1

Before we consider the career of Disraeli during his time as Derby’s1 second-in-command, it is worth glancing at the political geography which determined his actions and decisions. For the period between 1846 and 1868 has features of its own which distinguish it both from the preceding period and even more sharply from the era ushered in by the Second Reform Act. All periods of history are periods of transition, but some are more transitional than others. In a broad sense the thirty-five years between the two Reform Acts are years of change from a system in which the Crown was the dominant influence in Parliament to a system in which a mass electorate began increasingly to call the tune. The Crown had been, and the electorate was to be, a stabilizing influence in politics, in the sense that both, for diverse reasons, tended to produce governments which could control Parliament, and survive from one general election to the next. Crown patronage exercised through ministers was the basic reason which kept parties together before 1832; after 1867 it was to be the ‘caucuses’, those great extra-parliamentary organizations with their slogans, funds and discouragement of independent action by all but the hardiest rebel.

Neither of these factors operated effectively in the period under discussion. The twilight of royal government had begun long before 1832, with the gradual reduction of jobbery and patronage over the years. The Reform Act indirectly weakened still further the power of the executive over the legislature and, as a corollary, of the Crown over either. True, the royal eyes did not always seem aware of the gathering darkness: hence the semi-anachronistic actions of William IV, and the interventions of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, which make sense only if one presupposes a constitutional balance of forces already extinct.

But for a long time nothing emerged to compensate the executive for its loss of power. In the end, the place of Crown patronage was to be taken by party, and the importance of party even in the 1830s and 1840s should not be underestimated. On the contrary the provisions of the Reform Act gave a notable impetus to party organization through the need for registration of voters and many other matters. It was the era, too, of the great political clubs, the Reform and the Carlton, the effective headquarters of the two sides. Nevertheless, in a system where Parliament represented such a limited section of the population and where general elections far from being general were rather agglomerations of particular elections fought on local issues, or compromised by local bargains, party could not have the influence it was to have later. That influence depended upon the widening of the franchise and has increased with every stage in that process. For when once Parliament organized on party lines represents the whole nation also organized on party lines, politicians can no longer plausibly appeal against party discipline to a public opinion which is not expressed in Parliament at all.

But in the period between the Reform Acts this state of affairs lay well into the future. Only one in seven of the adult male population of the whole United Kingdom had the vote, in England and Wales one in five. Although the really scandalous pocket boroughs had disappeared, there still remained a large number where ‘influence’ in the old sense of the word had the final say. Moreover, successive general elections sharply differed from their modern counterparts in that a high proportion of seats, sometimes more than half, were not contested at all. In these circumstances the modern concept of a party programme and pledges, or the doctrine – highly dubious even today – of the ‘mandate’ had little significance to the average member, and still less to responsible statesmen who had to consider public opinion and national needs represented only partially, or not at all, in the House of Commons. This fact is, of course, the principal justification for Peel in 1846, and explains the paradox that, at the moment of his downfall so ingeniously encompassed by Disraeli and Bentinck, he was probably the most popular man in England.

The great difficulty, then, which every ministry from 1832 to 1868 encountered was the indiscipline of its supporters, an indiscipline which could not be countered either by the use of patronage or by an appeal to party solidarity. Every government sooner or later found its supporters split into warring factions. The problem posed by Peel during the Reform Bill crisis – how is the King’s Government to be carried on? – was no mere bogy, it was real and urgent. The difficulty could sometimes be overcome if certain conditions prevailed. One of these was the presence of a powerful figure who dominated his fractious supporters by sheer force of personality, as Peel himself did from 1841 to 1846. Another was when strong feelings, divided on party lines, produced a reasonable degree of discipline; for example, the Ministerialists kept more or less together from 1830 to 1834, and rallied again after 1835 in order to preserve the gains of the Reform Bill; they displayed similar cohesion from 1846 until 1851 in order to keep out the Protectionists. Such interludes were rare. There were six parliaments between 1841 and 1868. In only one of them did the Government which commanded the support of the House of Commons at the beginning retain it till the dissolution: this was Palmerston’s from 1859 to 1865. In every other case the House of Commons before it was dissolved brought about the resignation of at least one administration, sometimes two, together with numerous Cabinet crises. Today we talk – or we did until the psephologists sniffed contemptuously at the notion – about the floating vote in the electorate. In those days the floating vote was to be found not so much in the electorate, for successive elections, anyway after 1847 caused surprisingly little change, as in the House of Commons itself. Parliament then truly was what in legal theory it still is, a sovereign body to which Cabinets were really, not fictitiously, responsible, and which could make and unmake governments at will.

The twenty-two years following the repeal of the Corn Laws saw the emergence of no great issue which could stimulate party loyalty, and of no single leader, except perhaps Palmerston after 1859, who could inspire personal loyalty, sufficient to offset the natural incoherence of politics. It was a period of easy-going rivalry between a number of aristocratic factions, to which the mass of the country was content to leave government, as long as prosperity rose, taxes fell, free trade remained sacrosanct, and British prestige was upheld against all comers. It is often said that the 1832 Reform Bill gave political power to ‘the middle class’. That concept begs many questions, but without discussing them here, we may safely say that on no plausible definition of the middle classes can the proposition be justified as it stands. Parliament could not disregard the wishes of the northern manufacturers and their ancilliaries, nor of the great commercial interests in the country: hence the Reform Act of 1832 and the fiscal revolution initiated by Peel. But the ‘middle classes’ were not in a position, nor did they wish, to dominate Parliament. The political influence of land was still immense. As late as 1870 four hundred peers were reckoned to own over one-sixth of the whole surface of the country. It is not surprising that Cabinet and Parliament, lower as well as upper House, were overwhelmingly aristocratic in composition.

For this was the real hey-day of that ‘Venetian constitution’ which, Disraeli believed, had dominated eighteenth-century England, reduced the King to a mere ‘doge’, and thus ‘in the selfish strife of factions … blotted out of the history of England, the Monarch and the Multitude’. In fact, Disraeli’s picture of eighteenth-century politics is a caricature, and the monarch was very far from being a doge. But it was a much truer picture of the situation in his own day. Disraeli had no real historical sense; he wrote propaganda, not history, and projected the circumstances of his own times into the past. Between 1832 and 1867 the monarch was indeed on the way to becoming a doge, although the very confusion of parties left the Crown with a residue of real power; and ‘the multitude’, balked of a voice in Parliament and expressing itself in the wild vagaries of Chartism, might well appear to have been blotted out, if not from history, at least from the calculations of politicians. But the power of the ‘Venetian’ aristocracy was immense. Examples can be multiplied. Whole counties took their political colour from their leading ‘magnifico’. Why, as Professor Gash pertinently observes, should Bedfordshire have been Whig or Buckinghamshire Tory, unless it was because the Duke of Bedford was the one and the Duke of Buckingham the other?2 Palmerston’s last Cabinet had three dukes and six peers or sons of peers. Cobden wrote to a friend in 1858:

During my experience the higher classes never stood so high in relative social and political rank compared with the other classes as at present. The middle classes have been content with the very crumbs from their table … Half a dozen great families meet at Walmer and dispose of the rank and file of the [Liberal] party just as I do the lambs which I am now selling for your aldermen’s table.

The political scene was characterized by another feature. Not only did general elections change the political pattern little if at all, but that pattern was itself a curiously unsatisfactory one. Of the two aristocratic groups or ‘factions’, on which governments might plausibly be based, neither could command unaided at any time a clear majority in the House of Commons. The Derbyite Conservatives were the larger of the two, but their numbers, though rising from about 230 in the Parliament of 1847 to ‘280 and more on the muster roll’3 in 1852, sank to 260 in 1857 and never achieved a clear majority until after Derby’s death. The Whigs are less easy to estimate, for they shade imperceptibly into the Liberals, and could usually count on the Radicals. But it is clear that they were a smaller party than the Conservatives.

Since neither could govern without extraneous support and since elections gave such inconclusive results, politics or the struggle for power was largely a matter of bargaining with the other groups in Parliament. Of these there were three which counted: the Peelites, the Irish and the Radicals. It was to be a fundamental difficulty for Derby and Disraeli throughout that, however much these groups might distrust the Whigs, they distrusted the Conservatives even more. The Peelites were the most hopeful converts, and after the death of Peel in 1850 and Derby’s and Disraeli’s abandonment of protection in 1852, there seemed no obvious difference of principle why they should not have rejoined their old party. A large number of the rank and file of the hundred or so who followed Peel in 1847 in fact did so. But the leaders would not, and it was they who counted, for they were men of ability and ministerial experience, ‘men of business’, precisely the reinforcement which the Conservatives so desperately needed to give their front benches a decent appearance: men like Graham, Gladstone, Dalhousie, Lincoln, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell in the House of Commons, and Aberdeen, Ellenborough, Canning in the House of Lords; all of them as Gladstone put it ‘for one reason or another much above par’, adding that there was not a ‘dandy’ or ‘coxcomb’ among them.4 The detailed circumstances in which Derby’s offers were declined will be discussed later, but it is clear from the outset that the overriding cause was not political principle but personal dislike for Disraeli, the man who had with relentless invective driven their beloved leader from office.

The other groups can be more speedily dismissed. The Radicals might inveigh like Cobden against the prestige of ‘the higher classes’, in the Liberal party, but they were not likely to do any better by supporting the Conservatives. Disraeli flirted occasionally with the idea of an alliance with Bright whom he liked, and dined with him from time to time, but nothing serious came of it. As for the Irish, although they did not always support the Whigs and were to bring down Russell in 1852 in revenge for his reckless no-popery campaign of the previous year, they were not likely to ally with the party of the Anglican establishment or with the man whom O’Connell had called ‘Scorpion Stanley’ and who was widely regarded as one of the deadliest enemies of Irish nationalist and Roman Catholic claims. Here again Disraeli made some tentative gestures of conciliation, particularly in 1859, when Whig foreign policy was favourable to the unification of Italy and therefore hostile to the temporal power of the Pope, but Derby quickly quashed the movement. The Irish must be counted as an element in Whig strength for most of the period, although a capricious and erratic one.

The Whigs, then, had most of the cards in their hands, but not quite all. Otherwise they would have been in office the whole time. Although the Peelites, Radicals and Irish could usually be relied on to help to turn the Conservatives out, they could not always be trusted to keep the Whigs in. The Peelites with their high-minded qualms of conscience, and Gladstone’s inability to make up his mind which side he was on, were a factor almost as incalculable as the Irish. The Radicals were very far from being a homogeneous or even always a distinguishable group. There were semi-pacifist Radicals, like Cobden and Bright. There were bellicose jingo Radicals like Roebuck, whose motion brought down the Aberdeen Government in the Crimean War. Then, the Whigs had their own internal feuds. From the day that Russell under royal pressure dismissed Palmerston in 1851 until the latter’s second premiership began in 1859, they were divided into two factions which constantly intrigued against one another. Palmerston soon had his revenge on Russell, thus giving Derby his first brief administration in 1852. Russell got his own back by helping to eject Palmerston in 1858 and Derby and Disraeli were in again. The two Whig leaders each had a rallying cry to appeal to the uncommitted groups and to public opinion. Russell’s was a further instalment of parliamentary reform, but this never really ‘took’. Palmerston’s was far more effective, jingoism and gunboats, and he won. In 1859 Russell consented to serve under him. Palmerston was Prime Minister till his death in 1865. Then Russell came into his own, introduced his Reform Bill, broke his party, and let in Derby and Disraeli for the third time in 1866. But three brief minority administrations accounting for little more than four out of twenty-two years do not amount to much. The Whigs for all their factiousness and quarrels provided the normal Government of the day.

To consider the plight of the Conservative party after 1846 it is necessary to look for a moment at its past history. In the hey-day of its supremacy from 1784 to 1830 its strength had been that it was an alliance between the country squires whose support was essential for any government, and the new class of efficient administrators, official men or ‘men of business’ to whom the Crown was willing to entrust its patronage in Church and State in return for carrying on the King’s Government; these were men like Pitt, Liverpool, Huskisson, Canning, Peel. The policy of the Tory party was the policy of the official men, but they had to take account of the interests and prejudices of the squirearchy, whose votes were just as important to them as crown patronage. In addition the Tories could rely on the Church, a substantial section of the great landed aristocracy, and a considerable support from certain business and commercial interests.

The events of 1829 to 1832 seemed to have shattered this alliance irreparably. The problems of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform broke the old Tory party into contending factions. The Whigs were allowed in, and by shaping the new constituencies seemed to have consolidated their power for many years to come. But thanks to the genius of Peel, the somnolence of Melbourne, and the genuine alarm caused by Whig alliances with the Irish and Radicals, the old Tory party, now called Conservative, was soon reconstructed. By 1841 Peel, the pupil of Liverpool, had effectively applied his former chief’s principles in the changed circumstances of the post-Reform-Act era, and was rewarded by victory at the polls. His Cabinet was the ablest of the century, and he enjoyed the support of the country gentry, the Crown and much of the business community, too. He had achieved what would today be called a ‘consensus’ of moderate men of property from all classes banded against revolution but ready to accept cautious change.

But even Peel failed to surmount the Corn Law crisis. The policy of the Cabinet and the interests of the Country party were irreconcilably opposed. The party broke into two bitterly hostile sections and, with the exception of Stanley, every man of official rank and ministerial experience followed Peel. The party therefore was confronted after 1846 with a new problem. Hitherto it had been the party of the able administrator as well as of the county member with his broad acres. Its leaders were more efficient than those of the Whig party. It was less exclusive socially and offered much more of a career to the talents. Now, however, its able administrators had vanished: they were all Peelites. The party would for the first time have to depend upon the country squires, not merely for silent votes (‘the finest brute-vote in creation’, as Bagehot put put it), but for speeches. The county members would actually have to read Blue Books and reports, understand Board of Trade returns and, if fortune favoured them, even take office. Of course, this situation gave a wonderful opportunity to Disraeli. He would not otherwise have become leader in the House of Commons when he did. But it also meant that the actual task of leading the party was infinitely harder, and the hope of gaining office for any length of time slender in the extreme.

Of the assets which Peel had acquired or inherited in 1841, only the Church, the country squirearchy and a section of the territorial aristocracy remained. The principal commercial interests were on the side of free trade, and the Crown, the traditional ally of the party, was decisively alienated. Queen Victoria might refer to Russell and Palmerston as ‘those dreadful old men’, but neither she nor Prince Albert bore any love for the protectionists. Their approval was reserved for the Peelites, who like the Prince were earnest, efficient and addicted to political economy. Bentinck, aware of this entente, had at one time – such was his fury against the Court – contemplated moving for the repeal of the Regency Act which made the Prince Consort regent in the event of a royal minority. True, Bentinck was no longer on the stage. But Disraeli was regarded with even more aversion. ‘He has not one particle of the gentleman in his composition’, wrote the Prince. Derby seems to have been scarcely less disliked. The importance of court approval can easily be overestimated; there was no question in the 1850s of the monarch’s prejudice having the effect that it had had half a century earlier. But the Crown was not a complete cipher, and the very confusion of politics gave it an influence at this time, which disappeared later when the Party system became more rigid after 1867. Even after that the Queen had a considerable nuisance value, as Gladstone was to experience on many occasions. Certainly at this time it was better to have the Court with you than against you. Equally certainly its goodwill was an asset which Derby and Disraeli did not possess.

To rebuild the Conservatives as an effective force in politics, a genuine alternative to the dominant Whig-Liberal party, was bound to be a difficult task, and Disraeli could not set about it as he pleased. At every step he had Derby’s opinions to consider, and he had to take account of the prejudices of the party. For it was not only true that the groups and interests which he had to woo were profoundly suspicious of the Country party, it was also true that the Country party was scarcely less suspicious of its potential allies. But Disraeli had four great assets: he was immensely hard-working; he was ready to trim his sails; he had no use for lost causes; and he had already posed the question which has vexed Conservatives ever since – what will you conserve? He had not answered it completely, but he had discovered at least a negative aspect of the answer: there is no need to conserve the disabilities imposed upon you by your political adversaries.

2

In his letter to Derby about the leadership Disraeli defined the task of the Conservative leader as being ‘to uphold the aristocratic settlement of this country. That is the only question at stake however manifold may be the forms which it assumes …’ This assertion is the key to Disraeli’s policy for the rest of his life. It represented his profoundest conviction and, through all the labyrinthine twists and turns of his bewildering policy, it remained to the end his guiding purpose. It is therefore important to know what he meant by ‘aristocratic settlement’ and why he believed in it.

He did not equate aristocracy with oligarchy: that, in Disraeli’s view, was the sin of the great Whig families who, having installed themselves by what he liked to call a coup d’état in 1832, had preserved their power by an alliance with anti-national and basically anti-aristocratic forces such as the Irish, the ‘Scotch’, the dissenting shopkeepers and the Manchester manufacturers. The Whigs were a selfish clique who in their greed for power and place had betrayed the true interests of their class. They were too clever, too fond of abstract theories, too much centred on London and, despite their huge estates, insufficiently rooted in the realities of their own countryside. The aristocratic settlement which Disraeli wished to preserve was not the rule of these self-confident, casual and cosmopolitan grandees.

He had in mind, rather, the whole ordered hierarchy of rural England epitomized in his own county of Buckinghamshire. It was the world so brilliantly portrayed by Trollope, a world of careful gradations, headed by such dignitaries as the Lord Lieutenant, the county members, and the Bishop, containing its Whiggish ‘magnificoes’ in the form of a few great landowning peers, perhaps even a duke, but broadly and firmly based upon a wealthy Tory residential squirearchy whose substantial estates covered the country. This was the class which, in alliance with the clergy as junior partners, effectively governed a great part of England. They constituted at quarter sessions the legislature and judiciary of the county. Their capital and their keen interest in all that pertained to the land ensured the prosperity of the tenant farmers and so, at one remove, that of all the multifarious ‘interests’ which depended upon agriculture. They were unfashionable and cut no ice outside their own localities, but they were the solid backbone of rural England.

It was the world of the Frank Greshams contrasted with that of the Dukes of Omnium. This was the order which Peel had ‘betrayed’; and this was the society whose way of life Disraeli saw it as his task to vindicate and defend against the Whig grandees and their unholy alliance with ‘the men of the North who thought that they were to govern England’.

Of course, the social structure was more complicated than this picture suggests. There were Liberal squires, and plenty of great peers were Tories, though in some cases recent converts, like Disraeli’s own Duke of Buckingham or Derby himself. From the turn of the century until 1832 there had been a drift from among the ranks of the Whig families to the Tory side, largely explained by the Tories’ apparent monopoly of office. But the trend was halted and perhaps even put slightly into reverse in the 1830s and 1840s. At the time of the Reform Bill, Tories had outnumbered Whigs in the House of Lords by about three to two. In the Corn Law crisis and its immediate aftermath the two parties were nearly level. In any case it would be wrong to equate the great landowning families with the whole peerage. Probably, although no reliable statistics exist, a majority of what Disraeli called ‘the magnificoes’ had been Whigs all along, and the number that could be counted as Tories, in the sense that they supported Derby, was actually declining during the decade following the fall of Peel.

The difference in attitude between the grand Whig or Whiggish families and the country gentlemen cannot be explained on economic grounds only, although it is true that the latter depended more exclusively upon agriculture than the former and were, therefore, more likely to be hostile to free trade. It was, rather, a difference of temperament explicable by sociological factors which would repay a closer study than can be given here. We have already discussed the fear of revolution as a cause of the repeal of the Corn Laws. This element in early Victorian politics is often forgotten, but it was very important. The great Whig noblemen with their cosmopolitan London outlook were more aware of the danger than the provincial gentry. They knew Europe and saw what was happening there. To them the Reform Bill and free trade were necessary concessions made in order to avoid a revolutionary alliance between Manchester and the mob.

The gentry tended to see the matter differently. The countryside appeared placid enough, and, even if they had been shaken for a moment by the agrarian discontent of 1830, they saw little danger fifteen or twenty years later. Chartism had been largely an urban phenomenon. The Anti-Corn Law League seemed mere agitation. The country squire was conscious that land bore a heavy burden in respect of tithes, taxation and rates. He did not of course like this burden, but he regarded protection as the quid pro quo. Free trade was unfair because it removed the moral basis of the tacit bargain on which the burdens upon land were founded. It was the beginning of the end of that ‘territorial constitution’ which had been England’s greatest contribution to civilization and the true cause of her grandeur.

Why did Disraeli wish to defend the aristocratic settlement and the territorial constitution? His detractors have sometimes attributed his political philosophy to snobbery, to love of the great and grand whose names roll so sonorously from his pen in his letters to his sister. No doubt there was an element of this in his character, but it would be quite wrong to regard his attitude as simply that of a successful social climber. He believed in the aristocratic principle and the territorial constitution because he believed that they guaranteed freedom. Tithes, the poor rate and the administration of justice were burdens imposed on land, as he put it in a speech in the House in 1846.

In his life of Bentinck he contrasted the British and continental systems with that of America. ‘Ancient communities, like the European must be governed either by traditionary influences or by military force.’ You could not transplant the American constitution – that favourite panacea of radicalism – to Europe, because conditions were not analogous. Republican democracy might flourish in the New World, but not in the Old, where dethroned dynasties, ‘a confiscated aristocracy’ and ‘a plundered church’ would appeal to the sentiments of loyalty and revenge with subversive effects which in the end could only be overcome by the sword. This was what had been happening off and on ever since 1789, and even more markedly since 1848: a mournful sequence of revolution, anarchy and military dictatorship. In Lord George Bentinck he writes:

Disraeli believed in a territorial aristocracy partly because he was at heart a romantic, partly because he had a genuine hatred of centralization, bureaucracy and every manifestation of the Benthamite state. He felt the sort of reverence that Burke had had for the many independent corporations and institutions which, however odd and anomalous, however contrary to abstract symmetry, to what Burke called ‘geometrical’ theories, were the true bulwarks of English liberty. This was one of his principal arguments in favour of the Church of England, ‘a majestic corporation wealthy, powerful, independent … broadly and deeply planted in the land … one of the main guarantees of our local government, and therefore one of the prime securities of our common liberties …’ For similar reasons he opposed state interference with the ancient universities. And it was for this reason above all others that he supported the aristocratic hierarchy of the counties against the levelling spirit of the age. There was nothing incompatible with this in any of the great reform measures associated with his name: the extension of the franchise in 1867; the labour and sanitary legislation of the 1870s; the various manifestations of Tory democracy. To recognize that the masses might be supporters of a territorial constitution if the aristocracy legislated on their behalf, to perceive that the power of middle-class radicals allied with Whig magnates might be challenged by an alliance of the urban working classes and the country gentry, was indeed a stroke of imagination, but it did not contravene the fundamental tenets of Disraeli’s belief.

What was more, he managed to give the impression that the aristocratic settlement was essentially English, that in upholding it he was upholding a national cause against the foreign, alien, imported theories of continental doctrinaires. The Corn Law battle is described by him in his life of Bentinck as one stage in ‘the great contention between the patriotic and the cosmopolitan principle, which has hardly begun and upon which the fate of this island as a community depends’. And in 1872 he declared that beneath the superficial struggles of politics over the past forty years there had been a fundamental cleavage between a party of change animated by ‘cosmopolitan’ notions, and the party which sought to ‘resume the national principles to which we attribute the greatness and grandeur of the country’.7

After the death of Palmerston, whose patriotism in foreign policy could hardly be challenged, it became possible for Disraeli to acquire the ‘national’ colours for his own party not only in home affairs but in the foreign field as well. Gladstone and the Liberals could be stigmatized as insufficiently mindful of ‘the grandeur of the country’, and the electoral advantage of the patriotic cry reaped by the renovated Conservative party – an asset which it has contrived to retain ever since. Thus devotion to the Crown, support of the territorial constitution, belief in the Empire, the assertion of England’s great place in the comity of nations, together with an enlightened policy of social reform could all be combined under Disraeli’s leadership in the ministry of 1874 to 1880. But all this lay far in the future. Neither Crown nor Empire nor patriotism were of much use to the Tory cause in the 1850s. Social reform was not a vote-winner when its beneficiaries had no votes. Only the aristocratic settlement remained, and its appeal was inevitably limited.

How did Disraeli see himself in the context of the territorial constitution? That an alien exotic figure of Jewish extraction should lead the country gentlemen of the English counties has often seemed paradoxical and fantastic. Indeed it was, and his acceptance can only be explained by the strange combination of circumstances already discussed. But it is not likely that Disraeli himself thought it so odd. He had already persuaded himself not only that the Jews were natural aristocrats with ancient lineages stretching back far beyond those of the English peerage, but that he himself belonged to its most aristocratic branch. Tancred is full of references to the aristocratic nature of Jewry. At the same time, with his establishment at Hughenden, Disraeli had become himself a member of the class of country gentlemen whose cause he represented, and it is important to remember that this was not such a startling transformation as is sometimes claimed. It is easy to underestimate the degree to which Isaac D’Israeli had, not by any conscious design, prepared the way.

Isaac had lived as a country gentleman at Bradenham, a considerably larger and much more beautiful house than Hughenden, for twenty years before his death. Of course, he was not a typical English squire, but he conformed to the usages of the county, as far as the tastes of an intelligent agnostic literary man allowed. He had long ago abandoned his ancestral faith, as had his wife’s family. He kept up little if any connexion with his co-religionists. He was well-to-do. He preserved game. He sent his younger sons to Winchester. His daughter, but for a tragic accident, would have married into a prosperous landed family. His children were Anglicans and called him ‘the governor’. What more could one ask? Apart from name and appearance there was very little to remind the world of the origins of the family at Bradenham. Benjamin did indeed attract the maximum of attention, but his brothers did not: one was a Civil Servant, the other a gentleman farmer. If Benjamin was fundamentally an urban character, it remains true that he loved the country and knew at least something about country pursuits and the sort of life that a country gentleman led. The charge of social climbing can perhaps be made against him in his younger days, although even then it was really a form of romanticism rather than the vulgar snobbery of the age. But whatever the past, by 1850 Disraeli had convinced himself that he belonged to the aristocratic order as much as any of those whom he met in the grand world of Tory politics. He had a fundamentally patrician outlook. To stay at the great country houses, the castles and palaces of the English nobility gratified him not as the social triumph of an adventurer but as the belated recognition of an equal.

1 Stanley succeeded to the earldom of Derby in June 1851, and is referred to as Derby throughout this chapter.

2 Politics in the Age of Peel, 185.

3 M. & B., iv, 76, quoting Disraeli to Mrs Brydges Willyams, April 13, 1857.

4 Quoted by J. B. Conacher, ‘Peel and the Peelites 1846–50’, English Historical Review, LXXIII (1958), 431–52.

5 M. & B., iv, 77, quoting a letter of April 29, 1857.

6 Lord George Bentinck, 555–7.

7 R. B. McDowell, British Conservatism, 1832–1914 (1959), 60, quoting speech of June 24, 1872.