1

The protectionists had taken their revenge. In a famous passage which should, one feels, be read to the sound of the roll of drums Disraeli in Lord George Bentinck details the names of the great county members who voted against Peel, the very flower of the old ‘Country party’. They were irreconcilable. Indeed, only sheer hatred of the ‘Arch-Traitor’ would have induced them to vote down a measure which on all other grounds they supported and approved. As a result the new Conservative party of which they formed an essential if latterly forgotten element was split for ever, anyway in the form in which it had been so laboriously and patiently reconstructed by Peel from the debris of 1832.

Moreover, the line of cleavage was of crucial significance, both for Disraeli personally and for the future of his party. Nearly all the office-holders and men of ministerial calibre followed Peel. The protectionists chiefly consisted of that class of country squires and the sons of peers who entered Parliament not as a career but as part of their status, men who no more thought of office than a Justice of the Peace thought of elevation to the Judicial Bench. There were no leaders among them in the lower House. In the Lords there was Stanley, who remained undisputed master of the whole party for the next twenty years, but in the House of Commons Disraeli had a wonderful, indeed a unique opportunity. He found himself almost the only figure on his side capable of putting up the oratorical display essential for a parliamentary leader. At a single stride he had by-passed the entire official Tory hierarchy. Two years later, with the sudden death of Bentinck, apparently still in the prime of life, his position was even further enhanced. ‘By this strange event’, as the Duke of Argyll says in his memoirs, ‘Disraeli was soon left absolutely alone, the only piece upon the board on that side of politics that was above the level of a pawn … He was like a subaltern in a great battle where every superior officer was killed or wounded.’1 The situation has no parallel in our political history. Disraeli needed genius to get where he did, but he could never have managed it without quite extraordinary luck as well.

But the very circumstances which brought him to such a position in his party rendered that position a bleak and barren heritage. The classes which governed England both before and after 1832 were basically conservative with a small ‘c’. They wished to preserve the Crown and Parliament, to retain the Church of England, the Justices of the Peace, the rights of property and inheritance, with no more concession than was necessary to the forces which were transforming society. Politics largely turned on just how much concession was necessary. For the second time in sixteen years the Tory party – or rather a majority of its members – seemed to have misjudged the amount needed. The first occasion was over parliamentary reform. On that issue and on the Corn Law crisis the governing class in effect decided that the high Tory policy would provoke into reality that perennial nightmare of early nineteenth-century England, violent revolution. In other words conservatism was not best maintained by supporting the Conservative party. Hence the long lease of power for the Whigs, who, especially when combined with the Peelites, seemed to offer a safer and more prudent administration than Bentinck and after him Disraeli could hope to do even under the control of an ex-Whig grandee like Stanley. A whole generation was to elapse and many great changes to occur before the Conservative party would once again command the support of the conservative classes.

Accordingly, when Lord John Russell took office on July 5 he was better placed than the figures of his party supporters suggested. The Whigs were outnumbered by eighty or ninety, but the protectionists were determined to keep Russell in if only to keep Peel out. They sat on the Government side of the House for the last weeks of the session, which were principally notable for a series of intemperate personal charges levelled by Bentinck against some of the ex-ministers. Even Disraeli felt obliged to defend his old friend Lyndhurst against one of these. The Peelites constituted the nominal opposition, but they, too, were anxious to support Russell – in order to keep out Stanley and Bentinck.

On July 18 the protectionists in both Houses gave a great dinner at Greenwich to the two leaders. Bentinck agreed to continue as leader in the House of Commons, but declared that he looked on Stanley as leader of the party as a whole. Before the prorogation, which did not occur till August 28, Disraeli accompanied Bentinck to King’s Lynn to address ‘500 substantial squires and yeomen’ at a dinner, and thence to Waltham to address a similar gathering at luncheon. His changed status in the Tory world was signalized by an invitation to stay at Belvoir Castle. The Duke of Rutland no longer regarded his son’s hero as ‘a designing person’. Disraeli was received, he told Mary Anne, ‘by six servants bowing in rows’.

At the end of the session he repaired to Bradenham. For a week or so he felt too languid and exhausted to write even to his closest friends. A similar prostration seems to have overcome Lord George Bentinck, who had gone to Welbeck to recuperate. ‘I am fast relapsing into my natural dawdling and lazy habits,’ he wrote to Disraeli on September 22, ‘and can with difficulty get through the leaders of even The Times.’ And he added despondently, ‘… in face of high prices, Railway Prosperity, and Potato Famine, depend upon it we shall have an uphill game to fight.’2 There was very little doing for the moment in the political world. It is always mortifying for prophets of doom to find that everything goes on much the same. The repeal of the Corn Laws showed no signs of ruining agriculture. Bentinck and Disraeli could only adjure their friends to wait and see, and make preparations for the next session. But Bentinck had no more intention than Disraeli of ceasing from the political struggle. To the astonishment of the sporting and fashionable world assembled at Goodwood, the news broke that he had sold his stud, and abandoned racing entirely, doing so, moreover, at a moment when his prospects had seldom seemed brighter. That someone with such a position on the Turf should have given it all up for the frail hope of reversing free trade was a remarkable example of self-sacrifice, whatever one may think of the cause for which it was made. In 1848 Bentinck’s former property, the colt Surplice, won the Derby. The following day Disraeli met him in the library of the House of Commons researching with gloomy demeanour into the price of sugar, which was once again the subject of parliamentary dispute.

Disraeli spent the autumn and early winter on Tancred. He also took the opportunity of the lull in politics to give careful thought to his personal affairs, for it was clear that what he would have called ‘a critical conjuncture’ in his career was close to hand.

It required no immodesty on Disraeli’s part to see that the effective leadership of the protectionist party in the lower House was likely to fall to him sooner or later. Bentinck’s early death was not predictable, but his temper and temperament were. The chances of his lasting as leader for long were not high. Yet, although Disraeli was the obvious successor, it was essential for him to obtain a certain qualification. Bentinck’s position as son of a duke permitted him to be a member for a borough. If Disraeli was to lead the Country party he needed all the social prestige he could get. It was essential to represent a county. Such constituencies were in general less venal than boroughs, the process of election more dignified, and frequently superfluous, for they were often uncontested. Disraeli was already beginning to have trouble with Shrewsbury even as he had with Maidstone. Clearly the right and proper place for him now was as Knight of the Shire for his beloved county of Buckingham. But there was a snag. A county member had to be, on however modest a scale, a landowner in his own right. How was this to be accomplished?

One possibility presumably, though it does not appear to be mentioned in any of Disraeli’s calculations, was to wait for his father’s death, which in the course of nature could not be long distant. On any view delay would have been the more prudent course, for his money affairs were still highly embarrassed. It is true that his wife had by 1842 settled £13,000 of his debts, and was apparently willing to provide as much again. Disraeli recorded these facts in a letter to his father to be opened only in the case of his own previous death, for he was anxious that Isaac should recompense Mary Anne out of his ‘patrimony’.4 But in 1846 his debts were probably about £15,000 to £20,000, in spite of his wife’s generosity, and the size of their joint income – in reality almost all hers – which was returned for tax purposes in 1843 at £7,695.5

At this moment, however, there came on to the market a property admirably suited to Disraeli’s requirements. Hughenden Manor, a mile north of High Wycombe, had belonged to the Norris family, whom the Disraelis had known well since their own move to Bradenham only a couple of miles away. In 1845 John Norris died and his executors put up the place and estate for sale. The house was a white, stuccoed, three-story building of simple appearance, built probably at the end of the eighteenth century. The garden and lawns sloped down to the south, cutting through woods on either side. To the east the park fell away steeply towards the little church which lay in the grounds. The place was and is most attractive. The land consisted of about seven hundred and fifty acres and the rents in 1846 were reckoned to be a shade over a pound an acre, £763 per annum.

It was in many ways an ideal property, but the sum involved – nearly £35,0006 – far exceeded Disraeli’s resources or any free money still left with Mary Anne. At this juncture Lord George Bentinck stepped in. ‘We have got all that Huendon [sic] matter to talk over’,7 he wrote to Disraeli on December 12, just before coming down to stay for the first time at Bradenham. No doubt the whole business was thrashed out fully then. The upshot was that Bentinck and his two brothers, Lord Titchfield and Lord Henry Bentinck, agreed to put up the money to make Disraeli a country gentleman. On the strength of this promise Disraeli decided to stand for Buckinghamshire in the general election of 1847.

The complicated negotiations which followed need not detain us. Disraeli, as one would expect, was an infuriating purchaser from the point of view of the vendors, and the affair took the best part of two years before completion in September 1848, the original dates fixed being first June then Christmas 1847. The excuse given was a dispute about the valuation of timber. But in reality Disraeli was in no position to produce the money in time for June, though Isaac advanced enough to prevent the whole thing collapsing; and in the autumn a disastrous financial crisis made it extremely difficult for even the Bentincks to obtain credit. By the end of the year the situation looked better. Bentinck, who evidently kept a close watch, wrote on December 24, 1847:

Bentinck was right: the valuation of the timber, estimated at £8,127 by the vendors and at £7,313 by Disraeli’s solicitor, was fixed by an arbitrator at £7,332, and agreed deductions reduced it to £7,250, a saving of nearly £900. Disraeli, however, continued to procrastinate, and a stiff letter survives from the vendors’ solicitors on August 23, 1848, ending with the sentence: ‘Neither our clients nor ourselves have been treated with that courtesy which we had a right to expect.’

In the end Disraeli temporarily borrowed £19,000 from his solicitors and from the bank. He also had the advantage of his patrimony, for Isaac died early in 1848. But the basis of his credit was a loan of £25,000 from the Bentincks. This had been promised but not finally effected, when on September 21 Bentinck suddenly died – a disaster which threatened the whole arrangement for Hughenden. Lord George was not an impoverished younger son; he already had ample means and could expect on his father’s death, if Disraeli is to be believed, ‘20 or 30 thousand per ann, to say nothing of his chance of being Duke of Portland, his brother Titchfield, not being married, and very ailing’. As long as Bentinck lived Disraeli was safe, but he now would depend upon the two brothers whom he scarcely knew, and perhaps upon the aged Duke.

The latter was immensely rich, indeed a millionaire many times over, with an income of £180,000, but the very rich do not necessarily throw their money about. The two brothers were in great awe of their father, who must have made relations no easier by seldom communicating with them except in writing. Lord Henry saw Disraeli in the middle of October and told him that nothing had so far been said to the Duke, but that he and Titchfield hoped that Disraeli would not object if the Duke proposed to pay off the £25,000 in return for receiving the rents and becoming the mortgagee of the whole estate. Disraeli replied that in that case he could only sell the estate, pay off the debt, and resign the county.9 Lord Henry protested that the Duke would not dream of such a thing.

Then I went on [Disraeli writes in his letter recounting the interview to Mary Anne] to the state of my affairs, observing that it would be no object to them and no pleasure to me unless I played the high game in public life; and that I could not do that without being on a rock. And then I went into certain details, showing that I could not undertake to play the great game, unless your income was clear. That was all I required and ample.10

Lord Henry begged him to say nothing to the Duke, and promised to see what he could personally do. ‘He remained with me four hours,’ Disraeli concludes, ‘and appears more devoted than even Lord G.’

The final outcome was that Lord Titchfield and Lord Henry Bentinck lent Disraeli the £25,000 needed and the Duke was not involved. We do not know exactly what the terms were, but it is reasonable to guess that at the time, though a disagreeable change occurred later, Titchfield, like Lord Henry, had no intention of calling in his money, and that the whole transaction was conducted in the spirit of Lord George’s wishes that it should be a political not a business affair, a contribution from one of the great landowning families of England to enable their class to be represented by one of the most brilliant men of the day.

Did Disraeli remember Lord Monmouth’s words to Coningsby?

And it is our own fault that we have let the chief power out of the hands of our own order. It was never thought of in the time of your great-grandfather, sir. And if a commoner were for a season permitted to be a nominal Premier to do the detail, there was always a secret committee of great 1688 nobles to give him his instructions.11

With his capacity for half-ironical analysis he may well have seen the parallel. There was something wonderfully appropriate in this action by one of the greatest of all the families made by the events of 1688. The Bentincks had been Whigs until recently, but in changing to the other side they showed a more acute political feel than the Cavendishes or Russells for the trends of the time and the interests of their order. There was no real future for the Whig aristocracy in alliance with the Liberals, Radicals and Irish, although it was to be many years before this became apparent. But the trouble for the Bentincks and others who sensed this truth was that, anyway in the House of Commons, all the clever men were on the wrong side. This was why Lord George had thought of hiring a barrister to put his case for him. Here was a far better solution: no need to brief; no need to give secret instructions; simply a matter of financing a parliamentary genius who seemed to understand the true interests of the aristocracy better than they did themselves. It was a remarkable stroke, and, if we except the possible case of Burke, one without precedent in English history.

The Disraelis finally moved into Hughenden in the winter of 1848. During the course of the negotiations much had happened both in Disraeli’s private and public life. On April 21, 1847, his mother died at the age of seventy-one. It is unlikely that the loss meant much to Disraeli except in so far as it affected his father and sister. Isaac had by now been totally blind for seven years and depended entirely upon Sarah and the faithful Tita. He did not long survive his wife, dying in Tita’s arms on January 19 of the following year. He was eighty-one. Disraeli felt his father’s death far more acutely. In spite of Isaac’s occasional complaints of neglect, especially in the days of the affair with Henrietta, father and son were deeply devoted to each other. Benjamin admired Isaac’s literary talent. Isaac admired Benjamin’s and took a puzzled pride in his son’s political rise, although not always understanding what it was all about. In the ’seventies Lord Rowton records Disraeli saying of his father:

But affection can often exist without full understanding. Disraeli was undoubtedly fond of his father. Rowton records how in 1866 Disraeli and the younger Stanley dined together at Bellamy’s and drank a bottle of champagne to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Isaac’s birth. Now in 1848 Disraeli at once set about producing editions of his collected works, and wrote the colourful but inaccurate memoir mentioned earlier. Almost all the work was done by Sarah; so Disraeli told Lord Rowton when the latter expressed some surprise at Disraeli’s admission that he had recently read for the first time a chapter of a book he was supposed to have edited twenty years earlier.13

Disraeli was his father’s heir and sole executor. It is not certain how much he inherited. For probate purposes Isaac’s personal property was declared at just under £11,000 of which one-third each went to Benjamin and Sarah, and one-sixth each to Ralph and James. Benjamin as eldest son also inherited the real property, but since land in those days did not have to be declared for probate and relevant papers are missing, there seems no means of ascertaining how much it was worth. It must have been a fair amount, unless we are to suppose that Isaac had been living on capital for the latter years of his life. Whatever it came to was, no doubt, swiftly engulfed by Disraeli’s debts.

Bradenham itself did not belong to Isaac; so the home was broken up, and most of his library of 25,000 books sold at Sotheby’s. Sarah departed to live with friends. Ralph, who already had chambers in London, continued in his employment as a clerk in Chancery at £400 a year. James went on farming the Manor Farm at Bradenham. Tita was the great problem. He had just announced his marriage to ‘Harvey’, who had been old Mrs D’Israeli’s maid and was now housekeeper, ‘an event which we suspected,’ Disraeli told Sir Philip Rose,14 ‘had taken place some years previously’. The thought of the man who had solaced the last hours of Byron and Isaac D’Israeli accepting the usual fate of the retired butler and becoming keeper of a public house or a greengrocer’s shop was not to be borne. Fortunately at this moment Disraeli met Sir John Hobhouse, Byron’s old friend, who happened to be President of the Board of Control; he persuaded him to appoint Tita as a messenger, and all was well for the next ten years or so. But a fresh crisis arose when the Board was abolished in 1859. Luckily the Tories were in power, and the younger Stanley at the India Office which replaced the Board agreed to appoint Tita as chief messenger, ‘but without the liability of having to carry messages’. In 1874 Tita died, leaving ‘Harvey’ a widow. Once again fortune favoured the former Bradenham ménage. Disraeli was now Prime Minister, and Queen Victoria at his request conferred a civil list pension of £50 a year upon Tita’s relict.

2

Parliament reassembled on January 19, 1847. It was agreed that the peculiar seating which had resulted from the split in the Tory party in the last session could not very well be continued without inconvenience. The protectionists accordingly joined the Peelites on the Opposition benches, and Disraeli and Bentinck occupied the front bench with Peel, though it was tacitly understood that neither of them would sit next to him. It was a great thing for Disraeli to be on the front bench for the first time. He symbolized his transformation from brilliant rebel to grave statesman by a corresponding change in dress and speech. Both became duller. He wore a suit of impeccable black, instead of the gorgeous colours of the past, and he spoke in a more weighty manner, avoiding the extravagance, the vituperation, and the imagery of his great philippics. Of course, he could never be wholly dull: his speeches still make far better reading than those of his contemporaries, but it is only rarely that they soar again with quite the abandon of those wonderful flights which destroyed Peel.

The general election was held in June and resulted in the return of about 325 Whigs, Liberals, Radicals and Irish, prepared to support the Government, and about 330 Conservatives, of whom some 230 were protectionists, the remaining 100 being in general supporters of Peel. The situation was therefore much as it had been before, and Russell’s administration seemed secure, as long as there was no reconciliation between the Peelites and the Country party.

Disraeli was elected without a contest along with a Mr Du Pré, another Tory, and a Whig from the Cavendish family, later to be created Lord Chesham. In his election address he dwelt with pride upon the political contributions of men of Buckinghamshire. ‘The parliamentary constitution of England was born in the bosom of the Chiltern Hills; as today our parliamentary career is terminated among its hundreds.’ He referred to Hampden, Shelburne, Grenville, Chatham, Burke and, on a slight note of anticlimax, to the Chandos clause. He ended:

‘Now let the men of the North who thought that they were to govern England – let them bring a political pedigree equal to that of the county of Buckingham.’

On the practical problems of the future Disraeli’s principal pledge was to give free trade a fair run – both he and Bentinck took this view – and to support ‘popular principles’ against ‘liberal opinions’, ie local self-government against centralization, factory legislation against non-intervention, Justices of the Peace against Stipendiary magistrates, the rule of the local landed proprietors against Benthamite Civil Servants from London, a national Church independent of the state against Whig Erastianism.

The general election came not a moment too soon for the Whigs. Even in the spring signs were beginning to multiply of an imminent financial crisis. In September, to quote Disraeli, it ‘burst like a typhoon’. Numerous banks closed their doors. Money could not be got for less than 60 per cent, and an autumn session had to be held to grant indemnity to the Government for having authorized – very belatedly – the Bank of England to exceed the limit laid down in Peel’s act for the issue of notes in excess of bullion, and thus provide the desperately needed credit.

Bentinck surveyed the scene with a sort of gloomy relish, attributing the disaster, naturally, to the repeal of the Corn Laws. Indeed, his only regret seems to have been that the situation was not even worse. On November 14 he wrote:

His real dread was that the crisis might somehow result in Peel’s being sent for, but this calamity was averted and by the end of the year the worst of the panic was over.

Meanwhile a particularly embarrassing problem arose. In the general election Baron Lionel de Rothschild had been elected Liberal member for the City of London, his colleague being the Prime Minister. Rothschild was, of course, a member of the Jewish faith and it was impossible for him to take, as the law required, the Parliamentary oath ‘on the true faith of a Christian’. Clearly an attempt would now be made by the Liberals to remove this disability. Equally clearly the great majority of the Tory party, particularly the county members, would feel bound, as defenders of the established Church, to resist the admission of MPs who, though denying the divinity of Christ, would none the less be able to legislate on the organization, worse still the doctrine, of the Church of England. On December 16 Russell moved that the House should consider the removal of the civil disabilities of Her Majesty’s Jewish subjects.

Disraeli had already set forth his highly unorthodox views on Judaism and Christianity in Tancred, which had been published in March. They were there for all to read. Nevertheless they might have been regarded as mere extravaganza from a novelist’s pen and have done him no particular harm in his party, if he had not been determined to assert them by vote and speech in the House of Commons. Disraeli not only regarded Christianity as the completion, the logical fulfilment of Judaism, he also considered that the Jews were entitled to be admitted to the House because theirs had been the faith into which our Lord and His disciples were born. ‘The very reason for admitting the Jews,’ he said to the House, ‘is because they can show so near an affinity to you. Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism?’ This was quite a different argument from the orthodox liberal thesis that no one should be excluded from the legislature on grounds of his religious beliefs, however false those beliefs might seem to the majority of members.

In Tancred Disraeli had gone so far as to argue that Christians should be positively grateful to the Jews for having prevailed on the Romans to crucify Christ. He did not quite repeat this claim to the House of Commons, but his whole approach was deeply repugnant to the other members, and this repugnance was enhanced by his curious trick – unconscious self-revelation perhaps – of referring to ‘your Christianity’, and what ‘you owe to this people’, as if he felt himself, in some sense, alien to both sides; which indeed he was. He ended:

Disraeli was repeatedly interrupted throughout his speech. High Tories were prepared to meet an argument based on toleration, not one based on the view that the Jewish religion was nearly as good as Christianity. When he sat down he was received in frosty silence from both sides of the house, apart from one or two angry cries of ‘Divide’.

Surprisingly Bentinck also spoke in favour of admitting the Jews, though he did not use any of Disraeli’s unorthodox arguments. He had been in favour of Catholic emancipation, and had voted for removing Jewish disabilities in 1830 and in 1833 on much the same ground. He had a straightforward old-fashioned Whiggish belief in religious liberty, and he was not now going to leave Disraeli in the lurch; although he seems to have been rather hazy about his own previous attitude.

Bentinck’s memory was correct. Stanley had voted for the Jews in his Whig days both in 1830 and in 1833, even as Bentinck had, but he probably did not feel very strongly on the matter, and saw that it would be highly inexpedient to support the Jews now that he was leader of the Country party. Nor would he have felt any objection to leaving Disraeli out on a limb: from his point of view the more Disraeli damaged his prospects of becoming leader in the House of Commons, the better. Bentinck, too, did not care greatly about the merits of the case. He was actuated above all by loyalty to Disraeli.

In spite of an attack of influenza which would have fully justified his absence from the House, Bentinck spoke and voted for Russell’s motion, which was carried by a large majority, although the protectionists voted against en masse.

Disraeli’s most captious critics must find it hard to censure his conduct over the Jewish question. He had nothing to gain and much to lose by speaking as he did. The motion was sure to be carried anyway, and it would have been easy to abstain or absent himself. His career was in the balance. A great deal depended upon his presenting to the high Tory squires with their belief in Church and State the appearance of a ‘sound man’. He had just become member for Bucks, and he was about to set up as a country gentleman at Hughenden. He had a good chance of living down his erratic past and securing the leadership of the party. Of course, the balance was not wholly one-sided: there were his remarks in Tancred which might have been thrown back at him with some disagreeable gibes if he had seemed evasive; there was his personal friendship with Rothschild. But Rothschild was politically a Liberal: to seat him was to instal an opponent. The gibes based on Tancred would soon have been forgotten. The overwhelming balance of advantage from a careerist point of view lay in silence and abstention.

Disraeli never flinched for one moment on this issue. It was to occupy Parliament at regular intervals for ten years, during which Jewish Emancipation Bills were repeatedly carried in the lower and rejected in the upper House. He did not often speak again, but there was no need to do so, in view of the heavy majority for emancipation. He consistently voted according to his conscience – the allegations to the contrary have no substance18 – and in 1858 had the satisfaction as leader of giving personal support to the Bill which finally settled the matter by a compromise allowing each House to make its own rules about the form of oath. Nor was this all. In his life of Bentinck published at the end of 1851 he repeated all his most politically obnoxious arguments in favour of the Jews; and with complete irrelevance to the theme of the book, for after a chapter of twenty-five pages on the subject he thoughtfully informs the reader on the first page of the next: ‘These views, however, were not those which influenced Lord George Bentinck …’ Courage was a quality which even his bitterest enemies could not deny him.

The immediate result of the Jewish debate was Bentinck’s resignation from the leadership of the protectionists. One of the Whips conveyed to him the dissatisfaction of the party, and, without waiting to ascertain how widespread it really was, he seized the opportunity. He was depressed by influenza at the time, and, though in no way acting from pique or pride, was acutely conscious of the difficulties and frustrations attending his office. He also felt with some justice that he had been outmanœuvred by the Whips. Disraeli shared this view, and Bentinck himself put his finger on a major weakness in the party organization, writing to his short-lived successor, Lord Granby, when he pointed out that the Whips had been taking orders direct from Stanley and not from the leader of the Commons.

‘I cannot help giving you this friendly advice … to appoint your own Whippers-in; and let them take their orders from you and no one else.’19 As we shall see, Disraeli suffered the same difficulty, and Stanley’s close relations with two Whips far from well disposed to the leader in the House of Commons were to be a source of trouble for him, too.

The succession caused an acute problem. Bentinck himself wanted Disraeli and was highly indignant when he was passed over. ‘None of this could have happened, had you played a generous part’, he wrote furiously to Stanley on February 9, 1848, and for several months he refused to speak to his former chief. But Stanley and the Whips were right for the time being to take the line they did. Disraeli’s speech on the Jewish question, regarded by many Conservatives as positively blasphemous, was still ringing in their ears. If Bentinck had been driven out on this question it was a fortiori impossible for Disraeli to succeed him. Had he not been out of Parliament, Lord John Manners might possibly have been chosen leader. In the end the choice fell on his brother, Lord Granby, who it is idle to pretend was other than a stick. Protectionism was his sole remedy for all the evils of the day. Elected on February 10, a week after the session began, he had thrown in his hand by March 4, conscious of his own inadequacy. Many people hoped that Bentinck would return, but he refused to budge from his new seat on the second bench below the gangway; Disraeli by mutual consent had remained on the front bench to avoid the appearance of a complete split in the party. No successor to Granby could be found, and for the rest of the session the party was without any official leader in the lower House, Stanley doing his best to guide affairs through the medium of the two Whips. The result was, of course, complete confusion. In April, Manners noted in his diary a conversation with Disraeli.

Nothing came of the overtures from Lord Lincoln. Disraeli and Bentinck made the principal speeches for their party, but their relations with Stanley were anything but cordial for most of the session. ‘Is there a real Stanley?’ Augustus Stafford records Disraeli saying. ‘I believe it is a mere myth sung to lull Newdegate.’22 This acid quip suggests that no love was lost between them. However, towards the end of July Stanley accepted, with all signs of cordiality, a dinner invitation to Grosvenor Gate, the object of which was to patch up the quarrel between himself and Bentinck. This act of mediation may well have brought Disraeli closer to Stanley and it is significant that Stanley asked him to sum up for the session. He did so at the end of August with characteristic imagery, ridicule and zest.

There was much indeed to satirize. The Government had been fortunate to face so feeble an Opposition, for their own performance from the autumn session onwards had been lamentably incompetent. True, it was a difficult year, all Europe resounding to the hubbub of revolution and the crash of toppling thrones, and London enduring the last great Chartist demonstration. However, this scarcely warranted Sir Charles Wood’s remarkable feat, unrivalled even by our own modern fiscal experts, of introducing four budgets in six months. Disraeli’s mockery was seldom better displayed than on this subject and on the suspension of the Bank Charter Act, which he compared to the liquefaction of St Januarius’s blood – ‘the remedy is equally efficient and equally a hoax’. Long afterwards he told Lord Rowton that this was ‘the speech which made me leader’.

3

On September 21, 1848, Bentinck suddenly died of a heart attack while walking alone from Welbeck in the afternoon to visit an old friend, Lord Manvers. He had often been in poor health, but he had seemed better recently and his death came as a complete shock. Disraeli was deeply moved at the loss of his colleague, benefactor and friend. Opinions of Lord George Bentinck are various and conflicting. He was not a good parliamentarian, ponderous, rigid and clumsy. Disraeli overstated his talents. Yet he certainly was not the mediocrity depicted by his enemies. He had great tenacity, and he worked very hard. His character contained serious blemishes, bad temper, obstinacy, vindictiveness and vilification. Yet there was sincerity, loyalty, courage and honour, too. It has been said that no one is a hero to his own valet – in the days when people had valets; but this at least was not true of Bentinck. A moving letter from his servant, Gardiner, survives among Disraeli’s papers. After some routine communication he continues:

To Disraeli, despite the gulf that existed between their interests and talents, Bentinck was intensely loyal, and very grateful. The Duke of Newcastle wrote in a letter of condolence on Bentinck’s death:

Disraeli at once set about collecting material for a laudatory biography of his friend, which he described in its last sentence as ‘the portraiture of an ENGLISH WORTHY’. He called him there ‘one of the great personages of debate’, and in a parliamentary tribute made at the beginning of the next session said, ‘He has left us the legacy of heroes: the memory of his great name, and the inspiration of his great example.’ But Disraeli does not seem to have been wholly convinced by his own eulogy. He told Greville privately that Bentinck’s deficiencies could never have been got over, ‘and, as it had been proved that he could not lead an Opposition, still less would he have been able to lead a Government’. Stanley was even more severe; speaking to Queen Victoria in 1852 he said: if alive, Bentinck ‘would have made confusion worse confounded’. Gladstone’s verdict was different. ‘If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry,’ he told Morley, ‘there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not force and constancy enough.’25 But this was an opinion given in 1891, and probably coloured by dislike of Disraeli.

What was to happen to the leadership of the party in the House of Commons? The chaos that resulted from Bentinck’s resignation had rendered the party useless during the session of 1848. It was vital to avoid a repetition. But Disraeli, who was now the only man capable of leading, still remained unacceptable to a large section, perhaps a majority, of the protectionists, although there was a group which at once began to intrigue in his favour. Lord Henry Bentinck was its leading spirit, the Duke of Newcastle gave his support and, among the county members, R. A. Christopher, Sir John Trollope, William Miles, George Bankes and Sir John Buller. Disraeli was not disposed to remain an idle spectator of these interesting manœuvres, and, although in the throes of moving from Bradenham to Hughenden, made frequent visits to London in order to lobby politicians and newspaper editors.

Three people, whose decisions were vital, continued to regard him with suspicion, Stanley and the two Whips, Newdegate and Beresford.

The circumstances to which Newdegate alluded are easy to guess. It was a fair time since the scandal of the visit by Henrietta and Lyndhurst to Bradenham, but if Sir Philip Rose could write in 1882 that he had ‘had it thrown in his teeth … within very recent years’, how much stronger must such feelings have been in 1848. Add to this rumours of Disraeli’s past conduct over Vivian Grey, the continued refusal of the Quarterly Review even to mention his name, the alleged tergiversations in his early political career, his rickety finances, the extravagancies of his novels, his views on the Jewish question, his mysterious half-foreign appearance, and the virulent abuse, much of which stuck, hurled at him by malignant journalists. No wonder Greville could write of him in 1847 that he had ‘a character so disreputable that he could not be trusted’. It is not surprising that Stanley, who had personal reasons of his own for disliking Disraeli, should have tried to find someone else in place of Bentinck. His choice lighted on J. C. Herries, an elderly dug-out who had begun life as a Treasury clerk in 1798, working his way up to Chancellor of the Exchequer in Goderich’s administration, and whose sole asset was that almost alone of the protectionists he had some degree of official experience.

Stanley wrote a long and elaborate letter to Disraeli from Knowsley on December 21. After observing that Disraeli’s talents would always give him ‘a commanding position in the House and a preponderating influence in the Party’, he went on to explain that the party ‘from whatever cause’ would not give ‘a general and cheerful approval’ if he were formally elected leader. He therefore paid him ‘the much higher compliment’ of asking him to waive his claim and to ‘give a generous support to a Leader of abilities inferior to your own, who might command a more general feeling in his favour’.27

He wrote at the same time to Newdegate, ‘I hope … that Disraeli will have the good sense to acquiesce in, and aid, the arrangement. I have never seen of late years any reason to distrust him, and I think he will run straight, but he would not be acceptable as leader.’28

Stanley reckoned without his man. Disraeli had no intention of assisting in any such arrangement. He may have been aware of his unpopularity in some quarters, but he knew that he had some very active supporters, and that in ability he towered above the collection of incoherent squires who, interspersed with one or two superannuated official men, occupied the benches of the protectionist party. His reply29 beginning, ‘My dear Lord’, and ending, ‘Pray believe me, my dear Lord Stanley, yours sincerely B. Disraeli’ was ‘cold but civil’, as Greville put it.

The office of leader of the Conservative party in the H. of C., at the present day, is to uphold the aristocratic settlement of this country. That is the only question at stake, however manifold may be the forms which it assumes in public discussion and however various the knowledge and the labor which it requires. It is an office which, in my opinion, requires the devotion, perhaps the sacrifice of a life.

The man who undertook it, he went on, needed the warm personal regard of his supporters. Had Stanley still been in the House of Commons, Disraeli would gladly have served under his banner. ‘Honor and personal feelings … attached me to George Bentinck in his able but hopeless career.’ But now there were no longer any personal ties. He did not wish to sacrifice ‘interesting pursuits, health, and a happy hearth, for a political career which can bring one little fame’. He felt that he could do more ‘to uphold the cause’ in an independent position ‘by acting alone and unshackled than if I fell into the party discipline which you intimate’. He ended by recommending ‘the water cure’ for Stanley’s gout and congratulating him on his son’s election for Lynn. It was a masterly letter.

Stanley was too old a hand not to know what was usually involved in upholding the cause by ‘acting alone and unshackled’. Nine times out of ten it meant trouble, and he could easily envisage the party dissolving into fragments if Disraeli took a different line from Herries. In any case Herries proceeded to refuse the leadership. Stanley now wrote a much more accommodating letter to Disraeli, declaring that he had no axe to grind and was prepared to act with anyone whom the party would agree on as a leader, whether Herries, Granby or Disraeli. This was on January 6, 1849, and Parliament was due to meet on February 2. Much intrigue followed and Lord Henry Bentinck even gave up hunting in order to forward Disraeli’s candidature. It was now the turn of Beresford, the other Whip, to express alarm to Stanley. Early in January he said that he had discovered – rather belatedly, it would seem – ‘a deep intrigue to force Disraeli on us as Leader’. He was willing to admit the latter’s superiority and would not try to create disunion if the party really wanted Disraeli. But he did not mean ‘to assist in an arrangement which I verily believe will bring great obloquy upon a Party, which I have joined from principle and which has its weight from character’.30

Stanley, however, saw that it was pointless to resist any longer. There was no possibility of finding someone whom Disraeli would accept as a second Bentinck. He was bound to be the real leader in the Commons, unless the party threw him off altogether, and this would have been madness. The most that could be done was to save the faces of the Whips and Disraeli’s numerous personal enemies by an arrangement which would at least in form keep the question of the leadership open. Stanley bethought himself of a suggestion of Herries that the leadership should, as it were, be put into commission. He suggested, Disraeli told his wife on January 31, a committee of three with equal power consisting of Disraeli, Herries and Granby; ‘that I should or rather must be the real leader; that this would remove all jealousies for the moment’. When Granby succeeded as Duke of Rutland, Disraeli would become titular as well as real leader. Disraeli went on: ‘[Stanley] was friendly and cordial. Says it is all over with the party if I retire. Refused: but at his request left it open as he has not yet even consulted Granby.’31

Although Disraeli never formally withdrew his refusal, he tacitly accepted this ludicrous arrangement in order to demonstrate its absurdity. Herries was a mere hack. As for Granby, Disraeli’s candid view, before he became leader of Young England and intimately connected with Granby’s brother, Lord John Manners, is clear enough from a letter to his wife in 1841: ‘Granby made a speech. The Radicals were awestruck at a future Duke & listened with open mouths to his high Castilian emptiness.’32 Stanley did his best to make the committee a reality, and it is not true, in spite of Disraeli’s own account, that he became formally leader in 1849. Stanley consulted Herries on occasions and often adjured Disraeli to do so. The Whips regarded themselves as primarily responsible to Stanley rather than to anyone else for the next two years, and it was not until the winter of 1851–2 that the committee was actually dissolved when Granby resigned. But Disraeli was the effective leader long before that, and the position of the triumvirate was aptly summarized by Aberdeen to George Smythe – ‘Sièyes, Roger Ducos, and Napoleon Bonaparte’.33

At this inopportune moment when Disraeli was endeavouring to consolidate a reputation for solidity and soundness a spectre from his past suddenly reappeared. Robert Messer, the stockbroker’s son, third member of the trio whose speculations in 1824–6 ended so disastrously, began to bombard him with dunning letters. He had, he said, been owed in 1831 as much as £1,500 and had received over the years mere trifles at irregular intervals amounting to far less than the interest on the debt. Disraeli replied by declining to communicate except through his solicitor, Mr Wright. Messer, correctly suspecting that he intended to repudiate the debt, wrote back quoting some of Disraeli’s own letters to him in 1831. One is enough to show their tenor.

I have not literally a shilling in the World … I have no friend in the World that I can ask to lend me five pounds – I have trespassed on my friends too much. In addition to all this I need hardly say that I have not a tradesman who is paid … I declare most solemnly that I have not at this moment the money wherewith to pay my journey to the metropolis …

After declaring that all he demanded was £12. 10s. per quarter until he could establish himself in a permanent position, Messer ended: ‘From your position in Society & mode of living I feel assured you cd pay so small a sum.’34 This was written on March 19, 1849. Before Disraeli could take any action Wright had interviewed Messer and informed him that Disraeli considered that he had no claim on him at all, and whatever he paid was out of ‘pure pity’ and ‘extreme kindness’ and was ex gratia. Messer wrote an indignant letter on March 23. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘carefully preserved all your letters and memoranda which passed between us during the period of the transactions out of which my claim arises – viz. in 1825 … and have also my accounts in perfect order.’35 He added that he owed to his own character as a man of honour to place the papers before some disinterested third party who could judge where the merits of the case lay. Disraeli decided to compromise. It would have been awkward for someone in the process of establishing himself as leader of his party to have letters of this sort circulated at all widely. Messer in the end alleged a debt of £1,100; Disraeli’s solicitor managed to compromise it at £500 to be paid in instalments with interest over seven years, the first instalment to be followed by the return of all his letters to Messer. How far Messer was blackmailing or how far the debt was genuine there is no means of knowing.36 Two years earlier in 1847 Disraeli had used his good offices to procure Messer a job with the railway magnate ‘King’ Hudson, and there was no suggestion then of a pecuniary claim in Messer’s letter thanking him.37 On the other hand, it is not likely that Disraeli would have paid unless he thought Messer had some sort of case. Disraeli’s finances continued long after this to be erratic, incoherent and uncertain, but this is the last we hear of the early imprudences which cost him so much difficulty for nearly a quarter of a century.

1 Duke of Argyll, Autobiography, i, 279.

2 Hughenden Papers, Box 89, B/XX/Be/11.

3 Lord George Bentinck, 539.

4 M. & B., iii, 147.

5 Dividends were £3,974, rents were £3,721. It is fair to add that the latter figure included £1,500 for the house in Grosvenor Gate, and no doubt their disposable income would have to be reduced by an even larger figure on account of various outgoings.

6 £27,700 for the land and advowson, and £7,250 for the timber.

7 Hughenden Papers, Box 89, B/XX/Be/16.

8 ibid., Box 89, B/XX/Be/45.

9 He had been elected by now.

10 Disraeli to Mrs Disraeli, October 18, 1848, quoted, M. & B., iii, 151–2. The exact nature of the proposal which Disraeli was rejecting is not wholly clear. Evidently it involved some sort of contingent liability on his wife.

11 See above, p. 1.

12 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/B/13, December 14, 1873.

13 ibid., A/X/B/21, ‘Easter Day’, 1873.

14 Rose’s account is in Hughenden Papers, Box 27, A/XI/A/3.

15 Hughenden Papers, Box 89, B/XX/Be/42.

16 Hughenden Papers, Box 89, B/XX/Be/40.

17 Whibley, Lord John Manners, i, 283.

18 See M. & B., iii, 74–78, for a conclusive refutation.

19 Whibley, Lord John Manners, i, 294.

20 The two Whips.

21 Whibley, Manners, i, 298.

22 ibid., 299.

23 Hughenden Papers, Box 89, B/XX/Be/141, October 26, 1848.

24 Hughenden Papers, Box 80, B/XX/Be/140, October 22, 1848.

25 Morley, iii, 465.

26 M. & B., iii, 120–1.

27 ibid., 121–4.

28 ibid., 126.

29 ibid., 124–6.

30 ibid., 315.

31 ibid., 138.

32 Hughenden Papers, Box 2, A/I/A/170, n.d., probably February 23, 1841.

33 M. & B., iii, 139.

34 Hughenden Papers, Box 17, A/V/A/20, March 19, 1849.

35 ibid., Box 17, A/V/A/21, March 23, 1849.

36 In a letter to Wright, Disraeli wrote on March 25: ‘Observe his date 1825. The transactions commenced in 1823 & he has never given any account of them ’altho he received from Evans between 2 & 3000 £. Why he mentions 1825 is that that was the period I called on him in consequence of his being forbidden any longer to come to the office. I forgot that last fact (the cause of my being sent) but it is important at least for yr appreciation of all the circes.’

37 August 20, 1847, endorsed by Disraeli, ‘NB. He received from Mr. Hudson an appointment of £100 pr aim: with a certain prospect of promotion D.’ Hughenden Papers, Box 17, A/V/A/18.