of ill-humour and to fall asleep when conversation stuttered. Sometimes in Charlotte’s letters Mary Anne is Dizzy’s ‘decidedly worse half’; at other points she appears as ‘a bore at tea-time’ and her conversation is ‘dreadful’. ‘Dizzy has the gout’, she writes in 1864, ‘and reads French novels to while away the heavy hours spent near Mrs Diz.’ Yet at other points Mary Anne is Disraeli’s ‘shrewd, good-natured wife’ and Charlotte stresses her own devotion to her. No matter how rude Charlotte was about Mary Anne in her private letters, she continued to invite the Disraelis to private Sunday evening dinners, to accept invitations to Hughenden and to treat both Mary Anne and Disraeli as part of her own family: sometimes inconvenient, sometimes embarrassing, but always loved. Also noticeable in her letters is her sympathy for Mary Anne, an old lady out of step with the modern world. The Mary Anne of Charlotte’s letters is tired but quite unwilling to accept the reality of her own ageing. ‘Ladies, who have no children consider themselves young, handsome and fascinating for ever – they lack the admonishing hands which mark the flight of time’, Charlotte writes in 1865. In October that year Mary Anne is ‘very cross. Lady Carrington says she must be nearer eighty than seventy, that she is the most wonderful woman in the world, but quite the most tiresome one.’ Mary Anne told no one her real age, not even Disraeli, but in Charlotte’s account few are fooled by her performance of eternal youth. She is ‘pale, thin & wrinkled’ and she struggles in London drawing rooms, ‘where she grows weary & dissatisfied because men & women listen to her great husband & pay little attention to her; and where she says odd & startling things to arrest the eyes & ears of men & women’. No matter how much sense Mary Anne talks, her ‘shrewdness of observation is always marred by a spice of the ridiculous’.
Mary Anne in her finery as described by Charlotte is a startling creature, at one point ‘beautifully attired in an old evening dress, wearing, like the savages, a wreath of red feathers’ and at another appearing in a wig ‘adorned with sky blue velvet folds and gold butterflies’. ‘Not ridiculous’, Charlotte adds loyally, ‘but very becoming.’ And while she might be marginalised in the social seasons of the mid 1860s, her determination to be part of them remains unabated. In July 1864 Charlotte writes that Disraeli is longing for the repose of Hughenden ‘but Mary Anne wants a continuation of London and the world’. Charlotte regrets Mary Anne’s devotion to London, believing her to be happier at Hughenden, ‘where she can be out in the open air from morning till night, and to have trees & flowers & shrubs – which harmonize with all ages’. In society, in contrast, ‘the younger & most agreeable or the most gifted, & fascinating often turn away from poor Mrs Dis, whom they find tiresome, and leave very cross at their neglect’. This is a theme repeated a few months later, when Mary Anne returns from Hughenden in an admirable temper, ‘the prolonged life among her beautiful beech-trees & evergreens suiting her far better than her existence in the brilliant world’.47
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Vying with Mary Anne for attention in Charlotte’s letters is her eldest daughter Evelina. In 1865 Evelina married her cousin Ferdinand de Rothschild, repeating the family habit of intermarriage, which kept the fortune consolidated. It was a happy match, celebrated in June 1865 by a happy wedding at which Disraeli made a speech. Evelina, he said, had been ‘long admired and so long loved’. Addressing Lionel and Charlotte directly, he confessed he felt no need to console his old friends on the loss of their daughter to a home of her own, since the couple planned to ‘build their nests, if not in the same tree, at least in the same grove’.48 After their honeymoon tour Evelina and Ferdinand did indeed settle near her parents, and Charlotte’s correspondence is full of pride in her daughter as she took her first steps in society as a married woman. But in December 1866 Evelina died in childbirth alongside her baby. Ferdinand retreated to Buckinghamshire, where he built at Waddesdon a palace of mourning dedicated to his lost love. Charlotte and Lionel were paralysed with grief from which neither ever fully recovered. In the first days after Evelina’s death, only Mary Anne, unconstrained by manners or social ritual, could offer comfort. ‘I was, of course left’, Charlotte told her son Leopold, ‘with the good, kind-hearted Mrs Dizzy, who cried with me and then tried to tell me many things, which would have interested darling Eve had she been at my side, all mirth & fun & wit & humour.’49 ‘Come to me’, she asked Mary Anne. ‘I wish to thank you and to speak to you not of my sorrow, not of my darling’s sad end, but of her beautiful life; I want to tell you how much she appreciated your card how gratified she was for all your kindness.’50 Throughout that winter Mary Anne and Disraeli were constant in their support of their friends, sitting with them on Sunday afternoons, talking politics to distract and entertain, and allowing both Charlotte and Lionel to speak of their grief unimpeded. The things that were comical about Mary Anne were rendered irrelevant by the unconditional loyalty and sympathy she offered.
Evelina’s death took place six months after the Conservatives returned to power. In October 1865 Lord Palmerston died aged eighty. His Liberal successor as Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was less popular in the country and had a weaker grip on his party. Russell’s ministry was defeated over the question of parliamentary reform, struck down by a newly emboldened Derby and Disraeli. Disraeli returned to the Treasury, Reform unsettled and his relationship with Derby fundamentally altered. Derby was sixty-seven in 1866 and for years had been disabled intermittently by gout, which was becoming a serious obstacle to office. For months at a time he was forced to retreat to his sickbed at Knowsley, leaving Disraeli in charge of the party and the country. Derby was Prime Minister in name; in reality he shared the role with Disraeli, who was now the most visible and powerful politician in the government. His fractious party fell behind him, calmed by once more being in power and by the stature of Disraeli’s public profile. ‘Mrs Dis beams like the disk of the sun’, Charlotte reported in 1867. ‘She speaks perpetually of the enthusiasm which her illustrious husband excites wherever he goes; he talks politics with justifiable pride.’51
Now firmly in the ascendant, Disraeli made a crucial appointment. At Raby Castle in 1865 he had walked into the drawing room to find a fellow guest named Montagu Corry singing comic songs for the entertainment of the assembled ladies. Corry was mortified at being so discovered; Disraeli amused. ‘I think you must be my impresario’, he is reported to have said. Corry was twenty-eight when he met Disraeli. He was a dapper young man who took great pleasure in life, was well connected and popular with young women (‘What a Lothario Monty is’ was another remark attributed to Disraeli). In June 1866 Corry wrote a hesitant letter to Disraeli outlining his credentials to serve in government as a private secretary, and his commitment to the Conservative cause. ‘I can scarcely presume to ask for the honour of being Private Secretary to yourself, yet I do venture to hope that should you know of some member of the government, to whom my services might be acceptable, you would be willing to mention me.’52 Disraeli promptly appointed him as his secretary, and thereafter Corry grew to be one of the most important people in the lives of both Disraelis. He became a kind of ideal son, affectionate, competent and respectful. ‘So I am off, wishing you from my heart a tranquil night’, runs one letter from him, written at the end of a busy day at the House of Commons in 1867.53 He and Mary Anne became fond of each other, and Disraeli had complete confidence in him. He was quick to learn the kind of secretary Disraeli needed him to be, acting promptly on every instruction and request. In 1866 Disraeli entrusted him with the task of preparing his selected speeches for publication, and as Derby grew more infirm it was Corry’s efficient protectiveness that made it possible for Disraeli to act as both Chancellor and Prime Minister. ‘The relations between a minister and his secretary are, or at least should be, among the finest that can subsist between two individuals’, Disraeli wrote in Endymion, the novel he published in 1880. ‘Except the married state, there is none in which so great a degree of confidence is involved, in which more forbearance ought to be exercised, or more sympathy ought to exist. There is usually in the relation an identity of interest, and that of the highest kind; and the perpetual difficulties, the alternations of triumph and defeat, develop devotion.’54
It was Corry who was at Mary Anne’s side in June 1866 when Grosvenor Gate was surrounded by rioters. The defeat of Russell’s Reform Bill provoked public anger, and a massed meeting in Hyde Park to call for Reform descended into chaos as protesters broke down railings and rallied in Park Lane. Charlotte de Rothschild reported that several windows at Grosvenor Gate were broken, but Mary Anne insisted that the protesters had no malign intent towards her or her house. Indeed, she wrote in a letter designed to reassure Disraeli, ‘I am happy to assure you no one takes the slightest notice of this house.’55 Another note insisted that the demonstrators were ‘perfectly orderly’, although she could not control her anxiety completely. ‘I shall be anxious to see you safe the streets are made dangerous.’56 For his part Corry was impressed by Mary Anne’s calmness. ‘The soldiers have moved away to the M. Arch’, he wrote to his chief at the end of the second day of demonstrations. ‘Mrs Disraeli wishes me to add that the people in general seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves: and I really believe she sympathises with them.’57
Despite the demonstrations Disraeli remained unconvinced of the need for political reform, and it was Derby who insisted the government must confront the issue. But shortly after deciding to introduce a Conservative Reform Bill in the House of Commons, Derby was once again struck by illness. Disraeli was therefore charged with shepherding Reform through Parliament, a task requiring unparalleled energy as competing factions, parties and political demands were reconciled in one Bill. The Reform Act of 1867 was a compromise act, in many respects as far removed from the legislation Disraeli envisaged as it was from the measures the Liberals demanded. Nevertheless it effectively enfranchised all male householders and its passing has historically been seen as Disraeli’s greatest parliamentary triumph. It made him a hero to his party and confirmed his position as Derby’s successor. At the end of the April night on which the Bill was passed, Disraeli was cheered by his own MPs, Tory gentlemen who had always looked on him with hostility and suspicion. He was swept out of the debating chamber towards the Carlton Club by young supporters who wanted to shake his hand and celebrate over dinner. But he slipped away, returning instead to Grosvenor Gate, where Mary Anne was waiting for him. ‘I had got him a raised pie from Fortnum and Mason’s, and a bottle of champagne’, she told Thomas Kebbel. ‘He ate half the pie and drank all the champagne, and then he said, “Why, my dear, you are more like a mistress than a wife.”’ ‘I could see’, Kebbel wrote, ‘that she took it as a very high compliment indeed.’58
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Thereafter their position was unquestioned. One of Mary Anne’s acquaintances wrote to her recalling the peroration of Disraeli’s disastrous maiden speech: ‘The time will come when you shall hear me.’ ‘That time has indeed come’, commented the correspondent. ‘They have done his bidding you must be supremely happy.’59 In October 1867 they paid a triumphal visit to Edinburgh, where Disraeli was due to speak at a great Conservative banquet. It was his first visit to Scotland since the 1820s, and Mary Anne had never before been north of the border. At the banquet Disraeli toasted Mary Anne’s health, declaring, ‘I do owe to that lady all, I think, I have ever accomplished, because she has supported me by her counsels and consoled me by the sweetness of her disposition.’ Both of them were cheered to the rafters, and when at the end of the evening they were alone, they could not contain their glee. ‘We were so delighted with our reception’, Disraeli told the essayist John Skelton, ‘that after we got back we actually danced a jig (or was it a hornpipe?) in our bedroom.’60
Disraeli’s devotion to his wife was now a matter of public note, even in an uxorious age. ‘It is certainly a very remarkable alliance’, Skelton wrote. ‘That her heart, however, is as kind as her taste is queer, everybody admits; and she has splendid pluck and illimitable faith in Dizzy.’ Did Disraeli feel true chivalry for her? Skelton wondered. Or gratitude? Or something more? ‘When visiting at the big houses, where the big ladies fight a little shy of her, he won’t stand any nonsense. “Love me, love my Mary-Anne.” People will laugh no doubt when he is not looking; but to my mind there is something distinctly fine in this jealous and watchful regard.’61 At the Hughenden harvest home of 1867, Disraeli again toasted Mary Anne, declaring, ‘“without offence to anyone”, that Mrs Disraeli was the best wife in England’,62 and the consistency of his efforts to protect her from distress is evident in two letters from the second half of the 1860s. To his brother Ralph he wrote that he could not consent to make baby Coningsby his heir until he had spoken to Mary Anne, ‘wh: cannot be done hurriedly’,63 suggesting that he feared she would be hurt by formal recognition of a child not her own, and in October 1866 he sent an uncompromising reply through Corry to a man who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Mary Anne’s brother John. Mary Anne had not only bought John’s commissions, he told Corry, she had also paid his debts. ‘I think she had done eno.’ ‘I don’t mention this to her’, he continued, ‘as I wd. only revive sorrows.’64
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In the middle of November 1867 Mary Anne fell ill. One newspaper attributed her condition to a cold caught on the journey back from Edinburgh, but Disraeli’s biographers have assumed that her illness stemmed from the onset of uterine cancer. No one recorded her symptoms, but from the severity of her condition and the rapidity with which she deteriorated, it seems likely that she contracted an infection, although it is also possible that she suffered a uterine haemorrhage that left her dangerously weakened. For several days she hovered between life and death in dreadful pain. On 19 November it seemed as if a crisis was imminent. Parliament opened for an autumn session that day, but Disraeli remained absent. In the House of Commons Gladstone spoke of his sympathy. Every day the London papers carried bulletins on her health, gleaned from the information posted on placards outside Grosvenor Gate. The Queen wrote to ask for news, as did the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales. Offers of help poured in from Mary Anne’s circle, grand ladies anxious to share in the task of nursing her. An old servant wrote on similar lines, begging to be allowed to look after her former mistress. ‘I love her more & more & have found none like her.’65 Mary Anne’s former companion Eliza Gregory wrote Disraeli a guilt-ridden note for having attempted to subject her to blackmail. ‘Ask her to forgive me & to believe that my heart was faithful … I was easily led by dangerous designing influence of some she had around her.’66 Not content with expressing his sympathy in a public forum, Gladstone wrote of his sincere esteem for Mary Anne, with whom he maintained a cordial relationship even in the midst of rancorous exchanges with Disraeli. ‘I have always been grateful for and have sincerely appreciated Mrs Disraeli’s regard, and during the recent crisis I was naturally mindful of it; but, even if I had not the honour and pleasure of knowing her, it would have been impossible not to sympathise with you when the fortitude necessary to bear the duties and trials of your station was subjected to a new burden of character so crushing.’67
The crisis passed and Mary Anne recovered. ‘This morning, all seemed dark, & he was told to hope no more’, Disraeli told the Queen, the protocol of the third-person address contrasting with the intimacy of his account. ‘But within three hours of this, there was a change, & everything became hopeful: a state of complete composure but accompanied by increased strength.’68 ‘We are happy to announce a slight improvement in the condition of Mrs Disraeli’, proclaimed The Times. ‘On inquiring at the residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Grosvenor-gate yesterday afternoon, we were informed that she had passed a better night.’69 As Mary Anne remained confined to her room, gradually recovering some strength, Disraeli was brought low by an attack of lumbago, which left him unable to leave the house or even mount the stairs to see her. Deprived of each other’s company, they wrote notes instead from their respective sickbeds. ‘I am so grieved my dearest that you are suffering so much, and that I cannot be with you’, ran one from Mary Anne. And then, simply, ‘I have loved your letter my darling.’70 ‘We have been separated four days – & under the same roof! How very strange!’ Disraeli mused. But he was consoled by her presence in the house. ‘Grosvenor Gate has become a hospital, but a hospital with you is worth a palace with anybody else.’ And even in their unusual predicament she could still surprise and delight him. ‘Being on my back, pardon the pencil. You have sent me the most amusing, & charming, letter I ever had – it beats Horace Walpole & Md. de Sevigné.’71
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‘Notes from Dear Dizzy during our illness when we could not leave our rooms’, wrote Mary Anne on the packet of pencilled letters she added to her archive of papers. ‘At the end of the month both quite well.’ In her case it was a hopeful overstatement. She was seventy-five in 1867 and her illness left her permanently weakened. Although she marked her recovery in characteristic fashion by sacking the lady’s maid who had neglected her on her sickbed and promoting the housemaid who had cared for her tenderly, her days of planting from dawn till dusk at Hughenden were over. So too was her hard-won, contingent reign among the London hostesses. Yet her illness crystallised two things. The first was that she was loved by the public in spite of her absurdities. Kings and queens wrote to enquire of her but so did old servants and strangers and the readers of newspapers. The second was that she was loved by her husband. A romance that had begun as a fantasy became, in its third act, authentic and true. ‘Dizzy married me for my money’, she told the friends who came to while away the hours with an old lady resplendent in a red and gold drawing room. ‘But if he had the chance again, he would marry me for love.’ For his part Disraeli came to realise that the love affairs of the old were just as unexpected and romantic as the amorous adventures of the young. ‘Threescore and ten, at the present day, is the period of romantic passions’ he wrote in 1870. ‘As for our enamoured sexagenarians, they avenge the theories of our cold-hearted youth.’72