1

Isaac Disraeli and Sarah were naturally anxious to see the erratic genius of the family safely and suitably married as early as possible. They hoped that he might be successful with Ellen Meredith, the younger sister of his dead friend, William. He did, in fact, propose to her early in May 1833,1 but she refused him. The rebuff does not seem to have disconcerted him. On May 22 he wrote to Sarah:

By the bye would you like Lady Z—— for a sister-in-law, very clever, 25000l, and domestic? As for ‘love’ all my friends who married for love and beauty either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for ‘love’, which I am sure is a guarantee of infelicity.2

Lady Z—— was Lady Charlotte Bertie,3 aged twenty-one, a daughter of the Earl of Lindsey. Sarah did not approve of her. She expressed doubts about the money and adjured him to remember ‘what improvident blood more than half fills her veins’.4 She urged him not to give up Ellen Meredith, but to try again. Nor was Sarah the only person to push Disraeli in the direction of matrimony. Mrs Bolton, curiously enough, also had a candidate. In November of the previous year she pressed the case for a Miss Trotter, who was a patient of her husband and a friend of Lady Francis Leveson-Gower. Mrs Bolton described her, rather unpromisingly, as ‘a splendid wreck and now in great misery’. But she went on to say

No one thing could reconcile me more to this world of ill nature than to see her your wife. All her fine feelings are thrown back and she – with all her brilliant qualities and splendid fortune there – she is a lone solitary creature.5

Nothing came of the suggestion. As for Lady Charlotte, she seems to have enjoyed Disraeli’s company. She first met him in the box of a friend, Lady Sykes, at the opera on May 18. She wrote in her diary:

… He is wild enthusiastic and very poetical … The brilliance of my companion infected me and we ran on about poetry and Venice and Bagdad and Damascus, and my eye lit up and my cheek burned and in the pauses of the beautiful music [Tancred] my words flowed almost as rapidly as his … He tells me that repose is the great thing and that nothing repays exertion. Yet noise and light are his fondest dreams, and nothing could compensate to him for an obscure youth, not even glorious old age. I cannot understand his trying to get into Parliament …6

But the matter went no farther. Lady Charlotte became engaged to Josiah John Guest, MP, who was nearly thirty years older, very rich, one of the proprietors of the Dowlais ironworks, and a partner of Wyndham Lewis, whose wife pressed the match. Many years later Disraeli had the pleasure as Prime Minister of recommending their son for a peerage.7 Lady Charlotte Schreiber (as she later became, marrying her children’s tutor after Guest’s death) was a notable Victorian ‘character’, who had ten children, wrote books on iron, translated the Mabinogion and became a great collector of china, fans and playing-cards. One suspects that she would not have suited Disraeli. In any case, whatever he might say to appease his family, he was not interested in matrimony at this moment. For in the summer of 1833 he became deeply involved in an illicit love affair which was to dominate his life for the next three years.

The person in whose box Disraeli met Lady Charlotte Bertie was Henrietta, wife of Sir Francis Sykes, third baronet, of Basildon in Berkshire. ‘She is a fine woman, and very pleasant and good natured’, wrote Lady Charlotte in her journal. Disraeli fell in love with her and she became his mistress about this time or a little later. She was the eldest daughter of Henry Villebois of Marham Hall in Norfolk and Gloucester Place in London, a rich man and a partner in the great brewing firm of Truman and Hanbury.8 Sir Francis was the grandson of the first baronet (1730–1804), an able and respected servant of the East India Company, who made some £300,000 in its employ and was a close friend of both Clive and Warren Hastings. Sir Francis’s father, the second baronet (1767–1804), only held the title for a few weeks, he and his wife and youngest son dying of scarlet fever in Germany within ten days of each other and less than two months after the first baronet’s death. He was a much less worthy character than his father, being both dissipated and extravagant in his youth. He later became more respectable, marrying a daughter of the first Lord Henniker and entering Parliament.

His son, the third baronet (1799–1843), an orphan at the age of five and a delicate child as a result of the scarlet fever which carried off his parents, was brought up by the Duchess of Chandos, his maternal great-aunt. In 1821 he married Henrietta. They had three sons and a daughter.9 Sir Francis owned Basildon, a fine house though scarcely a ‘Palladian palace’, as Disraeli called it, and a house in Upper Grosvenor Street. He did his best to provide for his family in spite of a diminished patrimony. He was evidently an intelligent man, as his privately printed Scraps from a Journal (1836) shows. But his health was weak – his letters to Disraeli abound with medical details – and his character was not very strong. He had, moreover, made a disastrous marriage to a headstrong, wilful and passionate woman whom he could not easily control.

A conspiracy of silence has till recently concealed the story of her liaison with Disraeli, although it was well known at the time. The evidence consists of a series of badly written, ungrammatical semi-legible love letters – some eighty altogether – from her to him, and a memorandum by Disraeli’s solicitor, Sir Philip Rose, summarizing the story and advising Lord Rowton, Disraeli’s literary executor, to destroy them.10 Happily he did not, and they survive among the Hughenden papers. Inquiries have failed to discover Disraeli’s letters to her. The family probably destroyed them after her death. Monypenny refers to the affair so briefly and in such guarded language that it is impossible to infer what really happened. He does not even reveal the lady’s name. Although numerous books about Disraeli have appeared since the official biography, it was not until 1960 that the silence was broken by an American scholar, Professor B. R. Jerman in his book, The Young Disraeli.11

Henrietta was a woman of striking appearance, as the picture by Maclise shows. The first part of the novel Henrietta Temple is clearly based on this love affair, and Disraeli’s feelings for her are vividly described.

There is no love but love at first sight. This is the transcendant and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy…. An immortal flame burns in the breast of the man who adores and is adored…. He laughs alike at loss of fortune, loss of friends and loss of character. The deeds and thoughts of men are to him equally indifferent. He does not mingle in their paths of callous bustle or hold himself responsible to the airy impostures before which they bow down. He is a mariner who, in the sea of life, keeps his gaze fixedly on a single star; and if that do not shine, he lets go the rudder, and glories when his barque descends into the bottomless gulf.12

Disraeli first met Henrietta in the early spring, probably April. By June the affair was in full swing. On June 24 Disraeli apologizes to Austen for not seeing him. ‘The truth is, my dear fellow, but this is an explanation which I offer only to you – I have for the last ten weeks been only nominally in Town. The engrossing nature of my pursuits I leave to your imagination …’13 This is very probably an allusion to Henrietta. Early in June, Disraeli decided to bring Henrietta to Bradenham for a short visit on the 9th, and persuaded Sarah to send a formal invitation. The prospect of this fashionable figure from the grand London world descending upon the Disraeli household filled his sister with alarm.

Life at Bradenham was normally of a quiet and somewhat Jane Austenish hue – anyway when Benjamin was away. Sarah’s letters to him are filled with such episodes as their brother Jem’s (James) indignation at Benjamin’s ingratitude for all that he had done for the latter’s bay mare, or her fear that ‘the Governor will get into a scrape’ with the Bishop of Bristol ‘about the Sabbath’, or the odd conduct of Mr King, the Rector of Bradenham, in inviting the D’Israelis to dinner along with the Norrisses and the Dashwoods, despite the bad relations of the three families. ‘It was so like the Kings who owed us all three a dinner and were determined to make one do.’

The visit bristled with difficulties. For example, there was the cook, Mrs Adams, who, as early as April, had been described by Isaac to Benjamin as ‘sunk into childishness’. Indeed, Isaac with reckless optimism tried to enlist his son’s aid in procuring a new one – ‘The great difficulty is to get one who will live in the country’, he wrote. Disraeli was scarcely the man to cope with such domestic matters, as his sister well knew, and Sarah soon followed up her father’s letter: ‘It is too bad of the Governor to torment you about cooks.’ And so, in June, Adams was still there, but would ‘get furious’ if the visitors came down any later than the 9th. And what were they to do to entertain Henrietta?

But the visit seems to have been a success and Jem, then aged nineteen, was delighted when Henrietta offered to send him some antlers. A month later, in early July, we find Disraeli writing from Southend, where Sir Francis and Henrietta had taken a house. At the beginning of August they parted for the time being, and Disraeli returned to Bradenham. The first letter from Henrietta which has survived and can be dated accurately was written to him on August 16. It leaves no doubt about their relationship by then.

The signature is revealing. Disraeli needed not only a mistress but an adoring mother, someone to look after him in illness, sympathize with him in adversity, encourage him when he was in a mood of despondency, admire him when he was successful. His loves and friendships were almost invariably with women older than himself: Sara Austen; Clara Bolton; Henrietta; his wife; Mrs Brydges Williams. He sought the maternal solicitude which his mother never gave him – or not to the extent which he demanded. Henrietta ‘would be such an affectionate old Nurse to my child, and kiss and soothe every pain’. She corrects him as if he were her young son. ‘I hope my child you do not neglect the comb or the teeth. I shall scold you if you do, but above all I charge you not to smoke much. It leaves a strong flavour and last night at the Opera it was spoken of.’ The same pattern is repeated a few years later with Mary Anne Lewis, his future wife. ‘No one attended the funeral [of her brother] except your child,’ he writes. And again, ‘How is his darling? When will she come to see her child?’ She was twelve years older and really could provide the quasi-maternal affection that he wanted. Hence the success of the marriage. Henrietta was not so well suited to satisfy this element in Disraeli’s temperament. She could not give him material security, for she had no money of her own and was married to someone else; and, however much she might play up to the maternal role for which Disraeli cast her, she was basically a passionate, emotional, jealous, highly sexed woman who wanted a lover. Here are some typical letters:

Sometimes she had doubts about him and wanted to be reassured.

Best beloved do you love me? Do you indeed? How often have I asked you that question, how often been soothed by your assurance of devotion to me. I do not doubt you, oh no, I dare not – it would drive me mad – I have faith, the most implicit faith in all you have said and sworn and I know we shall meet with the same love we bear each other now. Dearest exert yourself for my sake and let our parting be as short as possible and I will bear it as best I can …

How I wish I was very clever for your sake. I do not fear your criticism. I have just sense enough to feel my deficiency & to wish we were more on a par … My sisters have been here, nosy things going on … [illegible] between H and her love. I have felt too unwell to leave my bed and was obliged to declare I had the cholera. My best blessing is with you Darling of my heart. Adieu. Think of me.17

Sometimes their love-making gave her belated fears which she wanted him to dispel, though it is hard to see what he could say.

I suffered last night from a fit of horror. I will hide my head in the dear bosom and ask you a question. Do you think any misery can occur to us now from all the loved embraces? I fear we are very rash people & when I think I shake – answer please a little yes or no & I beseech you not to be angry with me for who have I to communicate all my thoughts and fears but you my Soul … Can you come at 4. I hope to be there before that time. Remember yes or no.18

One cannot easily imagine Mary Anne, who for all her fantastical manners was cool and practical at heart, indulging in effusions like these. Nor does it require the wisdom of hindsight to guess that for Disraeli a liaison of this sort could not last for very long. At heart he, too, was cool and practical. He was not going to sacrifice his life for love.

The conduct of the affair was made easier than it might have been by the irregularities in the private life of Sir Francis. Clara Bolton19  had now become his mistress, with the connivance of her husband, the doctor, who, according to Sir Philip Rose, ‘was said to derive a pecuniary benefit from the connexion’. At first her presence on the scene caused trouble, for she still seems to have been intensely jealous about Disraeli, but in the end it made possible a modus vivendi between husband and wife.

Matters came to a head at the end of August. While Henrietta was writing from London the first letter quoted above, her husband was away shooting.

A million and more of thanks [she wrote to Disraeli on August 17] for the dearest letter … I will do as you tell me, live for Hope, but I own to the task being difficult every thought is so entirely yours and latterly I have been utterly dependent upon you for amusement for everything … I hope the Grouse will be eatable20  – A most kind letter from My Lord saying it was 4 in the morning and he had despatched me the first birds he had slaughtered … and the day brought Mrs. Bolton but I was not downstairs and dared not exhibit myself had I been. Such eyes, red, yellow, anything but blue. Dearest, Dearest Ammin21 how he would hate my ugly self.22

Meanwhile trouble impended. Scarcely had the grouse and Mrs Bolton arrived but Sir Francis Sykes himself appeared unexpectedly in London, instigated, so Henrietta suspected, by Mrs Bolton. He at once made a scene, asked whether she had been seeing Disraeli, and when she admitted doing so for an hour or two every day, forbade her ever to meet him again.

But Henrietta did not interpret prudence as silence. The mysterious Baron Haber had seen Sir Francis at Mrs Bolton’s the previous night (August 19) and had told Henrietta. She resolved on a counterattack, and after drafting and destroying several notes, decided to go round to Mrs Bolton’s house in person. There she had a stroke of luck. She found her husband’s carriage standing outside the door, which was open.

I walked in [she writes to Disraeli]24 sans knocking, and up to the drawing room sans being announced. Fancy their consternation. I really thought Francis would have fainted. Lady S., as stiff as a poker and perfectly cool: ‘Mrs. Bolton I have called upon you in consequence of a scene which I am perfectly aware I owe entirely to you, and I am here to have an understanding as from what has passed there can be no discourse between us 3. [You and] Sir F. are aware of my more than intimacy with Disraeli. It has suited all parties to be a great deal together, not certainly from the intimacy of the ladies, for I have never expressed a friendship for you. I have never been even commonly ladylike in my conduct to you and when together Disraeli and I Francis and you formed to [sic] distinct parties, and it can be proved that we did. Consequently in Sir Francis’ absence there was no change in me, and should he leave London to-morrow your doors I would never enter – nothing should induce me, but I will give Francis the sanction of my presence25 on the strict condition of his not violating by unjust and ungenerous threats ties which he himself has sanctioned and which both himself and yourself know have been necessary to carry on your own game … Before I leave this house the solemn promise must be given never to mention Disraeli’s name as a bug bear.’

This attack threw the enemy into confusion. Mrs Bolton at first tried to fight back. She declared that Henrietta had caused ‘as much of pain as of surprise’ to her.

She then added for good measure that, through Disraeli, Henrietta’s character was gone.

But Mrs Bolton could not sustain the battle. Henrietta ends her account to Disraeli,

The air had been cleared and from then onwards Sir Francis accepted the situation. There was as yet no question of a separation. Henrietta agreed to go to France with him on a tour for eleven days. Disraeli was summoned from Bradenham to say good-bye on August 28, and the following day the Sykeses left for the Continent. After they had gone she wrote advising him to ‘live as plainly and industriously as possible – no fruit, no made dishes – how you are laughing but my advice is nevertheless good and to be followed, Sir. Remember I am to order you to obey.’ Then she wanders into an amorous rhapsody:

In Calais she met the Bulwers beginning on their ill-fated journey to Naples – a holiday intended to restore their fragile marriage but destined to shatter it beyond repair. They told her that Disraeli stooped so much that walking in front of them he looked like fifty. ‘I was in a rage but it is true. So remember.’ The Bulwers had a bed in the back of their travelling-carriage, and Henrietta writes: ‘I built castles in the air of our travelling.’27

A day or so after she had left for Calais, Disraeli began to jot down his reflections and experiences in a notebook. Although it has become known to students of Disraeliana as ‘the Mutilated Diary’,28  even that name suggests a degree of coherence and order which is lacking. It is, rather, a sporadic record of his feelings, his thoughts and people whom he met. It ends abruptly with the commencement of his parliamentary career four years later.

Disraeli begins, on September 1, 1833, with the oft-quoted words: ‘I have passed the whole of this year in uninterrupted lounging and pleasure.’ After a reference to his political efforts he goes on:

… and one incident has indeed made this year the happiest of my life. How long will those feelings last? They have stood a great test, and now absence, perhaps the most fatal of all. My life has not been a happy one. Nature has given me an awful ambition and fiery passions. My life has been a struggle – with moments of rapture – a storm with dashes of moonlight – Love, Poetry …

At this point two pages are torn out of the book and we resume with an incomplete sentence

… achieve the difficult undertaking. With fair health I have no doubt of success but the result will probably be fatal to my health.

The incident was undoubtedly his love affair with Henrietta, and the missing pages probably refer to this, too. What was the ‘great test’ which his feelings had stood? We can but conjecture – perhaps the Bolton episode. The whole passage is a strange one. ‘How long will these feelings last?’ The question is one which a man would scarcely ask if he was swept away by a passionate love affair; it is possible to suspect that even from the start he was less in love with her than with the idea of being in love and of being loved. A grand passion was an inseparable part of that Byronic tradition which so often sounds, with a slightly hollow note, in Disraeli’s life. ‘That beautiful pale face will be my fate’, wrote Lady Caroline Lamb, and, as if echoing the words, Henrietta writes to Disraeli: ‘Your pale face is before me my Beloved.’

It is clear from the diary that Disraeli was in a curiously unsettled state of mind. He was contemplating yet another method of making his name in the world: he planned to write nothing less than an epic poem on the subject of the French Revolution, and intended to devote the autumn at Bradenham to this great work. But he made little progress. Early in the fourth week of September Henrietta returned to London. On September 25 he suddenly left Bradenham to be with her.

It is not clear, in spite of the visit in June, quite how much the D’Israeli family knew about the liaison at this stage. It is hard to believe that they knew nothing. Isaac was unworldly, but not as unworldly as all that. At any rate, whether or not he correctly understood the reasons he was worried about his son’s erratic behaviour and wrote him a letter of unusual seriousness.

Disraeli soon returned to Bradenham. Meanwhile a further complication arose. Henrietta’s father, Mr Henry Villebois, had cut Henrietta and Disraeli in the street when he was last in London. Unfortunately the gesture was wasted, as the lovers were too engrossed in each other to notice him. He was obliged to inform Henrietta through one of his other daughters that he intended, so Henrietta reported to Disraeli, to go on cutting her until ‘my intimacy with you ceased’. He said that ‘Francis’ conduct was everything unprincipled and Mrs. Bolton no fit companion for either of us’. Henrietta went on:

She then proceeded to invite Disraeli to stay at Southend in November. Sir Francis, now apparently reconciled to the relationship, added his solicitations in cordial terms.

Dear D’Israeli

Lady Sykes has taken possession of the house at Southend for nearly a fortnight – we like it very much – the weather is favourable for all out door amusements … I like it much more at night as the appearance is grand mysterious and wild … we hope we shall have the pleasure of your company down here – there is a very good bedroom with the dining room attached to it, with a fire in it….31

There was only one snag. Presumably as a quid pro quo, he insisted upon the Boltons being regular guests, too. This seems reasonable enough in the circumstances, but naturally Henrietta disliked having as a constant guest a woman who had been her lover’s former mistress. Indeed, she had already sought reassurance on this very point, and wrote to Disraeli in the same letter quoted above,

And so it is all over with B – is it not so – tell me. Write to me as soon as you can (to-morrow, do) – the fracas did good, not anything now but praise –. I have seen no one excepting always the Boltons – we are going to-morrow to Gravesend about Francis’ yacht.32

And again she writes a week later from Southend

Disraeli seems to have arrived early in November, but there was no question of the Boltons making any overt trouble. ‘My word is law, my look is a command,’ Henrietta wrote early in December, just after Disraeli’s return to Bradenham, ‘but I am hourly nay every minute annoyed by the coarse vulgarity of the one, and the hypocrisy, the low cunning of the other.’34 Disraeli too must have been embarrassed by the situation. Poulter’s Grange, Southend, during the month of November, certainly contained a curious household: Sir Francis, weak and affable; Dr Bolton, ill-bred and familiar; Mrs Bolton, brassy and overdressed;35 Henrietta, condescending and grand; Disraeli, silent and cryptic. It suited all parties concerned to preserve a veneer of civility, but beneath it passions seethed.

2

Disraeli passed the whole of November at Southend, returning to Bradenham at the end of the month. He had made some progress with the Revolutionary Epick, and indeed it was becoming more than ever necessary that he should finish the book, if only to recoup his finances. These had long been in a state of confusion. To some extent he was able to stave off the most pressing demands, and to earn enough for current expenses, by his pen. But the last of his books to make much money had been The Young Duke, for which he had received and spent the advance as long ago as 1830. Since then he had published Contarini Fleming in May 1832, and Alroy along with the Rise of Iskander in March 1833.

Contarini Fleming, as we saw, was a complete failure. Author and publisher shared the profits, which amounted to only £18 each. Alroy, whose opening chapter, as Disraeli himself admitted, made just as good sense if one read it backwards, was oddly enough more profitable – anyway to the author, if not to the publisher. Murray declined it, but Saunders and Otley gave an advance of £300, which enabled Disraeli to pay off his debt to Austen. Most modern critics would attribute some merit to Contarini, perhaps a little to Iskander, and none whatever to Alroy, which is written in a deplorable sort of prose-poetry and is perhaps the most unreadable of his romances. The contemporary public found all three equally obscure, and Disraeli by now badly needed the money which only a real popular success could give him. It was destined to come neither soon nor easily. Over a year later, early in 1835, we find the American gossip writer N. P. Willis writing: ’d’Israeli cannot sell a book at all, I hear.’ Not until December 1836 did he manage to catch the attention of the public again – with Henrietta Temple.

If his income had declined, his expenditure had increased. His wardrobe, ‘ruinous’ in 1830, had certainly become no less so in 1833; there had been election expenses, and finally there was Henrietta. To conduct a love affair with a lady of fashion was bound to be costly. Moreover, in Henrietta’s case it was also extremely distracting. She was possessive, tearful and exhausting. Being in love with her was a full-time occupation when she was present, and a considerable drain on the emotional and mental resources even when she was not. When one is trying to compose an epic poem it is presumably tiresome to have to spend hours writing love letters.

Desperate for money, Disraeli resolved to consult his old friend Austen, who had just lent him another £300 when he passed through London at the end of November on his way back to Bradenham from Southend. Disraeli now asked him to lend an additional £1,200, which he said would cover his outstanding debts, in return for an assignment of his copyrights. These, with the exception of The Young Duke, which was due to fall in shortly, belonged to Disraeli, and he proposed to bring out a complete edition of his romances, ‘by which if I sell 4000 in monthly volumes I shall make £1,500’. In addition the appearance of ‘the Epic poem and a novel’ (presumably Henrietta Temple) would produce at least £1,000. The loan would give him the necessary tranquility of mind to complete these two works within six months. ‘I entreat you my dear friend not to look upon this letter in the light in which such appeals are usually and justly viewed.’36

But Austen felt it was a time to deliver a rebuke. Rightly or wrongly he considered that Disraeli had ‘dropped’ him in the course of climbing into a more upper-class world than that inhabited by sedate London solicitors like himself. On December 1 he wrote and said so, adding that after ‘many hours of most anxious and painful consideration’ he had decided to refuse the loan, although he would not insist on calling in the £300 existing debt. Could not Disraeli appeal to his relatives?

This rebuff seems to have come as a genuine surprise to the recipient. ‘I awoke from a dream,’ he wrote to Austen on December 3, ‘I really thought that you would have done anything for me and that’s the truth.’ He repudiated the charge of having dropped his old friend.

He went on to say that his debts were solely due to electioneering expenses, doubtless forgetting that he had told Austen the year before that the cost to him of the Wycombe election had been ‘a mere trifle’.38 He ended:

Now for my father. In the most important step of a man’s life, though this should be breathed scarcely even to you, I have opposed his earnest wishes, and I have based my dutiful opposition upon my independence. I do not wish by extraordinary money applications to one who was always very generous to me to revive a most painful subject. As for my relations I have never been on terms of intimacy or friendship with a single member of the whole brood. Friends my dear Austen are not made every day nor do the habits of my life which are either passed in the dazzle of existence or complete solitude, allow me to make them. It is in youth only that these connections are formed and yours was my last. Had the friend [Meredith] who in his gloomier hours never found me wanting been spared to me I should not have had to write this humiliating letter. Farewell …39

Disraeli’s reason for not wishing to apply to Isaac may have been because he had rejected some sort of matrimonial project, favoured by the family; or it may have been merely an excuse. Henrietta was duly shocked by Austen’s heartlessness.

Disraeli remained at Bradenham to compose his poem, though he was evidently much distracted by his difficulties. Henrietta’s letters poured in:

Of all the evils of life to be harassed about money is the most provoking.

Loving you as I do I cannot but grieve at our separation. I went into your room today, arranged your wardrobe, kissed the Bed, swallowed my tears and behaved as a heroine – dearest dearest Ammin – I do think my fate is a cruel one – born to love you does add to my sorrow & still I am grateful that I do – I live for Thursday, remember to tell me all. Today’s letter was the kindest, the dearest – write me many such … 125 lines [of the poem], I scarcely believe it. Dearest I am astonished and delighted and congratulate you. Tell me every word your Father says about it. Is he not delighted?41

The answer to the last question was doubtful. Isaac thought that the style resembled that of Pye,42 but we do not know whether Disraeli passed this opinion on to Henrietta. And so the letters continue. On Christmas Eve she writes:

… The blissful hours we have spent! Never let them be effaced from your mind. Sometimes I fear novelty will wear off & satiety succeed to your present feelings – can it ever be? Last evening I amused myself turning over all your Duke St. wardrobe – washing the brushes etc & I felt a gush of happiness even for the old slippers – you may laugh for I did at my folly, still I hate to think it is folly, for I could not wish to love you less and I should if I felt not so.43

The end of the year saw an unexpected and welcome change in their fortunes. Disraeli called on the Austens after Christmas, and Austen, whether cajoled by his wife who still adored Disraeli, or persuaded by Disraeli’s personal charm, lent him the £1,200 at 2½ per cent for a year.44 For the time being Disraeli was safe.

3

Disraeli spent most of the spring of 1834 at Southend finishing off the Revolutionary Epick. Before he went he rather reluctantly agreed to repay the Austens’ kindness by giving the first part of the poem a trial run at a literary party of Mrs Austen’s on January 16. The scene was recalled many years afterwards by Mrs Austen’s nephew, Sir Henry Layard.45 Disraeli was dressed in his most fantastic and affected costume, his shirt collar turned down in Byronic fashion, his shoes enlivened by red rosettes, his hair elaborately curled and highly scented. He stood with his back to the fire and recited in theatrical tones the opening canto. He then had to go, and as soon as he was out of the room Samuel Warren, one of the other guests, who was an excellent mimic and later wrote a best-selling novel called Ten Thousand a Year, proceeded to declaim a sort of parody which he had improvised for the occasion. The whole party dissolved in laughter, and there was at least one literary circle in which Disraeli’s poem was ridiculed even before it was published.

At Southend, Disraeli seems to have made rapid progress despite the claims of Henrietta.

I pass my days in constant composition [he wrote in mid-February to Sarah.] I live solely on snipes and ride a good deal. You could not have a softer climate or sunnier skies than much abused Southend. Here there are myrtles in the open air in profusion.46

On one occasion he even hunted. As he modestly puts it,

I hunted the other day with Sir Henry Smythe’s hounds and, although not in scarlet, was the best mounted man in the field riding Lady Sykes’s Arabian mare which I nearly killed: a run of 30 miles and I stopped at nothing. I gained great Kudos.47

His good progress with the poem may partly be explained by the fact that Henrietta was not there all the while, for in the same letter he observes that his only companion is her daughter Eva, who ‘is a most beautiful child and prattles without ceasing’ – it was one of Disraeli’s most amiable traits that he was devoted to children – and that the Sykeses were away indefinitely. ‘Solitude at this moment,’ he observes, ‘suits me very well.’

Not that his solitude was entirely undisturbed. Disraeli’s family suddenly seems to have taken to literature. Sarah wrote a short story and pestered her brother into getting it accepted, only to complain bitterly at the low payment which she got for it. The pen of Ralph, too, was not idle. ‘I suppose you will be at Southend for some time,’ he mournfully observed,48 as he sent his brother first a work entitled ‘Preparatory Schools and Public Schools by an Old Wiccamist’ and secondly ‘a slight humorous sketch’. He had, however, some doubts whether his brother had perused either very carefully. For example, against the words ‘Until the son is 12 years it is the mother alone who must find him a preparatory school’ Benjamin had marked an obscure squiggle. What did it mean? And in a passage beginning, ‘Of what use is all this knowledge of Latin and Greek …?’ blank had been left for Benjamin to insert a list of suitable books, but the blank remained – blank. As for the humorous sketch, Benjamin said that ‘the design and execution are not felicitous’. ‘Do you like its foundation?’ asked his persistent brother, adding, ‘But I do not think you have much looked into it, though I perceive one slight alteration.’ Disraeli’s family loyalty was deep, but it must have been strained at times.

The first book of the Epick was published in March. Disraeli asked permission to dedicate it to the Duke of Wellington, who courteously declined. In his preface the author declared that he awaited the public’s verdict to decide whether to publish more, ‘… and if it pass in the negative I shall, without a pang, hurl my lyre to limbo’. However, although the verdict was anything but favourable, this did not stop Disraeli from bringing out two more volumes in June. These fell equally flat. True, there were encouraging cries from his family and friends – Isaac conceding that his apprehensions about the resemblance to Pye were unjustified. True, that ancient and celebrated lion-huntress, Lady Cork, who had once been addressed by Dr Johnson as ‘dearest dunce’, was so enthusiastic that she instructed her maid to bind the volumes in crimson velvet at the cost of seventeen shillings. But nothing could conceal the fact that Disraeli was not a poet. His style is feeble, derivative, and wholly devoid of inspiration.

4

In April 1834 one of the difficulties of Disraeli’s private life was temporarily removed: Sir Francis Sykes departed on a prolonged tour of Europe. He did not return until late in 1836. Mrs Bolton vanished from the scene, too, and we next hear of her as occupying a somewhat equivocal status in Rotterdam.49 Disraeli and Henrietta were able to carry on their love affair without further interruption from that quarter. Sir Francis seems to have fully condoned their relationship and wrote friendly letters to both of them during his sojourn on the Continent. Disraeli now lived openly with Henrietta and virtually took up residence in the Sykes’s London house in Upper Grosvenor Street. They went everywhere together, and enjoyed to the full a London season of unusual brilliance. ‘What a happy or rather amusing society H and myself commanded this year,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘What delicious little suppers after the opera.’

Disraeli’s letters to his sister at this time sound more than ever like a gossip column in a glossy weekly journal. In a single week in June he went on Monday to the Duchess of St Albans’s, on Tuesday to the opera with Lady Essex, on Wednesday to the Duchess of Hamilton’s. A month later he made his début at Almacks. He dined regularly with Lady Blessington at Gore House. D’Orsay was his friend, and he writes in his diary: ‘I am as popular with the first-rate men as I am hated by the second-rate.’

He met the celebrities of the day; he was sought out by the aged Beckford, the owner of Fonthill and author of Vathek, who was drawn from his habits of a recluse to meet this rising literary and social star; he had a long talk with O’Connell, with whom he was later to quarrel so bitterly; he was introduced to Lord Hertford, celebrated alike for his wealth, arrogance and profligacy – the Lord Steyne of Vanity Fair, the Lord Monmouth of Coningsby. At Lady Cork’s he meets the Duke of Wellington, at Lady Blessington’s Lord Durham, at Mrs Norton’s Lord Melbourne.

The last of these encounters has achieved a well-deserved fame. It took place in the early summer. Grey was still Prime Minister. Melbourne, who had been Home Secretary since 1830, was not generally regarded as his successor, although he was, of course, one of the leading figures in the Cabinet. He was an intimate friend of Mrs Norton. One evening, at her tiny house in Storey’s Gate, Disraeli came in, and Mrs Norton introduced him to Melbourne who was intrigued by his unusual appearance, and his equally unusual conversation, and suddenly asked him, in an abrupt but kindly tone: ‘Well now, tell me what do you want to be.’ ‘I want to be Prime Minister’, replied Disraeli. Melbourne was not easily surprised, but this reply surprised even him. He decided that such absurd ambitions should be discouraged. ‘No chance of that in our time. It is all arranged and settled’, he said, somewhat in the tone of Hilaire Belloc’s Duke,50 ‘Nobody can compete with Stanley … If you are going to enter politics and mean to stick to it, I dare say you will do very well, for you have ability and enterprise; and if you are careful how you steer, no doubt you will get into some port at last. But you must put all these foolish notions out of your head; they won’t do at all. Stanley will be the next Prime Minister, you will see.’51

Disraeli never forgot this curious conversation. Forty years later he told Lord Rowton that he could still repeat every word that Melbourne had said.

During this gay summer season Disraeli made one new friendship which was to be more important for his future than any of the encounters so far described. At a dinner party given by Henrietta on July 10 he met for the first time the former Tory Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst.52 The latter was over sixty, Disraeli was not yet thirty, but the two men took an instant liking for each other.

Lyndhurst comes down to history as a somewhat enigmatic figure, and the enigma is not made any easier of solution by the existence of two violently conflicting biographies,53 and by the fact that Lyndhurst himself before his death destroyed most of his papers. Nevertheless, there is enough surviving evidence from contemporaries to leave us in little doubt that, although Lyndhurst was a man of brilliant parts and considerable legal ability, he did not inspire trust. The licence of his conversation, his ribaldry and cynicism, his general levity of demeanour were ill calculated to give him a reputation for seriousness of purpose, high principles, and that Roman gravitas, which Englishmen were beginning to expect from their statesmen. It was not enough to have a good brain. In a brilliant portrait of Lyndhurst, Walter Bagehot wrote: ‘Few men led a laxer life; few men, to the end of their life, were looser in their conversation; but there was no laxity in his intellect.’54 This was, indeed, true. But it did not save Lyndhurst in an increasingly serious-minded era from the suspicion that there was something basically unreliable about his character and his principles.

Bagehot alludes to the laxity of his life, and Bagehot was a man who weighed his words carefully when he wrote them. For Lyndhurst, who managed to preserve an astonishingly youthful appearance long into his middle age, was a notorious pursuer of women. He is said to have been the prototype of Gilbert’s ‘highly susceptible Chancellor’ in Iolanthe. Lady Tankerville once, so Disraeli records, ‘asked Lyndhurst whether he believed in platonic friendship. “After, but not before,” was the reply.’55 And Disraeli wrote in an appraisal after his friend’s death: ‘He was wonderfully fond of the society of women, and this not merely from his susceptibility to the sex, which was notorious, but because he was fond of them in every relation of life …’ The passage ends with a description of Lyndhurst’s face which in its upper part was ‘that of Olympian Jove … The lower part of his countenance betrayed the deficiencies of his character, a want of high purpose, and some sensual attributes.’56

Although Disraeli had by now made the acquaintance of a good many men of power and influence, Lyndhurst was the first with whom he became on terms of real intimacy. Most accounts agree that Lyndhurst’s conversation was reckless in the extreme, and remarkably indiscreet. Disraeli soon found himself the recipient of high secrets. He had that delicious sense of being on the inside of great events, of knowing what really lay behind this or that celebrated political transaction of the immediate past. Nor was this the only advantage that he derived from his new friendship. Lyndhurst may not have been trusted everywhere, but he was a man of much influence, and high enough in the councils of the Tory party to help Disraeli in his political ambitions. He himself saw in his young friend’s literary talents a valuable weapon in the war of political journalism which raged between the parties. A useful bargain might well be tacitly struck. A great magnifico of a very different calibre from the Marquess of Carabas had found his Vivian Grey. Disraeli was in effect Lyndhurst’s secretary and man of confidence for the next two years.

His own political position was still doubtful. He remained in theory a Radical, and, both before and after meeting Lyndhurst, looked to the leader of the Radicals, Lord Durham, for patronage and advancement. On June 15 he met Durham for the first time at a dinner party given by Lady Blessington at Gore House. She skilfully guided the conversation so as to show Disraeli to Durham at his best, and he appears to have made an impression upon that great magnate.

But, however sparkling he was at Lady Blessington’s dinner-table, he does not seem to have convinced Durham that he would be an asset to the Radical party. At all events nothing came of the meeting.57 This was all the more annoying since it was clear that a political crisis impended. Despite, or perhaps because of, their huge parliamentary majority, the Whig party was beginning to dissolve into fragments. As early as March 1833 Durham had left the Cabinet. In May 1834 the right wing headed by Stanley, Graham and the Duke of Richmond resigned. In July the intrigues of Brougham drove the elderly Prime Minister, Grey, into resignation, and William IV, somewhat to the public surprise, selected Melbourne as his successor. Thus matters stood when Parliament went into recess in the late summer of 1834.

At the beginning of August, Disraeli repaired to Bradenham, melancholy, ill, and despondent at being away from Henrietta. His intimacy with Lyndhurst had much increased, and the latter’s readiness to help him was enhanced by the activities of Henrietta. Her letters leave no doubt that she used her influence with him to forward Disraeli’s interests. The question is what the basis of this influence was. Did Disraeli, as was believed in some circles at the time, encourage her to become Lyndhurst’s mistress in order to secure Lyndhurst’s patronage for himself? On this point it is necessary again to quote Sir Philip Rose’s memorandum.

Rose goes on to add, however, that the letters suggest that the pressure for the invitation came from the D’Israeli family rather than from Benjamin himself, and that it might have been embarrassing for him to refuse.

Examination of these papers and others which Sir Philip Rose probably had not seen enables us to clear up some points. It was Henrietta who first introduced Disraeli to Lyndhurst, and, whatever the circumstances in which she first met the latter, it was not the result of any initiative on Disraeli’s part. He therefore can be acquitted of that charge. Was Henrietta, as Rose believed, Lyndhurst’s mistress? The letters do not prove conclusively that she was, but she travelled with him on the Continent – along with some members of his family, it is fair to add – in the autumn of 1834.59  With a man of Lyndhurst’s reputation this makes for the probability of such a connexion, but not certainty.

Did Disraeli approve of, and connive at, the close friendship which prevailed between his mistress and the ex-Lord Chancellor? He was apparently invited to go on the continental visit, but refused. This might suggest that he did not approve. But Henrietta’s decision to accompany Lyndhurst was a sudden one prompted largely by the threat of her sister Maria descending upon her in Park Lane and trying to cajole her, on grounds of the notoriety of her affair with Disraeli, into quitting London and living with her father in Norfolk. Disraeli might have been genuinely unable to go at such short notice. Moreover, he had no money at all just then.

Dearest love you will see by the accompanying disagreeable letter why I am so anxious to leave it [London] on the 25th. Lord Lyndhurst arrived in town last night. I can make him do as I like so whatever arrangement you think best tell me and I will perform it only to my father I cannot go. I should lose my senses … I shall never be happy till clasped to your bosom … Ld Lyndhurst is anxious you should be in Parlt. Seriously he is a most excellent being and I am sure I can make him [do] what I please – even the Durhamites – he is a gt friend of Brougham.60

And she enclosed the ‘disagreeable letter’ from her sister Maria, which warned her that she would be socially ostracized ‘if you allowed him [Disraeli] to be actually Master of your House’, and implored her to go to Norfolk with her father.61

A few days later Henrietta announced her resolve to accompany Lyndhurst abroad adding,

I like Lord L. very much. He is very good natured and I only wish he had the power to serve us but he is too unambitious and only thinks of driving away care. He has a magnificent house.62

And shortly after that she thoughtfully observed: ‘He is a perfect fool where women are concerned.’63

The notorious visit to Bradenham, which seems to have caused such a scandal in Buckinghamshire county society, did not take place until July 1835, and it was followed by another that autumn when Henrietta and Lyndhurst again visited Bradenham together. The true relationship between the three cannot be determined with certainty. One thing, however, is certain; the episode did him nothing but harm in the locality where he was trying to make his political way. Sir Philip Rose goes further and says that when Disraeli was passed over for office by Peel in 1841 the Lyndhurst – Sykes imbroglio was ‘reported’ to be the cause. If such reports were current, they were probably ill founded, since Peel had, as we shall see, other and stronger motives for acting as he did in 1841. But there can be no doubt that the affair damaged Disraeli and that it made its contribution, along with many other episodes, to the understandable aura of distrust which hung around his name for so many years.

1 Jerman, The Young Disraeli (1960), 186.

2 Correspondence, 20.

3 She had a shadowy connexion with the Austens, her mother (née Layard) being a sister of Peter Layard, who was Austen’s brother-in-law and father of Henry Layard, the assyriologist and diplomat.

4 Jerman, 187.

5 Disraeli Papers, Box 13, A/IV/G/9, n.d.

6 Quoted by Jerman, The Young Disraeli, 187–8, from the manuscript diaries in the possession of Viscount Wimborne.

7 The first Lord Wimborne.

8 Rye, Norfolk Families (2 vols, 1911–13), ii, 968. Henrietta’s brother became High Sheriff of Norfolk and MP for West Norfolk. One of her sisters, Maria, who appears later in this story, married first Lord Glentworth, then a Colonel Baillie. She died at the age of 100 in 1903. The other, Emily, married Colonel Bathurst, a grandson of Bishop Bathurst of Norwich. Their son inherited the Villebois estates.

9 Francis, b. 1822; Frederick, b. 1826; Henry, b. 1828; and Eva, b. 1830. None of the three brothers had any male heirs. They inherited the title in succession and on the death of Henry in 1916 it passed to the descendants of the Rev. William Sykes, a brother of the third baronet, but a very different and much stronger character. It remains in that branch of the family today.

10 Hughenden Papers, Box 27, A/XI/A/8.

11 The story in this and the succeeding chapters is based directly upon Disraeli’s papers, but the main outline is the same as Professor Jerman’s, and although we differ in some details I should like to pay tribute to his skill in unravelling this and many other obscure matters in Disraeli’s early life.

12 Henrietta Temple, Bk II, ch. 4.

13 British Museum, Add. MSS., 45908, f.70.

14 Hughenden Papers, Box 7, A/I/B, June 4, 1833.

15 Hughenden Papers, Box, 13, A/IV/H/1.

16 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/82, n.d.

17 ibid., A/IV/H/1.

18 ibid., A/IV/H/66.

19 See above, p. 1.

20 She had sent some to Bradenham.

21 Henrietta frequently used this as a term of endearment. Ferdinand Armine is the hero of Henrietta Temple, of which Disraeli had written the first volume already. He did not resume and finish the novel until 1836, after he had parted from the real Henrietta for good and all.

22 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/2.

23 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/14.

24 ibid., Box 13, A/IV/H/88, n.d. The letter is printed in full by Jerman, The Young Disraeli, 200–2. The date must be August 22 or 28.

25 Professor Jerman reads ‘precedence’, but this makes no sense.

26 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/5.

27 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/6.

28 ibid., Box 11, A/III/C.

29 Hughenden Papers, Box 8, A/I/C/46.

30 ibid., Box 13, A/IV/H/8, October 11, 1833.

31 ibid., A/IV/H/10, October 30.

32 ibid., A/IV/H/8, October 11.

33 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/9, October 18, 1833.

34 ibid., Box 13, A/IV/H/12, December 6, 1833.

35 ibid., ‘Mrs B. is a mass of splendour – where the money to pay it [comes from] is an awful question.’

36 The correspondence about this loan is printed in full by Jerman, 207–11 and 214.

37 No doubt the last sentence refers to his love affair, but it is not clear what the entrance was to Society, which he disregarded. Perhaps it was a myth.

38 Austen did not forget. See Jerman, 212, for his reply. ‘I recollect your telling me when I cautioned you about electioneering expenses that you had managed for a mere trifle.’

39 See Jerman, 208–10, for the whole letter.

40 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/12, December 6, 1833. My transcription differs from Jerman’s, 215.

41 ibid., Box 13, A/IV/H/11, December 4, 1883.

42 The worst Poet Laureate in English history with the possible exception of Alfred Austin.

43 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/14, December 24, 1833.

44 Jerman, 217.

45 An article in the Quarterly Review for January 1889.

46 Correspondence, 23.

47 M. & B., i, 246. It is typical of the way in which that cautious Wykehamist Civil Servant, Ralph Disraeli, edited his brother’s letters that in his version Correspondence, 23) ‘pink’ is substituted for ‘scarlet’, the allusion to the ownership of the Arabian mare is cut out, and the last sentence is eliminated altogether.

48 Hughenden Papers, Box 9, A/I/E/54.

49 See above, pp. 1.

50 ‘We had intended you to be The next Prime Minister but three: The Stocks were sold; the Press was squared; The Middle Class was quite prepared’. Lord Lundy.

51 W. M. Torrens, Memoirs of … Viscount Melbourne (new edition, 1890), 275.

52 John Singleton Copley, 1st and only Earl of Lyndhurst, 1772–1863. Lord Chancellor 1827–30, 1834–5, 1841–6. Chief Baron of the Exchequer 1831–4.

53 Campbell in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors is hostile. Sir Theodore Martin, who was commissioned by Lady Lyndhurst to redress the balance, is panegyrical. Neither should be regarded as reliable.

54 Walter Bagehot, Biographical Studies (1880), 329.

55 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/A/57.1.

56 ibid., Box 26, A/X/A/60, 3.

57 Disraeli claimed in a memorandum written nearly thirty years later (see M. & B., i, 263) that Durham offered to return him to Parliament, but this seems to conflict with Durham’s rather unhelpful reply (ibid., 267) when Disraeli asked him point-blank for his support at Aylesbury. Perhaps Durham had made some non-committal observations which Disraeli misconstrued.

58 Hughenden Papers, Box 27, A/XI/A/8.

59 Lyndhurst’s first wife died at the beginning of the year.

60 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/85, n.d.

61 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/21, September 20,1834.

62 ibid., Box 13, A/IV/H/23, September 25.

63 loc. cit.