1

Disraeli went up to London on Friday, January 23, staying as usual at Edwards’s Hotel. He intended to make further inquiries about a house and to return to Hughenden after the week-end, for the opening of the session was still a fortnight off. But he abruptly changed his plans when to his astonishment on Saturday morning he read in The Times that there was to be an immediate dissolution. Three columns of the paper were filled with Gladstone’s election address, whose principal theme was an undertaking to abolish income tax. Although the time and place, a week-end and a London hotel, were anything but convenient, Disraeli was determined, with the aid of such colleagues as he could muster, to reply at once. Cairns was his chief assistant and between them they got out his answer in time for Monday’s papers.

Disraeli described Gladstone’s address as ‘a prolix narrative’, and declared that the Conservatives also had always been in favour of abolishing income tax. He did not say much about social reform or the Empire, although he devoted a good deal of space to the alleged iniquities of the Government’s policy over the Straits of Malacca – an issue on which they had, so he claimed, been insufficiently careful of British interests. Neither of the two manifestoes sounds particularly inspiring today, and it is hard to avoid the impression that both leaders had forgotten how much smaller a proportion of the electorate by then paid income tax. Disraeli’s main theme was essentially negative – a straightforward conservative attack, as in the Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches, upon ‘incessant and harrassing legislation’ and the dangerous opinions of the advanced Liberals. He conceded that the Prime Minister ‘is not certainly at present opposed to our national institutions or the integrity of our empire’, but he claimed that many of his supporters were hostile to the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Church of England, and the Union with Ireland.

This rather negative line probably accorded better with the public mood than a more constructive declaration of policy. Often after a period of strenuous reform a moment arrives quite suddenly when the British people tires of being improved. The winter of 1873–4 was just such an occasion. Gladstone’s administration, though bearing the same party label as Palmerston’s ten years earlier, was entirely different in policy and outlook. It was the first avowed and vigorous reformist Government since Grey’s, and its legislation had annoyed almost as many groups and interests as the Whigs had managed to offend between 1830 and 1834. In fact, Disraeli found himself playing the role of Peel in the 1830s, a rallying-point for the forces of property disturbed at excessive innovation though ready to accept the need for cautious piecemeal reform. The more Disraeli’s career is examined the clearer it becomes that Palmerston’s death marks the real dividing line in his political life. It brought to an end the sort of conservative liberalism which had been such an obstacle to the Conservative party ever since 1846. It gave Gladstone his opportunity to imprint his own stamp upon the Liberal party, and Disraeli the chance to assume not only the Peelite mantle in home policy but the Palmerstonian mantle in foreign affairs. In this respect the apparently disproportionate fuss which he made about the Straits of Malacca had a significance at the time which some historians have overlooked. Disraeli was determined to beat the patriotic drum, and he was right in gauging the impatience of the voters with the Little Englander and internationalist tone which seemed to sound so often in the speeches of leading Liberals.

Some degree of Conservative reaction was to be expected in 1874, but the extent of it, which surprised almost everyone, is explicable by three principal reasons. First there was the timing of the election. Gladstone could scarcely have chosen a worse moment to dissolve, and indeed took his own followers completely by surprise. Naturally people assumed that the question of his own seat had something to do with the decision, for a general election did at least solve that problem. In fact, this was not what influenced him. His choice was governed by an undisclosed split in the Cabinet. Although he had a large budget surplus, it was not enough for the abolition of income tax. His plan was opposed by the service ministers, who declared that they could not consent to the necessary reductions in their estimates unless the Government received a clear mandate from the electorate. Therefore, if he was to carry out his scheme he had to dissolve at once.

A second element in the Conservative victory requires further analysis by psephological historians. The borough electorate had increased by some 15 per cent, or 190,000 persons, since 1868. A large part of this increase must have been from among the compounders enfranchised by Goschen’s Act in 1869. These tended to be the poorer householders. If Disraeli’s advisers were correct when they told him in 1868 that ‘the Conservative feeling is more predominant in the humbler portion of the householders’, this addition to the electorate may well have contributed to his success at the polls six years later.

A third factor operating against the Liberals was the great improvement which under Disraeli’s auspices had been made to the Conservative party’s organization.1 He brought to an end after the 1868 election the unsatisfactory system whereby Spofforth of Rose, Norton & Co. had acted as Principal Agent. The firm was no longer charged with electoral work, and Rose was consoled with a baronetcy as soon as Disraeli got back into office. The new Principal Agent was John Gorst, an able young barrister who had lost his seat at the general election. He was told by Disraeli that his first task was as far as possible to ensure that every constituency was contested by a candidate chosen in advance. Some measure of his success is shown by the fact that in Scotland, the worst area for the Conservative cause, he raised the number of contested constituencies from twenty-one out of fifty-six to thirty-seven, and that over Britain as a whole more seats were fought in 1874 than ever before.

Gorst, moreover, virtually created the Conservative Central Office, which, with an equally able man as Secretary, Major Keith-Falconer, was performing by 1874 nearly all the tasks that it does today. The two also renovated an already existing institution – the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Working Men’s Associations. At Disraeli’s instigation the expression ‘Working Men’s’ was dropped as being unsuitable to a party which sought to minimize class conflict. The National Union was administered from the Central Office, Gorst and Keith-Falconer acting as joint secretaries. Its local associations flourished greatly in Lancashire, where there was a brand of popular Conservatism unique at that time.

Disraeli had suffered one loss since 1868; Lord Neville to whom he deputed general supervision of the party machine had succeeded to the earldom of Abergavenny and retired from active management, although he remained a much valued counsellor. He had no exact successor and Disraeli now dealt direct with the Chief Whip2 and Gorst. retired from active management, although he remained a much valued counsellor. He had no exact successor and Disraeli now dealt direct with the Chief Whip2 and Gorst. He differed from Gladstone in treating them as independent powers and refused to subordinate the Principal Agent to the Whip – a practice which he later abandoned with, according to Gorst, disastrous results.

The Conservative coffers were well filled by the time of the election. Here, too, they were better placed than the Liberals. It is, however, of interest to notice that the main source of funds, even after Disraeli’s day, continued to be the landed proprietors, especially some of the great magnates. There is nothing to substantiate the claim sometimes made that from 1871 onwards the liquor trade was a major or even an important contributor.3

For the moment the Conservative organization was better than that of the Liberals, but in spite of these pointers to success Gorst was cautious in prediction. In fact, his estimate was very similar to that made by his predecessors in 1868 – Conservatives 328, Liberals 325 – and equally wrong though in the opposite direction. On February 6, by which time the borough elections had shown a strong swing to the Conservatives, Gorst predicted a majority of twenty-seven. When the counties polled it was clear that they had won a great victory. In England they had a majority of over 110. In Scotland they raised their numbers from 7 to 19. In Ireland the Liberals were shattered by the emergence of the new Home Rule party which took most of its gains from them, leaving the Conservatives more or less intact. Disraeli, who had a contest himself for the first time since 1852, much to his annoyance because of the expense, came head of the poll in Buckinghamshire. The final figures for the whole country were, Conservatives 350, Liberals 245, Home Rulers 57.

Gladstone was astounded and chagrined at the result. With his penchant for seeing politics in terms of moral black and white he put down his defeat to the animosity inspired by his Licensing Act among the liquor trade. He told his brother that he had been ‘borne down in a torrent of gin and beer’, and Queen Victoria that ‘the most powerful operative cause has been the combined and costly action of the Publicans except in the North where from their more masculine character the people are not so easily manageable’.4  Although the Bill may have cost him some votes, there seems little reason to suppose that it was the chief reason for his defeat. The latest historian of these years finds no evidence of a systematic attack by the licensed victuallers on the Government.5

For a moment Gladstone contemplated meeting Parliament in the hope that he might somehow be able to dispose of his £5m surplus before his hated rival could get at it. ‘Is it not disgusting,’ Mrs Gladstone wrote to her son Herbert, ‘after all Papa’s labour and patriotism and years of work to think of handing over his nest-egg to that Jew?’6 But there was no way out. In the end Gladstone followed Disraeli’s precedent and resigned without waiting for defeat in the House.

On February 17 the Queen sent for Disraeli. He was well prepared. At the last moment he had discovered a suitable house, No. 2 Whitehall Gardens, and so was able to conduct in reasonable comfort the negotiations for forming a Cabinet. The colleagues whom he most closely consulted were Cairns, Derby, Northcote and Hardy. It was plain sailing but for one rather angular cape that had to be rounded. Lord Salisbury’s trenchant mind and eloquent voice would not only be a valuable asset if he was in the Cabinet; they might be a serious danger if he was not. Lady Derby7 conducted the negotiations. Disraeli awaited their outcome with anxiety. After some hesitation Salisbury, who was pressed by such normally anti-Disraeli figures as Carnarvon, Sir William Heathcote, and the Duke of Northumberland, gave way. His accession drew the sting from the party’s Right.

Disraeli could now go ahead. He was determined to have a small Cabinet. He did not manage to achieve the target of ten which he had laid down many years before as the theoretical optimum. But his Cabinet of twelve, six peers and six commoners, was the smallest since 1832. On the whole the appointments were obvious. The six peers with one exception, the Duke of Richmond, went back to positions that they had held during 1866–8. The Duke became Lord President with the leadership of the House of Lords. He would have liked the War Office, but Disraeli intended to have the great spending departments in the House of Commons. The previous tenants were not available. Monty Corry’s father was dead, and Pakington, to Disraeli’s relief, had lost his seat. The War Office in the aftermath of the Cardwell reforms was likely to be the less easy of the two, and Disraeli gave it to Hardy, who had been Home Secretary in 1868. The Admiralty went to Ward Hunt. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer was, of course, Northcote, who would have been Disraeli’s first choice in 1868.

This left one important vacancy, the Home Office, and for that, after considering Hicks Beach, Disraeli made his most sensational choice, Richard Cross, a completely new man who had never held office before.8 Cross was a friend of Derby, and a power in Lancashire. He possessed deep knowledge of local government, and turned out to be a great Home Secretary. Whether or not Disraeli, who had met him once at Manchester, perceived this flair one cannot say. He probably realized that Cross was at least competent, and for the rest wished to please Lancashire and Derby. Lord John Manners, removed from his familiar niche of First Commissioner of Works to that of Postmaster-General, completed the Cabinet, which was composed as follows:

    First Lord of the Treasury B. Disraeli
    Lord Chancellor Lord Cairns
   

Lord President of the Council (and
Leader of the House of Lords)

Duke of Richmond
    Lord Privy Seal Earl of Malmesbury
    Home Secretary R. A. Cross
    Foreign Secretary Earl of Derby
    Colonial Secretary Earl of Carnarvon
    War Secretary Gathorne Hardy
    Indian Secretary Marquis of Salisbury
    Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Northcote
    First Lord of the Admiralty G. W. Hunt
    Postmaster-General Lord John Manners

There were only three members of Disraeli’s former Cabinet left out: the Duke of Marlborough who did not wish for office and declined the Viceroyalty of Ireland, Pakington and Wilson-Patten. The two latter were consoled with peerages. Of ministers outside the Cabinet there were at least three, W. H. Smith, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Irish Secretary, and Lord George Hamilton, Under-Secretary for India, who were destined to make their mark later. Another able man was Viscount Sandon, MP for Liverpool, who held the important post of Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education, ie in effect Minister of Education. There was one minister who was far from able, but was nevertheless most offended at being excluded from the Cabinet, Disraeli’s now middle-aged protégé, Lord Henry Lennox. He did not refuse the post offered, First Commissioner of Works, but his conversation henceforth was full of disloyal spite. He was a failure in his job and caused Disraeli much worry. But in general the Tory administration of 1874 was a strong one and until the disruption caused by the Eastern question very harmonious. It had a professional touch that was a far cry from the ‘Who? Who?’ ministry of 1852, and the contrast is the measure of the change that had come over the Conservative party in the past two decades. Queen Victoria was delighted and was able to reassure her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, ‘You will see that instead of being a Govt. of Dukes as you imagine it will only contain 1 & he a very sensible, honest & highly respected one. The others are all distinguished & able men not at all retrograde.’9 It was the first Tory Government since Peel’s day which could in point of talent stand up to the Liberals. Moreover, it pleased all the diverse elements in the party. Salisbury and Carnarvon were pledges to the High Church and the Bight. Derby stood for Erastian liberal-conservatism; the presence of the appropriately monosyllabic Cross and Smith showed that neither Lancashire, suburbia nor the middle class had been forgotten. Evangelicalism was represented by Cairns, the Peelite tradition by Northcote, and the last enchantments of Young England by Lord John Manners, sole survivor, other than Disraeli himself, from the Cabinet of 1852.

More troublesome than forming the Cabinet was the choice of the Household. Yet it probably gave Disraeli more pleasure. Here was the world of Coningsby and Sybil. To parcel out these semi-honorific positions among the great Tory families and to gratify the hosts, or rather the hostesses, of the stately homes where he was wont to stay, was indeed a triumph, in spite of the numerous snags. For example, he at once offered the Mastership of the Horse to Bradford, but received a refusal. Then he suggested the Duke of Beaufort to the Queen, but she objected on grounds of his disreputable private life. His next suggestion was the Duke of Marlborough, ‘who does not ride’, Ponsonby dryly noted, but the non-equestrian Duke also declined. Finally he returned to Lord Bradford, who now accepted. Then there was difficulty over Lords Beauchamp and Bath, whose High Church tendencies alarmed the Queen. Had not Lord Beauchamp signed a dissenting report for the Ritual Commission on the perilous subject of ‘Lights as an accessory to the Holy Communion’? But she gave way eventually. In the end it was all settled, the throne was surrounded with a suitable galaxy of high-born nobility, and the political aid of the great Tory magnates was appropriately rewarded.

Exhausted by writing dozens of letters, not least by those in which he tried to mollify disappointed place-hunters, Disraeli repaired to Brighton for a brief holiday. But he cut it short on learning that both the beloved sisters were going to be in London for a day or so. To his intense chagrin they did not stay for long. ‘Constant separations! Will they never cease?’ he wrote to Lady Bradford.10 ‘I am certain there is no greater misfortune than to have a heart that will not grow old.’ Lady Bradford evidently rebuked him for some of the expressions that he used. ‘Your view of correspondence, apparently, is that it should be confined to facts and not admit feelings. Mine is the reverse’, he replied,11 and ended bitterly: ‘I awake from a dream of baffled sympathy and pour forth my feelings, however precious, like water from a golden goblet on the sand.’ But within two days all was well again. The Bradfords had promised to spend Whitsun at Hughenden.

These little dramas were repeated again and again. There would be periods of sunshine. Then Disraeli would cause offence by an exuberant letter, and Selina would rap him over the knuckles, or worse still say nothing, even in reply to telegrams. This led to cruel disappointments. ‘While I was working at some Despatches last night in my room in the House of Commons Monty knocked and came in triumphant with a telegram … His countenance was radiant with my anticipated pleasure. Alas! it was from the Mayor of Norwich I fell in a clear heaven like a bird shot in full wing.’12 His passion led him into actions which even he could not excuse. He even opened a letter from her to Corry. ‘Dearest M. She did not write to me & I opened hers to yourself!!! It is heinous: I cannot defend or palliate my act. But you may always open hers to myself. D.’13 This emotional seesaw was perpetually in process all through the years of his Premiership. It was distracting and time-consuming, but perhaps it helped to give him that zest for life which despite all his illnesses and setbacks never left him while there was breath in his body.

For the next six years the attention of Britain and, for much of the time, Europe, too, was centred upon Disraeli. He found this by no means a disagreeable sensation and never failed to play up to the part in which the turn of electoral fortune had cast him. In Parliament and in public he was an impressive, almost elaborately ceremonious figure, very conscious of the dignity of his great office. In Cabinet he was patient, formal and slightly remote. He did not talk much, but all accounts agree that he dominated discussion. He was not dictatorial. On the contrary he went to great lengths to conciliate refractory or difficult colleagues. He did not fuss or harass departmental ministers. He believed in leaving them alone to get on with their work, but he was always available for consultation and he became more accessible to back benchers, especially the younger ones, than he had ever been in his middle years. He was never rigid about methods or details for which he cared little. What made him emphatically a strong Prime Minister was that he seldom relinquished his purpose, or failed to get his way when he had decided on a policy. Of course, he did not always have a policy, but this was not a sign of inability to persuade or direct his Cabinet, rather of ill health, weariness and old age. ‘Power! It has come to me too late,’ he was heard to murmur at the apogee of his success after the Congress of Berlin. ‘There were days when, on waking, I felt I could move dynasties and governments; but that has passed away.’14

Yet, although old age and illness were part of the explanation, it is true to say that Disraeli never possessed the drive, energy or application which were the qualities of Pitt, Peel, Palmerston, or Gladstone. Of course, no Prime Minister ought to work too hard and become too enmeshed in minutiae, but it is impossible to direct affairs without some knowledge of detail as well as broad principles, for they are inseparable, especially in the field of domestic legislation. Disraeli probably went too far to the opposite extreme. He had given very little thought to what his Government would actually do if he won a general election. Cross was sadly disappointed at the Prime Minister’s lack of initiative when the Cabinet first met to decide upon the measures for the first session:

This procedure seems to have continued throughout Disraeli’s Premiership, though naturally with experience ministers had more suggestions to make. During the early autumn heads of departments would be asked for their suggestions for legislation in the next session. These would be discussed in the November Cabinets and strung together by Corry to constitute the draft of the Queen’s speech. Disraeli reconciled differences, settled disputes, decided priorities; but he did not initiate nor did he try to understand the details of the measures proposed. ‘He detests details … He does no work … M. Corry is in fact Prime Minister,’ declared Carnarvon in a burst of irritation.16 This was an extreme view, but Cross confirms it to some extent. ‘Disraeli’s mind was either above or below (whichever way you like to put it) mere questions of detail.’17  Neither Carnarvon nor Cross were in possession of Disraeli’s full confidence, though Cross soon came to have it, but their evidence cannot be disregarded. In the field of foreign policy Disraeli’s attitude was quite different and far more active. He followed it with keen interest, and, as his doubts about Derby grew, he intervened continuously and personally to an extent which has no parallel in the case of the other great departments.

Like most Prime Ministers, Disraeli treated with special confidence and trust a small inner ring of his colleagues.

The inner Cabinet consisted of Cairns, Derby, Northcote and Hardy. Later Salisbury replaced Derby, but at first he and Carnarvon were inevitably on terms of polite formality with Disraeli rather than intimate friendship. Cairns was the man whose judgement Disraeli most respected. Hardy was the man upon whose oratory he most relied. With Derby his relations were complicated and ambivalent. He had a personal friendship with him of longer standing than with any of his colleagues except Manners. Together in the old days they had often discussed how to rejuvenate the party and cajole ‘the Captain’. But their intimacy seems to have lessened as time went on. Perhaps the public discussion in 1871–2 of Disraeli’s supersession may have contributed. On February 8, 1874, while the election results were coming in we find Salisbury writing his wife, after dining with the Derbys: ‘I gathered that they had not quite given up the idea of his having the first place.’18 It is hard to see how they could have expected this, unless Disraeli voluntarily retired, but if they did, it may account for a certain constraint. Derby with his cool humdrum attitude was worlds apart from Disraeli. Oddly enough his demeanour and outlook were in many ways less patrician than Disraeli’s. He spoke, according to Disraeli, ‘a sort of Lancashire patois’.19 His opinions on the franchise, on Church questions, indeed many other topics, were those of a middle-class Liberal rather than a Tory aristocrat. Later the Eastern question was to drive the two men far apart. Northcote in a memorandum on the Cabinet’s foreign policy left among his papers wrote:

How he [Lord Derby] stood with Lord Beaconsfield was very difficult to say. They had long been personal friends and respected each other’s merits, though each in turn would say sharp things of the other. Lord Beaconsfield had great influence over him and often brought him to do what he very much disliked.20

Northcote’s own relations with Disraeli were most cordial, but essentially those of a subordinate rather than a colleague. He always addressed the Prime Minister as ‘Dear Mr. Disraeli’, whereas, except for Cross from whom such an address was natural in the circumstances, the others wrote ‘Dear Disraeli’, or if on really close terms, like Derby and Manners, ‘My dear D.’ Northcote was a born second-in-command. It was unlucky that later events were to give him the reasonable expectation, though never fulfilled, of rising to the top. He was loyal, popular, good-tempered, efficient, conscientious, but he lacked the vital spark.

Disraeli controlled both Houses and dominated his ministerial colleagues. There remained one element in the constitutional balance capable of obstructing him, if only to a limited degree – the Crown. But he soon established relations with Queen Victoria even closer and more cordial than in 1868. The progressive stages of his movement into the confidence of the Faery, as he called her in an ironic romantic allusion to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, have often been chronicled. Long before the end of his Premiership he had broken through the strict etiquette which surrounded her. She did not cavil when against all the rules he proposed her toast as Empress of India at her own dinner-table. She allowed him to write to her in the first person – a privilege which he wisely reserved for special occasions. She invited him to be seated during his audiences, only enjoining him to keep the secret. Naturally he did not, and an exultant letter promptly whizzed from his pen to Lady Bradford. At an early stage he also broke through the normal channels of communication with the Queen. He remained on excellent terms with Ponsonby, whose impartiality he genuinely respected; but still Ponsonby was a Whig. There might be advantages in putting his opinions to the Queen directly or by another route, usually Lady Ely, one of the Ladies of the Bedchamber to whom Corry wrote regularly on his master’s behalf.

The Queen’s political sympathies after five years of Liberal ascendancy were very definitely on Disraeli’s side. With a few exceptions Gladstone’s programme of legislation seemed to her inimical to the prestige of the Crown. She was nervous, too, of his impetuousness and his incalculability; and his hold over the forces of militant democracy had perturbed her still further. She regarded the election of 1874 as a wholesome sign that the nation had recovered its senses. ‘Since 46 under the gt. good & wise Sir R. Peel there has not been a Conservative Majority!!’21 she wrote to her eldest daughter on February 10. ‘It shows a healthy state of the country.’ It is wrong to suppose that the Queen’s disapproval of Gladstone dates only from the Bulgarian atrocity agitation of 1876. That indeed aggravated it, and turned it into fear, even hatred. But her feelings about Gladstone earlier are shown well enough in another letter to the Crown Princess of Prussia on February 24:22

Ld Palmerston was quite right when he said to me ‘Mr. Gladstone is a very dangerous man’. And so vy. arrogant, tyrannical & obstinate with no knowledge of the World or human nature. Papa felt this strongly. Then he was a fanatic in religion – All this & much want of égard towards my feelings (tho’ since I was so ill that was better) led to make him a vy dangerous & unsatisfactory Premier. He was a bad Leader of the H. of Commons.

There could be no complaint about lack of égard for her feelings on Disraeli’s part. He was genuinely considerate and made things as easy for her as he could. His letters were admirably summed up by Ponsonby writing on one occasion to the Queen: ‘Mr. Disraeli has a wonderful talent for writing in an amusing tone while seizing the points of an argument.’23 Gone were the dismal days when the Queen received a memorandum of such length and complexity from Gladstone that she had to get a précis made by Sir Theodore Martin. To his wife, Ponsonby, who was never at ease with Disraeli, made a less-flattering comment on the new Prime Minister: ‘… it seems to me that he communicates nothing except boundless professions of love and loyalty and if called on to write more says he is ill.’24  Ponsonby thought that Disraeli’s letters of sympathy were written with his tongue in his cheek, but he shrewdly added: ‘Are not her woes told in the same manner?’

The language which Disraeli used to the Queen does indeed sound artificial, absurd, and at times perilously near to bathos. He would, he once said, have thought himself like Proserpine in Hades, if the gift of primroses from Osborne ‘did not remind him that there might yet be spring & tho’ Proserpine be absent there is happily for him a Queen to whom he is devoted at Windsor.’25 On another occasion he mentions some plans of his ‘to yr Majesty in secrecy … but in life one must have for one’s secret thoughts a sacred depository & Lord Beaconsfield ever presses to seek that in his Sovereign Mistress’.26 And when she inquired after his health at a moment when the Government had just won an unexpected victory at a by-election, he replied:

No doubt political success is a skilful physician but there is a sanitary talisman more efficacious even than that – & that is the condescending sympathy of a beloved Sovereign whose Kindness is always as graceful as it is gracious.27

This sort of thing invites censure from austere critics, but it was not meant for publication, and if the Queen liked it, and Disraeli chose to please her, there seems no reason to cavil.

Two criticisms of a more serious kind need to be considered. Did Disraeli exercise undue personal influence over the Queen, and – a closely connected question – did he encourage her in unconstitutional notions about her own power? On the first point it is by no means the case that the influence was all in one direction. Sir Thomas Biddulph, the Keeper of the Queen’s Privy Purse, thought ‘that Dizzy is a perfect slave to the Queen’, so Ponsonby wrote to his wife.28 At the height of the Eastern crisis in a letter to Salisbury, Derby wrote: ‘I know what the pressure of the court is on our Chief.’29 And rather earlier Salisbury had written on the same theme to Carnarvon: ‘Balmoral is becoming a serious nuisance.’30 Of course, far more often than not, Disraeli persuaded the Queen to do what he wanted, but he could never be sure of success, and on two important measures, the Public Worship Regulation Bill of 1874 and the Royal Titles Bill of 1876, especially the latter, the Queen pressed him into action which he might not otherwise have taken. During the Eastern crisis she almost threatened abdication, ‘the greatest power the Sovereign possessed – nothing could stand against it for the position of a Minister who forced it on would be untenable’, so Gladstone once said.31 Disraeli might well have wondered whether he had conjured up something more formidable than he had bargained for. When the Eastern question was at its height he had to remind the Queen, who was violently pro-Turk and seemed to be reproaching him for weakness, that he was not her Grand Vizier.

But he cannot be acquitted of having himself made such a reminder necessary. ‘Is there not just a risk,’ wrote Derby on May 4, 1874, ‘of encouraging her in too large ideas of her personal power, and too great indifference to what the public expects? I only ask; it is for you to judge.’32 It was perhaps not improper, in spite of Gladstone’s disapprobation, to keep the Queen informed of Cabinet discussions and the names of dissentients. ‘In a Cabinet of twelve persons there are seven parties,’ Disraeli wrote on one occasion, and he then analysed them at length.33 There were precedents for this frankness. More doubtful but not clearly unconstitutional was Disraeli’s habit of enlisting the Queen in overpersuading obstinate or recalcitrant ministers. ‘In what frame of mind will the Queen find Sir Stafford Northcote?’ she asked on November 12, 1877.34 ‘It would be as well to intimate … that our military and naval preparations shd be adequate for emergencies,’ replied Disraeli the same day,35 and on November 28: ‘Lord Beaconsfield … was pleased with the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s tone & perceived that a “Faery Queen” had waved her magic wand over him.’36

Yet there certainly were occasions when his language, if taken literally, attributed powers to the Queen that were anachronistic even then. When a newly appointed law officer had allowed his promotion to leak out before the Queen’s formal assent had been given, ‘Mr Disraeli is determined to put down this loose habit & make yr Majesty’s subjects understand where the Constitution has placed the Government of the Country.’37 During the Eastern crisis, when the Queen threatened ‘to lay down the thorny crown’ and seemed to be implying that the Cabinet had not fulfilled their promises to her he wrote: ‘… your Majesty has the clear constitutional right to dismiss them.’38 This was nonsense, and both Disraeli and the Queen must have known it, even if they were prepared to suspend disbelief for the moment. The truth is that Disraeli’s language should not be taken literally. It was part of an elaborate comedy of manners in which he was author, actor and spectator, with the Queen cast in the other principal role, while Whiggish figures like Derby and Ponsonby observed dryly and dubiously from the wings. To analyse all this in terms of Bagehot is to take it far too seriously. There was little danger of the actors stepping suddenly into real life. The Queen had no more intention of abdicating than Disraeli had of being dismissed.

2

Parliament met on March 19. The Liberal party was in a state of disarray. Gladstone, much put out at his defeat, wished to resign the leadership at once. ‘I deeply desired’, he wrote many years later, ‘an interval between Parliament and the grave.’39 He was dissuaded from immediate action, but he was determined to retire before the next session. Meanwhile he announced that he would attend only occasionally. With a united Cabinet, a friendly monarch, a majority in both the Houses of Parliament, and the Opposition in chaos, Disraeli was in a position to carry whatever programme he wished. There was, as we have already seen, only one snag – he had not got one. Having at last obtained power he had curiously little idea what to do with it. The suddenness of the election is part but not the whole of the explanation. It is doubtful whether a longer period of waiting would have resulted in his working out a policy for immediate legislation. Although he had on occasions piloted complicated measures through the House, for example the Reform Bill of 1867, he never really had a legislative mind. Ideas, impressions, tone – these he was a master at suggesting. They are his great contributions to the Conservative Party. For concrete legislative achievements we must look elsewhere.

The immediate question was the budget. In this, like all Prime Ministers, Disraeli took a keen interest, and discussed it at length with Northcote. They decided that Gladstone’s panacea was impracticable. Income tax could be reduced, but not abolished. A penny off the income tax, abolition of the sugar duties, substantial aid to the rates for expenditure on lunatics and policemen, these were the main features of Northcote’s first budget. It was a compromise that pleased some and not others. The farmers were angry that the Malt Tax still remained. The landed gentry were delighted at rate relief – a measure for which the Country party had agitated ever since the repeal of the Corn Laws. The abolition of the sugar duties pleased the free traders, and the reduction of income tax was, as Disraeli predicted, ‘a golden bridge for all anti-income tax men in our own ranks. They will grumble, but they will support us.’ Northcote had no difficulty in carrying the House of Commons. Even Gladstone was not very censorious.

Otherwise little else was planned by the Cabinet, apart from a Royal Commission on the Trade Union legislation which had been badly botched by the Liberals, a new Factory Act and a Licensing Act to amend Bruce’s unpopular measure.40 These together with the budget and routine matters were expected to provide sufficient occupation for the session. But Parliament, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The Archbishop of Canterbury stepped in where the Cabinet hesitated to tread. The session of 1874 was to be dominated by an ecclesiastical storm which no one had predicted a few months earlier.

With the concurrence of the Bishops, Tait had drafted a Bill designed to expedite and cheapen the legal process of enforcing discipline on recalcitrant clergy. The Bill was primarily aimed at the extreme Ritualists, but the danger was that it might be used by fanatical evangelicals against moderate High Churchmen, and there was also the opposite possibility, viz. action by the High against the Low. Although the Queen was enthusiastic, and the Archbishop pressed strongly, Disraeli would have been glad to leave the matter alone, for a Cabinet which contained Cairns on the one hand and Salisbury on the other could never be united on such a prickly topic. He was, however, prepared to do his best behind the scenes, and, without any public appearance, he succeeded in getting the Bill greatly improved in the House of Lords, where it was introduced.

When it came down to the House of Commons, however, still as a Private Member’s Bill, Gladstone descended from Hawarden like a thunder clap and moved six portentous resolutions defining the whole position of the Church of England, and fiercely attacking what he called ‘a Bill to put down Ritualism’. This was too much for Disraeli, who suspected that Gladstone was not likely to have much support and who now came into the open denouncing ‘Mass in masquerade’, as he called the Ritualist practices. He won easily. Gladstone withdrew his resolutions, and the Bill was carried with one important amendment which resulted in something of a brush between Salisbury and Disraeli. The former urged the peers not to be intimidated by a ‘blustering majority’. Disraeli in reply referred to his colleague as ‘a great master of flouts and jeers’. Happily no offence was taken. As for the Bill, although its passage pleased the Queen and strengthened her affection for her Prime Minister, it proved difficult to enforce and caused far more harm than good. Moreover, the High Church party henceforth regarded Disraeli as a sworn foe, and part of their bitter hostility to him over the Eastern question stemmed from this episode.

Disraeli had planned to visit Ireland that autumn, but as early as April his health was beginning to show the premonitory symptoms of the illness which later prevented him. He had more than one attack of gout during the session, but nothing serious, and he was not inhibited from attending during the season a succession of dinner parties, routs and balls, especially if there was a chance of seeing Lady Bradford. In September he paid his second and last visit to Balmoral. Ponsonby found him ‘clever and bright in sparkling repartee but indolent and worn out … he shot little arrows into the general discourse pungent and lively and then sat perfectly silent as if it were too much trouble to talk’.41 He caught a chill there and was treated by Sir William Jenner for incipient bronchitis. ‘This morning the Queen paid me a visit in my bedchamber. What do you think of that?’ he wrote to Lady Bradford. Although he soon recovered, and went from Balmoral to Bretby, he was ill again, this time with gout. The Irish visit, which involved three non-political speeches and a multitude of further engagements in less than a fortnight, was beginning to cause him much perplexity. On September 15 Derby wrote a long letter to dissuade him from going. ‘First you are overdoing yourself …’ and then what was he to say? ‘Every question in Ireland whether of the past present or future is a party question … You cannot be decently civil to Catholics without offending Protestants and vice versa …’42 The attack of gout now made the visit impossible that year. The chance did not come again, and Disraeli, whose political life was so largely spent on Irish disputes, never set foot upon Ireland.

He recovered sufficiently to attend the autumn Cabinets and make the traditional Guildhall speech, but he was far from well, and when the Cabinets were over was persuaded by his doctor to spend some weeks at Bournemouth. He did not relish the experience and his letters to the sisters abound with jeremiads. Monty Corry could only stay with him for a day. The weather was bitter. The hotel, although a son of Baron Rothschild had taken a suite in it, turned out to be atrocious; the Rothschild indeed lived on hampers from Gunnersbury, and his father kindly offered to provide them for Disraeli, too. But even this had its difficulties. What with turkeys from Bretby as well, and twenty pheasants from the Prince of Wales, he had so much food that he was obliged to dispense with hotel meals; and as he was not drinking wine he could not ‘order their choice and costly vintages. This would have been the use of Monty.’ Now he would infallibly be ‘denounced as a screw’. True the Lord Chancellor offered to put him up in his new house near Bournemouth, but driving past it one day Disraeli observed that it appeared to be still unfinished. ‘Any fires would have been the first lit in his steaming walls. What an Irish invitation, to be the guest of a man whose house is not yet built.’43

However, in spite of these vicissitudes his health did improve, and he was in a much better state for the January Cabinet meetings before the new session. While still at Bournemouth he performed an imaginative gesture in advising the Queen to recognize the importance of literature by conferring a GCB and a pension on Carlyle, and a baronetcy on Tennyson. In the former case he was certainly being magnanimous, for Carlyle had in the past denounced him in very strong terms. It is, however, fair to add that Derby, who suggested the idea, did so partly because ‘it would be a really good political investment’, since Carlyle was ‘for whatever reason very vehement against Gladstone’. Both men refused the offers; although Carlyle was softened for the time being, and, so Lady Derby said, ‘scarcely knew how to be grateful enough’. But the curmudgeonly old prophet could not keep it up for long. Two years later we find him referring to Disraeli as ‘a cursed old Jew, not worth his weight in cold bacon’.44

The session of 1875, thanks partly to Gladstone’s formal retirement and replacement by Hartington, was the easiest of Disraeli’s ministry. It was also the most constructive, for the major measures of social reform associated with his period in office were passed then. The list is impressive: two important Trade Union Acts; the Public Health Act which consolidated a multitude of earlier measures; the Artisans Dwellings Act empowering local authorities to replace slums by adequate houses; an Agricultural Holdings Act which met, though only partially, some of the tenants’ grievances; an Act to safeguard the funds of Friendly Societies; a Factory Act to protect women and children against exploitation – there had already been one in the previous session to establish the principle of the ten-hour day; and finally the Sale of Food and Drugs Act which remained the principal measure on that subject until 1928. No other session was quite as productive, although the Rivers Pollution, Merchant Shipping and Education Acts of 1876 were important, and so, too, was the Factory Act of 1878 based on the report of a Royal Commission set up two years earlier.

Whether we look at these measures from the point of view of Disraeli’s career or of the history of the Conservative party, it is important to see them in the right perspective. They certainly represented a substantial effort to redeem electoral pledges, and taken together constitute the biggest instalment of social reform passed by any one government in the nineteenth century. But it is an exaggeration to regard them as the product of a fundamentally different political philosophy from that of the Liberals, or to see in them the fulfilment of some concept of paternalistic Tory democracy which had been adumbrated by Disraeli in opposition to Peel during the 1840s and now at last had reached fruition. The forces of property, commercial and industrial as well as landed, were by 1874 too deeply rooted in the Conservative party to make it politically possible for the party to pursue the idea of an aristocratic anti-middle class alliance with the working masses even if it had wished to do so. As a result of the Act of 1867 it was electorally necessary to make some concessions to working-class demands, and it may be that the Conservatives after 1874 were more ready to do this than the Liberals after 1868, because those demands had become more articulate. But it would be straining the evidence to go beyond that.

There is nothing discreditable in the way in which the Conservative party arrived at these measures. Governments usually act in just such an empirical hand-to-mouth fashion. But it is wrong to present their legislation as if it marked a substantial shift from laissez faire to state intervention. On the contrary Cross and other spokesmen were at pains to disavow anything that savoured even remotely of collectivism, except in the case of the Factory Acts and health legislation which were recognized by both parties to involve special considerations. In other spheres one is struck by the cautious attitude behind the Conservative social reforms. Disraeli made a positive virtue of permissive as opposed to compulsory legislation. ‘Permissive legislation is the characteristic of a free people,’ he declared in June 1875.45 In general he was probably right, and compulsion is always unpopular in England, but the defects of this approach in some fields are shown by the history of the Artisans Dwellings Act of 1875, rightly acclaimed as the first attempt at encouraging slum clearance. Six years later only ten of the eighty-seven English and Welsh towns to which it applied had made any attempt to implement its provisions. But it is doubtful whether the temper of the times would have allowed anything more dirigiste. The Merchant Shipping Act is another good illustration of this reluctance.

One has to allow not only for the individualist self-help creed which prevailed almost as much in the Conservative as in the Liberal party, though no doubt the extreme doctrinaires, eg Henry Fawcett, were to be found in the latter. It is also important to allow for the unwillingness of both parties to spend taxpayers’ or ratepayers’ money. Historians have been slow to recognize the strength of this inhibition, although it has been a potent factor ever since (except perhaps during the two world wars). The Conservatives, based heavily on the counties and small boroughs, where landowners perpetually complained at rising rates, felt particularly sensitive about proposals, such as educational reform, which increased that burden. Indeed, the Education Act of 1876 can be interpreted largely as an attempt to prevent the incursion of rate-aided ‘boards’ into the counties, and at the same time to preserve as far as possible the position of the voluntary denominational schools. Conservatives were equally reluctant to spend the taxpayer’s money. Extravagance was a stock accusation made by Liberal ‘economists’ against Conservative budgets, and after 1876, when declining prosperity began to reduce the yield of existing taxes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer dug in his toes more firmly than ever against any increase in government expenditure.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that much the most successful of the Conservative social reforms were the two measures introduced by Cross in June 1875 to deal with the labour question: the Employers and Workmen Bill, which, superseding the old Master and Servant Act, made breaches of contract normally no longer liable to criminal prosecution; and the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Bill which changed the law of conspiracy in favour of the trade unions and legalized peaceful picketing. The two Acts satisfactorily settled the position of labour for a generation. Since they involved neither interventionism nor public expenditure, and since they gave the unions almost everything which they wanted and had been denied by the Liberals, it is not surprising that the party was jubilant. Disraeli, who took a keener interest in these than any of Cross’s other measures, told Lady Chesterfield that the legislation ‘will gain and retain for the Conservatives the lasting affection of the working classes’.46

The social-reform measures of the Conservative Government were of varying quality and efficacy, but it would be safe to say that on balance they did a great deal more good than harm. It would be wrong to pitch Disraeli’s claims too high as author of this valuable legislation. Some of it was already in the Civil Service pipeline, some flowed naturally from the publication of official inquiries, some was of the codifying nature which would probably have been passed by any government then, and much of it was due to the hard work of Cross, whose role in this Cabinet can only be compared with that of Neville Chamberlain in Baldwin’s.47 Disraeli had emphasized that social rather than political reform would be the Conservative policy. There was, too, his famous quip about sanitas sanitatum. Moreover, he took a close interest in the trade-union question, going to the trouble to procure an opinion from Hardy in 1873 on the legal aspect, and backing Cross successfully against the rest of the Cabinet when the Home Secretary wisely insisted on going far beyond the recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1874. He certainly sympathized with social reform. Sybil testifies to his genuine dismay at working-class conditions in the north a generation earlier. ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy,’ he said in a speech in Lady Londonderry’s grounds in 1848. He had given sporadic support to various Factory Bills for most of his political life. The measures of 1875 did not threaten the interests of the landed classes. They were quite compatible with the sceptical but empirical attitude of most businessmen and employers to state intervention. The strongest exponents of laissez faire were to be found on the Liberal not the Tory benches.

But social reform was not the principal or even a leading secondary preoccupation of Disraeli. He took little interest in the details. ‘I believe that Mr Secy. X is working on a Dwellings Bill’, he wrote vaguely to Salisbury before the November Cabinets of 1874. His letters to Cross contain scarcely anything about that or kindred subjects and he seldom spoke in the parliamentary debates on them. True, he told Lady Bradford that these reforms were ‘a policy round which the country can rally’, and at the end of the 1875 session wrote to the Queen: ‘Since Mr. Disraeli has been in Parliament he does not remember a Royal Speech which contained the announcement of so many important & truly popular measures having been carried.’48 Yet he seems to have forgotten all this by the general election of 1880, when a certain amount of boasting over the Government’s achievements would have been legitimate, and he said nothing about it in his manifesto.49 Nevertheless if Prime Ministers are blamed when matters go wrong, even though their personal responsibility is remote, it seems only just that the converse should apply. The social measures passed in 1874–80 did something to make the lot of the urban masses less unhappy, less precarious and less unhealthy. Disraeli was at the head of the administration that brought this about, and he encouraged the policy even if he did not concern himself with its details. He deserves his share of the credit.

Social-reform legislation was the most important feature of the last reasonably smooth session in Disraeli’s Premiership. True, it was not entirely smooth. There were awkward questions of parliamentary privilege in connexion with Dr Kenealy, the excitable counsel for the Tichborne claimant, and John Mitchel, an Irish felon. Disraeli does not seem to have shown himself at his best in coping with either. At any rate, he came in for a good deal of criticism, not merely from the Opposition. Then there was trouble over a Liberal resolution on compulsory education, Conservative attendance being low owing to ‘casual and social causes; principally Ascot races, always perilous to the Tories’, Disraeli told the Queen, adding that ‘he kept the wires of the telegraph vibrating alternately with menaces and entreaties’ in order to get the truants back in time for the division.50 Finally there was a crisis over the Merchant Shipping Bill. An incompetent President of the Board of Trade, Sir Charles Adderley, at odds with his officials, had to steer a tricky course between the enthusiasm of Samuel Plimsoll and the interests of the shipowners. In the end the Bill had to be shelved till the next session. This provoked a notable tantrum on the part of Plimsoll. He danced with rage on the floor of the House and shook his fist at Disraeli, thus raising another problem of privilege. Disraeli had every intention of moving Adderley after this fiasco, but he somehow did not manage to do so until 1878. Asquith is supposed to have said that a good Prime Minister must be a good butcher. On that test Disraeli was a bad Prime Minister; he was kind-hearted and he never found it easy to get rid of failures.

In place of the Merchant Shipping Bill, Disraeli substituted an Agricultural Holdings Bill which was intended to remove some of the grievances of tenants against landlords. This was a delicate matter for a Conservative Cabinet to deal with. Disraeli justified it in a letter to the Queen. He admitted that there was ‘no immediate clamor’ and continued:

‘Tenant Right’ is a perilous subject. In various forms it has harassed many parts of Europe since the great Peace of’15. It is used by the party of disturbance in Europe & in this country to effect their ulterior objects in changing the tenure of land, on wh: in England the monarchical & aristocratic institutions mainly depend.

The advocates of Tenant Right would compel its adoption. The compulsory principle is so odious in this country that there would be no great fear if the Tenant Right Cry was only combined with the principle of compulsion – but unfortunately there is much in the relations between Landlord & Tenant in this country, wh: is unsatisfactory & anomalous; more in theory no doubt than in practice but still existing, & connected with the cry of Tenant Right. These circumstances give it a popular & powerful character & influence. The object of the measure of Yr Majesty’s Government is to take advantage of these tranquil times, get rid of those anomalies & circumstances of apparent injustice, & leave the cry of Tenant Right combined only with the odious condition of Compulsion.51

During the session Disraeli did not neglect the social duties of his office. He gave a series of grand dinner parties and was himself, as in the season of 1874, a regular guest at dinners, receptions and balls. It was an odd feature of the rules of precedence in those days that the Prime Minister went in behind all the peers and bishops, even those whom he had made. As a result he was sometimes badly placed. On one occasion, Disraeli recorded with horror, he was actually sandwiched between two men. But these hazards did not deter him, especially if there was even an off-chance of seeing Selina. During Whitsun and the autumn recess Disraeli repaired as of old to Hughenden, enjoying, at least for a time, absolute solitude and repose. ‘I have been here nearly a week,’ he wrote to Lady Bradford on May 19,52 ‘and have not interchanged a syllable with any human being. My personal attendant,53 tho’ sedulous, and sometimes I believe, even honest, is of a sullen and supercilious temperament and never unnecessarily opens his mouth. This I think a recommendation …’ In October he described his days at Hughenden to the same correspondent; how he rose at 7.30, went through his mail, sauntered on the terrace after breakfast inspecting the peacocks, worked in his ‘little room (my cabinet)’ till ‘dejeuner’ at one o’clock, and after that in the library, where ‘I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books’.54 Thus we can envisage the old statesman getting through his red boxes, sometimes indulging in day dreams, and constantly, pen in hand, writing the endless stream of letters which has made posterity fancy, perhaps delusorily, that of all the great political figures in history he is the one it knows best.

There was one matter which gave him some annoyance at his country retreat. The church, which was much dilapidated, had been restored partly at Disraeli’s own expense, and the vicar, the Reverend Henry Blagden, who was High, made the ceremony of reopening it something of a demonstration. ‘The sacerdotal procession was tremendous,’ Disraeli told Lady Bradford. ‘… certainly nearer a 100 than 50 clergymen in surplices and particolored scarves … Everything was intoned.’ He added: ‘I was obliged to bring in a Protestant sentiment by way of protest’, and in his speech at the luncheon that followed he expressed his hope that henceforth at Hughenden it would be possible to ‘combine the “beauty of holiness” with the pure Protestant faith of the Church of England’.

During the autumn he was much vexed by difficulties connected with the Navy, which was so often the bane of his political life. The Admiralty issued instructions about fugitive slaves which, Disraeli, unlike Derby, Ward Hunt and the law officers, at once saw were certain to raise an anti-slavery uproar. He promptly had them cancelled. Then two battleships collided in the Irish Channel and one of them, Vanguard, sank. Nor was this the whole catalogue of disasters; the Queen’s yacht with the Queen on board ran down a private schooner, the Mistletoe, in the Solent and three lives were lost. ‘Water I trust will not prove fatal to the Government’, wrote Disraeli to Salisbury. ‘Between Plimsoll, the Vanguard, and the Admiralty Instruction and Minute we seem to be in a leaky state.’55 The affair of the Mistletoe caused endless correspondence. The public took sides, and the queen was much distressed when following the coroner’s verdict the Admiralty censured Captain Welch who commanded her yacht. Disraeli promised to keep it out of the Press, but he did – and could have done – nothing. Matters were not eased by the personality of the First Lord. ‘I fear Hunt has got into some terrible scrape with H.M. about Welch,’ Disraeli told Salisbury. ‘Our friend has the art of doing disagreeable things in a disagreeable manner, ’tis pity.’56

Much the most important episode in the recess was the purchase of the Suez Canal shares. This will be discussed in the next chapter, but other matters connected with the east are worthy of note. The winter of 1875–6 was the occasion of the Prince of Wales’s visit to India. It was entirely his own idea prompted by love of sightseeing and desire to consolidate the Crown’s prestige. Writing from ‘that temple of the winds’, as he called Windsor Castle, Disraeli said in a letter to Salisbury on March 30:

Disraeli persuaded the Queen, who had become very hostile to the whole idea, to leave the management in his hands. The Prince’s visit could not now be cancelled, but there were genuine objections to Princess Alexandra going, for the correct treatment of Western wives at the courts of the Indian Princes who were to be visited caused grave problems of protocol and propriety. Moreover, Derby, among a long list of reasons for keeping the Princess at home, added a final one that could not very well be avowed: ‘… and lastly, “Hal” is sure to get into scrapes with women whether she goes or not, and they will be considered more excusable in her absence….’58

Foiled in her efforts to go to India, the Princess now made the modest request to be allowed to visit Denmark with her children. The Queen objected to this, too, and maintained, on the strength of an opinion given by the judges in the reign of George II, that she had the right to prevent the children from leaving the country. Disraeli consulted Cairns, who thought the precedent a bad one, and that in any case the Queen ought not to exercise the right even if it existed. ‘To force the Prs to live in seclusion as she must do for 6 months in England is a serious matter.’59 In the end the Queen gave way. As for the Prince’s visit to India, it was a success in spite of her forebodings. Of course, there were many more troubles to overcome, not the least of them being money. The House of Commons, aware of the Queen’s great wealth, was always stingy about paying for any sort of royal progress. The Prince’s cause was espoused by Lord Randolph Churchill in the House of Commons, not very successfully if Disraeli is to be believed: ‘… he had prepared a Marlboro House manifesto, and utterly broke down, destroying a rather rising reputation.’60 Disraeli himself, however, agreed that the Prince must not go in a ‘mesquin’ fashion. In the end enough money, but no more than enough, was voted. It required several letters from Disraeli, beginning ‘Sir and dear Prince’, his somewhat eccentric mode of address, to smooth over the situation.

During that autumn it fell to Disraeli for the second time in his career to appoint a Viceroy of India. He had no use for Lord Northbrook, the incumbent whom he had inherited from Gladstone. The last straw was when the Viceroy refused to use secret service money ‘on moral grounds’‚ as Disraeli indignantly wrote to the Queen. Fortunately his son had got himself entangled with an undesirable lady in Simla, and Northbrook decided to disentangle him by resigning and returning home. But the vacancy, though welcome, proved difficult to fill. Disraeli, who believed in rewarding friends, began by trying two of his Young England supporters, but Manners refused and so did Lord Powis, another disciple of those distant days. Disraeli then offered the post to Carnarvon, but he had just lost his wife, and he declined. Finally Disraeli’s choice fell on the second Lord Lytton, Bulwer’s son, then British Minister in Lisbon. Lytton, who wrote bad poetry under the pseudonym of ‘Owen Meredith’ and inherited some of his father’s worst failings, proved in many ways to be a disastrous appointment, though much can be forgiven to a man whose character is an archetypal illustration of the consequences of a broken home. But Disraeli with his views about the need to appeal to an Oriental people through their imagination seems to have regarded poetry as a qualification. And as always he invested the appointment with that sense of drama and romance ever present in his mind. On January 20, 1876, Lytton, back from Lisbon, came to see him.

The year that had just begun was to be an unhappy one for Disraeli. His health deteriorated, temporarily as it turned out, but long enough for him to have to quit the House of Commons. His leadership came in for much criticism; and half-way through the year the Eastern crisis with its dangers and complications loomed over the political horizon. It is true that matters did not go too badly at first. Disraeli induced the Queen to open Parliament in person, although he himself narrowly escaped being trampled underfoot by the rush of members to see the novel spectacle. Moreover, he had no difficulty in defeating the opponents of the Suez Canal purchase, who were made to look carping and little-minded. But from then onwards his passage became choppy. The Government survived an adverse motion on the Slave Circular by only forty-five votes, there was a tiresome debate on the affair of the Mistletoe, and one of the major measures of the session, the Royal Titles Bill, ran into unexpectedly fierce opposition.

This Bill, like the Public Worship Regulation Bill of 1874, was a case of Disraeli’s yielding to the Queen. Not that he disapproved of the contents, for he was all in favour of her becoming Empress of India; but the timing was inconvenient and he would have postponed it if he could. He did not wish, however, to cross his ‘Royal Mistress’, who had set her heart on the idea. ‘The Empress-Queen demands her Imperial Crown,’ he told Cairns on January 7,62 and on January 11 he counselled Salisbury to put the announcement in the Queen’s speech after the paragraph referring to the Prince’s Indian visit. ‘What might have been looked upon as an ebullition of individual vanity may bear the semblance of deep and organised policy.’63 Proposals to adopt the imperial title for India had been in the air ever since the Mutiny. The plan can only be understood if the traumatic nature of that disaster is remembered. It caused lasting apprehension about the stability of British rule. Furthermore, since the days of the Mutiny a new threat exercised those of nervous disposition, the advance of Russia in Central Asia. The Tsar was an Emperor. Basically the Royal Titles Bill, like the Prince’s visit, was a counter-blast to the threat of Russian invasion or subversion in India, a measure designed to reaffirm and symbolize British power. Whether it made any difference to the average Indian is very doubtful. At the most it may have given some satisfaction to the Princely class which Salisbury in a later letter described to Disraeli as ‘the only one over whom we can hope to establish any useful influence.’ He continued in reference to a proposal by Lytton to establish an Indian peerage:

Disraeli fully agreed with him and with Lytton’s proposals, although nothing came of them.

The usefulness of the change of title may have been open to argument, but it is hard to see what positive damage could have ensued. The hostility excited both in London society and in the Liberal Press, quarters seldom in harmony, is surprising. It is true that Disraeli had made a serious blunder by failing to inform the Opposition in advance, as was the normal convention with regard to such legislation. He also forgot to tell the Prince of Wales, who, returning from his tour, was understandably cross when he learned for the first time from the newspapers that he would one day be Emperor of India. The Queen took the blame for both these omissions, but the first of them certainly made Disraeli’s conduct of affairs more difficult. The struggle in both Houses was prolonged and exhausting, though in the end victorious. It bore heavily on Disraeli, who was far from well, but he could console himself when it was all over with two reflections. He had earned the lasting gratitude of ‘the Faery’, and, a curious by-product of the battle, he had taken final vengeance on Lowe.

Disraeli’s old enemy had dealt some effective blows at the Suez Canal purchase, but he surpassed all bounds of prudence when he delivered a venomous attack on both the Queen and the Prime Minister during April in a public speech at East Retford, where he claimed that at least two Prime Ministers had resisted the pressure of the Queen to change her Indian title. ‘More pliant persons have now been found and I have no doubt the thing will be done.’ Disraeli seized the opportunity. Gladstone at once denied having been one of the Prime Ministers concerned, and the Queen allowed Disraeli to quote her statement that she had never made such approaches. He asked permission of the House to use her name in debate, and in a brilliant oration of withering invective proceeded to destroy Lowe, who was obliged to make an abject recantation. His public life was terminated. He never held office or the respect of the House again. ‘He is in the mud and there I leave him,’ Disraeli wrote to Lady Chesterfield. He did not usually bear malice against his enemies, even those whom he had worsted. Lowe was an exception. Shortly before his death Disraeli was asked by a friend whether there was anybody in London with whom he would refuse to shake hands. He paused to think. ‘Only one,’ he replied, ‘Robert Lowe.’

During the whole of spring and summer of that year Disraeli’s letters abound with complaints about his health. He was afflicted by bronchitis, asthma and gout; and his condition seems to have been made worse rather than better by some of the medical advice that he received, for example Sir William Gull ‘ordering me … to drink port wine, wh: I have not done for ten years, and wh: has nearly killed me’.65 Although illness was largely responsible for his deficiencies in leadership the fact did not prevent hostile comment. Sir William Heathcote, a high Tory and former MP for Oxford University, wrote a revealing letter to Salisbury:

The aspect of the Govt. in the House of Commons distresses me most seriously and I can hardly imagine how you are to keep the machine going if you are not somehow relieved of the incubus of your present Chief.

Cold and lukewarm in all that might serve the Church or Religious Education and thus (to place it on its lowest ground) real conservatism, he is earnest only in sensational clap trap in which he is continually compromising himself by contradictory utterances …

In the ordinary conduct of business Disraeli shows himself at every turn quite incompetent to guide the House …66

Heathcote’s views on ‘real conservatism’ can perhaps be discounted, but his opinion of Disraeli as a leader is confirmed by others. In a biographical study which, though it does less than justice to Disraeli’s first two years as Prime Minister, rings true about his third, Bagehot writes:

In 1867 he made a minority achieve wonderful things but in 1876 when he had the best majority – the most numerous and obedient – since Mr. Pitt, he did nothing with it. So far from being able to pass great enactments, he could not even despatch ordinary business at decent hours. The gravest and sincerest of Tory members – men who hardly murmur at anything – have been heard to complain that it was hard that after voting so well and doing so little, they should be kept up so very late. The Session just closed will be known in Parliamentary annals as one of the least effective or memorable on record, and yet one of the most fatiguing.67

Whether or not Disraeli was aware of these murmurings, he certainly felt that the personal strain on him of another session would be too much. The alternatives were either to resign, or to retain the Premiership but go to the House of Lords. The Queen spontaneously suggested the latter course to him at the beginning of June. But Disraeli in reply expressed – how sincerely it is hard to say – a strong preference for resignation. Moreover, according to his own account given to Hardy, he actually sounded Derby as to whether the latter would be willing to succeed him.68 He seems to have envisaged at that time, though he did not say this to Hardy, a combination of Derby as Prime Minister and Hardy as Leader of the House of Commons. But Derby put a stopper on all these plans by a categorical refusal to take over; he also indicated that Hardy would not be his choice as leader, although his principal reason for declining was a conviction that he could not manage the Queen or lead the party on Church questions. Finally he said that he would not serve under anyone else.

Disraeli thus had no option but to stay on. It may well be that he expected this outcome, and he must have been aware of the reluctance with which the Queen would have accepted Derby. He wrote to all his colleagues asking them their frank opinion on his leading them from the House of Lords, and of course they all urged him to do so. As Buckle writes, ‘It is difficult to believe that Disraeli did not foresee and desire the issue of the crisis.’69 The problem now was who should lead the House of Commons. Here Disraeli changed his mind, plumping on second thoughts for Northcote. He was influenced by the fact that Hardy was quick-tempered and so not altogether popular in some quarters, whereas Northcote was universally liked. He considered, too, that Hardy’s uxorious tendency to dine at home kept him from being in his place in the House as regularly as he should; and Disraeli had stern standards in this respect. Also there was the problem of what would happen if Disraeli’s own health really did collapse and Derby was forced to become Prime Minister. Hardy took his disappointment manfully and magnanimously, but stipulated that he, too, should go to the Lords at the first convenient moment. Later Disraeli came to believe that he had made a mistake. The unexpected return of Gladstone to the fray put a premium on fiery and combative leadership. Northcote could contribute much but not that, and he was particularly inhibited by having been at one time Gladstone’s private secretary. Hardy would have made a more effective showing.

Late on Friday, August 11, Disraeli made his last speech in the House of Commons, a reply to the Opposition’s allegation of neglecting the Bulgarian atrocities. No one except a few Cabinet colleagues realized that he would never be seen there again except as a visitor. At the end of the debate he strolled down to the bar of the House and stood apparently in a reverie, gazing back. Then he retraced his steps and after exchanging some conversation with Lord George Hamilton, took his usual exit behind the Speaker’s chair. An observer noticed earlier in the evening that there were tears in his eyes. Next day the news that the Queen had created him Earl of Beaconsfield70 appeared in all the papers. One can well believe Disraeli’s sincerity when he told the Speaker that the change had cost him a ‘pang’. He had lived for the House of Commons for nearly forty years. It had been the scene of his vicissitudes and triumphs. In the end he had acquired a mastery over it which only Gladstone could rival. Whatever his deficiencies in the last year, his departure left it a poorer and a duller place. As long as he was in the House there was drama, mystery, romance, excitement. All these were to come again, but, for the moment, life seemed suddenly more drab and humdrum, especially to the younger men who had been fascinated by this extraordinary and unorthodox leader with his inimitable turn of phrase, his far-ranging sweep of vision, his sardonic contempt for hypocrisy and cant. Out of the many letters that he received, one passage from an opponent, Sir William Harcourt, must have particularly pleased him. ‘To the imagination of the younger generation your life will always have a special fascination. For them you have enlarged the horizon of the possibilities of the future.’71 It would not be a bad epitaph.

Disraeli was a great Parliamentarian and a superb actor, two characters often though not always conjoined. Until ill health undermined his concentration and energy his skill was universally admired; not only skill but courage, the quality for which after his death Gladstone sincerely praised him in his valedictory address. He needed all the courage at his command. For long years he stood alone, trying to answer most of the great orators of the day ranged against him on the opposite benches. His tongue-tied colleagues in the early days of his leadership could give him little support, save their goodwill. But he never faltered, never surrendered, never failed in resource, eloquence and ingenuity. In an age of amateurs he was, along with Gladstone, Palmerston, perhaps Graham, but few others, a professional politician, always in his place, always alert, a master of the rules of procedure and debate. The House of Commons was his life, and he loved it. In the end it came to respect, and even, though with exceptions, to love him.

He could always command its attention. His voice was full, clear, without the slightest trace of a provincial or – despite his alien appearance – a foreign accent. His pronunciation was very precise, giving full weight to every syllable of words which most Englishmen tend to slur or telescope. ‘Bus-i-ness’, he would say, or ‘Parl-i-a-ment’. He told Sir William Fraser that he regretted one physical deficiency. Short-sighted even as a young man, he was so myopic from his middle age onwards that he could not see the expressions on the faces of the back benchers, and so found it hard to gauge the effect of his words. He did not make many gestures. He always began slowly, deliberately and quietly. When he was going to score some special hit, his unconscious signal to the cognoscenti was a slight nervous cough and the production of a white handkerchief from his left pocket, which he would pass to his right hand, sniff at for a moment, and return again to the same pocket with his left hand, holding it there until a new subject for his wit, eloquence or indignation came up.72

Disraeli’s approach to his audience was essentially practical, and seemingly commonsensical. He addressed them as a sophisticated man of the world addressing an assembly of like-minded persons. He did not, after his first few years as leader, go in much for the rather baroque eloquence which had been his technique in his attacks on Peel. This cool worldly tone was not enough to make him stand out in contrast to the Liberal leadership as long as that position was held by Palmerston. But Palmerston’s death gave him a chance not only to assume a distinctive policy but also to emphasize a distinctive style, the antithesis of Gladstone, who was himself in so many ways the antithesis of Palmerston. Although we tend to think of this great duel as dominating the whole mid-Victorian era from 1850 to 1880, in fact the direct confrontation of the two men as leaders of their respective parties in the House of Commons lasted little over eight years. Gladstone only became leader in the session of 1866 and virtually abdicated after the election of 1874, though he did not formally retire till the next year. When he returned in full spate after the Bulgarian atrocities Disraeli had moved to the House of Lords.

Disraeli never made the mistake of trying to beat Gladstone at his own game. The torrential flood of words, the convoluted sentences with their parentheses within parentheses, the lofty moral appeals, the ingenious quasi-theological arguments, the fierce denunciations, were addressed to an opponent lolling with his legs crossed, his hat tilted forward, and his eyes half closed. When Gladstone or for that matter any other opponent became really indignant Disraeli would move round in a westerly direction, put his eyeglass slowly to his eye, gaze at the clock over the entrance door, and then relapse again ‘into simulated sleep’.73 But his attention never relaxed. Once when Gladstone paused as if losing the thread of his argument Disraeli quickly said across the table as though to help, ‘Your last word was “Revolution”.’74 The many examples of his wit are too well known to quote here. One can well believe that he was missed by opponents as well as by friends and that the House of Commons seemed a different place without him.

In the House of Lords, that ‘dullest assembly in the world’, as Lord Salisbury called it, he at once acquired an ascendancy unrivalled since that of the 14th Earl of Derby. Although the House had a Conservative majority, it had latterly by no means always obeyed the orders of the Conservative Cabinet. An example was the drastic amendments made to the Judicature Act in 1875. There was no more of this after Disraeli took his seat. He had declared with the sublime confidence of youth nearly fifty years earlier in The Young Duke that whereas his style in the Commons was going to be that of Don Juan, in the Lords it would be based on Paradise Lost. In fact, it was much the same in both, and equally effective. Observers noticed that he at once adapted himself to the new forms and, unlike most ex-MPs accustomed to addressing the Speaker as ‘Sir’, never failed to begin ‘My Lords’. Yet although he enjoyed being an earl – with his beliefs how could he have failed to do so? – he missed the vigour and warmth of the popular assembly. When a friend asked him how he found his new surroundings he replied, ‘I am dead; dead but in the Elysian fields.’

1 M. & B., v, 184–5; and see Hanham, Elections and Election Management, 114–15, and 358–68, for a full account of the organizational changes made at this time.

2 The Chief Whips during Disraeli’s leadership were Colonel Taylor, 1859–68 and 1873–4, The Hon. Gerard Noel, 1868–73, Sir William Hart-Dyke, 1874–80, Rowland Winn, 1880–5.

3 Hanham, 225.

4 Royal Archives, C.33.23, February 9.

5 Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 1867–85, 223–6, effectively rebuts Sir Robert Ensor’s theory in his England, 1870–1914, 21–22, that the liquor trade was a major element in Tory strength from the 1874 election onwards.

6 Georgina Battiscombe, Mrs. Gladstone, 158.

7 Salisbury’s stepmother.

8 Disraeli seems to have had difficulty in making up his mind about filling the three key posts for home affairs. His first draft gave Beach the Home Office, Cross the Board of Trade, and Sclater Booth the Local Government Board. He then switched Cross to the Home Office, Beach to Local Government, and Booth to the Board of Trade. His final version kept Cross at the Home Office, removed Beach to the Irish Secretaryship, returned Booth to the Local Government Board, and brought in Adderley, one of his worst appointments, to the Board of Trade.

9 Royal Archives, Kronberg Letters, February 21, 1874.

10 Zetland, i, 57, March 13, 1874.

11 ibid., 59, March 17, 1874.

12 ibid., 83, May 12, 1874.

13 Hughenden Papers, Box 95, B/XX/D/252, n.d.

14 M. & B., v, 299.

15 Viscount Cross, A Political History (printed for private circulation, 1903), 25.

16 Hardinge, Carnarvon, ii, 78.

17 Cross, A Political History, 44.

18 Cecil, Salisbury, ii, 44.

19 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/A.

20 British Museum, Add. MSS, 50063A, f. 306.

21 Royal Archives, Kronberg Letters.

22 ibid.

23 ibid., D.4.67, June 20, 1874.

24 Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby; his Life from his Letters (1942), 245.

25 Royal Archives, B.61.2, May 2, 1879.

26 ibid., B.61.15, June 9, 1879.

27 ibid., B.63.27, February 8, 1880.

28 Ponsonby, 245.

29 See below, 1.

30 Salisbury Papers, Salisbury to Carnarvon, May 27, 1877.

31 Ponsonby, 187.

32 M. & B., vi, 414.

33 ibid., vi, 194.

34 Royal Archives, B.53.43.

35 ibid., B.53.44.

36 ibid., B.53.53.

37 ibid., A.50.1, November 19, 1875.

38 M. & B., vi, 246.

39 Morley, ii, 498.

40 The popularity of Cross who introduced both measures is attested by the following jingle:

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,

Whatever the Rads may think;

For he has shortened the hours of work

And lengthened the hours of drink.’

41 Ponsonby, 244.

42 M. & B., v, 346–7.

43 Zetland, i, 179.

44 M. & B., v, 358.

45 Hansard, 3rd Series, ccxxv, 525.

46 Zetland, i, 260, June 29, 1875.

47 Cross was responsible for the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, Licensing and Factory Acts, the legislation about Trade Unions and also an important Explosives Act. The Public Health, Sale of Food and Drugs, and Rivers Pollution Acts, though often attributed to him, were the work of Sclater Booth, President of the Local Government Board. Sandon was responsible for the Education Act, Adderley for the unsatisfactory Merchant Shipping Act, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Friendly Societies Act.

48 Royal Archives, A.49.33, August 5, 1875.

49 Oddly enough, Cross in his own election address also scarcely mentioned the subject.

50 M. & B., v, 380–1, June 11, 1875.

51 Royal Archives, A.49.27, July 23.

52 M. & B., v, 378.

53 His German valet, Baum.

54 M. & B., v, 404–5.

55 M. & B., v, 433, October 15.

56 Salisbury Papers, December 29, 1875.

57 Sir Philip Magnus, King Edward the Seventh (1964), 132.

58 Hughenden Papers, Box 112, B/XX/S/1109, March 31, 1875.

59 Hughenden Papers, Box 91, B/XX/Ca/160, Cairns to Disraeli, September 19, 1875.

60 M. & B., v, 429–30, to Lady Bradford, July 17, 1875.

61 ibid., 437, to Lady Bradford, January 20, 1876.

62 ibid., 457.

63 ibid., 458.

64 Hughenden Papers, Box 92, B/XX/Ce/77, June 7, 1876.

65 M. & B., v, 495, to Lady Bradford, July 3, 1876.

66 Salisbury Papers, April 15, 1876.

67 Biographical Studies (2nd edition, 1889), 366–7.

68 Gathorne Hardy, ii, 4, July 12, 1876.

69 M. & B., v, 496.

70 I shall continue, however, to call him by the name by which he will always be known to posterity.

71 M. & B., v, 498.

72 Fraser, Disraeli and his Day, 401–2.

73 loc. cit.

74 ibid., 393.