Disraeli’s life for the six years following the fall of Derby’s second administration was comparatively uneventful. One personal sorrow afflicted him almost at once, the death of his sister Sarah. It was a heavy blow. Of the surviving members of his family she was the only one for whom he felt any strong affection. She alone had genuinely believed in his star. Moreover, though on the best of terms with Mary Anne, she was the one person in whom he could confide his occasional tiffs and differences with his wife, and to her he revealed some secrets that he revealed to no one else, particularly with regard to his money affairs. She stayed at Hughenden in September 1859 and Mary Anne commented on her delicate appearance. Thereafter she rapidly declined, and died on December 19. ‘She was … one of those persons who are the soul of a house and the angelic spirit of a family’,1 Disraeli told Lady Londonderry. Sir Philip Rose many years later wrote:

… On the first occasion of his becoming Prime Minister I remember saying to him, ‘If only your sister had been alive to witness your triumph what happiness it would have given her;’ and he replied, ‘Ah, poor Sa! poor Sa! we’ve lost our audience, we’ve lost our audience …’2

Because of his sister’s death Disraeli did not give his usual parliamentary dinners at the beginning of the session of 1860. One observer suspected that this was not the only reason. Greville commented:

… Disraeli under the pretext of a family affliction gives no dinners; but the probable cause of this is not the death of his sister which happened two months ago, but his own uncertainty as to whom he should invite and who would be disposed to own political allegiance by accepting his invitation. Such is the disorganised state of that party.3

There is no doubt that Disraeli’s position was in jeopardy during 1860; he was blamed for the defeat of the previous session, and he was suspected of disloyalty to Derby. Derby did not mean to upset a government which was on most issues as conservative as he could wish. ‘Keeping the cripples on their legs’ was how he described his tactics. The accusation that Disraeli worked against him seems unjustified. He may have chafed, but he obeyed orders. This did not prevent the emergence of a vociferous anti-Disraeli clique, and Derby warned him that there was a ‘Cabal’ against him. The hostility to him found expression in an acid article in the April number of the Quarterly Review. It was made the more piquant by the widespread knowledge that the anonymous author was Lord Robert Cecil, a younger son of Disraeli’s friend and former cabinet colleague, the 2nd Marquis of Salisbury. Surveying Disraeli’s career the author wrote:

To crush the Whigs by combining with the Radicals was the first and last maxim of Mr. Disraeli’s tactics. He had never led the Conservatives to victory as Sir Robert Peel had led them to victory. He had never procured the triumphant assertion of any Conservative principle or shielded from imminent ruin any ancient institution. But he had been a successful leader to this extent, that he had made any Government while he was in opposition next to an impossibility. His tactics were so various, so flexible, so shameless – the net by which his combinations were gathered in was so wide – he had so admirable a knack of enticing into the same lobby a happy family of proud old Tories and foaming Radicals, martial squires jealous of their country’s honour, and manufacturers who had written it off their books as an unmarketable commodity – that so long as his party backed him, no Government was strong enough to hold out against his attacks.

These were the sentiments of Henry Drummond – strong language from a young Tory MP. When his father remonstrated, Lord Robert replied: ‘I have merely put into print what all the country gentlemen were saying in private.’ There was an amusing sequel. On arriving at Hatfield soon after the publication of the article, Lord Robert was dismayed to learn that Disraeli was one of the guests. He went into the garden to brood upon the best method of coping with this embarrassing situation, but coming round the turn of a path in the shrubbery he met his leader face to face. ‘Ah Robert, Robert, how glad I am to see you!’ Disraeli exclaimed, and cordially embraced the young man before he had time to say a word. As Lady Gwendolen Cecil puts it, ‘If he had entertained any undue sense of his importance as a mutineer it must have been effectively dissipated.’4

Disraeli was not the man to bear malice against a Tory rebel who was only doing what he himself had done twenty years earlier. But he did resent the ingratitude with which, so it seemed to him, his services were being treated by his more experienced followers. On June 11 he wrote a long letter5 to Sir William Miles, to whom he had written on a similar occasion in 1851 and who occupied a position analogous to that of the chairman of the 1922 Committee today. After recounting the history of his relations with the party since Bentinck’s death – not quite correctly – Disraeli came to the point. ‘I must resign a leadership which I unwillingly accepted, and to which it is my opinion that fourteen years of unqualified devotion have not reconciled the party.’ The letter dismayed Miles, and he promptly consulted leading members of the House of Commons such as Walpole and Henley. It soon became clear that there would be general consternation if Disraeli resigned, and Miles persuaded him to withdraw the letter. There is not much evidence about Derby’s attitude, but Greville’s claim that he was ‘violently discontented with Disraeli’ seems untrue or at any rate not more than a reference to a passing mood. Their correspondence though not copious at this time is friendly enough, and Derby never hesitated to find fault directly if he had any complaint. The opposition to Disraeli was noisy rather than large, and probably did not amount to more than a dozen or so headed by George Bentinck, known as ‘Big Ben’, a remote cousin of Lord George and MP for Norfolk. He invariably referred to Disraeli as ‘the Jew’.

If Disraeli had any hankering for an alliance of convenience with the Radicals, he suppressed it from now onwards. Throughout 1860 he behaved with impeccable conservatism: opposing the remission of the paper duties, allowing Russell’s Reform Bill quietly to expire, and generally supporting Palmerston against the left-wing Liberals. He refused to have anything to do with a proposal by Bright that the Conservatives should join with the advanced Liberals and eject the Government. He agreed with Derby in concluding an effective parliamentary truce with Palmerston for the next three years. Of course, Disraeli did not abandon the usual attacks and criticisms of debate. He and Derby regarded it as part of their duty to modify and conservatize Government measures, and in an era when the Government did not make every detail of every measure an issue of confidence, there was a good chance of carrying amendments of this kind. But the Tory leaders were determined to keep Palmerston in office.

Sometimes difficulties arose. For example, Derby and Disraeli continued, in opposition as they had in office, to differ from one another on the relative claims of defence expenditure and Treasury economy. Disraeli was fortified by Northcote, who, as a member of the Committee on Public Accounts, had discovered some ‘frightful’ examples of extravagance in the Navy. He decided, in spite of Derby’s misgivings, to make economy the main theme of his attacks on the Government during 1862, and during one of the debates used an expression which later became famous, ‘bloated armaments’. Derby had to explain in the House of Lords that his lieutenant had been referring to the whole of Europe and not to England in particular. Derby agreed, however, to an amendment to be proposed by Walpole, urging economy on the Government. But Palmerston decided to make the issue one of confidence and Walpole, alarmed lest the Government might fall, withdrew his amendment. Disraeli was much annoyed; taking advantage of the fact that the next day was Derby day, he made an acid reference to ‘favourites bolting’. It was now Walpole’s turn to be angry, and Derby had to smooth matters. ‘My own opinion is that you were the person who had the most reason to complain,’6 he told Disraeli, who wrote to Mrs Brydges Willyams, ‘Between ourselves, as you well know, I had no desire whatever to disturb Lord Palmerston, but you cannot keep a large army in order without letting them sometimes smell gunpowder.’7

After 1862 Disraeli could claim with some plausibility that his fiscal views were prevailing. Gladstone, in his later Budgets, enforced economies, and his large surpluses went towards reduction of taxation. On one important financial matter Disraeli scored a triumph for which posterity can be grateful. Gladstone, with that fiscal pedantry which sometimes marred his judgement, pressed vehemently for the extension of income tax to charities. Disraeli successfully led the attack on this iniquitous proposal, and Gladstone had to drop it.

Throughout these years Disraeli was active in debates on foreign affairs. He kept himself very well informed as in the past on Cabinet discussions. Charles Villiers, who was President of the Poor Law Board, was his source. ‘The division in the Cabinet on Tuesday week on the French Alliance was 12 to 4. Ayes Ld. Palm – Ld. John – Gladstone – M. Gibson’,8 Disraeli wrote to Derby on one occasion. On the four major issues of the period, the Risorgimento, the American Civil War, Poland, and Schleswig-Holstein, Disraeli favoured non-intervention. He strongly censured what he called the ‘piratical’ means by which Garibaldi had achieved Italian unity. His views pleased Pio Nono. ‘Mr. Disraeli was my friend. I regret him,’ he told Lord Odo Russell, and he gave his blessing to Earle when the latter on a visit to Rome revealed that he was Disraeli’s private secretary. Both at this time and later Disraeli was hoping to woo the English Roman Catholic vote and he was on cordial terms with Cardinal Wiseman. He declined all invitations to meet Garibaldi when the famous hero visited London in April 1864, although Derby and the other Tory leaders seem to have felt no such misgivings.

When the American Civil War began Disraeli, like most Englishmen, expected the South to win. He privately welcomed the seeming collapse of the republic as a blow in favour of aristocracy. But he thought it unwise to take sides publicly. Palmerston, Gladstone and Russell would have done well to copy him. Many years of Anglo-American ill feeling might have been averted if they had appeared genuinely neutral in their attitude to the deadly struggle. Disraeli was right, too, though by no means fully backed in his party, on both the Polish and the Danish questions. Russell on each occasion made offers of help that he could not fulfil and excited hopes that he could not gratify. This was the policy contemptuously described by Derby as ‘meddle and muddle’, and it brought British prestige to almost its lowest point in the nineteenth century. The mismanagement of the Schleswig-Holstein affair was  so bad that Derby and Disraeli abandoned the parliamentary truce and launched a real attack on the Government in 1864. They won in the Lords by nine votes but they were eighteen short of victory in the lower House; and so Palmerston survived.

Disraeli’s obiter dicta on foreign affairs were not always sensible. He tended to look through spectacles tinted by the colours of lurid romance. ‘At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen but by capitalists,’ he told Mrs Brydges Willyams on July 21, 1863.9 ‘For the last three months it has been a struggle between the secret societies and the European millionaires. Rothschild hitherto has won …’ He met Bismarck at a party in London in 1862 and was much impressed when the Prussian Chancellor told him: ‘I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor States and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.’10 This indeed was an exact prediction. But in November a year later we find Disraeli writing to Earle:11 ‘Prussia, without nationality, the principle of the day, is clearly the subject for partition.’ He was not the only Englishman to exaggerate the power of Napoleon III and to underestimate that of Bismarck.

Disraeli’s acquiescence in Derby’s general policy of keeping the Government in office won the approval of the Queen and the Prince Consort, who could never wholly rid themselves of the idea that party warfare was in some way ‘factious’. The Court had not in the past looked on Disraeli with much favour. His attacks on Peel were long remembered and his first spell of office in 1852 had failed to remove this adverse impression. His second term as Chancellor of the Exchequer had been more efficacious, but it was not till the 1860s that any real cordiality appeared. Early in 1861 the Disraelis were invited to stay a couple of nights at Windsor from January 23 to 25. ‘It is Mrs. Disraeli’s first visit to Windsor,’ he wrote to Mrs Brydges Willyams,12 ‘& is considered very marked on the part of Her Majesty to the wife of the Leader of the Opposition when many Cabinet Ministers have been asked there without their wives.’ Disraeli had a long conversation with the Prince and put as favourable a gloss as he could on the condition of the Conservative party. ‘“But you have no newspapers,” he exclaimed pettishly, “the country is governed by newspapers! and all the Liberal journals are in the pay of foreign Powers. So much for the liberty of the Press. However when Parliament is sitting their influence is less.”’13

At the end of the year occurred the premature death of the Prince. Disraeli’s public tribute to him greatly pleased the Queen, who expressed her gratitude. There is plenty of evidence that Disraeli genuinely admired the Prince. Three years earlier, writing from Windsor to Mrs Willyams, he said:14 ‘Here is most agreeable society … Her Majesty a most gracious hostess & perhaps better conversation cannot be had than that afforded by the two Princes, the Prince Consort & the Due d’Aumale, the two most richly cultivated minds I ever met, & men too of great abilities.’ After the Prince’s death Disraeli told the Saxon Minister in London, Count Vitzthum: ‘We have buried our Sovereign … If he had outlived some of our “old stagers” he would have given us, while retaining all constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government. Of us younger men who are qualified to enter the Cabinet there is not one who would not willingly have bowed to his experience.’15  No doubt Disraeli sometimes went rather far. The Queen presented him with the Prince’s speeches in gratitude for his parliamentary aid over the Albert Memorial. In thanking her he said among other things:16 ‘The Prince is the only person whom Mr. Disraeli has ever known who realized the Ideal’, and warming to his theme ended: ‘… the name of Albert will be accepted as the master-type of a generation of profounder feeling and vaster range than that which he formed and guided with benignant power.’ But his admiration for the Prince cannot be written off as a pose to please the Queen, even if this expression of it is fairly described by Buckle as a ‘somewhat hyperbolic eulogium’.

In 1863 the Disraelis scored a social victory of the first magnitude. They were asked to the wedding of the Prince of Wales. He wrote in triumph to Mrs Willyams:17

Disraeli left a long memorandum18 about the wedding which took place on March 10 – too long to be quoted here. He believed that his inclusion was due to a personal gesture of friendship on the Queen’s part. He never knew that he owed the invitation to Palmerston, whose letter to the Queen explains itself:

… It has been suggested to Lord Palmerston that as Mr. Disraeli has, like Lord Derby, behaved very well about the Bill for the Prince of Wales’s establishment, it might be a gracious as well as a not unuseful thing if your Majesty saw fit that he, as Leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons might be invited to the Wedding as well as Lord Derby …19

Although sometimes cynical, Disraeli remained to the end incurably and overwhelmingly romantic in his attitude to royalty. The Queen’s invitation could not have gone to a recipient who appreciated it more. He was no less gratified by the honour which he received soon afterwards of a personal audience. The Queen had accorded these only to ministers since the Prince’s death, with one exception, Derby.

He went down to Windsor on April 22 and was entertained at dinner by the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Queen being busy on papers brought down by Russell, the only other guest. Disraeli told the Prince and Princess that nightingales fed on glow worms ‘exactly the food which nightingales should require’. The Prince was incredulous ‘and exclaimed: “Is that a fact or is it a myth?” “Quite a fact, Sir; for my woodman is my authority, for we have a great many nightingales at Hughenden and a great many glow worms.” “We have got one nightingale at Sandringham,” said the Prince smiling.’ Disraeli breakfasted next day with Russell and the Maids of Honour.

Disraeli was summoned to wait for his audience in Prince Albert’s special room.

Already, one feels, Disraeli is investing the Queen with some strange magical quality. She appears. She vanishes. The myth of ‘the Faery’ is being born.

During the splendid summer of 1863 all attention was concentrated on the newly married royal couple. The Disraelis had their fill of the incessant balls, dinners and receptions, living, as Disraeli said, ‘only in a glittering bustle’. Politics were at a low ebb. Everything turned on Palmerston. As Prime Minister he exactly suited the mood of the times. Seven years earlier Derby had described him as ‘a Conservative Minister working with Radical tools and keeping up a show of Liberalism in his foreign policy’. This was no less true in 1868, and Palmerston knew it. He was a parliamentary tactician of consummate skill and he had in 1859 effectively neutralized all those who might make trouble. There was, moreover, a general disposition to let things drift during the Prime Minister’s lifetime. After all, he could not last for ever … Or could he? As year followed year and the old statesman appeared sprightly and vigorous in the House, or at grand social occasions, there seemed something immortal about him.

It was true that in the autumn of 1863 when he was seventy-nine an episode occurred which for a moment made his tenure appear doubtful. Not that he showed any sign of dying. Rather the contrary, for he was threatened with citation in a case of criminal conversation, as it was called. The allegation was that he had had improper relations with a Mrs Cane. The jest went round the clubs that she was certainly Cain, but was he Abel?21 Disraeli in his last letter to Mrs Brydges Willyams wrote: ‘Lord Palmerston’s almost absurd escapade … is probably a case of extortion founded on some slight imprudence – & it is to be hoped will evaporate.’22 To Derby he was more frivolous:23

… The Palmerston escapade! It should make him at least ridiculous; perhaps it may make him even more popular. How do we know the affair has not been got up to dissolve on? They want a cry.

It is a little annoying for the Low Church party wh: had acknowledged him as ‘the man of God’ – but so was King David & he behaved even worse …

But Disraeli’s hope expressed to Mrs Willyams turned out to be justified. The case did evaporate, and Palmerston sailed on as confidently as ever. After his victory in 1864 over the Danish question he scrambled up the stairs to the Ladies’ Gallery, so Disraeli was told, to embrace Lady Palmerston, who had been listening to the debate. ‘An interesting scene, and what pluck! To mount those dreadful stairs at three o’clock in the morning and at eighty years of age! … It was a great moment.’24

The flat calm into which the ship of state had drifted was perhaps a reason why Disraeli in the early 1860s had time to assemble a number of autobiographical sketches, observations, anecdotes, character studies. It is not clear what his purpose was. If his intention was to write connected memoirs he never fulfilled it. Some of these reminiscences have been quoted here from time to time when dealing with the periods in his career to which they refer.

These years of rather uneventful opposition had at last brought Disraeli more into acceptance by the world of what would now be called ‘the establishment’. The favour shown to him by the Queen was one important step. Another was his election already mentioned as a Trustee of the British Museum. But his progress had been slow. He was not elected to Grillions, a select parliamentary dining club, till 1865. Gladstone had become a member in 1840. The following year the Athenaeum made amends to Disraeli for blackballing him thirty-four years earlier, and elected him under the rule permitting every year the entry of a certain number of distinguished persons with priority over ordinary candidates. In 1868 he was elected to ‘The Club’, a similar institution to Grillions. Disraeli did not attend these societies more than courtesy required. He disliked men’s dinner parties and went to them as a political necessity rather than a social pleasure.

On July 6, 1865, Parliament was dissolved. The ensuing election like that of 1857 was a plebiscite for Palmerston. It left the state of the parties virtually unaltered and the Conservative leaders in a state of despondency. An imprudent and much-criticized speech of Derby’s comparing Roman Catholics to dogs that ought to be muzzled may have done some damage, especially as it came at a moment when Disraeli was delicately casting a fly over this particular group in the hope of winning them from their traditional Liberal allegiance. But it probably made little difference to the outcome, any more than the faults of organization which other critics found in the Tory ‘machine’. Disraeli, while defending the latter to Derby, conceded that the outlook was gloomy. ‘The state of Scotland alone is most serious’, he wrote to Derby on July 28. ‘All influence appears to have slipped away from its proprietors.’25 Equally dismal was the scene in London, where the Liberals scored heavily. ‘If Scotland and the Metropolitan districts are to be entirely and continuously arrayed against the Conservative cause, the pull of the table will be too great and no Conservative Government, unless the basis be extended, will be possible.’26 He offered to retire if his withdrawal would help Derby to form a coalition government with a right-wing Whig as leader of the House of Commons. Derby firmly refused on both personal and public grounds.

And so all seemed set for another period of somnolent opposition when at last an event occurred which changed the whole situation. On September 3 Disraeli passed on to Derby a rumour from his secret source in the Cabinet that all was not well with the Prime Minister.

The reformers of the Cabinet, tho’ obliged to postpone the consideration of details console themselves with the belief that P. will not be able to meet Parliament again.

His bladder complaint, tho’ in itself not perhaps fatal, deprives him of his usual exercise and sleep which was his forte and carried him thro’ everything.27

Six weeks later, on October 18, Palmerston died quite suddenly two days before his eighty-first birthday. It was the end of an era. ‘Our quiet days are over; no more peace for us,’ Sir Charles Wood was heard to say as he walked sadly away from the funeral.28  Palmerston’s incongruous position as a Whig who was in many ways more Tory than the Tories had blurred and confused the real dividing lines in politics. His death created a new situation.

Inevitably his successor as Prime Minister was Russell, and as leader of the House of Commons, Gladstone. At once a sharper personal feeling became apparent. In the House of Lords, Derby regarded Russell with a vengeful eye. He thought him far more responsible than Palmerston for the humiliating fall of the Conservatives in 1859. In the lower House Gladstone formally became what he had long been in reality, Disraeli’s arch-opponent in the great parliamentary duel.

On all personal grounds Disraeli regretted the passing of the old Prime Minister. He appreciated ‘characters’ and Palmerston was one. A host of stories clustered around him as they have in modern times around Winston Churchill, some true, some merely bien trouvés. Disraeli noted many in his fragmentary reminiscences. Yet regret at the loss was tempered by recognition of an opportunity. Russell was certain to bring in a Reform Bill, but the Parliament of 1865 had been elected to support Palmerston, not Reform. The previous session had displayed an ominous split on the Liberal side when Robert Lowe and a group of supporters sided with Disraeli in rejecting a private member’s Borough Franchise Bill. There now seemed every chance of deep division among the Government’s followers if the Government itself introduced a Reform Bill.29

There were two possible attitudes for the Conservatives to take towards a Reform Bill. They could try to co-operate in order to make as moderate an agreed measure as possible, and thus settle the question for the next fifteen or twenty years – in effect a continuance of the party truce; or they could seize the opportunity to split the Liberals by allying themselves with the anti-Reform group which was determined to oppose any Bill however moderate on the ground that it was the slippery slope to total democracy. Derby seems to have inclined to the first course. ‘From what I hear,’ he wrote to Malmesbury on November 6, ‘they mean to bring in a Reform Bill but one of a very mild character which we may find ourselves able to support.’30

Disraeli, too, appears to have toyed with this idea at one time, but he changed his mind decisively early in November, when Stanley, who had been invited to join Russell’s administration – an offer that he had no intention of accepting – asked Disraeli what, if anything, he should say about the Conservative line on Reform. ‘My idea’, he told Disraeli, ‘would be to strengthen the moderate as opposed to the thorough-going reformers.’31 To his surprise, Disraeli counselled extreme reserve. He acquiesced, but was clearly puzzled.

Three weeks ago you and I both thought that a very small Bill passed by Conservative support would be the best solution of the difficulty; now you are against any Bill. No doubt you have good reasons for this altered view; but I don’t know them and can only take it on trust that they are good.32

Disraeli did not believe in superfluous explanation and ‘Young Morose’ still ate out of his hand. It is, however, easy to guess the way his mind was moving. His attitude to parliamentary reform was throughout these years purely opportunist. He must have seen that there was a good chance of bringing the Government down. For this purpose the last thing he wanted to do was to co-operate in a moderate Bill. On the contrary, the less moderate Russell’s Bill, the greater the likelihood of his fall owing to a right-wing Liberal rebellion.

Disraeli got his way with Stanley, but his position in the party at large was precarious throughout the autumn and winter of 1865–6. Derby did little to help. He gave no lead on any of the controversies of the day, which included the case of Governor Eyre, the question of Cattle Plague compensation, and a revolt against the Malt Tax, as well as parliamentary Reform. Malmesbury, replying on October 23 to Carnarvon, who had deplored Derby’s attitude, referred to ‘the almost total want of communication between him and Disraeli. The latter does not court it. The former is too proud to press it.’33 Illness and age were probably the reasons. The Conservatives were in a state of considerable unrest and matters were complicated by the attitude of the Liberal anti-Reform group, ‘The Third Party’, as it was called. They disliked both Derby and Disraeli, but there was just a possibility that they might serve under Stanley. Joliffe, the Chief Whip, told Derby of this plan, and Northcote in his diary records Joliffe’s account of Derby’s reaction. ‘Ah! they think if they can get him they can float, but I don’t think they will get him; and if they do, they won’t float.’34 There was not much love lost between father and son either then or later. As Northcote puts it in the same entry: ‘Joliffe said the Third Party was looking to Stanley as leader and would act with Disraeli in any other capacity. They said, “Lord Derby might be disposed to sacrifice himself for the advantage of his country and his son.” I said I thought him much more likely to do it for the former than the latter, to which Joliffe assented.’35

Although other names were mentioned from time to time, Stanley seems to have been the only serious possibility during these years as a replacement for Disraeli. But he did not aspire to be a candidate. Disraeli, who had himself suggested Stanley as an alternative Prime Minister in 1859, returned to the theme in the autumn of 1865, when it seemed quite conceivable that Derby intended to retire. According to Disraeli, Stanley ‘was horrified at the idea, declared that he was willing to act under Disraeli and would take the Foreign Office if desired, but would not take the Government himself’.36  Later Disraeli, too, became convinced that Stanley had not got the qualities of a leader. Northcote reported to him on March 8 a plan of Lady Salisbury37 that Stanley should take office under Gladstone at the head of a Conservative-Liberal alliance. Disraeli pooh-poohed the notion as

dreams of princesses in fairyland. Lady Salisbury wants Stanley to take a leading place. It won’t do. W.E.G. and S. sound very well. One is a man of transcendent ability; the other, though not of transcendent ability has considerable power. But neither of them can deal with men. S. is a mere child in such matters. The other, though more experienced, is too impetuous and wanting in judgment to succeed as a leader.38

Other names were occasionally canvassed. One was General Peel, Sir Robert’s brother, who had once challenged Disraeli to a duel. But they were on good terms now and he had no such ambitions. As for the various more far-fetched suggestions, such as a coalition of Whigs and Tories under the Dukes of Cleveland, Devonshire, or Somerset, or under Clarendon, or even Cranborne, there was never much in them. Derby and Disraeli were in a similar position to Baldwin after the election of 1923. There was much dissatisfaction with the leadership, but no one could decide on any practical alternative.

On March 12, after numerous wrangles and last-minute changes, Gladstone, to a tepid House and an unenthusiastic Liberal party, announced the principal features of the new Bill. It dealt with the franchise only and it seemed mild enough, reducing the occupation qualification in the boroughs from £10 rating to £7 rental and in the counties from £50 rental to £14 rental. There was a provision that county leaseholders and copyholders resident in towns should vote in the counties where their tenements were situated. This partisan clause was the obverse of the equally partisan one in Disraeli’s 1859 Bill requiring 40s freeholders resident in boroughs to vote in the borough instead of the surrounding county. There were some fancy franchises, but less elaborate than Disraeli’s. It was reckoned that the Bill would enfranchise some 400,000 new voters, about half of them working class, but that the borough constituency would still retain a majority of the other classes even if all the new borough voters belonged to the working class. The Bill would give the vote to rather more than one in four of the adult male population in England and Wales, whereas hitherto it was the privilege of slightly under one in five.

The county provisions of the Bill alarmed the Conservatives, who feared that the county leaseholders in the boroughs together with the new voters in the non-borough towns and the suburbs would swamp the safe Conservative tenant farmers. The Bill also alarmed the Whig owners of small boroughs, not so much in itself as for the redistribution of seats which was bound to follow. Disraeli, who was supported by such personages as Carnarvon and Cranborne, now made up his mind for root and branch opposition. Derby fully agreed, though owing to an attack of gout he was unable to attend the party meeting on March 16, where Disraeli made, according to Northcote, ‘a capital speech, reciting the history of the Reform Bills since 1852; throwing all the blame of the present agitation upon W.E.G.; objecting principally to the county franchise proposed in the Bill … We must leave it to our leaders to decide in what form the opposition had better be made, having reference especially to the feelings and dispositions of our friends on the other side.’39

The friends on the other side, compared by Bright to the inmates of the Cave of Adullam, ‘everyone that was in distress and everyone that was discontented’, made most of the running, and Disraeli played a congenial part as a wire-puller behind the scene. The Cave was led by Robert Lowe, a pugnacious, quarrelsome, Wykehamist albino who sat for Lord Lansdowne’s pocket borough, Calne. He hated democracy. His reasons were essentially cool symmetrical ones of intellect, a sort of Benthamism in reverse. He was also influenced by his experience of Australia and America, and perhaps by the accident of having been hit over the head during an election riot in 1860. He had a first-class, if rather donnish, brain, and an acid, sardonic mode of speech.

Even at this stage when a temporary alliance of convenience kept them on parallel lines there was no intimacy between Disraeli and Lowe. They had nothing in common except physical short-sightedness. Lowe, so Northcote was told, ‘has no dislike for Disraeli, but a good deal of contempt for him’. Disraeli had little reason to be predisposed in favour of Lowe. His brother, James, had been Lowe’s fag at Winchester, and, as Disraeli noted a year or so earlier, was accustomed to say, ‘No one knew what a bully was till he knew him.’40 Lowe’s hard doctrinaire intellectual approach was utterly alien to Disraeli’s intuitive, romantic, flexible opportunism. No letter from Lowe survives among Disraeli’s papers. They seem to have communicated, if at all, through the intermediary of Lord Elcho, a leading Adullamite. Later, they were to be on terms of deadly animosity.

The great parliamentary battle over Russell’s Bill was dominated by Lowe and Bright. Lowe was fighting, not for the principle of aristocracy – he had no use for picturesque tradition or nostalgic sentiment – but for what would now be called ‘meritocracy’. The case has seldom been better stated, nor has its answer been more splendidly made than by Bright, who supported the Bill, not for itself but as the stepping-stone to better things. Gladstone, too, made a fine contribution to a debate which for sheer intellectual quality is generally agreed to have been unrivalled in any political assembly of modern times. But Gladstone was hampered by having to defend the details of a Bill riddled with anomalies. As for Disraeli, he made some clever and amusing speeches, but in general bided his time and encouraged others.

The first crucial division was taken on the second reading when Lord Grosvenor, a dissident Whig, seconded by Stanley, moved an amendment requiring the Government to bring forward its redistribution scheme before the House decided on the changes in the franchise. In one of the most crowded houses ever known the Government only won by 318 votes to 313. Thirty-five Liberals voted with the opposition, and another six were absent. One Conservative voted with the Government. Dismayed by this rebuff, a section of the Cabinet favoured resignation, but Gladstone was strongly against it, and the Government resolved to carry on, hoping to conciliate the Adullamites by agreeing to take the proposed redistribution of seats along with the proposed extension of the franchise. This was a great tactical concession to the Opposition. Any redistribution measure was bound to offer a far wider target than one confined merely to the suffrage, for it would be opposed by most of those who found their seats redistributed out of existence.

Nevertheless it required all Disraeli’s skill to bring the Government down. On May 10 came the disastrous failure of the great banking house of Overend and Gurney, followed by a crash on the Stock Exchange and a rise in the bank rate to 10 per cent. Some of the Adullamites began to waver. To throw out the Government might seem factious at such a moment. Anyway, they did not really want to throw out the Government, with the consequential risk of a dissolution. They wanted Russell to shelve the Bill, but remain in office. Disraeli, therefore, had to tread a delicate path. He could not beat the Government without the help of the Adullamites, but it was difficult to persuade them to vote with him if the Government threatened to resign. He played his hand very adroitly. He was extraordinarily skilful at managing men, and his talent was needed to the full. He made one blunder, or rather his secretary Earle did. A highly technical point of parliamentary procedure was involved, but Earle displayed more conceit than knowledge when he confidently asserted that Derby, who had warned Disraeli of the error, was in the wrong.41 Disraeli trusted much to Earle, but this episode which involved an embarrassing withdrawal may have given him doubts. Earle was not destined to remain his confidant much longer.

On June 7 a procedural amendment by Stanley was lost by twenty-seven votes. Later that evening Walpole’s amendment to substitute £20 for £14 in the counties – a direct challenge – was only lost by fourteen. Five days later Ward Hunt, a Conservative county member, proposed an amendment to substitute rating value in the counties, a proposal which, since rates were always lower than rents, would have put the equivalent rental value up to £16 at least. Hunt’s amendment was only lost by seven. This last episode furnished an interesting comment on Disraeli’s determination to subordinate all else to defeat the Government. The conviction of the Conservative county members that they would gain from raising the proposed county occupation franchise to £16 or £20 was largely a delusion. Dudley Baxter, partner of Philip Rose and an able statistician, who advised Derby and Disraeli on these matters, came to the conclusion after a careful analysis that the general effect of lowering the county franchise to £14 would be to strengthen the Conservatives, because the £14 to £20 occupiers would probably divide two to one in favour of the Conservatives and their enfranchisement would help to swamp the 40s freemen resident in the boroughs, who voted in the counties and were overwhelmingly Liberal.42 But neither Derby nor Disraeli was prepared to risk a quarrel with the county members. It was too late to convince them that the amendment was unfavourable to the Conservative party. The great object was to bring down the Government, and so Baxter’s memorandum was quietly disregarded.

The Conservatives were in high fettle after this near miss. They had begun the session in a minority of seventy. They were now in a minority of only seven. One more heave and the Government would either go out or drop the Bill. Disraeli felt that the next initiative would come best from the Adullamites. He and Taylor, the Chief Whip, drew up a list of possible anti-Government Liberal peers to meet at Lord Lansdowne’s, and sent it to Derby, who was at last galvanized into activity. He returned it with comments and he helped to persuade likely men to turn up.43 The meeting at Lansdowne House decided that the best manoeuvre would be to move an amendment to the borough franchise on the same lines as Hunt’s for the county, ie to substitute rating value for rental. Lord Dunkellin, son of the Marquess of Clanricarde, was chosen to move it.

The case against this amendment was overwhelming because of the extraordinary anomalies and complete lack of uniformity in the assessment of rateable values. But Gladstone was very inadequately briefed, and the Cabinet could not decide whether or not to make the matter an issue of confidence. It was only at the very last moment that Gladstone, apparently on his own authority, indicated that the Government might resign, but it was too late by then to rally Adullamite waverers. The debate turned largely on the broad question of Reform. Disraeli did not speak, but he had been very active behind the scenes, using all his skill in persuasion and cajolery to win over waverers. These tactics may well have paid better dividends than a speech. When the division was taken the amendment was carried by 315 to 304, forty-eight Liberals voting with the Opposition. A week of chaos ensued before Russell resigned. The Queen was passionately anxious for him to remain. The Cabinet was divided, some wishing to carry on, some – Gladstone above all – to dissolve, some to resign, but the Chief Whip strongly advised against dissolution, and on June 26 Russell tendered his resignation to the Queen. Thus ended amidst a babel of intrigue and recrimination the last Whig Cabinet to govern Britain.

The week was no less eventful for the Opposition. The obvious solution to the parliamentary problem created by the fall of Russell was a broad anti-reform coalition, and this was what seems to have been generally expected.44 Indeed, as we saw earlier, the possibility of fusion between the right-wing Whigs and the Tories had been discussed off and on ever since the death of Palmerston. But in the event nothing of the sort occurred. Why? As so often in the confused politics of the 1850s and 1860s the answer – or a large part of it – lies in the personality of Disraeli. The Third Party made it clear that they had not unseated Russell to instal Derby if this meant serving under Disraeli’s lead in the House of Commons. Indeed, their preference was to keep out Derby, too. On June 22 or 23 Grosvenor told Derby through an intermediary that he could not guarantee the support of the Cave for a Tory government, and that the best answer would be a Whig Prime Minister in the Lords, such as Clarendon, with Stanley as leader of the House of Commons.45  Elcho wrote to Disraeli on similar lines.

Disraeli was not going to tolerate this. As soon as he saw Grosvenor’s letter he told Derby that the terms were ‘not consistent with the honour of the Conservative party’.46 Certainly on the face of things the Third Party was pitching its claim high, but its conditions may not have been quite so ‘preposterous’, to quote Buckle, as they have come to be regarded since. Many of the Adullamites seem to have genuinely believed that Derby intended to make way for a Whig Prime Minister; and although the Cave could only command one-seventh of the Conservative numbers, had not the Peelites been in much the same relation to the Whigs at the end of 1852, and did not they contrive to acquire the premiership together with half the seats in the Cabinet? Moreover, although he denied it, there is at least a possibility that Earle had given Elcho a wrong impression of Derby’s readiness to efface himself:47 one is tempted to wonder whether Derby or Disraeli, without making any specific promise gave an impression to the Third Party at a time when its support was hesitant that they would agree to some such terms as Grosvenor and Elcho envisaged.48

There is no proof of this, but clearly both the Tory leaders knew that a coalition would only be possible if they stepped down. This was a political fact which they had discussed quite frankly on more than one occasion. The only leading Conservative who had a chance of being accepted as Prime Minister in a coalition was Stanley. Whatever ideas Derby may have toyed with in the past, his action was quite decisive now. He made no overtures to the Adullamites while Russell’s Government struggled in its death throes; they on the contrary made overtures to him. Disraeli meanwhile urged him to stand firm:

The amiable and spirited Elcho has played his unconscious part in a long matured intrigue.

The question is not Adullamite; it is national. You must take the Government; the honour of your house and the necessity of the country alike require it.

What is counted on and intended (not by the Court) is that you should refuse; that a member of the late Government shall then be sent for, and then that an application should be made to a section of your party to join the Administration; which application will be successful, for all will be broken up.

There is only one course with the Queen: to kiss hands.

And the effect will be this: in twenty-four hours, all, Lansdowne, Granville (if you want him), Clanricarde … will be at your feet.49

Derby was sent for by the Queen on June 27. On the following day he called a meeting of twenty-two of his principal supporters. They were unanimous that he should accept the Premiership and first try to form a government on a coalition basis. Moreover, everyone except Lord Bath agreed that if the Adullamites refused Derby should go ahead with a purely Conservative administration.

Derby accepted this advice, which was indeed his own preference. He gave no opportunity to Clarendon, Granville, or any of the Whig ‘possibles’ to stake a claim for the premiership. Nor did he give his son a chance; their relations were distant; Derby distrusted Stanley’s views on church questions, and doubted his ability to lead. These decisions killed a coalition, and must have come as a relief to Disraeli. His own position was safe now. It is doubtful whether he believed what he said about winning over the Third Party, but it may have seemed wise to appear optimistic. Derby, as Disraeli well remembered from 1855, needed encouragement: the important thing was to get him into a government-forming mood, even if he, too, knew at heart that he would make little progress with the Cave. In the end the only Liberal to join was Michael Morris, MP for a pocket borough of Lord Clanricarde. He was given permission by his patron to become Solicitor-General for Ireland.

Disraeli would have been the chief victim of fusion had it taken place under a Liberal Prime Minister or even under Stanley. If Derby had seriously aimed at fusion, he, too, would have had to jettison Disraeli. But, to his credit, he had no intention of paying that price. He told General Grey that he ‘could not throw Mr. Disraeli over in order to get [Lord Clarendon]’.50 Undoubtedly Disraeli’s own preoccupation throughout the crisis was a personal one. His fortunes were tied to Derby’s success in forming a purely Tory administration – also to Derby’s remaining as leader of the party. If Derby had retired at this time it was by no means certain that Disraeli would have succeeded him. These circumstances are quite enough to explain his anxiety to torpedo an anti-reform coalition. There is no contemporary evidence for the theory that his real purpose was to save the Conservatives from being tarred with the brush of reaction and to prepare the way for a Reform Bill of his own. This seems to be an ex post facto myth to account for a series of manoeuvres inspired by enlightened opportunism rather than a deep-laid plan.51 Nevertheless it remains true that Disraeli’s personal interests coincided on this occasion with those of his party and that any other course would have been fatal to it. At long last, after seven years of apathetic defeatism, the Conservatives had been restored to a state of vigour. The whole question of their being able to furnish a plausible alternative to Whig-Liberal rule was at stake. If Lord Bath’s advice had prevailed, they might have declined into a mere appanage of the Whigs. Derby’s third government, like the previous two, was to be little better than a caretaker administration while the Whigs and Liberals resolved their squabbles, but the Conservative party survived; and in the end it was the Whigs who joined them, not they the Whigs.

Disraeli got his way over the composition of the new Cabinet to a far greater extent than ever before. His strength was shown by his making Northcote’s entry into the Cabinet a condition of his own. Derby demurred, but gave way. Disraeli also won on another issue. He secured the Foreign Office for Stanley. He was helped by Malmesbury’s voluntary withdrawal, but Derby nevertheless had doubts, shared incidentally by the Queen, about his son’s suitability. Others who could be said to be Disraeli’s men and received Cabinet Office were the Duke of Buckingham, Gathorne Hardy, and – ironically, in view of later events – Carnarvon. But he was unable to secure the ejection of Chelmsford from the Woolsack, the only alternative, Cairns, being needed in the Commons. Derby, however, warned Chelmsford that he could not expect to be kept there for long.

The Cabinet, far stronger than either of its predecessors, was made up as follows:

    First Lord of the Treasury Earl of Derby
    Lord Chancellor Lord Chelmsford
    Lord President Duke of Buckingham
    Lord Privy Seal Earl of Malmesbury
    Home Secretary Spencer Walpole
    Foreign Secretary Lord Stanley
    Colonial Secretary Earl of Carnarvon
    War Secretary General Peel
    Indian Secretary Viscount Cranborne
    Chancellor of the Exchequer B. Disraeli
    First Lord of the Admiralty Sir John Pakington
    President of the Board of Trade Sir Stafford Northcote
    President of the Poor Law Board Gathorne Hardy
    First Commissioner of Works Lord John Manners
    Chief Secretary for Ireland Lord Naas

There were the usual blunders in the course of the Government’s formation, especially over minor posts, and the usual hard feelings. Derby offered the Vice-Presidency of the Council to two people simultaneously,52 and he offended Lord Stanhope, who seems to have been given reason to expect the Duke of Buckingham’s post, by not only passing him over but saying nothing to him. ‘It is certainly strange’, wrote Northcote, ‘that Lord D. should have been so awkward, but he is awkward in these matters and there is no denying it.’53

A few days later Disraeli, annoyed at another instance of Derby’s awkwardness, delivered a rebuke, such as he would have scarcely risked a few years before. Derby had apparently turned down applications for honours with some terseness. Disraeli wrote enclosing a copy of his own form of reply, a soft answer warning applicants of the difficulties, but promising to forward the application to Derby:

Unfortunately the very individuals who have received this sort of reply from me have received subsequently from you or by your authority answers of a very different kind which have created great discontent … I doubt whether the leader even of a party with a majority can ever afford to give point blank refusals to applicants for honours. I have reason to believe that Sir Robert Peel never did, altho’ he had a large majority and practically was very parsimonious in the distribution of dignities.54

Disraeli made one important personal change. Earle, who had been back in Parliament since 1865, indicated a desire for an official position. Disraeli, although there is no sign in his papers of any cooling off, may well have felt that his private secretary, who had made two quite tiresome errors through lack of judgement, would be better placed elsewhere. He offered Earle the secretaryship of the Poor Law Board at £1,100 p.a., which was accepted with alacrity, but it would appear that Earle hoped to continue as a personal confidant of Disraeli. His hopes were to be disappointed. Disraeli had his own ideas about that role. Ignoring Earle’s suggestions for a successor, he appointed the young man he had met at Raby Castle.

‘Monty’ Corry was the perfect choice. He was devoted to Disraeli, highly capable, and devoid of personal ambition. After Mary Anne’s death he was to become even more indispensable, managing those tedious domestic matters such as engaging servants, finding houses, etc., at which Disraeli was so hopelessly incompetent. He was gay, amusing, and very good-looking. He moved easily in society, and though relatively poor himself, was a regular guest at the great country houses. He never married – an undoubted asset in a private secretary, but he was no misogynist. On the contrary, he was what the Victorians used to call a ‘gay bachelor’, and he conducted numerous love affairs. Disraeli had no objection to this. ‘What a Lothario Monty is’, he noted in tones far from censorious. Corry under Disraeli’s will was given absolute discretion in dealing with his master’s papers. It is perhaps symbolic of the difference between two social worlds in Victorian England that he preserved intact the evidence of Disraeli’s affair with Henrietta, against the advice of the virtuous bourgeois, Sir Philip Rose, who wanted it to be destroyed. To Corry such an episode was a normal part of life in the circles in which he moved.

Disraeli was soon on terms of far closer friendship with Corry than he had been at any time with Earle. It is of Corry that he is thinking in a famous passage in Endymion:55 ‘The relations between a Minister and his secretary are, or at least should be, among the finest that can subsist between two individuals. Except the married state, there is none in which so great a confidence is involved, in which more forbearance ought to be exercised, or more sympathy ought to exist.’ T. H. S. Escott, a contemporary journalist, described Corry in 1878 as ‘the social link that connected Lord Beaconsfield with a world which he surveyed as a contemptuous critic rather than inhabited as a born denizen. He gave the Prime Minister all the gossip of the clubs and all the chatter of the drawing-rooms …’56  Corry did more than this. He was not only loyal, devoted and discreet, he was also, behind a manner of great charm and gaiety, extremely efficient. To quote Escott again, ‘…. in a word the model of secretaries’.

1 M. & B., iv, 268.

2 ibid., i, 180. Monypenny has not transcribed it quite correctly, but the errors do not matter.

3 Strachey and Fulford, The Greville Memoirs, vii, 453, January 24, 1860.

4 Lady Gwendolen Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (4 vols, 1921–32), i, 97.

5 See M. & B., iv, 289–91, for the full text.

6 ibid., 312.

7 loc. cit.

8 Derby Papers, Box 146/1, dated simply, ‘Thurs’.

9 M. & B., iv, 339.

10 loc. cit.

11 loc. cit.

12 ibid., 382, January 19.

13 ibid., 295. Disraeli to Derby, January 28, 1861.

14 Brydges Willyams Letters, April 12, 1858.

15 C. F. Vitzthum von Eckstaedt, St Petersburg and London, 1852–64 (2 vols, 1887), ii, 176.

16 M. & B., iv, 394, April 25, 1863.

17 Brydges Willyams Letters, March 4, 1863.

18 M. & B., iv, 385–91.

19 The Letters of Queen Victoria, 2nd series, i, 70. February 26, 1863.

3 Disraeli memorandum on the visit is given in full, M. & B., iv, 385–92.

21 Hughenden Papers, Box 97, B/XX/E/298, Earle to Disraeli, November 1863.

22 Brydges Willyams Letters, November 5, 1863.

23 Derby Papers, Box 146/1, October 30, 1863.

24 M. & B., iv, 405, quoting from a note left among Disraeli’s papers.

25 ibid., 416.

26 loc. cit.

27 Derby Papers, Box 146/1.

28 Algernon West, Recollections (2 vols, 1899), i, 306.

29 I should like to acknowledge the help I have received for the rest of this chapter and for the next from a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis soon to be published entitled The Making of the Second Reform Bill, which its author, Mr F. B. Smith, of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of Melbourne, kindly lent to me.

30 Malmesbury, Memoirs, ii, 343.

31 Hughenden Papers, Box 111, B/XX/S/724, November 4.

32 ibid., B/XX/S/725, November 8.

33 Sir A. Hardinge, Life of the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon (3 vols, 1925), i, 272.

34 Andrew Lang, Life, Letters and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, First Earl of Iddesleigh (2 vols, 1890), i, 241.

35 British Museum, Add. MSS, 50,063A, February 22, 1866. The words after ‘country’ are omitted in Lang, i, 242.

36 Lang, Northcote, i, 232, Northcote’s diary, February 4, 1866.

37 The stepmother of Lord Cranborne. Her husband died in 1868 and she married Stanley, who had by then succeeded to his father’s earldom, in 1870. She was fifteen years older than her second husband.

38 British Museum, Add. MSS, 50,063A. Lang, i, 251, omits the name of Lady Salisbury.

39 Lang, Northcote, i, 253.

40 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/B/26. Note by Corry, October 1871.

41 ibid., Box 97 B/XX/E/371, ?May 27, 1866, Earle to Disraeli. The details are too complicated and arid to be worth repeating here. ‘Lord Derby is wrong on every point’, he recklessly wrote.

42 ibid., Box 44, B/XI/D 74, Memorandum by Baxter, June 12.

43 ibid., Box 110, B/XX/S/345, Derby to Disraeli, June 10.

44 Maurice Cowling, ‘Disraeli, Derby and Fusion, October 1865 to July 1866’, Historical Journal, VIII, i. (1965), 31–71, gives the most authoritative account of the crisis, and I have drawn on it freely.

45 M. & B., iv, 439–40, Derby to Disraeli, n.d. [June 22 or 23].

46 loc. cit.

47 Hughenden Papers, Box 97, B/XX/E/379, Earle to Disraeli, n.d. [June 24 or 25].

48 Cowling, 63.

49 M. & B., iv, 440; June 25, 1866.

50 Royal Archives, C. 32.480. Memorandum of conversation with Lord Derby, June 29, 1866.

51 Cowling, 70.

52 British Museum, Add. MSS, 50,063A, Northcote’s diary, July 4, 1866.

53 ibid., July 8.

54 Derby Papers, Box 146/2, Disraeli to Derby, July 16,1866.

55 Ch. 49.

56 T. H. S. Escott, ‘Lord Carnarvon’s Resignation’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, ccxii (1878), 357–8.