1

Disraeli was much mortified at his rebuff. Although he kept the facts of the application and refusal a profound secret, he was bitterly disappointed. It would be oversimplifying matters to say that his eventual conflict with Peel was directly caused by this episode, but his attitude to his leader naturally became more critical. There is nothing like full employment to suppress doubts; but he had time on his hands, time to reflect, brood, wonder. As early as February 1842 something of this state of mind appears in a letter to his wife. He feels, he says, ‘utterly isolated’, and he goes on: ‘Before the change of Government political party was a tie among men, but now it is only a tie among men in office.’1 Already in his mind a subtle transition was taking place. Peel and the other ministers were ceasing to be ‘we’ and becoming ‘they’.

There was no immediate breach. Partly because he suspected, probably without any justification, that there was a move afoot to drive him into rebellion, Disraeli bent over backwards to display his orthodoxy during the first year of the new Parliament.2 He kept away from the agricultural malcontents, Sir R. Vyvyan and others, who, encouraged by the resignation of the Duke of Buckingham, (Chandos), early in 1842 withdrew their support from Peel. At the end of the session Disraeli was regarded as sufficiently ‘sound’ to be asked by Fremantle, the Chief Whip, after Peel had spoken in an important debate, to reply ‘to any man of note who rose on the opposite benches’.3 But it was too much to expect that Disraeli would keep this up for long, and behave as a docile party man awaiting his turn for promotion. Bored, restless, vaguely discontented, fascinated by new and esoteric ideas, he soon gravitated to another small and rebellious section of the party, very different in character from the dull Duke and his empty-headed supporters. This was the group known later as ‘Young England’. Their influence on him was scarcely less deep than his on them.

The history of Young England has all the charm and nostalgia which attend tales of forlorn hopes and lost causes, like the Jacobitism that they themselves worshipped, like the Fourth Party which, forty years on, modelled itself upon them. The success of such movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure. They must, rather, be regarded as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation; showing that a gesture, however absurd it may seem to contemporaries, may sometimes live longer than many Blue Books. Neither Young England nor the Fourth Party achieved anything significant, but their memory will always beckon to those incurable romantics for whom political life is something more than a humdrum profession.

George Smythe, eldest son of Disraeli’s former friend Lord Strangford, was Young England’s Bonnie Prince Charlie and Lord Randolph Churchill rolled into one. Brilliant, reckless, dissipated, he burned himself out and died early, leaving rather the memory of what he was than the record of what he did. It seems to be agreed by all his contemporaries that he was a youth of extraordinary talent and charm. First at Eton, then at Cambridge, he dominated an exclusive coterie of intellectual patricians who, under the combined influences of Clarendon’s History, Bolingbroke’s Patriot King, Kenelm Digby’s Broadstone of Honour, Scott’s novels, and the Tracts for the Times, sought to revive a Toryism not the less potent for having never existed outside their imagination. If Strafford, Laud and Bolingbroke were his political mentors, his hero in all other things was Byron. The ghost of the great poet may often be seen walking in Smythe’s career. There is the same mixture of cynicism and romance, the same hatred of cant, the same contempt for prudent middle-class morality, the same disregard for money, the same inverted puritanism, the same irresistible good looks, the same impulse towards self-torment.

The parallel must not be pressed too far. Byron was a genius. Smythe was not more than talented. His verses, novels and political writings are forgotten now, or only remembered for absurdities like his plea to revive ‘touching’ for the ‘King’s Evil’ as a means of reviving the monarchy. Moreover, he never matured. Old for his years at Eton and perhaps at Cambridge, he then stopped. He was in spirit the eternal undergraduate. Disraeli described a speech of his early in February 1842 as having ‘ability though puerile’, observing earlier in the same letter to his wife that it was as ‘unprincipled as his little agreeable self.’ This was before he sniffed the incense of Smythe’s hero-worship. In Coningsby we have a more flattering picture. Coningsby himself is Smythe, though as so often with Disraeli’s heroes – Tancred, Lothair and Endymion are the same – he is curiously uninteresting, essentially passive, someone to whom things happen. A livelier portrait appears in Endymion, where Smythe features not as the hero but as Waldershare, whose ‘versatile nature became palled even with the society of duchesses …’

Smythe was undoubtedly ‘profligate’. He was wildly extravagant and always in debt. He was involved in a series of disreputable amours, and although women fell for him like ninepins he only made a respectable marriage to the heiress of his father’s dreams a few weeks before his death from tuberculosis, hastened by excessive potations of brandy. His temper and impetuousness were fatal disadvantages. In 1852 he fought the last duel on English soil against his colleague in the representation of Canterbury; at the ensuing election he only received seven votes. Well before then he had had his political career blasted by a scandal which, though not his fault, stamped him as a failure.

It is always difficult to see at a long distance of time exactly what it was that made such a person so fascinating to his contemporaries. Much of it must have been in that most elusive of qualities, conversational wit and the humour that depends on the time and mode of utterance. Disraeli wrote once:

George Smythe was very rich when he had made up his mind to marry an heiress and gave instructions to all the ladies who were and had been in love with him to work for his benefit. ‘Family,’ he used to say, ‘I don’t care in the least for: would rather like to marry into a rich vulgar family. Madness no objection. As for Scrofula why should I care for it more than a king. All this ought to be a great pull in my favour.’ Strange to say he succeeded and married an heiress – but literally on his death bed.5

Disraeli was entranced by him and forgave all his vagaries.6  Smythe died in 1857 at the age of forty-one, two years after he had succeeded as 7th Lord Strangford. ‘I once heard that you had said of me that I was the one man who had never bored you’, he wrote to Disraeli shortly before his death. And in the preface to the 1870 edition of his novels Disraeli described him as ‘a man of brilliant gifts, of dazzling wit, of infinite culture, and of fascinating manners’. But perhaps the truest epitaph was Lord Lyttelton’s – ‘a splendid failure’.

If Smythe was both leader and spoilt child of Young England, the person who represented its quintessence was not he but his closest friend of Eton and Cambridge days, Lord John Manners, second son of the 5th Duke of Rutland. He is too often ridiculed as the author of the couplet which has become notorious:

‘Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die,

But leave us still our old Nobility.’

Manners cannot be discounted so easily. The formidable Whewell, fellow of Trinity when Manners was an undergraduate and subsequently master for twenty-five years, once said: ‘I had rather be Lord John Manners than any young man who has passed through the University.’ Manners, who figures in Coningsby as Lord Henry Sydney, was a person of handsome appearance, the highest integrity, considerable ability and of the utmost good nature. He collected friends as readily as Smythe with his mordant and reckless wit made enemies.

The romantic Toryism that he espoused was absolutely consistent. The ‘worldly considerations’ of a Waldershare were unknown to him. No man was ever such an assiduous devotee of lost causes. He visited the Carlists in Spain, and composed a sonnet in honour of the unfortunate pretender. He toured Lancashire and decided that monasticism was the cure for Manchester. To him the only redeeming feature of the new social order in the north was the one which most people severely condemned. ‘There was never so complete a feudal system as that of the mills; soul and body are or might be at the absolute disposal of one man, and that to my mind is not at all a bad state of society,’7 he characteristically wrote to his brother, Lord Granby. Was the Provost of Eton in favour of abolishing Montem? Lord John was ready to organize a London committee of Old Etonians for resistance. Did Ambrose Phillipps De Lisle8 suggest an Anglican union with Rome – ‘the present Clergy to retain their wives and livings, appointing Curates to administer the Sacrament’?9 Lord John could be relied on to promote the unhopeful cause.

Both Manners and Smythe were profoundly influenced by Frederick Faber, a leading disciple of Newman. Young England was the Oxford movement translated by Cambridge from religion into politics. Both stemmed from the same origin – an emotional revulsion against the liberal utilitarian spirit of the time. The whole contemporary medieval revival which reached its apogee in the famous mock tournament organized by Lord Eglinton in 183910 was part of the same phenomenon, and there is something very appropriate in Lord John Manners leading many years later yet another of his forlorn hopes, the struggle for a Gothic design for the new Foreign Office. Alas, he had that robust Regency figure, Palmerston, against him; and the battle of the styles, conducted on strict Conservative versus Liberal party lines, ended, as so often with Lord John’s battles, in a victory for his opponents.

Viewed in its widest context, Young England, like Tractarianism and the Gothic revival, was the reaction of a defeated class to a sense of its own defeat – a sort of nostalgic escape from the disagreeable present to the agreeable but imaginary past. The aristocracy to which Smythe and his friends belonged was losing its ascendancy. It still possessed great power and influence, but the writing was discernible upon the wall, spelled out already by the Reform Act of 1832, soon to be underlined by the repeal of the Corn Laws. Just as the Oxford movement set up for its ideal the revival of a pure, uncorrupted, pre-Reformation church which had never existed, in order to counter the Erastian and latitudinarian tendencies of the day, so Young England resuscitated a no less mythical benevolent feudal system to set against the radical, centralizing Benthamism which seemed to be carrying all before it in the 1830s and 1840s.

Yet if this may be its social explanation, and if one may easily laugh at some of its more absurd follies, the movement should not be dismissed as wholly ineffective. It was not a bad thing that some generous young men of high birth should declare the owners of property to have duties as well as privileges. It was not a bad thing that there should be a section of the Tory party concerned with the harshness of the Poor Law. It was not a bad thing that the ‘haves’ should not be all grouped on one side against the ‘have-nots’, and that the landed classes should be encouraged first to put their own house in order and then to flay the abuses of the ‘millocracy’. And if the movement was mixed up with a good deal of ecclesiastical flummery, medieval bric-à-brac and gothic rubbish, did this really do anyone any harm?

Disraeli was not the man to take it too seriously. He certainly owed to Smythe parts of his theory of history as outlined in Coningsby and Sybil. In the Vindication he had merely traced the Tory apostolic succession to Bolingbroke. Now he goes back to the Stuarts, to Laud and Strafford. In Sybil even the Reformation is looked at with a jaundiced eye and there is much nostalgia for monasteries and the Old Faith. But he was careful not to translate any High or Roman sympathies in his writings into practical politics. He was well aware of the unpopularity of Puseyism. Any move on his part in that direction was intended only to please his new friends. ‘Dizzy’s attachment to moderate Oxfordism’, wrote Smythe with perception, ‘is something like Bonaparte’s to moderate Mohammedanism’.11

Disraeli had known Smythe from boyhood through his acquaintance with Lord Strangford. At a dinner party in February 1841 he first met Manners, who wrote in his journal: ‘D’Israeli talked well, but a little too well.’12 The misgivings implied in this comment soon diminished. Manners and Smythe, who were both in the House of Commons by the end of 1841, looked increasingly to Disraeli for a lead. Also in the House was another Cambridge friend, Alexander Baillie-Cochrane13 (Buckhurst in Coningsby). He was the fourth member and the dimmest of what Lord John called ‘our partie carrée’. On March 11, 1842, Disraeli wrote to his wife, who was at Bradenham: ‘I already find myself without effort the leader of a party chiefly of the youth and new members.’14 But the alliance was not formally consolidated until the next year’s session.

During the autumn recess in 1842 the Disraelis repaired to Paris and took up residence for a couple of months in the Hôtel de I’Europe in the rue de Rivoli. They were duly entertained by the Parisian haut monde and they met princes, dukes and counts galore, invested with all the glamour of ancient titles and high-sounding historic names. ‘But’, Disraeli wrote to Sarah, ‘where are the territories? There are only 100 men in France who have ten thousand per ann. Henry Hope and De Rothschild could buy them all.’15  The court was in mourning for the death of the Duke of Orléans, and so Mary Anne could not be presented, but Disraeli himself had several audiences from the King.

His object was not merely social. He had completely reversed the attitude to France expressed in his Gallomania of ten years earlier, and now sought to promote an entente between the two nations. He submitted a lengthy memorandum to the King.16 Palmerston, who dominated the policy of the late Government, had, so Disraeli argued, been anti-French. The new Government was better disposed, but spoke with an uncertain and confused voice. If pressure could be brought on Peel and Aberdeen, a clear pro-French policy might emerge. This was where Young England came in:

The Government of Sir Robert Peel is at this moment upheld by an apparent majority in the Commons of 90 members. It is known that among these 90 are between 40 and 50 agricultural malcontents who, though not prepared to commence an active opposition, will often be absent on questions which, though not of vital, may yet be of great importance to the Minister. It is obvious therefore that another section of Conservative members, full of youth and energy and constant in their seats, must exercise an irrestible control over the tone of the Minister …

Evidently Young England, as envisaged by Disraeli at this moment, was to be something more than a partie carrée. On his figures at least fifty would have been needed to produce any results. Nothing came of all this. Disraeli was in a mood of euphoria in Paris, and the heady exhilaration produced by that enchanting capital had given him an optimistic and oversimplified view of the dark politics of fog-ridden London. ‘Disraeli’s salons’, wrote Baillie-Cochrane to Manners, ‘rival Law’s under the Regent. Guizot, Thiers, Molé, Decazes and God wots how many deiminores are found in his antechamber, while the great man himself is closeted with Louis Philippe at St. Cloud and already pictures himself the founder of some new dynasty with his Manfred love-locks stamped on the current coin of the realm.’17

The formation of the new party did indeed proceed rapidly in Paris, but not on the grandiose lines contemplated by Disraeli. Manners and Smythe had been in Geneva together in the summer and had made their plans. From Geneva Smythe proceeded to Paris, where he found not only Disraeli but Baillie-Cochrane. Manners returned to London and the letters which he received from his two friends are a fascinating commentary on the role of Disraeli.18  Both favoured from the first a small, exclusive, intimate group acting in concert. They would not spurn outside supporters, but those in the innermost councils must be few. On October 19 Smythe, back in London, wrote to Manners

Most private. Dizzy has much more parliamentary power than I had any notion of. The two Hodgsons are his, and Quintin Dick. He has a great hold on Walter and ‘The Times’. Henry Hope who will come in soon is entirely in his hands. He was in Paris, and I had an opportunity of judging. You understand me? We four vote, and these men are to be played upon and won and wooed, for the sense in which we esoterics may have decided.19

The difficulty was Cochrane, who favoured keeping the party down to three and Disraeli at arm’s length.

You see Kok does not know him well, and sometimes dreads his jokes, and is jealous of his throwing us over. But even if he did, it is always better to be in a position to be thrown over than to be nothing at all.

The truth was that Disraeli had never at any time in his life been an easy man to know; and as he grew older he became no easier. It was hard to penetrate the façade which he now presented to the world. In his youth he had been overeffusive and oversensitive. He was vulnerable and had shown his vulnerability in his love affairs, his debts and his quarrels. He had made a fool of himself in his maiden speech. He knew that he had to preserve an iron control over his voice and countenance if he was to avoid revealing the passion and ambition which seethed in his mind. Hence his assumption of that magniloquent half-ironic half-serious manner which so disconcerted those who expected the ordinary self-deprecatory candour of the English upper class. The rhetorical quasi-Gibbonian sentences flowed, with their hyperbole, their satire, their mordant and witty asides, from a face as expressionless as an antique mask. How could the hearer tell whether these orotund extravagances were seriously meant? Indeed, did Disraeli himself really know?

Smythe was not disconcerted. He was too cynical, too much on the make. He had experienced at twenty-four the debts, amours, and dissipations which it had taken Disraeli ten years longer to run through. Despite the gap in age they understood each other profoundly: they were birds of a feather. It was otherwise with Manners and Cochrane. Smythe might laughingly refer to the new party as the ‘Diz-Union’, but his friends were less happy.

Manners, too, seems to have been uneasy. Six months later he noted in his journal: ‘Could I only satisfy myself that D’Israeli believed all he said, I should be more happy: his historical views are quite mine, but does he believe them?’21

Does he believe them? The question echoes emptily down the years. We can answer it no more certainly today than Lord John Manners could then.

2

Whatever the misgivings felt by some of them, the quartet became firmly established during the session of 1843. Lord John Manners had already provided a sort of manifesto in his pamphlet – ‘A Plea for National Holy-Days’, which inspired a certain amount of ridicule among the ill disposed. The four Young Englanders sat together behind the Treasury Bench. They consulted on every topic, concerted their speeches – when they could agree – and generally enjoyed all the pleasures of conspiracy, intrigue and a common sense of the ridiculous. Others voted with them on occasions: Henry Baillie, W. B. Ferrand, Peter Borthwick, Henry Hope and Stafford O’Brien. Monckton Milnes hovered around, half fascinated, half frightened and intensely jealous of Smythe, who, as he rightly suspected, regarded him as a figure of fun; John Walter allowed his house, Bearwood, to be the headquarters of many a meeting, and saw to it that The Times gave them generous treatment. But the quartet remained a quartet. Like the Fourth Party, they did not seek recruits and like it, too, they made a splash out of all proportion to their weight and numbers.

For a number of reasons the times were favourable to a dissident group in the party, anxious to draw the maximum of attention to itself. Peel had a safe majority, but he was not overpopular with his supporters. He was never good at managing men and although he had a warm heart he hid it behind a cold repellent façade. A certain pepperiness in his character had, moreover, begun to appear, and was to increase over the next four years. He has often been described as the last Prime Minister to exercise a detailed control over all the departments of state. The truth is, rather, that he was the first as well as the last, and that he was unwise to do it. The strain of unremitting work made him touchy and irritable. At times he scarcely bothered to conceal his contempt for the more wooden-headed of his supporters.

Throughout 1843 and 1844 Peel’s party still for the most part gave him solid support, but did so with increasing reluctance and resentment. A gap was opening between the rank and file – the old Country party, which had ever been the backbone of Toryism, and the Government men, the ministers and under-secretaries whose brains were as indispensable as the votes of the back benchers. It was an excellent opportunity for clever rebels to gain applause. The ministry was running into difficulties. There was much industrial and agrarian discontent. The economic depression which had vexed the country from 1836 onwards showed no real sign of lifting. In 1842 the Chartists made another great demonstration and brought a second petition to the House in May. From another quarter – middle-class radicalism – came the threat of the Anti-Corn Law League headed by Cobden and Bright. And all the while the problem of Ireland rumbled away in the background.

It was, indeed, Ireland which first drew Young England into open revolt. Smythe, Manners and Cochrane voted against the Government in July 1843 on Smith O’Brien’s resolution demanding an inquiry into the condition of Ireland. Disraeli was absent on this occasion, but on August 10 took the opportunity of the third reading of an Irish Arms Bill to deliver a contemptuous indictment of Government policy. He intended, he said, to abstain: ‘There are some measures which to introduce is disgraceful and to oppose is degrading.’ He ended by urging the Government to penetrate to the real heart of the problem and ‘put an end to a state of things that is the bane of England and the opprobrium of Europe’. The front bench did not relish these remarks from someone whose powers of trouble-making were known to be formidable.

They did not take Smythe and Manners very seriously, but Disraeli was in a different category. Sir James Graham, Home Secretary and a close friend of both Peel and Stanley, wrote to Croker at the end of August.

Disraeli was curiously insensitive about his effect upon others. It was typical of him that, after a session in which he had greatly offended his leaders and while he was in the middle of writing a novel which held up to ridicule the whole policy of official conservatism, he should have asked first Stanley and then Graham for a government post for his brother, James. It is true that he had already in 1841 procured through Lyndhurst a clerkship in Chancery for Ralph, but his political position was then rather different; moreover, Lyndhurst was a friend, whereas Graham and Stanley were not. Both sent the usual polite letters of refusal, but privately Graham was indignant. ‘His letter’, he wrote to Peel, ‘is an impudent one and is considered by me doubly so when I remember his conduct and language in the House of Commons towards the end of the last session.’ Peel replied on December 22, 1843.

A few weeks later he withheld the customary circular letter which he sent to all his supporters asking for their attendance in the coming session. Disraeli at once protested. The omission, he wrote on February 4, was ‘a painful personal procedure which the past by no means authorized’. And he alluded to Peel’s ‘want of courtesy in debate’. Peel replied in a conciliatory tone. ‘My reason for not sending the usual circular was an honest doubt whether I was entitled to send it … It gives me, however, great satisfaction to infer from your letter – as I trust I am justified in inferring – that my impressions were mistaken and my scruples unnecessary.’24 He disclaimed any intention of being discourteous. There the matter rested for the moment, and Disraeli made a point of giving support to the Government during the early part of the session of 1844, doing so, moreover, on Irish policy which had previously brought him into conflict with Peel.

The occasion was an Opposition vote of censure against the Irish administration. Disraeli persuaded the rest of Young England to vote with him, and during the debate made one of his most celebrated speeches, perhaps the first in which he caught the ear of the House of Commons and established himself as something more than a clever literary man. One passage in particular will always be remembered.

Peel responded to Disraeli’s support by referring to ‘the very able speech of the hon. member for Shrewsbury’.

But the rapprochement did not last long. In May, Coningsby was published. Disraeli’s description of the Tamworth Manifesto as ‘an attempt to construct a party without principles’, and of the ‘Conservative Constitution’ as a ‘Caput Mortuum’ cannot have pleased Peel and his friends. In the middle of May a fierce parliamentary battle took place on the Government’s Factory Bill. Ashley, the great philanthropist, with the support of all Young England, except Smythe, who could not always withstand his father’s adjurations to vote for Peel, managed to defeat in committee the Government’s proposal merely to limit the hours of work for boys under eighteen to twelve per day; Ashley considered that ten should be the maximum figure. Peel, however, brought in a new bill, and virtually forced the House to rescind its previous decision by a personal threat to resign. Disraeli did not have a chance of speaking on this occasion, but he did not forget.

A few weeks later Peel repeated the performance on another issue. He wished to equalize the tariffs on colonial and foreign sugar by lowering the latter, but a group of pro-colonial Tories had combined with the anti-slavery members of the Opposition to carry an amendment reducing the duty on colonial as well as foreign, ie largely slave-grown sugar, thus preserving the differential which had always existed between them, to the annoyance of free traders. Disraeli voted with the majority.

Peel was determined to get his way and have the vote rescinded. He summoned a party meeting and stated his case in a speech which even Gladstone said ‘was thought to be haughty and unconciliatory’.26 There was only a handful of overt dissentients, Disraeli and Ferrand among them, but Peel himself realized that his attitude was resented, for he told Gladstone as he left the room ‘that it was the worst meeting he had ever attended’ and he warned the Queen that the Government was in danger. Despite this awareness he seems to have made a scarcely less imperious speech in the House, and Disraeli obtained great applause by a defiant declaration that he had no intention of ‘changing my vote within forty-eight hours at the menace of a Minister’. The situation was saved for Peel by a brilliant speech from Stanley. ‘The Prince Rupert of Parliamentary discussion’, as Disraeli once called him, did not on this occasion return to find ‘his camp in the possession of the enemy’. The Government survived by twenty votes, and Queen Victoria wrote with relief on June 18 to the King of the Belgians of its narrow escape from the danger caused by ‘the recklessness of a handful of foolish half “Puseyite”, half “Young England” people’.27

Young England was causing perturbation in other high circles, too. The King of Hanover urged the Duke of Rutland and Lord Strangford to discipline their sons. The Duke did not know Disraeli even by sight, but Lord Strangford at one time had been a friend and admirer. Recently, however, his attitude had changed. Passionately anxious to see his son in office, he rightly regarded the latter’s hero-worship of Disraeli as an impediment.

It is grievous [the Duke wrote to Strangford in the grave and stately style of the old school] that two young men such as John and Mr. Smythe should be led by one of whose integrity of purpose I have an opinion similar to your own, though I can judge only by his public career.28 The admirable character of our sons makes them the more assailable by the arts of a designing person. I will write to John tomorrow and I shall enquire of him whether there is any truth in the report of his having engaged himself to a great dinner at Manchester under the presidency of Mr. Disraeli.29

Alas, it was almost true, although the Duke perhaps could take some comfort in the fact that the function was a ‘literary tea’ and that party politics were eschewed. The meeting – it was of young artisans of the Manchester Athenaeum – took place in October, Smythe, Manners and Disraeli all making speeches of much fervour. Disraeli prided himself on one much quoted passage:

Knowledge is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch’s dream: its base rests on the primeval earth, its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining as it were the communication between man and heaven.30

And it was in this same speech that Disraeli made another observation which has become famous: ‘The youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity.’ Charles Whibley in his Lord John Manners and his Friends discerns in the meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum the high water mark of their success, and Monypenny describes it as ‘the culminating point in the glory of Young England’.31 Even the doubting elders felt less uneasy. The King of Hanover, despite his disapprobation of people putting any ideas, even Tory ones, into the minds of the lower orders, admired Smythe’s speech, and Strangford and the Duke were proud, too, of their sons’ efforts.

Disraeli was busy now on Sybil, a sequel to Coningsby. It was even more hostile to Peel and all his works. Much of Sybil is devoted to the conditions of the working class in the great manufacturing capitals. Disraeli probably obtained a good deal of local colour in the course of a prolonged stay in the north, which followed his speech at Manchester. He and Mary Anne visited Lord Francis Egerton at Worsley Hall, and W. B. Ferrand, MP, at Bingley in the West Riding. Ferrand, a man of most intemperate language, was a stout ally of Young England and a great expert on the malpractices of manufacturers and millowners.

From Bingley, the Disraelis went to Fryston, one of the seats of old Mr Pemberton Milnes, the father of the busy, voluble and ubiquitous ‘Dicky’ Monckton-Milnes. They probably owed their invitation to the father, who enjoyed irritating his son. The latter’s attitude to Disraeli and Young England was ambivalent. Like Disraeli, he had sought and been refused office in 1841, although, unlike Disraeli, he proclaimed his ill treatment to all the salons of London. Therefore, in order to show that he was no mere doormat, he was inclined to skirmish on the flanks of Young England. On the other hand, he cordially detested Smythe, of whom he was intensely jealous, and who, according to a memorandum left among Disraeli’s jottings, ‘hated him with a sort of diablerie and treated him with a fantastic insolence which requires a great pen to picture’.32

It is seldom that impressions of the ceaseless country house visits of those days are recorded. It so happens that two reminiscences of that particular one have survived the years. Gathorne Hardy (later Lord Cranbrook but then an unknown young barrister), records how Disraeli’s conversation struck him as ‘too much striving to be epigrammatic’: moreover, he adds, vanity prevented him from talking freely ‘lest he should lose ground’.33 The other witness was Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope, a daughter of the famous Coke of Holkham, 1st Earl of Leicester in the new creation. Charades, she remembered, were acted, Richard Milnes distinguishing himself as Sarah Gamp. She was not previously well disposed to the Disraelis, but she was delighted at his half-foreign manner and at the way in which he helped her to dress her truffles; and Mary Anne won her heart, despite a peculiarly fantastical dress, by giving her the real story of the great row between Bulwer and his wife.34

The Disraelis returned to the south for Christmas and in the middle of January attended the last grand party given by their old friend, the Duke of Buckingham, who entertained the Queen and the Prince Consort at Stowe. ‘The whole scene’, wrote Disraeli to his sister on January 20, ‘sumptuous and a great success for the Duke.’35 But it was very cold. ‘Fancy, dear shivering Dizzy, and cross looking Mary Anne’, wrote the latter, also to Sarah, ‘in black velvet, hanging sleeves looped up with knots of blue, and diamond buttons.’

However, when the Queen had left, ‘all became joy and triumph to us’. Peel was very cordial ‘and remained talking for some time’. Graham and Aberdeen were civil, and the Duchess of Buckingham told Mary Anne ‘that her Majesty had pointed Dizzy out, saying “There’s Mr. Disraeli.” Do you call all this nothing?’36 It was the swan song of the Duke. His finances were already tottering. This lavish entertainment was the last straw. Within three years he was forced to leave the country, owing a million pounds.

3

The session of 1845 saw Disraeli in open rebellion against Peel. Why did he finally break with his leader? It is hard to see any notable change in Peel’s policy. Nor is there any real evidence that Disraeli perceived the impending split in the Conservative party. It may be, as Monypenny suggests, that the very process of writing Sybil had brought home to him the utter incompatibility of his outlook and that of Peel. Perhaps he realized, too, that all chance of preferment at Peel’s hands had finally vanished, that he had passed the point of no return, and that, however frail the hope, he had to stake his career upon the ruin of Peel’s. It would not be surprising if he was in a mood of some desperation by this time. He had been in Parliament for seven years, and he had done nothing of real importance. It is true that people listened to him with attention, and sometimes took what he said seriously. But they found many of his ideas eccentric and incomprehensible. Above all, they did not trust him personally. And no wonder. Here was an insolent, mysterious, half-foreign adventurer with a libertine past and a load of debt, who had married a rich widow for money. We may be sure that garbled versions of his past relations with Henrietta and Lyndhurst lost nothing in the telling. The truth was disreputable enough. Then there were powerful enemies: some, like Stanley, made through no fault of Disraeli’s; others, like Murray, Lockhart, Crocker and the world of the Tory literary establishment, made by his own reckless youthful indiscretions. Vivian Grey and The Young Duke constituted heavy millstones round the neck of anyone who wanted to become a respectable political figure. Disraeli could do nothing about them. They were there for all to read, and they told their tale.

Moreover, time was working against him. He was forty, old in those days for first entry into office. A whole group of able, hardworking and younger men were ahead of him in the official hierarchy: Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Lincoln, Dalhousie, Cardwell, Canning;37 all members of the Government, whether in or outside the Cabinet, all born between 1807 and 1813, all Oxonians – mostly products of Eton and Christ Church. How could he hope to displace these distinguished figures who represented the very cream of the upper-class English political world? No doubt it was some consolation to be hero-worshipped by the patrician youths of Young England, and to be the dominant figure in their exclusive coterie. Yet even this had not led to acceptance by their families. The Duke of Rutland regarded him as ‘a designing person’. Lord Strangford had thrown him over. He was not, like Smythe, Manners, Cochrane, a mere youth in his twenties. They could afford to wait, to indulge in eccentric poses and rebellious gestures, secure in the knowledge that they had plenty of time to make their peace with their leaders, but Disraeli could afford no such leisurely delay. The sands were beginning to run out, and in his less sanguine moments he must have known it. At all events, whether his motive was despair at his own prospects, belief in his own principles, long-sighted appraisal of the future, or – perhaps most probable of all – love of revenge, Disraeli enlivened the session by a series of bitter and memorable attacks on Peel.

The first arose as a result of the demand for a parliamentary inquiry into the alleged opening of a Radical MP’s letters in the post under a warrant from the Home Office. Disraeli observed that Peel ‘displayed an unusual warmth’, adding: ‘I am aware that it by no means follows that the right hon. gentleman felt it … but in a popular assembly it is sometimes expedient to enact the part of the choleric gentleman.’38 In the same speech he was rash enough to imply that Bonham, the agent of the Conservative party, who held a sinecure position in the Ordnance, had been concerned in the Despard plot of 1802.

Peel made a devastating reply on the second point. Bonham was only sixteen in 1802 and the story arose out of the fact that in 1799 his half-brother, Colonel Bonham, who was fifteen years older and a violent radical, had been confined in the Tower for a time on unspecified charges, habeas corpus being in suspense. Disraeli had to make an unreserved apology. Peel seemed to have scored on the first charge, too.

Disraeli bided his time to answer this, but his reply when it came was devastating. The lines of Canning which Peel quoted were ill chosen, not because of their content, but because of their author. Peel’s relations with Canning had been the most controversial episode in his career. Had he not, so his enemies argued, refused in 1827 to join Canning and engaged in a factious opposition which drove the great man to his premature death, ostensibly because Canning favoured Catholic emancipation? And had he not, only two years later, when back in office, carried precisely that measure which he had denounced while Canning was Prime Minister?

With the sarcastic drawl and impassive countenance which had now become his manner, Disraeli congratulated Peel on his felicitous use of the art of quotation, and on his introduction of the great name of Canning.

That is a name never to be mentioned, I am sure, in the House of Commons without emotion. We all admire his genius; we all, at least most of us, deplore his untimely end; and we all sympathize with him in his fierce struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity – with inveterate foes, and with – ‘candid friends’. The right hon. gentleman may be sure that a quotation from such an authority will always tell. Some lines for example on friendship, written by Mr. Canning, and quoted by the right hon. Gentleman! The theme – the poet – the speaker – what a felicitous combination! Its effect in debate must be overwhelming; and I am sure, were it addressed to me, all that would remain for me would be thus publicly to congratulate the right hon. Gentleman, not only on his ready memory, but on his courageous conscience.40

He sat down amidst tremendous cheers, and, according to his letter to Sarah recounting the triumph, Peel was ‘stunned and stupified, lost his head, and vacillating between silence and spleen, spoke much and weakly. Never was a greater failure.’ Disraeli seldom underestimated his own successes, but he seems on this occasion to have been right. The Prime Minister hated ridicule and was very sensitive to attacks. Disraeli knew that he had got Peel’s measure at last.

Twice more during the session he repeated the performance. The first occasion was a debate on the Corn Laws. Peel’s arguments in defence of these had long dissatisfied the more ardent protectionists. He had never defended the principle upon which the agriculturists considered them to be based; which was, broadly speaking, the importance of retaining the ascendancy of the landed interest as a dominant group in society. Peel preferred to rest the case on arguments of expediency, the necessity of being self-supporting in the event of war, the harm done to numerous vested interests if complete free trade were suddenly introduced. Moreover, for a long time he had believed in the fallacious doctrine that wages varied with the price of bread, and that repeal of the Corn Laws would cheapen bread only in order to enable the manufacturers to pay lower wages and make larger profits – a view which seemed to be confirmed by the alacrity with which the manufacturers rallied to the Anti-Corn Law League.

But the fact was that wages did not vary with the price of bread. In 1839–41 wages were low and bread expensive; in 1843 wages were unusually high, and bread was unusually cheap. By the spring of 1845 Peel had come to an important decision: the Corn Laws could not be defended; they were artificially keeping up the price of a basic necessity for the poor and no corresponding benefit was being gained. But he recognized that, however guarded his own words had been in 1841, a large majority of his party believed that he and they were pledged to uphold the Corn Laws. He resolved, therefore, to wait until 1846 and at some stage during that session announce his conversion to free trade. The life of the 1841 Parliament would then be nearing its end. Convention in those days dictated a six-year term for Parliament, unless something extraordinary occurred, and a dissolution before that was regarded as premature. Peel could go to the country in 1847 as an open free trader; by then accusations of bad faith would be harder to sustain.

Peel’s conversion was kept a close secret, only two other members of the Cabinet being privy to it. One was his closest friend, Sir James Graham. The other was Sidney Herbert. When in March 1845 Cobden launched one of his attacks against the Corn Laws, Peel convinced by his reasoning, turned to Herbert who was sitting beside him and said, ‘You must answer this, for I cannot.’ Herbert did his best, but in the course of his speech used an unlucky expression about agriculturists ‘whining for help’. Disraeli did not miss the opportunity. He drew an entertaining picture of the contrast in Peel’s attitude to ‘the Gentlemen of England’, when he was in Opposition and when he was in office

Disraeli went on to observe that protection seemed to be in the same position as Protestantism in 1828.

Dissolve if you please the Parliament you have betrayed and appeal to the people who, I believe, mistrust you. For me there remains this at least – the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an Organized Hypocrisy.

This final sentence brought a storm of applause and not only from the Opposition benches. A contemporary journalist describes Peel’s reaction – ‘nervous twitchings … and his utter powerlessness to look indifferent or conceal his palpable annoyance’ – together with ‘the delirious laughter’ of the House.42 As for Sidney Herbert, he was furious and never forgave the comparison with the valet.

Disraeli’s third and last attack during the session was prompted by an Irish controversy: Peel’s proposal to increase the government grant to the Maynooth seminary for the education of Catholic priests from an annually voted subvention of £9,000 a year to a permanent subsidy of £26,000.

The uproar was tremendous. Over 2,000 petitions against the Bill were presented to Parliament. Peel feared that the Government might fall. Gladstone, who had earlier written a book in which he denounced the original Maynooth grant, felt obliged to resign, although in fact he was now in favour of Peel’s measure. His speech of explanation was so involved and obscure that Disraeli decided that he had no future in politics. Young England was divided, Smythe and Manners supporting Peel, Disraeli opposing. Even Radical opinion was not unanimous. Cobden favoured the grant, but Bright voted against it on the ground that no state support should be given to any religious denomination, Protestant or Roman Catholic. As for the high Tory Protestants led by Sir Robert Inglis, their disapprobation was eloquent. Colonel Sibthorp said that he would rather lose his head ‘than forget I am a Protestant, born a Protestant, bred a Protestant, educated a Protestant – and God grant that I may die with similar feelings, and in that faith’.

Disraeli’s speech against the Maynooth grant was one of his most memorable tours de force. It is often quoted, and it is so much more readable than any of the others, except perhaps Macaulay’s splendid oration in support of the Bill, that we tend to forget what a poor case he had. He ought on his own principles to have been in favour of the grant. Smythe and Manners were truer to the generous concepts of Young England than was its leader. Disraeli had shown in Sybil much sympathy for ‘the old faith’. Surely he should not have grudged £17,000 p.a. to improve that ‘miserable Do-the-Boys-Hall’, as Macaulay described Maynooth. Gladstone may have been obscure, Peel prosy and humdrum; but they both spoke for tolerance and generosity, whereas Disraeli defended a fundamentally indefensible position. But he was not really concerned with the merits of the case. He wished to have another hit at Peel and this was an opportunity not to be missed. His argument was essentially ad hominem. To appreciate the full flavour one must read the whole speech, but the most famous passage is worth quoting on its own:

Returning to the actual subject, Disraeli urged the Roman Catholics to be wary of accepting the proffered boon from ‘polluted hands’, from ‘the same individual whose bleak shade fell on the sunshine of your hopes for more than a quarter of a century’. And then at last he came to his peroration.

Let us in this House re-echo that which I believe to be the sovereign sentiment of this country; let us tell persons in high places that cunning is not caution, and that habitual perfidy is not high policy of State. On that ground we may all join. Let us bring back to this House that which it has for so long a time past been without – the legitimate influence and salutary check of a constitutional Opposition. Let us do it at once in the only way in which it can be done, by dethroning this dynasty of deception, by putting an end to the intolerable yoke of official despotism and Parliamentary imposture. (Loud cheers,)44

It was a wonderful performance, delivered, we are told, without hesitation and without notes; and Disraeli held the House completely. He had prophesied that the time would come when they would hear him. That time had come now.

1 M. & B., ii, 125.

2 ibid., quoting letter to Mrs Disraeli, February 26.

3 ibid., 136.

4 Endymion, ch. 22.

5 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/A/61.1.

6 It would be interesting to know what happened to Smythe’s letters to Disraeli. In 1873 Disraeli told Corry that he had found enough for three volumes, but in the Hughenden Papers today there are only five letters remaining.

7 Charles Whibley, Lord John Manners and his Friends (2 vols, 1925), i, 106.

8 A rich young Catholic landowner, the original of Eustace Lyle in Coningsby.

9 Quoted by Whibley, Lord John Manners, i, 253.

10 Disraeli, being on his honeymoon, did not attend; his account in Endymion, chs. 59 and 60, is second-hand and inaccurate.

11 Whibley, Lord John Manners, i, 153.

12 ibid., 84–85.

13 Not to be confused with Henry Baillie, a man of Disraeli’s own age, a brother-in-law of Smythe and an intermittent supporter of Young England.

14 M. & B., ii, 130.

15 ibid., ii, 148. Henry Hope was a supporter of Young England and MP for Gloucester. Coningsby is dedicated to him and was written at his country seat Deepdene. He was very rich, having inherited large fortunes of Dutch origin from his father and uncle. His brother Beresford Hope, also a wealthy Conservative MP, brother-in-law of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, was a cordial enemy both of Disraeli and Young England.

16 M. & B., ii, Appendix, 409–13, taken from a draft in the Hughenden Papers.

17 Whibley, Lord John Manners, i, 141.

18 ibid., 138, et seq.

19 ibid., 143.

20 Whibley, Lord John Manners, i, 148–9.

21 ibid., i, 149.

22 Louis J. Jennings, Memoirs . . of . . Croker (3 vols, 1884), iii, 9.

23 C. S. Parker (ed.), Peel, iii, 424–5.

24 M. & B., ii, 185–8, for these letters in full.

25 Hansard, 3rd series, LXXII, 1016.

26 John Morley, Life of W. E. Gladstone (3 vols, 1903), i, 644.

27 A. C. Benson and Viscount Esher (ed.), The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837–61 (3 vols, 1907), ii, 19.

28 Strangford may have been regaling the Duke with some details of Disraeli’s private life.

29 E. B. de Fonblanque, Lives of the Viscounts Strangford … (1877), 224–5.

30 M. & B., ii, 247.

31 loc. cit.

32 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/A/33. The greater part of this acid memorandum, though not this particular sentence, is quoted in M. & B., iii, 51–53. Its purpose is not quite clear, but evidently by the time Disraeli wrote it, probably 1868 or thereabouts, he had come to regard Milnes with much dislike. See below, p.1, for a possible explanation.

33 A. E. Gathorne Hardy (ed.), Gathorne Hardy; a Memoir (2 vols, 1910), i, 53.

34 Pope-Hennessy, Monckton-Milnes, i, 195–6. Disraeli’s explanation, which he had from Henry Baillie, was that Bulwer ‘wants bonnes fortunes’. Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/A.26.

35 Correspondence, 203.

36 M. & B., ii, 249.

37 The son of the Prime Minister and Govenor-General and first Viceroy of India.

38 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxvii, 906, February 10, 1845.

39 ibid., 998, February 21.

40 ibid., lxxviii, February 28.

41 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxviii, 1028, March 17.

42 Quoted, M. & B., ii, 322.

43 Hansard, 3rd Series, lxxix, 565–6, April 11.

44 ibid., 568–9.