1

The autumn of 1834 saw a new political crisis and a new chance for Disraeli. Althorp, leader of the House of Commons, had inherited his father’s peerage and Melbourne felt obliged to insist on Lord John Russell as his successor. This occurred just as Disraeli was in the middle of weaving a plot reminiscent of Vivian Grey, whereby Chandos, with whom he was on friendly terms, was to join with Lyndhurst in resuscitating the old Country party.1 On November 14 William IV, unwilling to accept Russell, dismissed Melbourne and sent for Wellington. The Duke recommended him to send for Peel, who was in Rome at the time. It would take a month to bring him back. Meanwhile Wellington and Lyndhurst formed a two-man caretaker government, the political world hummed with intrigue and everyone made plans for the inevitable general election.

Disraeli first made an overture to Lord Durham, but there was nothing doing. The Radical Earl would not give tangible help, although he wished Disraeli luck – ‘these are times which require the presence in Parliament of every true and honest politician’. This was not good enough. In no way perturbed at swinging to the opposite side of the political compass, Disraeli applied to Wellington and Lyndhurst. The latter did his best, consulting Greville who had told him that Lord George Bentinck, Tory MP for King’s Lynn, needed ‘a good man to assist in turning out Billy Lennox’.2 Lyndhurst suggested Disraeli, adding that he was a friend of Chandos and, incorrectly, that Durham was trying to get him a seat. Greville commented dryly in his journal on December 6: ‘His political principles, must, however, be in abeyance, for he said that Durham was doing all he could to get him by the offer of a seat, and so forth; if, therefore, he is undecided and wavering between Chandos and Durham, he must be a mighty impartial personage. I don’t think such a man will do, though just such as Lyndhurst would be connected with.’ Nevertheless he passed the suggestion on to Bentinck, for he noted next day: ‘Disraeli he won’t hear of.’3 It would have required second sight to predict that within a dozen years they were to be intimate allies engaged in driving Peel out of office for ever.

There was now nothing for Disraeli but to make a third assault on Wycombe as an independent Radical, but it is interesting to notice that on this occasion at the instigation of Lyndhurst the Tory managers contributed £500 toward his election expenses.4 They appear to have had some misgivings, but Lyndhurst informed them that Disraeli would withdraw at once if the money was not forthcoming. Presumably it was considered worth while to ensure a contest even if the anti-Whig candidate sailed under Radical colours.

On December 16 Disraeli delivered a lengthy speech at Wycombe, which he considered sufficiently important to issue in pamphlet form immediately afterwards.5 He could not, he said, condescend both to be supported by the Tories because they believed he was a Tory and the Liberals because they thought he was a Liberal. He stood for repeal of the Malt Tax to relieve agriculture, and for the abolition of Irish tithes, though he was against lay appropriation, which all too often meant aristocratic robbery. ‘I know the love that great lords, and especially Whig lords have for abbey lands and great tithes: I remember Woburn and I profit by the reminiscence.’ He favoured abolition of Church rates if only for the sake of the Establishment itself, which ‘I consider … a guarantee of civilization, and a barrier against bigotry’. He also supported the reform of municipal corporations. As for Peel’s Government, he was noncommittal; it should be given a chance. He would have no truck with the argument that it was wrong to accept reforming measures from the party which had once opposed reform. The Whigs had a poor record for consistency, too, and anyway did consistency matter? ‘The truth is, gentlemen, a statesman is the creature of his age, the child of circumstances, the creation of his times.’ He laughed at the objection to a rising politician that at a former period of his career he advocated a policy different from his present one. ‘All I seek to ascertain is whether his present policy be just, necessary, expedient.’ The Whigs, he maintained, had aimed at power for life, and would have succeeded if they had been able to pack the House of Lords as they had packed the House of Commons. ‘I think we may feel that we have some interest in maintaining the prerogative of the Crown and the privileges of the Peers.’ Finally he let himself go in an entertaining comparison of the late Government to the performance of Mr Ducrow, a then celebrated circus performer who rode six horses at the same time. Unfortunately one by one they fell ill and donkeys were substituted instead.

It was all in vain. He was beaten for the third time, the figures being Smith 289, Grey 147, Disraeli 128.

Disraeli evidently decided after his latest setback that independent radicalism was no longer a winner, if it ever had been. He must join one of the two great traditional organized parties. His choice could not fail to be the Tories. Indeed, it already was, and if Lyndhurst’s overture to Bentinck had come off he would by now have been a Tory MP. The Whigs were out of the question. His political efforts had inevitably been based on a stout anti-Whig programme, if only because the constituency where he stood had as its sitting members two Whigs; and in the last contest he had accepted financial aid from the Tory managers. Monypenny’s suggestion that he was converted by the Tamworth Manifesto, Peel’s proclamation of a new and more liberal form of Toryism, will not hold water.7 Peel had not even returned to England by December 7, when Disraeli’s negotiations for a Tory seat at King’s Lynn fell through. The manifesto was not issued till the 16th.

As soon as the news of his defeat came through on January 7, Disraeli wrote to the Duke of Wellington: ‘I am now a cipher, but if the devotion of my energies to your cause, in and out can ever avail you, your Grace may count upon me who seeks no greater satisfaction than that of serving a great man.’ The Duke replied with guarded courtesy in the third person: ‘He very much regrets the result of the election at Wycombe.’ To mark his conversion to the Tory cause Disraeli had his name put down for the Carlton Club, his proposer and seconder being respectively Lords Strangford and Chandos. The former, a diplomat manqué and an Irish poetaster, was a great admirer of Contarini Fleming. His son George Smythe was to be closely linked with Disraeli in the Young England movement. It was some time before Disraeli got in, and after his experience at the Athenaeum he was somewhat apprehensive, busily lobbying Lady Blessington and others for their influence. But he was duly elected in March 1836, one of fifty out of four hundred candidates. By then Strangford was a member of the selection committee, and Chandos was chairman. As Strangford observed, ‘The Devil’s in the fire if you don’t get in.’ From early 1835 onwards Disraeli became a regular diner-out in Conservative houses. One party out of many deserves resuscitation. It was given by Lyndhurst. There Disraeli met for the first time W. E. Gladstone, ‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories’, MP for Newark since 1831 and one of Peel’s Junior Lords of the Treasury. Disraeli noted that the dinner was ‘rather dull but we had a swan very white and stuffed with truffles, the best company there’.

The general election greatly improved the position of the Conservative party, but Peel was still in a minority. Following the conventions of an earlier day, he tried, nevertheless, to carry on, but after six defeats in as many weeks he had to resign. The King was obliged in April 1835 to take back Melbourne as Prime Minister with Russell as leader of the House. He regarded the Whigs with bitter hostility for the remainder of his reign. The change of Government gave Disraeli a fresh chance. In those days acceptance of office involved vacating one’s parliamentary seat. Henry Labouchere, Member for Taunton, was one of those included in the new ministry, and it was decided at Tory headquarters to put up £300 and send Disraeli to fight the by-election. Bonham, the Tory agent, described Disraeli to a local Tory solicitor ‘as a Gentleman for whom all the Conservative Party are most anxious to obtain a seat in the H. of Commons … He is the son of Mr. D’Israeli well known in the literary world, and is himself a very able man.’8 In a later letter he ended: ‘At all events I am satisfied that we have sent you a good Candidate.’9 This was a big step forward, for Disraeli was now the official nominee of his party, and even if he lost was likely in the long run to get a safe seat, provided he put up a good performance. He had, however, to endure a good deal of abuse on the ground of being a turncoat. Even the unpolitical d’Orsay wrote urging him to proclaim that ‘though a Tory you are a reforming one, because it is generally understood that you committed yourself in some degree to the other party’.

A vivid account of his appearance and manner of speaking survives from the pen of a contemporary journalist. He was more dandified than ever, loaded with glittering chains on his waistcoat and rings on his fingers. ‘Altogether he was the most intellectual looking exquisite I had ever seen.’ But the observer was impressed by his powers of speech. ‘The dandy was transformed into the man of mind, the Mantalini-looking personage into a practical orator and finished elocutionist.’10 Disraeli was defeated by 452 to 282.

The Taunton by-election resulted in the most famous of all Disraeli’s personal quarrels. He was reported in the Press as having stigmatized O’Connell, with whom the Whigs had recently concluded a parliamentary alliance, as ‘an incendiary and a traitor’. In fact, he had not said this. He had merely quoted what the Whigs themselves had once said about O’Connell, and the most reliable version of the speech in question is that he described the Whigs as ‘that weak aristocratic party in the state who could only obtain power by leaguing themselves with one whom they had denounced as a traitor’.

However, O’Connell saw the garbled version and was greatly enraged by it. At a meeting in Dublin he let himself go in one of the most ferocious pieces of invective which the annals of British politics can furnish.11 He dwelt on Disraeli’s ‘superlative blackguardism’, ‘impudence’, ‘assurance’ and ‘gratuitous impertinence’. Disraeli himself was ‘a vile creature’, ‘a living lie’, ‘a miscreant’ and ‘a reptile’. He declared that he had himself once been asked to support Disraeli, and that the latter by turning his coat and becoming a Conservative showed that he possessed ‘perfidy, selfishness, depravity and want of principle’. He ended:

These outrageous remarks received wide publicity. A challenge was the only answer, but, since O’Connell had vowed, after killing a man in a duel, never to fight another, the correct procedure was obscure. However, O’Connell’s son, Morgan, had recently challenged a Tory peer, Lord Alvanley, whom he deemed to have insulted his father. Disraeli argued that the converse ought to apply and wrote to challenge Morgan O’Connell. The latter replied that he was not responsible for his father’s words. Disraeli then sent an open letter of over 1,000 words to the elder O’Connell and had it inserted in all the newspapers.12 As a piece of writing it shows some of Disraeli’s commonest defects, being too turgid and repetitive, but its tone was quite as offensive as his enemy’s and, given the circumstances, one need not feel any undue sympathy for O’Connell.

It would have been better to have left the matter at that, but Disraeli followed up with a second letter to the younger O’Connell.13  He inferred, he said, that the latter would only fight if his father had been insulted. This was to say that ‘I have insulted him’. The letter ended:

I shall take every opportunity of holding your father’s name up to public contempt. And I fervently pray that you or someone of his blood, may attempt to avenge the inextinguishable hatred with which I shall pursue his existence.

Disraeli now called upon d’Orsay to act as his second in the duel that seemed inevitable. D’Orsay as a foreigner was unwilling to interfere in a political duel. So he picked upon Henry Baillie, a mutual friend, for the task, but personally arranged all details. The duel did not come off. The police intervened and Disraeli was bound over to keep the peace. The affair made him notorious and gave him all the publicity that even he could wish for. His family was much alarmed at what seemed to them an excess of vindictiveness and ill temper, but Disraeli was unashamed. ‘Row with O’Connell in which I greatly distinguished myself’, he wrote in his diary for the year 1835.

2

The early summer had now arrived. Sir Francis Sykes was still abroad. Disraeli and Henrietta once again plunged into the gaieties of the season, with Lyndhurst as a frequent companion, guest, or host.

Almost every year saw a move upwards in Disraeli’s ascent of the social ladder. Lady Londonderry was the stepmother of his friend, Lord Castlereagh. Famed for her opulence and her arrogance, she was a great Tory hostess. Disraeli first met her on July 19 at the grand fancy-dress ball to which he refers in the diary. She went as Cleopatra ‘in a dress literally embroidered with emeralds and diamonds from top to toe’. She asked Castlereagh to introduce Disraeli and the encounter seems to have been a success. A few days later he was invited to dine at Rosebank, her country villa by the Thames. Disraeli was determined not to lose this valuable entrée into Tory society.

As for the ball, it was a splendid affair. Henrietta was dressed to look like one of Reynolds’s ladies, Mrs Norton was a Greek, and Disraeli’s dress was ‘very good’, although we are not told what it was. At half past two Lyndhurst, who went as a Marshal of France, gave a supper at his house in George Street ‘to eighty of the supremest ton and beauty … and everybody looked blue who was not going to Lyndhurst’s’.14 Nevertheless it seems as if Disraeli had not relished the ball in anticipation. At all events a tear-stained letter from Henrietta which probably refers to it would suggest some sort of trouble:

Wednesday 3 o’clock

You are quite right to do as you please and keep an old faithful friend waiting for dinner. As for this morning I was alone during the whole time consequently choice only could influence you – you never wished to go to the Ball and now you have the opportunity of staying away. I will not be drawn off and on as you would a glove – if I cared for you less I suppose I should not grieve at the appearance of neglect.

                                                         Henrietta Sykes15

However this does not appear to have been more than a passing tiff. The episode came only a few days after the celebrated visit à trois to Bradenham, which created such a scandal among the Buckinghamshire squirearchy, and since the visit was repeated only a couple of months later there was evidently no lasting quarrel.

Throughout 1835 Disraeli’s intimacy with Lyndhurst increased. He became the latter’s agent, go-between and general factotum. His mind buzzed with ingenious expedients. Might the situation after Peel’s resignation perhaps be saved by an alliance of Peel and Lyndhurst with Melbourne and the right-wing Whigs? Mrs Norton acted as agent for Melbourne, Disraeli for Lyndhurst, and pourparlers began. But the plan was wrecked by the Lichfield House compact under which O’Connell had promised Russell the support of his followers in return for Whig benevolence towards Irish reform. Nothing came of Disraeli’s proposal, except that Melbourne consulted Lyndhurst on the best way of getting rid of Brougham. Then, in the late summer another exciting possibility appeared. Was there not a chance that the King would again dismiss Melbourne, and if so, that Peel would this time refuse to accept office? In that case Lyndhurst would clearly be the man. Some such development seems to have been seriously envisaged by Lyndhurst himself, who claimed to have had a hint from Windsor, and he promised Disraeli a seat in the House if it came off.16 It is hard to see how all this could have been taken seriously, but ultra-Tory intrigue was rife both then and later, and the influence of the reactionary Duke of Cumberland may well have been at work on his brother, the king, and induced him to say foolish things if not to do them. Nothing happened, and a year later similar manoeuvres took place. ‘Great courage and eminent services of the Duke of Cumberland’, Disraeli records in his account of another series of equally abortive intrigues on behalf of Lyndhurst, and he finishes: ‘… a large party in the country would hail L’s accession to the Premiership with satisfaction. His firmness and courage have won all hearts …’ In fact, Lyndhurst carried little weight outside the House of Lords. He was never a serious contender for the Premiership and his moral and political character were not such as to inspire public confidence. However, Disraeli plunged merrily into the battle, wrote scurrilous anonymous articles for the Morning Post, packed with praise of Lyndhurst and abuse of the Whigs, hurried from dinner party to party at his patron’s side, and generally enjoyed himself in the bustle of political conspiracy.

With the close of the 1835 session Disraeli embarked upon his first serious contribution to political literature. During the autumn at Bradenham he wrote, and in December published, one of his most famous books, an open letter of two hundred pages to Lord Lyndhurst. Usually known for brevity’s sake as the Vindication, its full title is ‘A Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord by Disraeli, the Younger’. Its publication marks an important stage in Disraeli’s progress as a political thinker. The letter was first and foremost a defence of the House of Lords, then in bad odour with the reformers for having tried to reject the Municipal Corporations Bill during the previous session. Much of the defence is ingenious rather than convincing, for example that it is no more anomalous for certain people to be entitled by heredity to become legislators on reaching the legal age than for others to be similarly entitled by heredity to exercise the franchise; and at times he comes near to saying that the House of Lords is more ‘representative’ than the House of Commons, a proposition implausible even then, though perhaps less so in an age of limited suffrage than it would to today.

But the real interest of the book lies in its adumbration of nearly all Disraeli’s most well-known and characteristic ideas about history and politics. Here we have the anti-Whig theory of English history that the Tory party had been the truly democratic party, the party of the majority, ever since the reign of Queen Anne; that the Whigs were the oligarchical anti-national party which obtained power by a coup d’état and retained it in 1835 by ‘the same desperate and treasonable compact’, made by the Parliamentarians in the reign of Charles I, but with ‘Irish Papists’ instead of ‘Scotch Presbyterians’. We have, too, Disraeli’s admiration for Bolingbroke as the prophet of a reinvigorated Toryism, his contempt for doctrinaires and abstract theories, especially those of the Utilitarians, his deep respect for traditional institutions, and his reverence for landed property and all that goes with it. All these ideas are to be found in more vivid form in his later writings, especially Coningsby and Sybil. The Vindication is at times diffuse and ornate, both extravagant and slightly absurd. For example, he reproves those who doubted whether bishops should sit in the House of Lords thus:

There are too many sentences of this sort to put the book among the better specimens of Disraeli’s prose. Nevertheless it remains his only serious treatise on the subject and we can assume that he meant what he said here, whereas in his novels we may never be quite sure.

The theory of the Whigs as the ‘anti-national’ party was not as paradoxical as it sounds. At that particular moment, and for the next six years, their narrow majority rested on an alliance with O’Connell, and on a heavy majority of the Scottish seats. In England they were actually in a minority. Of course, it was quite another matter to convert this temporary phenomenon into a general law of history. The picture of the Tories as the ‘Democratic’ party is harder to swallow, and indeed it depends on what is meant by the word. The Whigs had extended the franchise from a small minority of adult males to a rather larger one, and the resulting constituency gave them a great victory in 1832. In an age of widespread territorial ‘influence’, open voting, and inadequate laws against bribery or intimidation, it by no means followed that a further extension would further damage the Tories. The opposite might be the case if the extension was judiciously made. The Chandos clause giving the vote to the fifty pound tenant-at-will and Lyndhurst’s successful move to retain the Freeman’s vote are the examples of Tory democracy chosen by Disraeli. Technically he was quite entitled to use the word, but one does not require much perspicacity to see what the authors of those amendments had in mind. It was certainly not ‘one man, one vote’.

The Vindication seems to have been reasonably successful. Lyndhurst considered it ‘masterly’, and Peel, to whom Disraeli sent a copy ‘with a cold dry note’,18 knowing that he was ‘by reputation the most jealous frigid and haughty of men and as I had reason to believe anything but friendly to me’, replied with a friendly letter of thanks, remarking that he had bought a copy as soon as it came out and ‘was gratified and surprised to find that a familiar and apparently exhausted topic could be treated with so much of original force of argument and novelty of illustration’. Disraeli showed it to Lyndhurst, who ‘thinks this is much considering the writer’.

Disraeli followed up the Vindication by a renewed burst of journalistic activity, on this occasion choosing The Times as his organ. He had been introduced to Barnes, the great editor, by Lyndhurst. The paper’s policy was to support Peel and attack the Whigs, and early in 1836 Disraeli, under the pseudonym of ‘Runnymede’, wrote a series of open letters to some of the leading politicians of the day. The tone is not quite as scurrilous as in the articles for the Morning Post, and there are some memorable if extravagant phrases. Melbourne is adjured to ‘cease to saunter over the destinies of a nation and lounge away the glories of an empire’; Palmerston is the ‘Lord Fanny of diplomacy … cajoling France with an airy compliment and menacing Russia with a perfumed cane’; and when Lord Cottenham succeeds Brougham as Lord Chancellor it is ‘the great transition from humbug to humdrum. We have escaped from the eagle to be preyed upon by the owl’.

But in general the tone shows Disraeli nearly at his worst. A visitor from foreign parts who learns that Lord John Russell is leader of the House ‘may begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped – AN INSECT’. Lord William Bentinck, the ex-Governor-General of India was standing in the Whig interest for Glasgow. The author predicts that he is unlikely to survive the session. ‘Congenial Cheltenham will receive from now glorious Glasgow the antiquated Governor and the drivelling Nabob.’ As for O’Connell, Disraeli reaches depths of verbose invective which suggest that the famous attack at the time of the Taunton election had cut deeper than he ever admitted. O’Connell is ‘the hired instrument of the Papacy; as such his mission is to destroy your Protestant society, and, as such, he is a more terrible enemy to England than Napoleon’. People have accused him of hypocrisy ‘humbling himself in the mud before a simple priest’.

Throughout these letters Disraeli evinced a virulent racial and religious prejudice towards Ireland. This was, indeed, to be one of the least commendable features of Victorian politics, especially among the unenlightened masses who saw their standards threatened by hordes of alien papist immigrants accepting low wages and living in filthy conditions. It is, however, surprising to find Disraeli going so far, even though it is true that the attitude fitted with his theory in the Vindication of the Whigs as the anti-national party and the Tories as the party of England. It is also true that the Lichfield House compact had aroused something of the same furious Tory indignation that was to be evoked in later years by Gladstone’s alliance with Parnell or Asquith’s with Redmond. Nevertheless Disraeli cannot in retrospect have reflected with pride on a passage like this – or at least one hopes not:

… [The Irish] hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood … My lords, shall the delegates of these tribes, under the direction of the Roman priesthood, ride roughshod over our country – over England – haughty and still imperial England?20

It is not surprising that Barnes became at times alarmed at the savagery and libellousness of some of his new protégé’s contributions and that he frequently watered them down before publication. It is also not surprising that Disraeli never publicly acknowledged his authorship, although he was sufficiently proud of his work to have the letters published in book form in July 1836 together with a tract entitled The Spirit of Whiggism which reproduces in abbreviated form the argument of the Vindication. It was dedicated to Peel, to whom one of the open letters, couched in terms of grandiloquent flattery, had been addressed.

Disraeli continued to write occasionally for The Times during the next few years. In the summer of 1836 O’Connell attacked Barnes and threatened in the same letter to the Press to describe ‘with hideous details’ the ‘private life’ of Lord Lyndhurst. The draft of a reply exists at Hughenden.21 O’Connell is stigmatized as ‘a tyrant, a swindler, a poltroon and a profligate … There is no human being … who if he were acquainted with all the circumstances of this creature’s life … would not shrink with disgust and horror from the loathsome portrait of this insolvent satyr.’ Barnes evidently regarded this as too strong in spite of his own dislike of O’Connell, and the reply in The Times (August 29, 1836), though vigorous, is toned down. Barnes frequently returned Disraeli’s later pieces for revision. On at least one occasion the author took offence and protested. He received a snub. After observing that he must be at least fifteen years older than his contributor, the editor went on:

Judge then my surprise at receiving a letter from you in which with the didactic and patronizing air of a tutor to a child ten years old you condescend to inform me who is the author of a well-known line and to give me a sort of elementary lesson on the meaning of the word Irony. I am perfectly convinced that you intend no offence nor am I apt to be offended, but really such a tone is inexpressibly ludicrous …22

Barnes frequently had to remind Disraeli that personalities, particularly from an anonymous source, are to be avoided. But the distinction between personal character and political or literary conduct was one which Disraeli, like most young men, never found easy to draw.

3

The eighteen months between January 1886 and July 1837 were perhaps the most hectic and turbulent that Disraeli had so far known. His debts had increased and his creditors became even more pressing. He had fobbed off Austen with £450 in January 1835, but a year later the solicitor was once again beginning to lose patience. Disraeli had persuaded himself that he was on the point of bringing off some sort of financial coup as London agent for Baron de Haber, with whom he had already had some dealings over the publication of the Gallomania and who turned up again, as we saw, in connexion with the Sykes-Bolton affair. Haber’s headquarters were at The Hague, but the transaction in question seems to have been the promotion of a loan to the Swedish Government. There is some obscure correspondence to Disraeli in February from J. S. Brownrigg, another financier, who declined to float a Swedish loan of £100,000 at 5 per cent.23 Disraeli’s commission from Haber was to have been £1,000, and he writes to Austen as if it was already his. His debts, he says, are £1,300, but his assets are scarcely less if the commission is counted in.24 Austen was sceptical, and a sharp exchange ensued, ending with Austen’s terse request. ‘So pray put an end to this correspondence by removing the cause of it.’25

The reader who wishes to study the whole of this history of prevarication and excuses should consult Professor Jerman’s admirable work. It need hardly be said that Disraeli’s venture in the foreign money market was, as Austen expected, an unredeemed disaster; he not only failed to lay his hands on a penny of the £1,000 commission but landed himself more heavily in debt than ever before. By May his affairs were in an alarming condition. Austen had, moreover, been correct in guessing even before this latest crisis that the total of Disraeli’s debts far exceeded the figure that he admitted. The situation now became much worse. But Disraeli still refused to apply to his father.

At about this time he found a new ally in his difficulties. The firm of solicitors who acted for Sir Francis Sykes were Messrs Pyne and Richards, and William Pyne, one of the partners, now became Disraeli’s principal stand-by during the next two years. It would be interesting to know more about him, for it seems clear that without his aid Disraeli might well have had to face bankruptcy at this time.26  One of the duties of Messrs Pyne and Richards was to pay over the allowance of £1,800 per annum which Sir Francis now made to Henrietta for the upkeep of herself and their London house while he was on the continent. When a year later he finally broke with Henrietta he claimed that his solicitors had during 1836 and 1837 paid £2,000 over and above the authorized allowance. Professor Jerman surmises that this may have been the money which tided Disraeli over his financial crisis. There is no conclusive proof, but it is quite likely that Pyne, at Henrietta’s instigation, did something of the sort.27 If so, Disraeli’s cryptic note for 1836 in the mutilated diary – ‘The singular good services of Pyne to me’ – would appear to be more than justified.

Although Pyne staved off the immediate dangers, Disraeli’s life for the next year was extremely embarrassing. ‘Peel has asked me to dine with a party today of the late Government at the Carlton’, he writes to Pyne in July. ‘Is it safe? I fear not.’ His letters show his usual fluctuations of optimism and despair. In September he tells Pyne, ‘I have no pecuniary cares for the next three months.’ In November he thinks that ‘between £3000 and £4000 might be poured into my coffers by May’. But in December he has to ask whether he can risk appearing at a Buckinghamshire Conservative dinner, where he is to propose the toast of the House of Lords. ‘I trust there is no danger of my being nabbed as this would be a fatal contretemps inasmuch as, in all probability, I am addressing my future constituents.’ In January 1837, however, he talks of buying the estate of Chequers Court ‘not under £40,000, perhaps £10,000 more as there is timber’.28 But this was probably a joke.

Meanwhile Austen continued throughout 1836 to press for the settlement of Disraeli’s long-overdue debt. He threatened at one stage to go to law over the matter, but Disraeli knew that he could twist him round his little finger. He finished Henrietta Temple in time for Christmas, and its sales must have given him enough money to repay some of the loan. But none of it went to Austen. In January 1887 he assured Austen that only the failure of a bank prevented him from paying up. Finally in February he gave way and applied to Isaac, who settled the greater part of the debt, probably not more than £700, though for some reason about £30 was still left outstanding. Austen proceeded to press for this, too, but Disraeli waited until the publication of Venetia in May before paying the last instalment.

This was the end of his connexion with the Austens. He had no further dealings with the husband. A later letter of his to Mrs Austen has survived – a reply in 1839 to one from her written months earlier in praise of his Tragedy of Count Alarcos. But their friendship was already part of the past. In December 1837 she told Crabb Robinson that she had broken with Disraeli because he deceived her about the fictitiousness of the characters in Vivian Grey.29 Whether or not Disraeli deceived her, it certainly was not the cause of their friendship fading away. The truth is that Disraeli had a streak of ruthlessness towards those who had served him well. If they could no longer do so, he was no longer interested. With Parliament and marriage he was moving into a world where the Austens could be of little help to him. One may suspect that he had long regarded them as bores. As the years passed by he came to regard them as something even less pleasing; reminders of a time when he had been raffish, struggling, debt-ridden and dependent, of the period in his life which he sought to blot out by tearing pages from his diary, by expurgating the social solecisms and Byronic extravagances from his early novels. As for the Austens, it is not surprising to find the ever-loyal Sir Philip Rose writing that they ‘seemed to be suffering under a morbid feeling of slight and neglect’.

Benjamin Austen died in 1863. If Disraeli noticed the fact at all, he made no comment that has been preserved for posterity. He did not write to Sara. She lived on and on, a prisoner of increasing deafness and mental infirmity. She even outlasted her former protégé, dying in 1887 at the great age of ninety-two. Six years earlier her nephew, Sir Henry Layard, had called on her, anxious to know whether she was much afflicted by the death of Lord Beaconsfield which had occurred the day before. ‘No,’ her aged companion said, ‘Not much – Nothing hurts her much now – She often confuses so much that she says Gladstone is her great friend.’30

4

Money was not Disraeli’s only trouble. There was Henrietta. True in the spring all seemed well. ‘This spring’, he writes in his diary on September 17, 1836, ‘Henrietta moved to Park Lane which she furnished with lavish and enchanting taste.’ But in the same diary a year later we read:

What led to this final breach? Sir Philip Rose refers to the liaison as having ‘materially affected D’s health and nearly shipwrecked his career’. He goes on: ‘Few other men could have had the necessary force of will to escape from such an entanglement.’ Certainly Henrietta’s letters suggest a neurotic possessiveness which must have sorely tried a man with the intense egotism of Disraeli.

1 o’clock In bed

Has he thought of his Henrietta this morning and wished her to be snugly placed by him in that comfortable couch sipping coffee and kisses at the same time … I love you even to madness, and do not suppose that I set [out] to show the power I have over you. I swear I suffer the torments of the damned when you are away and although there is nothing I would not sacrifice to give you a moment’s enjoyment I cannot bear that your amusement should spring from any other source than myself. Are you angry, love, at my selfishness. You never answer questions and I sometimes think I bore you by writing … it appears an age since we parted and I would that we were never separated a moment. Is it vain to suppose you would love me better and better the longer we were together? I feel I am not the vain frivolous being I am set down to be and with you for my guiding star what would I not do to retain and cherish the love I’ve gained …32

There are dozens of letters in the same vein, and it is easy to imagine that what at first flattered Disraeli’s vanity came in the end to be a maddening distraction.

But, despite Sir Philip Rose, it is far from clear that Disraeli really had the strength of mind to break off the affair of his own accord. Perhaps he would never have brought himself to do so if Henrietta had not provided him with an excuse by succumbing to the advances of the painter David Maclise, a notorious philanderer, handsome, big, and full of Irish charm. He had been a friend of Disraeli for many years and had first drawn his portrait as long ago as 1828. Exactly when Henrietta first became involved with Maclise is by no means clear. Nor is it clear when Disraeli first heard about the matter. Evidently it cannot have been before September 17 or he would hardly have written the passage in his diary quoted above. He knew all about it by December. Did Henrietta’s unfaithfulness cause the final parting, or was she seeking consolation from a new lover because Disraeli had already left her? Or was the truth more complicated – a half-hearted resolution on Disraeli’s part, hardened and confirmed by Henrietta’s yielding to Maclise?

We are unlikely ever to know the answers to these questions, and they do not greatly matter. The last recorded occasion on which Disraeli saw Henrietta was in August. She was ill at Basildon,33 and Disraeli characteristically made this an excuse for delay in answering Austen’s letters. ‘I have suddenly been called down here’, he writes on August 13 from Basildon, ‘by the dangerous illness of a friend.’34 It is tempting to wonder whether even then he was trying to end the affair. It would have been thoroughly true to form if Henrietta on receiving a letter of dismissal had at once thrown a fit of illness. But this is mere speculation. What is certain is that the two lovers parted in the autumn of 1836 and that the fact that Disraeli had been supplanted was well known to his intimates by Christmas. Clear evidence on this point comes in a letter to Bulwer, dated ‘Thursday’ and almost certainly written on December 22. Disraeli was negotiating at the time for Bulwer’s rooms in Albany, once occupied by Byron.35

Arranging his correspondence many years later, Bulwer wrote on the margin of this letter, ‘I believe this refers to Lady Sykes who exercised an influence over him – and was implicated in an affair with David Maclise – then his friend.’36 Two days later, on Christmas Eve, Bulwer wrote to Disraeli that ‘he was pained sincerely at the affliction you have undergone’.37

On Boxing Day Lady Blessington wrote a long letter of condolence:

If you knew how warmly and sincerely I enter into all your feelings, feelings I can so well understand you would not refrain from seeking consolation where it can best be found, with true and attached friends. I got your letter of Saturday only yesterday – I am glad you have written to Lord L. and that you will never permit anything to make a division between him and you, as nothing could have a worse appearance upon the public or be more likely to give rise to reports injurious to you both. Be assured that I never speak of you or let others speak, in any manner that could be disagreeable or injurious to you.

Of the lady, my respect for my sex, would always preclude me from speaking lightly. Many and many a time have I defended her, necessarily and successfully, and from respect to consistency I shall not now censure her, though my opinion is changed. Our mutual friend Mr. Bulwer is the only person before whom I ever spoke of her since my change, which change took place from the reports continually in circulation relatively to her forming her attachments …

She went on to chide him for being oversuspicious and touchy about the reviews of Henrietta Temple, and then reverted to the real Henrietta.

Was he, she wondered, quarrelling about straws? 

Disraeli replied from Bradenham on January 12.

… I really grieve if I said anything which deserved the lecture you gave me, though I am almost glad I merited it if only for its kindness. I was rather harassed when I was last in town as you know and have a disagreeable habit of saying everything I feel: but I love my friends and am not naturally suspicious or on the alert to quarrel about straws …39

On December 26 he writes to Pyne from Bradenham, having arrived just before snow made the roads impassable.

… I assure you when I reached the old hall, and found the beech blocks crackling and blazing, I felt no common sentiments of gratitude to that kind friend whose never tired zeal allowed me to reach my house, and is some consolation for the plague of women, the wear and tear of politics, and the dunning of creditors …40

On December 31 he wrote:

The Park Lane affair is not very agreeable to brood over &, view them as we please, these are domestic convulsions wh: strike one to the centre.41

But as time went by Disraeli seems to have become more reconciled to his lot. On January 8 he ends another letter to Pyne:

By March she has, in another letter to Pyne, entered the category of ‘malignant mistresses’ whom, along with ‘ungrateful statesmen’, he feels he can almost defy.43

This is not quite the last we hear of Henrietta. At the end of 1836 Sir Francis Sykes returned from over two years’ absence in Europe. His behaviour is one of the most puzzling features of the whole story. After Henrietta’s discovery of his relations with Mrs Bolton he appears to have completely acquiesced in his replacement by Disraeli, to whom he wrote in terms of trust and friendship; nor does he seem to have minded his wife’s association with Lyndhurst, although the latter’s reputation must have been notorious to anyone who had ever moved in society. True, he made no proper financial provision. But this was the result of improvidence rather than ill will, for when Disraeli wrote to him in Venice early in 1835, pointing out the difficulty of Henrietta keeping up a proper establishment and educating the children, the absent baronet put matters straight by authorizing the allowance of £1,800 p.a. already mentioned.44 In replying to Disraeli he said that he was ‘fully convinced of my wife’s honor and integrity which stands undefiled, though her conduct has been foolish’. A few days later he sent a letter to Henrietta, dictated to an amanuensis, for he was ill, but he ended in his own hand, ‘I cannot use another’s pen to write of my affection to you.’

But however complaisant his attitude may have been towards Disraeli or Lyndhurst, he was to take a very different line towards Maclise. No open breach occurred on his return. Shortly after the publication of Henrietta Temple, Henrietta wrote what was probably her last letter to Disraeli. It is undated, but must have been written in December or January, and throws some light on her relations with Sir Francis:

What can I say sufficient to convey to you my deep admiration of your book and the extreme pleasure I felt in reading it. You know I am not very eloquent in expressing my feelings, therefore I must fail to convey to you a tythe part of the extreme gratification I have in your brilliant success. Your complete triumph is echoed by everyone I come near.

I think it due to myself to tell you that you were mistaken in supposing that I had not received letters from Lord L. When I wrote to you I had had 2. Since, I have received several but I refrained from answering them as I felt convinced by your manner he had said something of me, and to no one will I stoop. I am aware of your correspondence with him and I hear of you from Miss Copley.45

It is possible that I may go abroad with Francis – he is perfectly recovered and tolerably kind to me – he is not in the slightest degree aware but that the sole reason for your absence from London is your application to your books and frightened me by projecting a trip to Bradenham.

All your daggers and things are safe. I do not like to return them to Bradenham.46

God prosper you,

H.

Henrietta evidently believed that Sir Francis still knew nothing of the affair with Maclise. Whether his kindness was genuine or feigned we cannot tell. It is possible that he was biding his time. During the first half of 1837 Maclise painted the family group, from which Henrietta’s portrait is reproduced. But later in the year Henrietta and her lover were caught flagrante delicto, in bed together at the house in Park Lane, and in July Sir Francis instigated proceedings for ‘criminal conversation’ against Maclise. He ran into unexpected difficulties, for Pyne and Richards refused to act; according to The Times report, ‘upon the ground that they apprehended that the result of the proceeding would not be productive to the plaintiff of any great “glory” or advantage’. Presumably both his condonation of the liaison with Disraeli and his own relations with Clara Bolton might have been brought out in court with damaging consequences. As a result of this refusal Sir Francis appointed another firm, Messrs Lake, Wilkinson and Co., to look after his affairs. It was a dispute over the bill from Pyne and Richards that caused the allegation referred to earlier of a payment of £2,000 over and above Henrietta’s allowance. The case was referred back for further evidence, and was either withdrawn or settled out of court. The proceedings against Maclise were dropped. Perhaps Disraeli, who was now in Parliament, could regard the outcome as yet another of Pyne’s ‘singular good services’. His own comments on the case survive in the mutilated diary, where he writes, ‘During the election occurred the terrible catastrophe of Henrietta nearly one year after we had parted.’47 And in a letter to his future wife, then Mrs Wyndham Lewis, written early in August, he says, after inviting her and her husband to stay at Bradenham:

All here is quiet and happy. Not a word about the painful subject which, it is tacitly agreed, shall be consigned to oblivion with the hope that there may never again be an occasion to recollect it.48

Although no legal action was taken against Henrietta, she was irretrievably disgraced, and she no longer moved in society. Sir Francis died in 1843. Mrs Bolton died in France in September 1839.49  Henrietta died three years later than her husband, on May 15, 1846, the very day on which Disraeli made one of his most brilliant speeches against the Corn Laws and, to quote a contemporary critic, ‘resumed his seat amid cheers which for duration and vehemence are seldom heard within the walls of Parliament’. He must have been aware of her death, but we know nothing of his reaction. For nearly ten years she had been dead as far as he was concerned, but the memory of the affair never faded from his mind. A quarter of a century later, when something reminded him of Basildon,50 he wrote in his reminiscent jottings – half playing with fire, one suspects – ‘I passed there in 34 & 35 some romantic hours … the house a Palladian palace.’ Although he did so much to expunge his early life from the pages of history, he could not bring himself to destroy Henrietta’s love letters. They survive still and tell their strange half-tragic, half-comic story to a generation no less intrigued by Disraeli than his own, but perhaps more tolerant and less censorious.

1 See M. & B., i, 262–5, for Disraeli’s account of these abortive intrigues.

2 Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford (ed.), The Greville Memoirs (8 vols, 1938), iii, 117. Lord William Lennox, son of 4th Duke of Richmond, M.P. King’s Lynn, 1832–4.

3 ibid., 118.

4 N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1853), 436. In an autobiographical note written in 1860 (Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/B/1) Disraeli says that he ‘stood for the Boro at the request of Sir Robert Peel’.

5 The Crisis Examined by Disraeli, the Younger, reprinted in William Hutcheon (ed.), Whigs and Whiggism (1913), 23–40.

6 This was a hit at Brougham, who had caused much scandal by a ‘progress’ in the north, during the course of which he played hunt the slipper with the Great Seal at a party, and arrived drunk at the Edinburgh races in his Chancellor’s full robes.

7 M. & B., i, 276.

8 Quoted by Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 462.

9 ibid., 463.

10 M. & B., i, 282, quoting Pen and Ink Sketches of Poets, Preachers and Politicians (1846).

11 M. & B., i, 287–8, quoting the Courier, May 6, 1835.

12 M. & B., i, 289–92.

13 ibid., 292.

14 Disraeli to Sarah, quoted M. & B., i, 302–3.

15 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/53.

16 Sir Theodore Martin categorically denies the whole story, but Disraeli’s evidence cannot be dismissed. See M. & B., i, 301–2, for his full account.

17 Vindication, 134.

18 Correspondence, 108, Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, January 1836.

19 Letter viii, February 2, 1836.

20 Letter xvi, April 18, 1836.

21 Hughenden Papers, Box 138, B/XXI/0/2.

22 The History of the Times 1785–1841 (1935), 441.

23 Hughenden Papers, Box 120, B/XXI/B/1080–5.

24 Jerman, 265–6.

25 British Museum, Add. MSS, 45908, f. 118.

26 Disraeli’s letters to Pyne were available to Monypenny, who copied extracts and quoted at some length, i, 354 et seq. Inquiries have failed to elicit their present whereabouts, and quotations here are taken from Monypenny’s notes, of which most but not all were published in the biography. Pyne’s letters to Disraeli do not appear to have survived. There is none in the Hughenden archives.

27 Jerman, 282.

28 M. & B., i, 351–3, for letters to Pyne from which these extracts are taken.

29 Jerman, 296, quoting Crabb Robinson’s diary, from the MS in the Dr Williams Library, Gordon Square.

30 Jerman, 34, quoting from the Layard Papers,

31 Hughenden Papers, Box 11, A/III/C., n.d. must be after August, 1837.

32 ibid., Box 13, A/IV/H 36, n.d.

33 Sir F. Sykes’s country seat near Reading.

34 British Museum, Add. MSS., 45908.

35 ‘… a curious coincidence of successive scribblers’, wrote Disraeli to Pyne on January 8, 1837, ‘the spell, I suppose, growing weaker every degree and the inspiration less genuine, but I may flare up yet and surprise you all’. Nothing came of this transaction in the end, and Disraeli never lived in Albany.

36 Knebworth Papers. The letter but not the marginal comment is published in his grandson’s biography of Bulwer, where it is misdated, being attributed to the year 1882. The Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (2 vols, 1913) i, 370.

37 Hughenden Papers, Box 104, B/XX/Ly/29, December 24.

38 Hughenden Papers, Box 119, B/XXI/B/580, December 26, 1886.

39 M. & B., i, 355.

40 ibid., 852.

41 Hughenden Papers, Box 301.

42 M. & B., i, 353.

43 Hughenden Papers, Box 301.

44 Disraeli’s letter has not survived, but the gist of it may be inferred from Sir Francis Sykes’s reply. Jerman, 247, February 18, 1835.

45 Lyndhurst’s daughter.

46 Hughenden Papers, Box 13, A/IV/H/68, n.d.

47 Hughenden Papers, Box 11, A/III/C.

48 ibid., Box 1, A/I/A.

49 The Times, September 27, 1839. ‘Lately at Harvre-de-Grace, Clarissa Marion, wife of George Buckley Bolton, Esq., of Pall Mall.’

50 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/A/59. Disraeli was reminded of the place by the eccentricity of its owner, Morison, of Tod, Morison & Co., who bought it from Sir Francis for £140,000. He died ‘worth I believe four millions and received during the last years of his life twelve shillings a week from his bailiff for working in his own garden at Basildon’.