Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli

CHAPTER ONE: STORYTELLING

10. Surgeons’ mates were not even required to pass a medical examination until 1798. See Holmes, Redcoat, pp. 95–6, for an account of the place of the surgeon’s mate in the army’s medical structure in the 1790s: ‘A physician-general and surgeon-general – both civilians with private practices in addition to their military duties – had existed since the time of Charles I, and an inspector-general of hospitals had been established in 1758. In 1794 an army medical board, on which these worthies sat, was set up, largely at the instigation of the Duke of York, in an effort to give more coherent direction to the medical services. Beneath them came the inspectors and deputy inspectors of hospitals, the physicians, surgeons and their mates who served in the hospitals, and the administrative officers who ran them. Each regiment had its surgeons and two mates, later termed assistant surgeons. In the eighteenth century they were essentially the colonel’s employees, who purchased their positions, received an allowance collected by captains from their company funds, and were given a grant from which they were expected to purchase all their medical necessities … In 1796 surgeons were given captain’s status when quarters were allocated, their assistants became commissioned officers, ranking as lieutenants, and both were to be regularly paid and provided with medicines (though not their medical equipment) by the government. In 1798 it was ordered that physicians must hold a medical qualification, while assistant surgeons were required to pass a medical examination before being appointed. However, regulations accorded them “no claims whatever to military command”.’

13. James Sykes, in his 1928 biography of Mary Anne (the first full-length account of her life), collated all the sources of this rumour, and gave this account of them: ‘Again, the statement has appeared, in various forms, that in her early days Lady Beaconsfield was a milliner, either on her own account or as an apprentice or assistant. When one of these statements appeared in the Press in 1902, Sir Edward Russell, of Liverpool, wrote a letter in which he said he had been told indirectly, on the authority of Sir Stafford Northcote (first Lord Iddesleigh), that once when Lady Beaconsfield was staying with Sir Stafford at Pynes, near Exeter, she privately asked her host to take her for a drive, and on reaching a certain point in Exeter she said to him: “That is the shop where I was a milliner.” Another writer said that in 1881, when gathering material for a biography of Lord Beaconsfield, an old lady who had been a companion to Lady Beaconsfield in her younger days, told him that before her first marriage she kept a milliner’s shop in Bath or Exeter. Yet another writer said that a former postmistress of Chepstow, whose family had been long connected with the place, informed him that Mary Anne Evans’s father left her very poorly provided for, and she took a situation in a milliner’s shop at Chepstow, which the postmistress indicated.’ Sykes, who was the first biographer to attempt to disentangle truth and fiction in Mary Anne’s story, went on to quote others of Mary Anne’s contemporaries denying the milliner story, and noted that these competing accounts gave ‘support to a conclusion one is tempted to draw from other facts and inferences – that Mary Anne herself was responsible for some of the romantic fiction which came to be associated with her early days’ (Sykes, Mary Anne Disraeli, pp. 17–18, 18–19).

CHAPTER TWO: TALL TALES