1

Disraeli’s love affair left one legacy for which posterity should be grateful. During the late summer and early autumn of 1836, which he spent at Bradenham, he finished Henrietta Temple. It was published by Colburn early in December and was financially his most successful effort since Vivian Grey. Like that novel, it is in two sections inspired by very different sentiments. The first part, which was written three years earlier, is a vivid account of Ferdinand Armine, the handsome, empty-headed, debt-ridden, impoverished heir to an ancient line, falling passionately in love, not with the wealthy cousin who could restore his fortunes, but with the beautiful and poor Henrietta Temple. Armine bears no resemblance whatever to Disraeli. Henrietta, who is only eighteen, bears little to the real Henrietta, except for her physical description, and her letters to Ferdinand. These are so like those of the real Henrietta that one is tempted to think that Disraeli transcribed them verbatim.1 But if the characters are fictitious, their experience is not. The account of love at first sight has an authentic ring of personal passion2 seldom found elsewhere among the novels. Philip Guedalla is surely right when he observes in his introduction to the ‘Bradenham’ edition: ‘The rustle of real petticoats is more audible than in any other part of Disraeli’s work.’

The second half of the novel is in sharp contrast to the first. Passion has vanished. In the first volume Disraeli could write of the lover: ‘To violate in her favour every duty of society; this is a lover, and this is love.’ In the second part he observes: ‘A female friend, amiable, clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces; and without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, none be content.’ From a story of passionate romance the novel has become an urbane comedy of manners. The best characters are those drawn from real life; and the portraits of Lady Bellair, who is Disraeli’s old friend, Lady Cork, and of Count Alcibiades de Mirabel, a delightful picture of d’Orsay to whom the book was dedicated, have an attractive sparkle which redeems the improbabilities of the story.

Disraeli needed money badly and quickly. Henrietta Temple produced some, but not enough. He promptly started another novel, Venetia, or the Poet’s Daughter, based on the lives of Byron and Shelley. The work was begun at Bradenham, but in the middle of January 1837 he left for London and stayed off and on for the next few weeks with d’Orsay, whose house at Kensington was adjacent to the famous Gore House, which belonged to Lady Blessington. ‘Saw of course much of the Countess B. whose magnificent mansion adjoined his elegant residence’, he wrote in his diary with that Ouidaesque touch that is never very far from his style. Disraeli was anxious to obtain local colour from the Countess, who claimed that she had known Byron well. In reality – not that this mattered for Disraeli’s purpose – Lady Blessington’s version of their acquaintanceship was highly misleading, and she much exaggerated he own intimacy with the great man.3

He had not been there long when a by-election occurred for the county of Bucks. He travelled at once all night to Aylesbury to canvass for the Tory candidate, but the effort affected his health. While talking to some friends on February 16 outside the George Inn he was struck by some sort of fit or seizure and fell down in a coma. He was taken to Bradenham, where he soon recovered, but there was an unfortunate by-product. The news got into the papers, The Times describing it as ‘a melancholy accident’, and thus alerted his numerous creditors, whose concern with his health was anything but disinterested. Demands rained upon him, and for the second time he was obliged to reveal some part of his plight to his father. This action received the grave approbation of d’Orsay, who wrote: ‘Je suis bien aise pour votre intérêt présent et futur que vous vous soyez décidé à avouer à votre père l’étendue de votre scrape. Car les plasterings-over se demolissent toujours et vous en auriez été victime continuellement …’4 Disraeli wrote to Pyne on March 8, ‘I ventured to say £2000 might be required. He looked blue’.5

Whether Isaac paid all this or not, Disraeli continued to be in dire straits for money. He returned to d’Orsay’s house, but in early March was back in Bradenham endeavouring to finish Venetia. There matters came to another crisis. ‘Of all things in the world preserve me from the Sheriff’s officer in my own county’, he wrote to Pyne,6 and the story goes that he had on one occasion to hide in a well to escape the attentions of that tiresome functionary. This was in spite of having paid his creditors, as he told Austen, ‘upwards of £1500 since December’. On April 23 he wrote to Pyne: ‘I conclude from your interview that the game is up and that our system has failed. I assure you that the only feelings I have are regret for your unavailing exertions, which I feel no professional remuneration can compensate, and gratitude for the generous zeal with which you have served me …’7 The nature of the system which had failed is unknown, perhaps something to do with the affairs of Henrietta and Sir Francis.

Whatever the truth in this matter, the setback was not fatal. Disraeli for the third time had recourse to Isaac, who evidently produced enough to prevent disaster. It is clear that Disraeli did so on each occasion with much reluctance, and that he never told his father, even if he knew himself, the total sum of his debts. He gave various excuses to Austen for his unwillingness: his refusal to take Isaac’s advice on matrimony, fear for Isaac’s health, Isaac’s disapproval of extravagance. One can probably add another: the thought of his sceptical old mother knowing about his scrape, and of the inevitable gossip among her Basevi relatives, whom he disliked and who disliked him. Perhaps, too, there was a touch of pleasure in pain, a certain enjoyment of the intrigues and subterfuges forced upon him, a feeling that a load of debt was one of the accepted features of the dandy and the man of the world; something, along with a fashionable mistress and membership of Almack’s, which marked him off from the Austens, Basevis – or for that matter the other D’Israelis – of this world. In Tancred, Fakredeen is ‘fond of his debts’, and exclaims ‘The two greatest stimulants in the world, Youth and Debt! What should I be without my debts, dear companions of my life that never desert me …’8

Disraeli’s financial methods certainly ensured that the ‘dear companions’ never deserted him. The original sum which he lost on the Stock Exchange was comparatively small, perhaps some two or three thousand pounds. By 1841 he owed at least £20,000, although his father had on three occasions come to the rescue. This increase was partly the result of habitual extravagance and overspending, but it was also the result of constant borrowings, renewals, assignments, annuities, etc., at enormous rates of interest. It is probable that most of these ruinous expedients could have been avoided if he had at any moment drawn up a true account of his position and given it to his father.

Venetia came out in May. It brought in some money, but not as much as Henrietta Temple. It is an awkward and artificial work, fatally marred by its whole concept – a fictionalized account of Byron and Shelley put back in the period of the American War of Independence. This involves such liberties with history that contemporary readers simply could not accept it. It is as if someone had produced in recent times a book about T. E. Lawrence or Rupert Brooke in the setting of the Crimean War. Professor Jerman may be right in seeing in it Disraeli’s last tribute to the Byronic myth which had enthralled him since his boyhood, a final protest against the respectable world with which he now had to come to terms. Whatever the motive, the novel, apart from the opening chapters with their charming picture of Venetia’s childhood, is not a success. Lord Cadurcis (Byron) never comes to life, and though it is reasonable to find Marmion Herbert (Shelley) on the side of the American rebels, it is too much to swallow when we read of him as a successful general.

Contemporary critics were severe on the portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb who had been the Prime Minister’s wife, and on the introduction of Herbert’s Italian mistress. Nor did they fail to observe one of Disraeli’s most deplorable pieces of plagiarism when he lifted the well-known passage from Macaulay’s essay on Byron beginning ‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the English public in one of its fits of periodical morality …’ with no acknowledgement other than ‘it has been well observed that …’

On June 19 the old King died. Disraeli accompanied Lyndhurst to Kensington Palace for the accession of Queen Victoria, and his famous description of the scene in Sybil is based on Lyndhurst’s account of it. He was confident that his efforts for the party would at last be rewarded; and he was right. The death of the monarch automatically caused a general election. Several offers came; the most promising of them seemed to be Maidstone, where the representation in the old Parliament was split between Wyndham Lewis, Conservative, and a Liberal who in the end decided not to stand again. The local Tories sent a deputation to the Carlton Club to seek a second candidate, and Disraeli was nominated. Liberal withdrawal did not prevent a contest, for the editor of the Radical Westminster Review, Colonel Perronet Thompson, decided to stand. But the Conservatives had a big lead, and, despite the cries of ‘Old Clothes!’ and ‘Shylock!’ which greeted him on nomination day, Disraeli was returned with a majority of 200 over the Radical colonel. The poll closed on July 27 and the figures were: Wyndham Lewis, 706; Disraeli, 616;9 and Thompson, 412. Maidstone was reckoned to be one of the most venal constituencies of the day. Wyndham Lewis was a rich man, but Disraeli ran into difficulties at once. It would appear from the correspondence that Wyndham Lewis advanced him part of the money, and had some trouble in getting it back. Although Disraeli produced £500 on account before the end of the year, matters were still dragging on early in 1838. But he had from the start an enthusiastic supporter in Mrs Wyndham Lewis. ‘Mr. Disraeli will in a very few years be one of the greatest men of his day’, she wrote to her brother. ‘His great talents backed by his friends Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Chandos, with Wyndham’s power to keep him in Parliament will ensure his success. They call him my Parliamentary protégé.’10

Disraeli was in the House at last. No one could say that he had had an easy passage. It was his fifth election in five years. He had endured much abuse in the course of them; and if he had brought it upon himself by his own cynicism and bravado, the experience was not the less disagreeable. Now he was filled with elation. ‘I franked your letter’, he writes triumphantly to his sister, and later in the same paragraph, ‘What fun, and how lucky after all I should esteem myself’.11 The new Parliament was not due to meet until November. Disraeli repaired once again to Bradenham for the autumn and spent a peaceful three months in what he called ‘desultory political reading’ varied by a visit from the Wyndham Lewises. On November 12 he wrote his last entry in the mutilated diary:

The King’s death had cut short the normal session, and accordingly Parliament met again in the autumn – an unusual procedure in those days. It soon became evident that the Whigs could carry on, and the confident prophecies of a Tory ministry proved premature. Disraeli made his maiden speech, one of the most celebrated in history, on December 7. It was fully in accord with the streak of reckless courage in his character, combined with love of the limelight, that he should have resolved to take the House by storm, and to try to make himself famous at his first attempt. F. E. Smith is the only person who has ever succeeded in this hazardous task, and he did not have to face the organized rowdyism of a section of the House. Disraeli’s effort was a failure which came near to disaster. ‘D’Israeli made his first exhibition this night,’ wrote Greville, ‘beginning with florid assurance, speedily degenerating into ludicrous absurdity, and being at last put down with inextinguishable shouts of laughter.’13

The subject which he chose, the validity of certain Irish elections, was bound to inspire the wrath of the Irish members, who were determined to avenge their leader for the great row over the Taunton election. Moreover, Disraeli caught the Speaker’s eye immediately after O’Connell had sat down. If ever time and circumstances pointed to trouble, this was the occasion. The earlier part of Disraeli’s speech as reported in Hansard14 does not sound particularly absurd. Perhaps such expressions as ‘majestic mendicancy’ for O’Connell’s protection fund, and the charge that ‘the strain of borough mongering assumed a deeper and darker hue’ in Ireland were somewhat extravagant for a maiden speech, but what inspired ridicule was evidently the manner of delivery rather than the matter. Towards the end, by which time he had great difficulty in making himself heard at all above the hisses, hoots, laughter and catcalls, Disraeli did launch into one of his worst pieces of affected and carefully prepared euphuism; and it was just as well that the final sentence was drowned by the uproar. Indeed, the conduct of the Irish may be regarded as a blessing in disguise. If Disraeli’s peroration had been listened to in silence it might have blasted his Parliamentary reputation for ever. As it was, he inspired a certain sympathy for his courage if for nothing else when, having been on his feet for precisely the time that he intended, he shouted in a voice heard high above the hubbub: ‘I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.’

That Disraeli had made a fool of himself somehow – and not solely because of the ruffianly conduct of the Irish – is too well attested for doubt. Stanley, who spoke immediately afterwards, made no reference at all to the episode. Yet even he, prejudiced as he was against Disraeli, could scarcely have avoided some mention of the behaviour of the Irish, whom he detested, if it had been simply a case of a new member on his own side being unfairly howled down. Hobhouse describes Disraeli’s speech as ‘such a mixture of insolence and folly as I never heard in my life before’.15 According to Monckton Milnes, ‘Disraeli nearly killed the House’, and ‘Peel quite screamed with laughter’.16 On the latter point there is a conflict of evidence. One parliamentary reporter said that Peel ‘cheered him in the most stentorian tones’.17 Chandos told Disraeli, who passed it on to Sarah, that Peel refused to regard the speech as a failure. ‘I say just the reverse. He did all he could under the circumstances. I say anything but failure. He must make his way.’18 But this is somewhat indirect evidence. Peel might well have wished afterwards to console a new member for a setback.

That the Irish uproar was a stroke of luck rather than ill fortune was confirmed by R. L. O’Sheil, an Irish MP with long experience and no love for O’Connell. Bulwer told Disraeli that O’Sheil, overhearing ‘a knot of low Rads’ abusing him in the Athenaeum, rounded on them and declared that ‘if there had not been this interruption Mr Disraeli might have made a failure. I don’t call this a failure, it is a crush.’ Bulwer invited Sheil to meet Disraeli, and the old Irishman gave sagacious counsel. ‘Now get rid of your genius for a session. Speak often, for you must not show yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet, try to be dull … and in a short time the House will sigh for the wit and eloquence which they know are in you …’19

‘As interesting a rencontre as I have ever experienced,’ Disraeli told Sarah, and he took this sensible advice. His next speech was a short unadorned comment upon a technical point in connexion with a Bill about copyright. Disraeli knew his subject well, and was listened to with attention. He did not speak again until March 1838, when he defended the Corn Laws against his old friend, Charles Villiers. He thought that this had been a success and told Sarah:20  ‘…all the squires came up to shake hands with me and thank me for the good service. They were so grateful and well they might be, for certainly they had nothing to say for themselves.’

2

On March 14, 1838, Disraeli’s rich senior colleague in the representation of Maidstone suddenly died. He came from an old Welsh landed family in Glamorgan, but the greater part of his wealth derived from his position as a partner in the Dowlais ironworks.21 He was entitled to a fifth share of the profits. These were apt to fluctuate widely. In 1829 they were below £5,000. In 1837 they were only just short of £100,000. Wyndham Lewis left his widow a life interest in a part of his fortune unconnected with Dowlais, yielding an income of between £4,000 and £5,000 a year, and in his house in London, No. 1 Grosvenor Gate (now No. 29 Park Lane). His interest in the ironworks was bequeathed to his brother.

Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis was born in 1792, daughter of Lieutenant John Evans, RN, and his wife Eleanor, formerly Miss Viney of Gloucester. She came from respectable middle class parentage. The Evans family had been for many years farmers in Devon. On the Viney side she had an uncle of some distinction who served under Wellington and became a major-general. On neither side was there any money to spare, and matters were made no better by her father’s death at sea when she was only two. Her mother married again in 1810, but her second husband, a Mr Thomas Yate, does not seem to have been a man of means either. They lived at Clifton, near Bristol, and it was at a ball in Clifton that Mary Anne met Wyndham Lewis. He at once fell in love with her. From a worldly point of view the match was highly desirable, especially as she had an extravagant ne’er-do-well brother in the army, to whom she was devoted; and in 1815 she and Lewis were married at Clifton parish church.

Mary Anne at once found herself elevated into a richer and grander world than anything to which she had been accustomed. Wyndham Lewis expected things to be done in style. She became a leading hostess in South Wales, and from 1820 onwards, when her husband first entered Parliament, entertained lavishly in London, too. He was fond of money, but never stinted it where she was concerned. When in 1827 they moved into the house at Grosvenor Gate she gave a great ball. ‘My company were most of the first people in London,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘the Duke of Wellington said it was like fairy land, the best ball he had been at this season, but are you not dazzled at your little Whizzy having received the Noble Hero at her house.’22 Two years later, when she gave a party to watch a military review in Hyde Park, she could boast of ninety guests, ‘half of them Lords and Ladies’.23 In fact, her marriage with Wyndham Lewis seems to have been happy enough, apart from her failure to have any children and his reluctance to purchase promotion for her brother.

Mary Anne was forty-five when her husband died, and her character was fully formed. She was an incessant talker – what in the language of the day was termed ‘a rattle’ – and of a flirtatious disposition. She was impulsive, warm-hearted, kind and affectionate; palpably not from the top flight of society, even perhaps by their standards slightly ‘common’. It was characteristic that she found one of her closest friends in Rosina Bulwer, whose social status was equivocal, too. Mary Anne did not lack shrewdness and a certain native wit, but she was remarkably uneducated and often made absurd remarks. To Disraeli himself we owe the story that she could never remember who came first, the Greeks or the Romans; while Rosina Bulwer would recount a malicious tale of how when the conversation had turned on the subject of the great Dean Swift, Mary Anne had asked who he was so that she could invite him to one of her parties.24

Disraeli had first met her on April 27, 1832, at a soirée of Bulwer’s. He described her to Sarah as ‘a pretty little woman, a flirt and a rattle, indeed gifted with a volubility I should think unequalled and of which I can convey no idea’. And he went on to add: ‘She told me she “liked silent melancholy men”. I answered “that I had no doubt of it”.’25 His only other recorded opinion of her in these early days was, as we saw, even less flattering: if Rosina Bulwer is to be believed, he described her as ‘that insufferable woman’.26 The circles in which they moved did not often intersect during the next five years, and her rash espousal in 1836 of the cause of Rosina during the quarrel which finally broke up the Bulwer marriage could not have endeared her to Disraeli.27

Naturally, however, they saw much more of each other when Disraeli became member for Maidstone and in the autumn of 1837 she and her husband stayed for a week at Bradenham. Disraeli’s letters to her suggest, as Monypenny puts it, ‘a sort of mock devotion’. With Wyndham Lewis’s death that situation could not continue. It is clear that she sought sympathy and support from Disraeli in her bereavement and he gave her advice on the legal problems arising from her inheritance. Her brother, who was seriously ill, died in the same year and she appears to have been on distant terms with her husband’s relations.

Upon my honour, dear kind Dizzy [she wrote from Glamorgan while on business over her husband’s estate], you are the only person I have written to (except on business) since I left town … I am glad you pass so much of your time with Lady L…. because the more you go to there or to any other married lady the less likely you are to think of marrying yourself … I hate married men … I would much sooner you were dead … Selfish, yes I am.28

Precisely when Disraeli first contemplated marrying her is obscure. Sir William Gregory in his autobiography has a story that it was suggested to him in jest by d’Orsay and Disraeli accepted the idea, which seemed new to him, with alacrity.29 This may or may not be true. What is quite certain is that, anyway in the first instance, Disraeli’s motives were essentially practical. Mrs Lewis was remarkably youthful for her years, but it is hardly conceivable that the garrulous naïveté of a widow twelve years older than himself would have appealed to a sophisticated man of the world like Disraeli if she had had neither money nor position. He had arrived at a moment in his career when a good marriage was, if not essential, at least highly useful. The commonly accepted opinion then and ever since that he married her for her money is, therefore, plausible enough, and appears to be confirmed by a sentence from the famous letter which he wrote to her during his courtship after a quarrel. ‘I avow, when I first made my advances to you, I was influenced by no romantic feelings.’

His intimate friends certainly took it for granted. ‘My good D’Is,’ wrote d’Orsay. ‘When I read in the beginning of your letter the tragedy is finished I thought you were married but on reflection I suppose that if it was so you would have said the comedy. How is it that you leave her in London by herself?’30

Yet when every allowance is made for interested motives there is something about Disraeli’s conduct that does not quite fit with a purely cynical purpose. For one thing he took to poetry (as with Henrietta), in his case a sure sign of love; and the tragedy which was finished was his five-act blank-verse drama Count Alarcos, a work almost as destitute of literary merit as The Revolutionary Epick. It is part of the ambivalent mixture of romance and irony in his outlook that one can never be sure what he was thinking about anything. The dandies and men of the world among whom he moved assumed that he was marrying for money. Perhaps they even convinced him, and it may have been true at first; to deny it now would make him appear a romantic simpleton. But it is difficult to read his letters to her without feeling that there was more to it than that

If he is telling the truth in the extraordinary letter which finally brought her to accept him, he did not know at first that she had only a life interest in her husband’s fortune. He soon found out, but he persisted all the same. It is undeniable that the restrictions on her use of capital made a great difference to a mere fortune-hunter in those days before the Married Women’s Property Act. If her money had been hers absolutely, it would have been his after marriage and he could have paid off all his debts. Although as things turned out she was able to help him, the fact would not have been self-evident to begin with. Moreover, she was twelve years older, and likely to predecease him. If so he would obtain nothing, for not only her fortune but her London house was entailed to relatives of her first husband.

Disraeli needed a home, affection, security. He had reached the age which most men of sense reach sooner or later when, as he put it, he ‘shrank from all the torturing passions of intrigue’. Feminine sympathy, admiration, idolatry, were essential to him.

Once again, as with Henrietta, there is the search for a missing mother. ‘Tell me that you love your child’, he writes, and he often uses similar words. It is hard to believe that he was concerned solely with money. Some of his letters have, it is true, a histrionic ring. Signed with his ‘mystical mark’, which looks like the outline of a misshapen turnip, they often refer to his trembling hand, streaming eyes and pale lips. But this was part of his manner; it need not be regarded as a pose.

On other occasions he is more matter of fact. ‘My dearest love, I have been obliged to betake myself to bed & wish you were with me there.’32

Disraeli first avowed his love at the end of July. She insisted that a year should elapse from her husband’s death before she gave any answer. It has been surmised that Mrs Bulwer implanted doubts in her mind. Whether or not this was so, Disraeli certainly regarded Rosina as an enemy.

At some stage Mary Anne admitted her love for him, but she remained adamant about the year. His suitorship was by no means smooth or easy. There were quarrels, tiffs and scenes. There was trouble over one of his grand friends.

I do not know what you mean by passing ‘so much’ of my time with Lady Londonderry. I do not pass any more time with her than Lady anybody else.

I hope you are amused at Clifton. You do not appear to have time to write; at least not to me.34

He often recurs to the absence of letters.

Above all persons you who alone occasion our painful separation are the last who shd grudge me the only solace under such circumstances. It does indeed appear to me more than unaccountable that a person who can have found time to write to her lawyer or trustee & probably to many a corpulent bear or seedy second rate dandy should have allowed nearly a week to elapse witht sending a line to the individual to whom she professes herself devoted …35

And if she could be jealous of his fashionable acquaintance, he could rage against the ‘ignoble prey’, as he later called them, whom she encouraged. ‘Fortunate Berkeley, thrice happy Stapleton cursed Neale! What is it to you whether he takes snuff or not.’36 And he sent her a poem beginning ‘Dark Doubt my heart invokes …’ each stanza ending ‘I have no hope’.

Early in their acquaintanceship she lent some money to Disraeli to help him out of a difficulty. There was trouble at Maidstone soon after Wyndham Lewis’s death. A petition was brought against his successor, and in the course of proceedings it was alleged that Disraeli had promised bribes in 1837 which he had failed to pay. The electors of Maidstone did not mind the first charge. They lived on bribes. But to promise and not to pay was much more serious; the accusation might ruin his chances of re-election. Unfortunately the petition was withdrawn before he could vindicate himself. He therefore sent a letter on June 5, 1838, to all the newspapers in his best polemical style personally attacking the barrister for the petitioners, who, he urbanely observed, displayed ‘the blustering artifice of a rhetorical hireling, availing himself of the vile license of a loose tongued lawyer, not only to make a statement that was false, but to make it with a consciousness of its falsehood’. This was too much for the Bar. A rule nisi for a criminal information against him was made absolute, and Disraeli had to plead mitigation of sentence. Under an appearance of contrition, he repeated most of his charges, but the Attorney-General prudently accepted the plea as ‘an ample apology’. Inevitably these proceedings involved substantial costs and it was for those that Mrs Lewis made him a loan.

Doubtless she had no lack of warning from those who disliked him that he was an adventurer out for money. The year was not up till the Ides of March, and she continued to hold him off. Meanwhile Disraeli began to sense the invidiousness of his own position. His friends expected the news of his engagement at any moment. He must either get a favourable answer or break things off altogether. To continue on the present basis would incur the charge of being a rich middle-aged widow’s paid lover. On February 7 he resolved to put matters to the test. He called at Grosvenor Gate and pressed her with the strongest words at his command to marry him. There followed a furious row. She flung the loan in his face, called him ‘a selfish bully’ and ordered him never to return to her house. Disraeli went back to his lodgings in Park Street and wrote a letter of over 1,500 words – it must have taken him at least two hours – and dispatched it that night. The letter is a remarkable production which has never been printed in full.37

He wrote, he said, ‘as if it were the night before my execution’. Everyone was talking of their forthcoming union except her. A friend had even offered him ‘one of his seats for our happy month. The affair was then approaching absurdity’. She must ‘as a woman of the world which you are thoroughly’ recognize the difference between their positions.

He admitted that he had not been influenced by love when he made his first advances. But his heart was touched when he found her in sorrow. He felt that she was ‘one whom I cd look upon with pride as the partner of my life, who cd sympathize with all my projects & feelings, console me in the moments of depression, share my hour of triumph & work with me for our honor & happiness’. As for her fortune, it was far less than he or the world had believed. What use was a mere jointure to him? ‘Was this an inducement to sacrifice my sweet liberty & that indefinite future which is one of the charms of existence?’ In the course of time he would succeed to that financial independence which was needful. ‘All that society can offer is at my command…. I wd not condescend to be the minion of a princess…. My nature demands that my life shd be perpetual love.’ He ended on a note of sombre prophecy:

Most women on receiving such a letter would have broken off the affair at once. But Mary Anne, eccentric and unsophisticated as she was, saw that there was something behind this theatrical extravagance. She realized, perhaps for the first time, that even if his feelings for her could not be described as love in the ordinary sense, at least they were not purely mercenary. ‘For God’s sake come to me’, she wrote. ‘I never desired you to leave the house, or implied or thought a word about money … I am devoted to you.’ And so all was well at last. She accepted him, and they were married very quietly at S George’s, Hanover Square, on August 28, the day after the session ended. Bulwer and Lyndhurst were among the few present. A prolonged honeymoon was spent at Tunbridge Wells and on the Continent. They did not return to England until November.

The marriage was a great success. To say that they lived happily ever after would be an exaggeration, but it is as near the truth as it can be of any marriage. Disraeli behaved towards her with a devotion and respect which was considered exemplary, even by Gladstone. Her social blunders, strange remarks, extraordinary gaffes, soon became famous, and her oddities did not diminish with time. But it is surely wrong to suggest as Monypenny does, that ‘fortunately Disraeli was bizarre enough himself to be blind or indifferent to many of her peculiarities’. On the contrary, Disraeli’s novels and letters show him as a man who was highly sensitive to the conventions and manners of the great world and extremely acute in observing the nuances of conduct among others. If he appeared indifferent to Mary Anne’s peculiarities, it was not because he failed to notice them but because he had made his bargain and he meant to keep it. To this rule he adhered with iron determination. No one who jested about her in his presence did so again. Whether his motive was gratitude, as is suggested by the well-known snub which he gave George Smythe,38 or love, or simply self-respect, he never compromised, nor by the slightest sign betrayed the consciousness that Mary Anne was in any way different from the great ladies in whose salons they moved.

In some of these salons he was no longer so welcome as he had been. An attractive amusing bachelor was much more of a social asset than the husband of a very odd, not very grand, widow of middle-class origins. Lady Londonderry and Lady Jersey, both appear to have cut the Disraelis off their lists. He was unperturbed. He probably guessed that they would change their attitude sooner or later – and of course they did.

As for Mary Anne, she sank her existence in his. She gave him just the love, devotion and worship he needed, and she protected him from the tiresome domestic details he detested. She believed passionately in his genius. She did everything she could for him. But she could survey him with a certain detachment as well as affection. She once drew up a list of the contrasting qualities, as she saw them, of him and herself. Famous though it is, no biography should omit it.

It begins with a characteristically inconsequential couplet at the top of the page ‘His eyes they are as black as Sloes, But oh! so beautiful his nose.’ and the list runs thus, his being on the left, hers on the right:

    Very calm Very effervescent
    Manners grave and almost sad

Gay and happy looking when speaking
    Never irritable Very irritable
    Bad-humoured Good-humoured
   

Warm in love but cold in friendship

Cold in love but warm in friendship

    Very patient No patience
    Very studious Very idle
    Very generous

Only generous to those she loves
   

Often says what he does not think

Never says anything she does not think

   

It is impossible to find out who he likes or dislikes from his manner. He does not show his feelings

Her manner is quite different, and to those she likes she shows her feelings

    No vanity Much vanity
    Conceited No conceit
    No self-love Much self-love
    He is seldom amused Everything amuses her
    He is a genius She is a dunce
   

He is to be depended on to a certain degree

She is not to be depended on
   

His whole soul is devoted to politics and ambition

She has no ambition and hates politics

    So it is evident they sympathize only on one subject: Maidstone like most husbands & wives about their Children.39

In the first few years of their marriage there were occasional differences. The main trouble was money. Disraeli did not wish her to know how deep he was in debt, and she was understandably annoyed at the successive revelations which took place. He could not touch her capital, but he seems to have made use of the improvement of his credit, resulting from his marriage. Perhaps he went rather farther than that. ‘Mrs. D is aware that I am about raising a sum of money but is ignorant of the method’, he wrote to Pyne from his honeymoon. A year later he writes: ‘A writ from Ford delivered in my absence to my lady & other circumstances have at length produced a terrible domestic crisis.’ About this time the shadowy figure of Pyne fades out and for a while Disraeli had to attend personally to these matters. He refers to Pyne being ‘always invisible’, and to his ‘general inability to prosecute business’.

Early in 1841 he put his affairs into the hands of H. S. Ford of Henrietta Street, whose writ had caused the domestic crisis. Ford did not prove satisfactory, and two years later he transferred to a solicitor called Wright, of Wright, Smith and Shepherd. To him he gave a memorandum which sheds some light on his dealings with Ford.40 The details are hard to follow, although it is interesting to notice that Disraeli borrowed at 40 per cent to pay a bill of £800 which he had been foolish enough to back for d’Orsay. It seems that Ford agreed to make a temporary advance at 5 per cent to repay all Disraeli’s most pressing creditors on condition of becoming his family solicitor and being introduced to Mrs Disraeli. How far she was in the picture one cannot say. She agreed to charge her life estate with a loan of £5,000 on the certain anticipation of a legacy of that amount, but apparently Ford was to merge his costs, which were £250 for this and £200 for another loan, into the general bill, ‘engaging that no attendance, conference or transaction directly or indirectly having reference to this loan should appear’. It looks as if Disraeli was being somewhat disingenuous. And what are we to make of an even more surprising transaction? The curious may discover at Hughenden a list of the contents of the house at Grosvenor Gate from ‘the three foot feather bed bolster and pillow’ in ‘the Attic Story Further Room West’ to the ‘Ormolu Time Piece representing Apollo in a Chariot attended by Cupid’ in the drawing-room, set out in a deed as security for the renewal of another loan from Ford from March 16 to April 14, 1842.41 Did Mary Anne know? It is impossible to be sure.

Naturally enough, involved as he was in these embarrassing financial matters, Disraeli was anxious about his mail arriving when he was absent. It was all too liable to contain something disagreeable. Mary Anne was greatly offended when, staying at Bradenham in February 1842 while Disraeli was in London, she discovered that Sarah was forwarding his letters without showing them to her.42 Much recrimination and hurt feeling ensued. Disraeli’s marriage by no means ended his intimate correspondence with his sister. There, an occasional flicker of humour even appears about Mary Anne, and Sarah co-operated in the little subterfuges by which he endeavoured to keep his money affairs secret. Yet it should not be thought from all this that Mary Anne was ungenerous. She paid in the end at least £13,000 towards his debts. Nor was there any question of a permanent quarrel with Sarah. On the contrary, Mary Anne got on excellently with the family at Bradenham for most of the while, and they with her.

The saga of all that she did to make his life happy has been told in many books. The stories about her solicitude for him are famous, how she endured in silence the pain of her hand crushed in a carriage door because she feared the knowledge might upset him before a speech; how for the same reason she persuaded Lady Salisbury to place her as far away from him as possible at dinner at Hatfield, for she had cut her face and she knew that he had lost his eye-glass and so would not see. There are many others. No wonder that Disraeli could dedicate Sybil ‘to one whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgement have ever guided, its pages; the most severe of critics but – a perfect Wife!’

3

It is hard to say how much success Disraeli really had during the Parliament of 1837–41. His own glowing accounts to his sister and his wife cannot be regarded as conclusive. He was incurably optimistic and he wanted to impress an adoring audience. He certainly made some speeches which read well today. There was his notable attack on the new Poor Law in 1839, arising out of the Chartist petition. He condemned the substitution of centralized relief for the old system based on local administration. It was one of his favourite themes throughout his career that the Tory party should always oppose the centralization, and favour the distribution, of power. But it is doubtful whether this weighed much with the country gentlemen against the fact that the new system was indisputably cheaper than the old. In criticizing the new law he was criticizing his official leaders who had supported it. He risked their disapproval again by being one of only three to vote against a Bill advancing money for a police force at Birmingham where the Chartist Convention was sitting. In 1840 he was one of five who opposed the harsh treatment given to some of the Chartist leaders. This was the time when the ‘Condition of England’ was beginning to disturb many thoughtful men, and Disraeli can be counted among them, even if he was concerned more with the dramatic than the practical aspect of the problem. Politically he could be described at this time as a Tory radical standing well to the left of centre.

But what eludes us today is the impression which he actually made on the House of Commons. If it had been as great as he obviously believed, would we not have heard more about it in the memoirs and letters of the day? Yet they are almost totally silent, except upon the fiasco of his maiden speech. Perhaps this very silence is significant, like the dog that did not bark in the Sherlock Holmes story.

Although Disraeli could not possibly be described as an orthodox Tory at this or any time, he wished to stand well with Peel. There is no hint in his speeches or writings of the major defects in Peel’s conduct and outlook from 1832 onwards, which he was to expose in Coningsby and Sybil. On the contrary, in The Times, under the pseudonym of ‘Laelius’, he supported Peel and reproved the Queen for her attitude over the Bedchamber Crisis – ‘Madam, it cannot be …’ and in a long encomium he described his leader as ‘a man unrivalled for Parliamentary talents, of unimpeached integrity … guided by principles but not despising expedients … most courageous when in peril; most cautious in prosperity.’

What did Peel think of Disraeli? The answer probably is that he seldom thought about him at all, and when he did regarded him as a bit of an oddity, perhaps something of a blackguard, but clever and worth encouraging. He would have known that he was a protégé of Lyndhurst and Chandos, both of whom were somewhat questionable characters, though people whom Peel did not wish to offend. Disraeli’s first meeting with him had not been a success, but that was quite a time ago. Peel now was as civil as might be expected, and asked him to dinner; on one occasion all the other guests were men who had held office, although it is very doubtful whether we should magnify this, as Monypenny does, into the equivalent of a meeting of ‘the shadow cabinet’. But Disraeli, sanguine and ambitious, may well have done so.

This was in 1840, and it was clear that the Whigs, kept in office only by royal favour, could not last much longer. They managed to limp through that year, but at the end of May 1841 they were defeated by one vote on a motion of no confidence. At the ensuing general election the Conservaties had a majority of between seventy and ninety. Disraeli had been obliged to find another seat. He could not satisfy the cupidity of the electors of Maidstone, and his old friend, Lord Forester, helped him to secure the nomination for Shrewsbury. This was reckoned to be safe enough, but the election was not all plain sailing. A vigilant though anonymous foe placarded the town with a list of the judgements out against Disraeli, amounting to £22,000. The details may have been incorrect, but his papers show a sum of roughly that amount registered against him two years later. Disraeli, however, stigmatized it as ‘utterly false’, declaring that he would never have stood had he not possessed ‘that ample independence which renders the attainment of any office in the state, except as the recognition of public service, to me a matter of complete indifference’. He was duly elected, although for months afterwards proceedings for bribery hung over him, and it was not till the following April that the good news arrived of his agent having ‘swopped’ Shrewsbury for Gloucester where a Whig member was in similar jeopardy.

Meanwhile he was in a state of excited anticipation. Melbourne, sticking it out to the end, waited for Parliament to meet. There was much discussion in the Tory party whether to treat the re-election of the Speaker or an amendment to the Address as the issue on which to eject the Government. Peel and most of the leading figures were against opposing the Speaker, and their decision not to do so is one of the landmarks in the development of the Speakership as a non-partisan office. But there was a dissident minority in the party, and a letter in The Times signed ‘Psittacus’ set out their views. In a letter to Peel, Bonham commented on ‘the most extraordinary and bitter abuse less at the Carlton than elsewhere (I hear) on the part of Disraeli who is the Psittacus of the Times, and of whom you will doubtless hear more.’43

Disraeli denied the charge, writing on August 17 to Peel:

Whether he was telling the truth is another matter. He made other denials on similar occasions, when we know that they were false. But the important point is that he was evidently suspected of being a trouble-maker – a charge which was bound to diminish whatever chance he had of receiving office.

On Friday, August 27, the Government was defeated on an amendment to the Address. On Monday, August 30, Peel kissed hands. By Saturday all the major and most of the minor offices were filled, but no summons came to Disraeli. In desperation he wrote on Sunday, September 5, to Peel. His letter ended:

… I have tried to struggle against a storm of political hate and malice which few men ever experienced, from the moment, at the instigation of a member of your Cabinet,45 I enrolled myself under your banner, and I have only been sustained under these trials by the conviction that the day would come when the foremost man of the country would publicly testify that he had some respect for my ability and my character.

I confess to be unrecognised at this moment by you appears to me to be overwhelming, and I appeal to your own heart – to that justice and that magnanimity which I feel are your characteristics – to save me from an intolerable humiliation.

                    Believe me, dear Sir Robert,
                           Your faithful servant 
                                     B. Disraeli46

This letter has sometimes been criticized as unduly importunate. It may seem so to those who imagine that politicians regard office in the same way as schoolboys are supposed to regard selection for the first eleven, an honour to be won on merit and to be lost without complaint. No one who has studied the political papers of any Prime Minister will suffer from that delusion. On the contrary, Disraeli’s letter will be seen as differing in eloquence only from the kind of plea which every Prime Minister receives from many disappointed applicants. Nor is there any reason for surprise that Mary Anne, on the strength of her own support for Peel and perhaps of her friendship with his sister, should have written, too.

Peel’s reply to Disraeli seems either evasive or based on a misreading, since it is largely devoted to a discussion of something which Disraeli never claimed, viz. that a member of the Cabinet had held out hopes of office to him. What Disraeli actually said was that he had joined the party at the instigation of a member of the Cabinet. He never implied that anyone had made a promise to him, nor was he willing to let Peel get away with this misconstruction. He sent a dignified letter of clarification which closed the correspondence.48

Although much has been written about Peel’s possible motives in passing over Disraeli, there is really no mystery if we look simply at contemporary evidence and forget about the claims made after Disraeli had become famous and Peel had been vanquished. There is only a problem if it is assumed that Peel’s natural instinct was to promote Disraeli, and that someone or something made him change his mind; according to one version, the party hacks, the Tadpoles and Tapers, whom he satirized in Coningsby;49 Stanley, according to another;50 the affair with Henrietta, according to a third.51 But there is not the slightest evidence in Peel’s papers that he ever contemplated office for Disraeli, nor does Disraeli’s name figure on the lists drawn up by Bonham, from which Peel worked.52  Why should he have bothered about Disraeli anyway?

Like all Prime Ministers of that era, Peel had to give office to those with great territorial ‘influence’, and to those who had long served without reward. ‘I have not four Parliamentary Civil Offices at my disposal in respect to which I can exercise a discretion,’ he wrote.53 There were eight peers, two heirs to earldoms, three baronets, one knight, and only one plain ‘Mr’ in his Cabinet; all, except the Duke of Buckingham, had held office before. Eleven ministers outside the Cabinet had been in office in 1834–5. Only four men were included who had entered the House since 1835, and there were special reasons in each case. Of course, Disraeli was a genius. He could ‘floor them all’. Peel’s career and the whole future of the party might have been very different if Disraeli had been in. But by the standards of his day Peel was acting perfectly reasonably in ignoring Disraeli, just as Disraeli, by the same standards, was acting quite unreasonably in expecting anything else.

1 Henrietta Temple, Bk IV, ch. 1 and 2.

2 Disraeli evidently thought later that he had overdone the passion. In the 1853 edition of his novels, Henrietta Temple, like Vivian Grey and The Young Duke, was subjected to a good many changes and excisions.

3 See Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron (1961), 465–84, for an analysis of Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron.
    According to Sarah Disraeli, Tita ‘declares that Ld Byron never saw Lady Blessington but three times’. Hughenden Papers, Box 7, A/I/B/453, February 2, 1833.

4 M. & B., i, 357–8.

5 Hughenden Papers, Monypenny’s notes,

6 M. & B., i, 359.

7 ibid.

8 Tancred, Bk V, ch. 3.

9 Maidstone, like most boroughs, was a two-member constituency.

10 M. & B., i, 376.

11 ibid., 378.

12 ibid., 382.

13 Fulford and Strachey (ed.), Greville Memoirs, iii, 404.

14 Hansard, 3rd Series, xxxix, 802–7.

15 Lord Broughton (J. C. Hobhouse), Recollections of A Long Life (6 vols, 1909–11,) v, 112.

16 Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes, i, 100.

17 M. & B., ii, 12, quoting Grant, British Senate in 1838, ii, 334. Perhaps Peel both laughed and cheered during this curious scene.

18 Correspondence, 79, December 8, 1837.

19 Correspondence, 81–82, Disraeli to Sarah, December 11, 1837.

20 ibid., 103, March 16, 1838.

21 I am indebted to Mr D. H. Elletson’s study of Mrs Disraeli in Maryannery (1959), for the information about the Wyndham Lewis and Evans families on which the first part of this chapter is based.

22 Elletson, Maryannery, 83.

23 ibid., 84.

24 Devey, Lady Lytton, 412.

25 Correspondence, 6–7.

26 See above, p. 1.

27 The deed of separation between the Bulwers was actually signed by Rosina in Wyndham Lewis’s house at Grosvenor Gate. Mary Anne’s ill-founded gossip about Rosina having discovered Bulwer with a woman in his rooms in Albany brought upon her a severe letter of rebuke from Bulwer himself, which she is unlikely to have readily forgiven. Disraeli’s relations with Bulwer seem to have cooled off for some years after his marriage; it may be that Mary Anne was responsible.

28 Quoted, Maryannery, 109.

29 Gregory, Autobiography, 93. There are several variants of this story which certainly would not have lost in the telling.

30 Hughenden Papers, Box 125, B/XXI/D/301, n.d.

31 Hughenden Papers, Box 1, A/I/A/60, December 30, 1838.

32 ibid., Box 1, A/I/A/54, December 5, 1838.

33 ibid., Box 1, A/I/A/69, n.d. Probably early summer, 1838.

34 ibid., Box 1, A/I/A/68, n.d. Probably autumn, 1838,

35 ibid., Box 13, A/I/A/57, December 23, 1838.

36 ibid., Box 13, A/I/A/39, October 18, 1838.

37 It is given in Appendix I; Hughenden Papers, Box 1, A/I/A/89.

38 The story is that Smythe in Disraeli’s presence once spoke disrespectfully of her. Disraeli gave him a look such as he had never given before. ‘George, there is one word in the English language, of which you are ignorant.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘Gratitude, George.’ Gregory, Autobiography, 94.

39 Hughenden Papers, Box 4, A/I/A/583; Monypenny (ii, 68) omits the couplet at the top and the sentence at the bottom.

40 Hughenden Papers, Box 17, A/V/B/45, March 6, 1843.

41 ibid., Box 17, A/V/D/2. It came to £2,871, of which £871 was a bill of d’Orsay’s.

42 Hughenden Papers, Box 2, A/I/A/173, Disraeli to Mrs Disraeli, February 25, 1842.

43 British Museum, Peel Papers, Add. MSS., 40486, f.7.

44 ibid., f.119.

45 Presumably Lord Lyndhurst.

46 C. S. Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers (3 vols, 1891–9), ii, 486–9, gives the whole correspondence. See also M. & B., ii, 118–20.

47 Parker 486–7. There is no proof that Disraeli knew of the letter from his wife, which is dated the night before his own, but it strains credulity to suppose that there was no collusion.

48 ibid., 487–9.

49 George Smythe in The Press, January 7, 1854.

50 A story of Monckton-Milnes who probably knew about the Henry Stanley affair. See above, p. 1.

51 Sir Philip Rose.

52 I am grateful to Dr Kitson Clark, whose knowledge of the Peel Papers is unsurpassed for drawing my attention to this point and for letting me read his unpublished chapter on Peel’s formation of his government, on which this and the next paragraph are largely based.

53 British Museum, Add. MSS. 40487, ff.64–65, Peel to the Duke of Buccleuch.